by Diane Sanfilippo
Balanced Bites
I get a TON of questions regarding fats and oils. And rightfully so. There is a TON of confusing, conflicting and darn right misleading information out there about which are the healthy ones for us to consume. I tend to come back to my three basic decision-making questions regarding pretty much any food choices and those are:
- Did my great, great grandmother eat this? (Or somebody’s great, great grandmother in another country.)
- How much processing is required for this food to go from the plant or animal to the item I’m about to eat?
- Does it TASTE good? (Really, if it doesn’t taste good, what’s the point?)
One of the reasons people get confused about fats and oils is that there are SO many out there on the grocery store shelves touting different qualities and with labels that hard-sell you on how wonderful they are for different cooking methods. In order to enlighten you on some of the important facts about fats and oils that you should know, I am going to share some excerpts from what I consider to be THE leading resource regarding this topic, Know Your Fats by Mary Enig, Ph. D.
According to Dr. Enig:
“Fats and oils (technically called lipids) are basically made up of collections of molecules called triglycerides. If the collection is liquid at ambient temperature, it’s called an oil; if it is solid, it’s called afat.”
Enig also goes on to explain that:
“Whether these food lipids are called fats or oils sometimes depends on their ambient temperature where they originate. Palm oil and olive oils are fruit oils, and coconut oil is from a fruit, which is also a seed; they are liquids at the ambient temperature where they are produced.”
And that:
“The practice of calling animal fats “saturated” is not only misleading, it is just plain wrong. For example, beef fat is 54% unsaturated, lard is 60% unsaturated, and chicken fat is about 70% unsaturated. This makes these animal fats “less than half” saturated. Therefore, they should really be called unsaturated fats. In fact, none of the naturally occurring fats and oils is made up of only all saturated or unsaturated fatty acids; rather they are mixtures of different amounts of fatty acids.”
Furthermore, when answering the question “Why are Animal Fats Called Saturated Fats?” Enig states that:
“These fats are called ‘saturated’ because people have been misinformed and because they don’t understand what the term saturated means when it is applied to edible fats and oils. When fats are totally ‘saturated,’ they are usually as hard as wax and they are not digested. When fats are almost totally unsaturated they are well digested, but they are very uncommon in the natural food suplply. Totally unsaturated oils are nonexistant in the natural foods.”
Read the Full Article Here and visit the Balanced Bites Blog: http://balancedbites.com/2010/07/fats-which-to-eat-and-which-to-ditch.html
