The Energy of Oil
No, not petroleum. Plenty of more knowledgeable and acute minds than mine write plenty about that. I'm here to talk about the oils we consume, in general, and two Holy Hell Who Thought THAT Was A Good Idea oils in specific.
If you want to know about food oils, you owe it to yourself to read the work of Dr. Mary Enig -- a lipid biologist. Oh, and she's a genius. I first encountered her writing in Nourishing Traditions where she makes the whole question of oils very accessible, including an extremely compelling argument in favor of :: gasp! :: saturated fats. You know, those pesky things human bodies were designed to consume and use with great efficiency? Oh wait, you don't know that? You're still buying into the conventional disinfowisdertainment? Read. Read. Read.
Nourishing Traditions is mostly a cookbook by Sally Fallon, but it's annotated to include lots of amazing information about food. For example, did you know that butter is medicinal and that butter from spring or fall milk (read: when grass is growing most exuberantly) is particularly useful for healing purposes? Or why beef broth is a medicine? Or how to make the absolute best ever, incredibly delicious toasted almonds without killing the good stuff in them? Or how to make your own whey and then make that into incredibly healthful whey lemonade? Yeah, you want this book. Meanwhile, read this: https://westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/skinny.html Read the whole thing. Then read Know Your Fats and, if you can get your hands on a copy, Trans fatty acids in the food supply: A comprehensive report covering 60 years of research. Here's another good online read: http://easydiagnosis.com/articles/oiling.html Some of the information overlaps with the other link I supplied, but this includes more of the political and business background, for those interested.
One unpublished study that was known to McGovern Committee members but not mentioned in its final report compared calves fed saturated fat from tallow and lard with those fed unsaturated fat from soybean oil. The calves fed tallow and lard did indeed show higher plasma cholesterol levels than the soybean oil-fed calves, and fat streaking was found in their aortas. Atherosclerosis was also enhanced. But the calves fed soybean oil showed a decline in calcium and magnesium levels in the blood, possibly due to inefficient absorption. They utilized vitamins and minerals inefficiently, showed poor growth, poor bone development and had abnormal hearts. More cholesterol per unit of dry matter was found in the aorta, liver, muscle, fat and coronary arteries, a finding which led the investigators to the conclusion the lower blood cholesterol levels in the soybean-oil fed calves may have been the result of cholesterol being transferred from the blood to other tissues. The calves in the soybean oil group also collapsed when they were forced to move around and they were unaware of their surroundings for short periods. They also had rickets and diarrhea
When Mary Enig, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, read the McGovern committee report, she was puzzled. Enig was familiar with Kummerow’s research and she knew that the consumption of animal fats in America was not on the increase-quite the contrary, use of animal fats had been declining steadily since the turn of the century. A report in the Journal of American Oil Chemists-which the McGovern Committee did not use-showed that animal fat consumption had declined from 104 grams per person per day in 1909 to 97 grams per day in 1972, while vegetable fat intake had increased from a mere 21 grams to almost 60.14 Total per capita fat consumption had increased over the period, but this increase was mostly due to an increase in unsaturated fats from vegetable oils-with 50 percent of the increase coming from liquid vegetable oils and about 41 percent from margarines made from vegetable oils. She noted a number of studies that directly contradicted the McGovern Committee’s conclusions that “there is . . . a strong correlation between dietary fat intake and the incidence of breast cancer and colon cancer,” two of the most common cancers in America. Greece, for example, had less than one-fourth the rate of breast cancer compared to Israel but the same dietary fat intake. Spain had only one-third the breast cancer mortality of France and Italy but the total dietary fat intake was slightly greater. Puerto Rico, with a high animal fat intake, had a very low rate of breast and colon cancer. The Netherlands and Finland both used approximately 100 grams of animal fat per capita per day but breast and colon cancer rates were almost twice in the Netherlands what they are in Finland. The Netherlands consumed 53 grams of vegetable fat per person compared to 13 in Finland. A study from Cali, Columbia found a fourfold excess risk for colon cancer in the higher economic classes, which used less animal fat than the lower economic classes. A study on Seventh-Day Adventist physicians, who avoid meat, especially red meat, found they had a significantly higher rate of colon cancer than non-Seventh Day Adventist physicians. Enig analyzed the USDA data that the McGovern Committee had used and concluded that it showed a strong positive correlation with total fat and vegetable fat and an essentially strong negative correlation or no correlation with animal fat to total cancer deaths, breast and colon cancer mortality and breast and colon cancer incidence-in other words, use of vegetable oils seemed to predispose to cancer and animal fats seemed to protect against cancer. She noted that the analysts for the committee had manipulated the data in inappropriate ways in order to obtain mendacious results.
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But lets take a step beyond that... In order to make rapeseed oil (an industrial lubricant) edible, a lot had to happen. It starts with the fact that the rapeseed market went soft as synthetic lubricants increased market share. Their relatively inexpensive production, long-lasting properties, and low toxicity pushed rapeseed out of contention. What to do? Oh! Genetically modify the plant to reduce the amount of euric acid and turn it into food! In case you didn't know, there is no such thing as a "canola" plant. The word "canola" came from Canadian Oil Association, or something like that. A manufactured word for a fake food. Not so pretty.
I can share the anecdotal addition that since making my own eating increasingly free of non-foods and fake foods, I can tell when I'm eating something with canola oil in it before I even swallow. My body does not like it. I get a little queasy and my mouth feels wrong. So far, I've been right every single time.
And let's look at soy oil. Soybeans don't have a lot of oil. Getting oil from them is not easy. They have to go through several processes in order to produce oil. And to what end? It's not that great. There are any number of naturally occurring, easy-to-extract oils that taste better, work better in cooking, and don't require a crop that is devastating to soil. Soy is not "all that". It's a piggy crop that does not really pay for its own existence on a large scale. And having spend time in Japan, I can tell you that it is NOT a central food item. It's present in small amounts in some meals. Think about when you order miso soup and it has a few small cubes of tofu. That's about right for what I experienced in Japan, no matter where I was. Actually, that's not strictly true: about half of the places I visited in Japan did not offer tofu in meals at all.
Miso, wheat-free soy sauce, and tempeh are useful and seem not to carry some of the health and nutrition baggage of tofu and soy "milk". The amount of processing required to create either of the latter consumes a lot of energy and the nutritional return on investment simply does not justify it. Tofu is the nutritional equivalent of Wonder Bread. Bioavailability counts.
My intention is not to offend the vegetarian or vegan folk who read this blog. Heck, I was a vegetarian for three years. It's just this: just because it's not an animal product doesn't mean it's great for your body, the economy, or the earth.
If you want to really peel your eyelids back, look into the political/economical history of soy farming in America. Suddenly, Aveeno's shift to putting soy front and center in their products makes perfect sense, however sad.
Soy oil and canola oil are as omnipresent as high fructose corn syrup. Take a stroll down the bread aisle and read the ingredients panels. Look in the salad dressing aisle: even dressings labeled as "olive oil" will have more of one of the other two than of olive oil in them. Even Newman's Own. So far, Seeds of Change dressings are the only ones I've found that can be depeneded upon to only have good, real, well-produced oils in them. Now, I usually make my own dressing, but the point is that these cheap, nutritionally questionable, oils are being shoved down our collective gullets just like other food-sabotaging ingredients, all in the name of someone who is not you making a big buck.
And speaking of manipulated fats, let's talk about homogenization. Bad. Juju. Homogenization is the process that keeps the fat/cream from rising to the top of a container of milk. It is a cosmetic procedure, not a safety enhancer. And guess what? The body suffers as a result. When you pound fat molecules over and over, until they are unable to reconstitute themselves? The body has no idea what to do with them. Worse? Homogenization hides the uglies in poorly manufactured milk. That's right, the blood, dead cells, and pus common to factory-dairied milk would normally sink to the bottom of the container into a highly visible sludge. If you homogenize the milk, they don't. How sick is that?
Now that's not the only reason I drink only real milk (read: milk that is neither pasteurized or homogenized and comes from cows given truly adequate grazing land, a gorgeous mineral box, and well-raised organic supplemental feed -- which does not include corn or soy meal, thanks very much -- and who get to keep their horns, which are actually important to their metabolic functions). I also think that it makes sense to drink the actual food because, for example, it includes the enzymes required to break down the proteins and sugars in the milk. "Lactose-intolerant" people who drink raw milk usually find that they have no problems whatsoever when they do.
Here's a factoid: the cream from real milk whips in half the time that homogenized cream does.
Here's another: feeding a cow soy meal shortens her life because its protein profile is not good for her body.
OK. I think I'm done ranting. If this is over-militant or caustic, I apologize. Sometimes I just hit my limit of hearing people say things about real foods that are simply not true. In the grocery store, I heard two women talking about the adult child of Woman A as being a dangerous lunatic because she is feeding her children fresh raw milk from the Jersey cows she bought for that purpose and in order to make cheese and butter. Woman B was horrified and went on to say that her son had made her some delicious pie crusts to freeze because he knows that her arthritis makes it hard for her to make her own crusts, but that he had not bothered to tell her that he'd used organic lard instead of Crisco and what was he doing: trying to KILL his own MOTHER?
I'm not often given to swearing, but Holy Fucking Shit. Is this REALLY where we live? Are we so brainwashed that we think that fucking bullshit Crisco is something our bodies will thrive upon as we drink our pesticide-laden coffee with fat-free Land O'Lakes "Half and Half"??? It took all of my self-control to not butt in and share some uninvited information. So, instead, I'm screaming it here.
Did I mention that my lard, tallow, real milk, and meat-eating ass has a triglyceride count of 43? Yes, I think I did.
Fuck you corporate and political person-haters who prioritize money over the sanctity of life and health! Your brainwashing is incomplete and some of us are awake enough to see through your aspartame-partisan politics.
If you want to know about food oils, you owe it to yourself to read the work of Dr. Mary Enig -- a lipid biologist. Oh, and she's a genius. I first encountered her writing in Nourishing Traditions where she makes the whole question of oils very accessible, including an extremely compelling argument in favor of :: gasp! :: saturated fats. You know, those pesky things human bodies were designed to consume and use with great efficiency? Oh wait, you don't know that? You're still buying into the conventional disinfowisdertainment? Read. Read. Read.
Nourishing Traditions is mostly a cookbook by Sally Fallon, but it's annotated to include lots of amazing information about food. For example, did you know that butter is medicinal and that butter from spring or fall milk (read: when grass is growing most exuberantly) is particularly useful for healing purposes? Or why beef broth is a medicine? Or how to make the absolute best ever, incredibly delicious toasted almonds without killing the good stuff in them? Or how to make your own whey and then make that into incredibly healthful whey lemonade? Yeah, you want this book. Meanwhile, read this: https://westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/skinny.html Read the whole thing. Then read Know Your Fats and, if you can get your hands on a copy, Trans fatty acids in the food supply: A comprehensive report covering 60 years of research. Here's another good online read: http://easydiagnosis.com/articles/oiling.html Some of the information overlaps with the other link I supplied, but this includes more of the political and business background, for those interested.
One unpublished study that was known to McGovern Committee members but not mentioned in its final report compared calves fed saturated fat from tallow and lard with those fed unsaturated fat from soybean oil. The calves fed tallow and lard did indeed show higher plasma cholesterol levels than the soybean oil-fed calves, and fat streaking was found in their aortas. Atherosclerosis was also enhanced. But the calves fed soybean oil showed a decline in calcium and magnesium levels in the blood, possibly due to inefficient absorption. They utilized vitamins and minerals inefficiently, showed poor growth, poor bone development and had abnormal hearts. More cholesterol per unit of dry matter was found in the aorta, liver, muscle, fat and coronary arteries, a finding which led the investigators to the conclusion the lower blood cholesterol levels in the soybean-oil fed calves may have been the result of cholesterol being transferred from the blood to other tissues. The calves in the soybean oil group also collapsed when they were forced to move around and they were unaware of their surroundings for short periods. They also had rickets and diarrhea
When Mary Enig, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, read the McGovern committee report, she was puzzled. Enig was familiar with Kummerow’s research and she knew that the consumption of animal fats in America was not on the increase-quite the contrary, use of animal fats had been declining steadily since the turn of the century. A report in the Journal of American Oil Chemists-which the McGovern Committee did not use-showed that animal fat consumption had declined from 104 grams per person per day in 1909 to 97 grams per day in 1972, while vegetable fat intake had increased from a mere 21 grams to almost 60.14 Total per capita fat consumption had increased over the period, but this increase was mostly due to an increase in unsaturated fats from vegetable oils-with 50 percent of the increase coming from liquid vegetable oils and about 41 percent from margarines made from vegetable oils. She noted a number of studies that directly contradicted the McGovern Committee’s conclusions that “there is . . . a strong correlation between dietary fat intake and the incidence of breast cancer and colon cancer,” two of the most common cancers in America. Greece, for example, had less than one-fourth the rate of breast cancer compared to Israel but the same dietary fat intake. Spain had only one-third the breast cancer mortality of France and Italy but the total dietary fat intake was slightly greater. Puerto Rico, with a high animal fat intake, had a very low rate of breast and colon cancer. The Netherlands and Finland both used approximately 100 grams of animal fat per capita per day but breast and colon cancer rates were almost twice in the Netherlands what they are in Finland. The Netherlands consumed 53 grams of vegetable fat per person compared to 13 in Finland. A study from Cali, Columbia found a fourfold excess risk for colon cancer in the higher economic classes, which used less animal fat than the lower economic classes. A study on Seventh-Day Adventist physicians, who avoid meat, especially red meat, found they had a significantly higher rate of colon cancer than non-Seventh Day Adventist physicians. Enig analyzed the USDA data that the McGovern Committee had used and concluded that it showed a strong positive correlation with total fat and vegetable fat and an essentially strong negative correlation or no correlation with animal fat to total cancer deaths, breast and colon cancer mortality and breast and colon cancer incidence-in other words, use of vegetable oils seemed to predispose to cancer and animal fats seemed to protect against cancer. She noted that the analysts for the committee had manipulated the data in inappropriate ways in order to obtain mendacious results.
-------
But lets take a step beyond that... In order to make rapeseed oil (an industrial lubricant) edible, a lot had to happen. It starts with the fact that the rapeseed market went soft as synthetic lubricants increased market share. Their relatively inexpensive production, long-lasting properties, and low toxicity pushed rapeseed out of contention. What to do? Oh! Genetically modify the plant to reduce the amount of euric acid and turn it into food! In case you didn't know, there is no such thing as a "canola" plant. The word "canola" came from Canadian Oil Association, or something like that. A manufactured word for a fake food. Not so pretty.
I can share the anecdotal addition that since making my own eating increasingly free of non-foods and fake foods, I can tell when I'm eating something with canola oil in it before I even swallow. My body does not like it. I get a little queasy and my mouth feels wrong. So far, I've been right every single time.
And let's look at soy oil. Soybeans don't have a lot of oil. Getting oil from them is not easy. They have to go through several processes in order to produce oil. And to what end? It's not that great. There are any number of naturally occurring, easy-to-extract oils that taste better, work better in cooking, and don't require a crop that is devastating to soil. Soy is not "all that". It's a piggy crop that does not really pay for its own existence on a large scale. And having spend time in Japan, I can tell you that it is NOT a central food item. It's present in small amounts in some meals. Think about when you order miso soup and it has a few small cubes of tofu. That's about right for what I experienced in Japan, no matter where I was. Actually, that's not strictly true: about half of the places I visited in Japan did not offer tofu in meals at all.
Miso, wheat-free soy sauce, and tempeh are useful and seem not to carry some of the health and nutrition baggage of tofu and soy "milk". The amount of processing required to create either of the latter consumes a lot of energy and the nutritional return on investment simply does not justify it. Tofu is the nutritional equivalent of Wonder Bread. Bioavailability counts.
My intention is not to offend the vegetarian or vegan folk who read this blog. Heck, I was a vegetarian for three years. It's just this: just because it's not an animal product doesn't mean it's great for your body, the economy, or the earth.
If you want to really peel your eyelids back, look into the political/economical history of soy farming in America. Suddenly, Aveeno's shift to putting soy front and center in their products makes perfect sense, however sad.
Soy oil and canola oil are as omnipresent as high fructose corn syrup. Take a stroll down the bread aisle and read the ingredients panels. Look in the salad dressing aisle: even dressings labeled as "olive oil" will have more of one of the other two than of olive oil in them. Even Newman's Own. So far, Seeds of Change dressings are the only ones I've found that can be depeneded upon to only have good, real, well-produced oils in them. Now, I usually make my own dressing, but the point is that these cheap, nutritionally questionable, oils are being shoved down our collective gullets just like other food-sabotaging ingredients, all in the name of someone who is not you making a big buck.
And speaking of manipulated fats, let's talk about homogenization. Bad. Juju. Homogenization is the process that keeps the fat/cream from rising to the top of a container of milk. It is a cosmetic procedure, not a safety enhancer. And guess what? The body suffers as a result. When you pound fat molecules over and over, until they are unable to reconstitute themselves? The body has no idea what to do with them. Worse? Homogenization hides the uglies in poorly manufactured milk. That's right, the blood, dead cells, and pus common to factory-dairied milk would normally sink to the bottom of the container into a highly visible sludge. If you homogenize the milk, they don't. How sick is that?
Now that's not the only reason I drink only real milk (read: milk that is neither pasteurized or homogenized and comes from cows given truly adequate grazing land, a gorgeous mineral box, and well-raised organic supplemental feed -- which does not include corn or soy meal, thanks very much -- and who get to keep their horns, which are actually important to their metabolic functions). I also think that it makes sense to drink the actual food because, for example, it includes the enzymes required to break down the proteins and sugars in the milk. "Lactose-intolerant" people who drink raw milk usually find that they have no problems whatsoever when they do.
Here's a factoid: the cream from real milk whips in half the time that homogenized cream does.
Here's another: feeding a cow soy meal shortens her life because its protein profile is not good for her body.
OK. I think I'm done ranting. If this is over-militant or caustic, I apologize. Sometimes I just hit my limit of hearing people say things about real foods that are simply not true. In the grocery store, I heard two women talking about the adult child of Woman A as being a dangerous lunatic because she is feeding her children fresh raw milk from the Jersey cows she bought for that purpose and in order to make cheese and butter. Woman B was horrified and went on to say that her son had made her some delicious pie crusts to freeze because he knows that her arthritis makes it hard for her to make her own crusts, but that he had not bothered to tell her that he'd used organic lard instead of Crisco and what was he doing: trying to KILL his own MOTHER?
I'm not often given to swearing, but Holy Fucking Shit. Is this REALLY where we live? Are we so brainwashed that we think that fucking bullshit Crisco is something our bodies will thrive upon as we drink our pesticide-laden coffee with fat-free Land O'Lakes "Half and Half"??? It took all of my self-control to not butt in and share some uninvited information. So, instead, I'm screaming it here.
Did I mention that my lard, tallow, real milk, and meat-eating ass has a triglyceride count of 43? Yes, I think I did.
Fuck you corporate and political person-haters who prioritize money over the sanctity of life and health! Your brainwashing is incomplete and some of us are awake enough to see through your aspartame-partisan politics.