Let’s Talk About Cooking Oils

Today I am talking about why you should not cook with soy oil, rice bran oil etc. I explain what to look for in cooking oils and what will INFLAME you. I am very passionate about this topic because we use cooking oils every day and making this one shift can so radically impact health!

Here are my favourites for cooking at various temperatures:

Olive Oil – For salads and low heat cooking. As almost purely a monounsaturated oil (liquid at room temp, more solid at cooler temps), olive oil has a very low smoke point. More on smoke point below.

Macadamia Oil – For salads and low to medium heat cooking. So lucky that we have easy access to this beautiful oil, which has a slightly higher smoke point and therefore a bit more versatile. I love this when I want to cook at medium heat and don’t want to incorporate a coconut-y taste (e.g. Italian dish etc.). This oil is also highly shelf-stable and resistant to being oxidised / rancid due to its LOW Omega 6 content!

Coconut Oil – For medium to high heat cooking, baking, roasting. This is the most flexible oil you can work with. Also, it is mainly saturated fat — which is a GREAT thing because it’s highly heat stable. Coconut oil is made of Lauric acid and Medium Chain Fatty Acids (MCFA’s) which have been shown to increase metabolism and are not stored as body fat in the body. This fat does not make you fat. Make sure you pick cold pressed extra virgin or virgin coconut oil, preferably organic, and not highly processed versions (popular in the 80’s but less popular now).

Butter – For low temperature cooking. Butter is 63% saturated fat and 21% monounsaturated fat (rest us polyunsaturated). Due to the higher monounsaturated %, this is best for low heat cooking. So delicious, and if you can find butter from pasture-raised cows, even better due to a higher Omega 3 profile. The Westgold brand is really good too. DO NOT EVER use margarine or fake “plant butters” for many reasons (that will have to be another post – – but trust me when I say that margarine does NOT do anything good for the body and is highly inflammatory).

Why worry about smoke points etc.? What you want to avoid by all means is ingesting RANCID oil. When oil is oxidised, it becomes rancid. When you cook with oils above their smoke points, they are oxidised.

But what about all the other high-smoke point oils out on the shelves like canola oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil? Corn Oil, Sunflower Oil, Rice Bran Oil and Soybean Oil are very high in inflammatory Omega 6 (and most of chronic disease is currently linked to Omega 3 / 6 imbalance with 6 being too high in our current diets due to indiscriminate use of Polyunsaturated Fats like these). Polyunsaturated fats are not shelf stable too, and to make them shelf stable, they go through a LOT of processing at high temperatures and bleaching – which makes them RANCID and OXIDISED before they even reach you.

Canola oil is another name for “Canadian Oil Low Acid” or “LEAR” (Low Erucic Acid Rapeseed). You can now guess why they renamed it to Canola. Large amounts of erucic acid fed to animals can result in fat deposits infiltrating their heart walls, so they genetically engineered LEAR to have a lower proportion. Note that rapeseed has cancer, fatty deposits in the heart / thyroid / kidney, adversely affects nerves and could be linked to multiple sclerosis and celebral palsy. Which is WHY you should stay as far away from Canola as possible!

I know this was a long post — and I will be converting this to a newsletter for my subscribers. However, I just really wanted to share this because most of us don’t think about what we are cooking with in terms of oils and it’s not our fault. Social conditioning and supermarket shelf-stocking has determined what we cook with. And the rate of Omega 6 consumption + chronic disease it brings has risen with the rampant use of these polyunsaturated oils (PUFA’s) due to lack of understanding of how they affect the body.

PUFA’s, according to very recent research have also been known to block insulin receptors, making it difficult for our cells to absorb energy from glucose, leading to higher blood sugar, insulin resistance, and resulting adrenal stress! (When insulin is out of whack, adrenals are out of whack…. in short these make us tired and cranky.) Last but not the least PUFA’s inhibit detoxification pathways in the liver causing all sorts of cascade effects (hormone imbalance, gut issues, inflammation etc.).

Ray Peat, PhD has some fascinating writing on this topic, amongst others and based on his research, PUFA’s cause obesity and accelerated ageing – – a definite reason to stay away from an excess of these!

I have not covered other healthy animal-based options here (again, another future post), but options such as ghee, lard and tallow are quite healthy (high smoke point, low omega 6 as long as they are grass fed, saturated fat) and supportive to the thyroid / adrenals.

I hope that with this additional knowledge you can make the shift to better choices that will support your gut, adrenals, insulin and not make you sick with every teaspoon you use.

Educate yourself and read some more on this topic (a bit long and hard-going but well worth the time): Suitable Fats, Unsuitable Fats: Issues in Nutrition

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