Category:
Nutrition

On Fats

Fats taste good. Our palates instinctively crave these substances, that were likely rare in the diet of root-grubbing, seed-gleaning proto-humans. The hard-wired response is that you can’t get enough.
Our ancestors of that period, by all the evidence available, were most likely very lean folk. On another finger, same hand; well planned, long term studies of large test groups seem to bear out the fact that we don’t need to eat any fats at all beyond that quantity of essential fatty acids necessary for health. These three, linoleic, linolenic, and arachidonic acids are available from a number of seed sources for the vegan diet.
Only the very most choice cold-pressed polyunsaturated vegetable oils are safe to eat, in our opinion. Heat and solvent extraction methods encourage the formation of free radicals, which are known to be inimical to your health.* The monounsaturates, exemplified by olive oil, can take heat well enough to be used as friture. On the other hand, products rich in polyunsaturated lipid (such as safflower, corn, soya, sesame) are not really suitable for this use. These oils cannot attain true frying temperatures without burning. They should be used raw.* When they are heated, conditions become favourable for production of the aforementioned free radicals. Even if not actually burning and smoking, most of these aromatic specialty oils do lose any distinctive flavour or aroma they may have had once heated.
Fried foods are not particularly nutritious.
We don’t perceive huge benefit in the use of margarines made from vegetable oils. Hydrogenation, which is necessary for the room-temperature solidity of fats, will change any lipid into something very similar to lard. If that was not the method used to solidify these fats at room temperature, then emulsificants and a good deal of water were probably used to foam it up.
You can avoid the entire problem of extraction methods that are beyond your control and the like by getting all the fats you need directly from oil bearing products like poppy seed, olives, flax seed, filberts, or a hundred other comestibles. Some of these go far back into the intestinal history of Homo sapiens sapiens. We evolved around them, so to speak.
Fats are also responsible for that ‘satisfied feeling’ of fullness after eating. They generally take longer to leave the gastric area.
The ideal, as far as consuming polyunsaturated fats is concerned, is to use them before they oxidize, or become rancid. This happens with alarming rapidity in many products. Many oil bearing seeds go bad without any extra attention, over time, but most keep their stored oils in good condition for the coming germination. When the integrity of the seed is broken, oxidation will begin immediately.
In light of all this, you may wish to change the way these products are consumed. Instead of using them in their refined state, out of the bottle, eat the oilseeds themselves. Aside from the fact that these products mostly contain excellent proteins and other nutrients, the oils taste by far at their best when fresh. Poppy seeds, sesame, any of the nuts, all contain great quantities of oils. Freshly ground or entire, these are much closer to the natural foodstuffs we evolved ingesting.

*Even in the truly fractious and opinionated world of nutritional surmise and research, where even the facts can be strained, there is some guarded consensus on this.
*Solvents are commonly used in the extraction of oils. Who do you trust?

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More Nutrition:

On Calcium | On Vitamin B¹²  |  On Greens | On Protein | On Legumes |