Poor-quality fat means any food that contains hydrogenated oil, partially hydrogenated oil, hydrogenated palm kernel oil, margarine and any margarine-like spreads with hydrogenated oil, cottonseed oil, Olestra, and most commercial supermarket-bought cooking oils. Poor-quality fat also includes most fried foods – french fries, chicken, chips, and so forth.
Read the labels on everything you buy. Hydrogenated oils are found in many mass-produced food products, including potato chips, corn chips, crackers, cookies, prepared foods, frozen foods, baked goods, snacks, and others. Most of the oils you find in a supermarket are highly process – heated at temperatures and stripped of their sensitive essential fats and other nutrients.
As best you can, replace poor-quality fat-containing products with quality oils and quality-fat foods.
These would include olive oil, sesame oil, and coconut oil – all of these oils are great for cooking. Other oils to use for dressings and dips include sunflower, flax seed, hazelnut, pistachio, hemp-seed, and macadamia nut oils. Always use expertly processed unrefined organic oils – these can generally be found at a health food store.
Use real butter rather than margarine – the best choices are hormone free and farm fresh or organic. Butter made from raw and unpasteurized milk is best. Ghee can be used as a substitute for butter. Ghee is clarified butter, also called separated butter; it is a traditional, time tested food from India that is highly heat stable and so can be used for browning or light frying.
Other preferred sources of health-giving fats included:
- Avocado – organic and fresh is best
- Olives – emphasize variety
- Fresh Fish – especially those that are ocean or stream caught and not farm raised
- Nuts and Seeds – organic is always best
- Nut Butter – peanut butter, almond butter, sesame butter
- Free-range Eggs – eggs that come from real chickens on a farm eating real food
- Organic Dairy products – especially products produced from grass-fed animals
By the way, healthy fat in your food does not translate to fat on your body. If you deprive yourself of essential fat to lose weight, you’ll get the opposite result. And even if you lose weight, you’ll likely suffer from some of the symptoms of clinical fat deficiency – irritability, fatigue, brittle hair, dry skin, redness around the eyes, digestive complaints, constipation, and mood disorders. Fat is essential to life. It serves as an energy source for the heart and brain. It’s building block for many of the hormones and chemicals that keep us alive. It’s a nutritional source for the central nervous system, and it lines and protects every organ. The body cannot produce these fats on its own and that is why they are called essential. You may have heard of them as EFAs or Omega-3 and Omega-6 as well.
In small quantities, poor-quality fats are harmless to most people. But when poor-quality fats become part of our staple fare, day in and day out, our health will eventually suffer. Now is your opportunity to do the best you can in cleaning out the low-end, mass-produced, poor quality fats from your home and replace them with high quality counterparts.
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