Oils and Fats and Heart Disease, Oh My

Last night, Alex and I were driving back to NY after being home for Mother’s Day and my sister-in-law’s bridal shower, and as usual, I had quite a difficult time choosing a snack from the gas station.  I didn’t want anything full of sugar, or with hydrogenated oils, or with refined grains.  I spent about 5 minutes perusing the aisles, skimming ingredient lists of potato chip bags.  When I make potato chips at home, these are my ingredients: potatoes, butter, Cajun seasoning.  The. End.  Well, I checked about every bag of chips I could find.  Not a single one was made with butter, and I couldn’t even find one made with olive oil.  Finally, I settled on buying Utz All Natural “Dirty” Jalapeño-flavored chips.   Here is the list of ingredients: potatoes, peanut oil or a blend of peanut oil and canola, corn, safflower or sunflower oil, salt, dextrose, potato starch, jalapeno pepper powder, natural flavors, dehydrated onion corn starch, dehydrated garlic, citric acid, extractive of paprika, spice extractive.  I need to start packing my own snacks for car trips…

What kind of cooking oil do you buy?  I'm assuming you use oil to cook with; after all, the USDA has told us to replace solid fats with liquid fats whenever possible, and I can't recall the last time I saw someone cook with lard or butter in a pan... at least not without feeling horribly guilty about it.  My grandmother was always dispensing health information to us on “good” vs. “bad” oils, which foods had antioxidants, which foods would prevent heart attacks, etc.  She would cut out little articles from the paper and mail them to my mom, folded up with a little note or with important parts of the article underlined.  She swore that canola oil was one of the "good oils.”  What’s the story with all these oils?

Most seed and vegetable oils (safflower, corn, soybean, canola, sunflower, grapeseed, cottonseed) are a very new addition to the American diet because the techniques required to produce them were not possible before industrialization.  I learned from Whole Health Source that extracting oil from substances such as safflower, corn, soybean, and canola, is a difficult and harsh process, as opposed to extracting oil from palm fruit, olives, or coconuts.  This is why, when I buy olives from the olive bar at Wegman's, the oil surrounding them is plentiful.  In contrast, I don't think I've ever heard someone describe corn or soybeans as "oily," at least not in the same sense as they would olives.  So it’s not too hard to believe that getting oil from these foods is pretty unnatural and difficult.

Since everyone began avoiding saturated fats, the demand for alternatives increased, and so a variety of industrial oils were born.  In today’s world, they are ubiquitous.  However, when there is a dramatic shift in a population's diet, we need to look at the health impact, and it doesn’t look good.  The main reason I am so against these oils is their high omega-6 content, mostly as linoleic acid (LA).  To briefly get into a very complex subject, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are both important to our diet.  They are involved in a number of mechanisms, but maintaining a proper ratio and perhaps a proper overall amount of each is crucial.  The proposed ideal ratio is still a little controversial and can vary, but I’ve heard around 3:1 or 2:1 omega-6 to omega-3.  Currently, some Americans have ratios of 20:1 or higher due to the high consumption of corn and soybean oil in our country.  What makes matters worse is that we heat these oils when we cook.  Through cooking, polyunsaturated fats like the omega-6’s found in seed oils can be transformed into trans fats (which I hope by now everyone knows, believes, and agrees will kill you).  In addition, they are a billion times more easily oxidized than monounsaturated fats (olive oil) and saturated fats (animal fat).  The oxidation process introduces free radicals, and these compounds are explosive.  Free radicals, as anyone who has taken organic chemistry knows, begin this huge chain of reactions to introduce more free radicals in what is known as a free radical cascade.  Inflammation increases, and the free radicals begin damaging cell membranes, chromosomes, etc.  Eventually, the endothelial cells lining your blood vessels are damaged and lose their elastic properties.  Enter heart disease.  There is an entire chapter on this topic in my current favorite book, Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan, MD, and Luke Shanahan.  As the authors state, “Nature doesn’t make bad fat, factories do.” Amen!

A recent article, "Changes in consumption of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in the United States during the 20th century" by Blasbalg et al, brings to light the impact of replacing animal fat and butter with industrial oils.  Here is the conclusion of the paper, verbatim: "The apparent increased consumption of LA, which was primarily from soybean oil, has likely decreased tissue concentrations of EPA and DHA during the 20th century."  (FYI: LA is linoleic acid, an omega-6 fatty acid found in industrial oils; EPA and DHA are the omega-3 fatty acids thought to have great health benefits.)  Basically, we're getting less omega-3's and more omega-6's than ever.  It's interesting because this increase in omega-6 fatty acid consumption coincides quite nicely with the 20th century epidemics of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type II diabetes in our country.  However, correlation does NOT automatically equal causation.  We must be very careful before making that leap...

Over the past 100 years, these diseases have risen to epidemic levels in the United States.  So, through all my reading, I've tried to take a step back to examine what has changed between then and now.  Diet?  Exercise?  Stress?  I could see any of these as possible contributors.  Some studies suggest that we might actually be exercising more now than we were 100 years ago, so I'm not quite buying that as the major contributor.  Stress is a definite possibility, but let's hope that's not the real cause since we all just can't quit our jobs to get rid of stress.  To me, the logic is simple.  When we ate different stuff, we didn't die of heart disease and obesity.  You are what you eat.  Therefore, I want to try and eat more like our ancestors did.  One of the biggest changes in diet from then until now is the introduction of industrial oils, and so in our home we're doing our best to revert back to old fashioned butter and animal fat.  It's quite challenging, though, because these oils are EVERYWHERE.  When I’m in the grocery store, they pop up in basically every processed product on the shelf, including soups, chips, granola bars, cake mixes, bread, frozen pizzas, packaged gravy, cookies…  Slowly, we have been eliminating these products from our diet completely.  The results?  Fresher foods requiring more prep time, and higher grocery bills.  But isn’t your health worth it?