Read an Excerpt
The Big Book of Healthy Cooking Oils
Recipes Using Coconut Oil and Other Unprocessed and Unrefined Oils
By Lisa Howard, Jenny Castaneda Page Street Publishing
Copyright © 2015 Lisa Howard
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62414-164-5
CHAPTER 1
Oils and Your Health
For decades, fat has gotten a big thumbs-down, while proteins and carbohydrates have been put on culinary pedestals. Lately, though, carbs have taken on a less-than-angelic reputation. Some of them are thought of as being "good" carbs (whole-grain, whole-food products), while others have acquired a reputation for being "bad" carbs (processed, refined products). Protein, too, has come under greater scrutiny because shoppers have come to realize that many products boasting added protein are in fact highly processed foods. The extra protein often consists of soy, dairy and/or wheat ingredients, all of which are common allergens that many people must avoid. Our once black-and-white view of nutrition is becoming complex shades of gray.
So, what are these macronutrients, really? And how do they impact our health? Although this book is primarily about fats, let's sketch out the bigger picture so that you can better understand where and how fats fit in. We'll start with protein. It's more clear-cut than carbs and fats.
Proteins
You've probably heard the phrase "complete protein" and wondered what that meant. To back up a step, proteins are made of multiple amino acid chains that our bodies break down to digest. There are roughly twenty amino acids that our bodies use to build cells and muscles and facilitate immune responses. Others act as enzymes that trigger metabolic processes. In a nutshell, protein is essential to the health of every animal on the planet. Fortunately, our bodies can synthesize most of those amino acids. Nine of them, however, can't be synthesized. We have to eat them. We call a food a "complete protein" when it contains all nine of those amino acids.
The vast majority of complete proteins come from animal and seafood/fish sources because they've already had to synthesize those proteins for themselves. Plant foods are rarely complete proteins. (Quinoa, amaranth and soy are notable exceptions.) But the good news is that by strategically overlapping plant foods, we can obtain complete proteins from them. In other words, if you eat a wide variety of plants — and make a special effort to combine certain groups such as legumes and grains — your protein needs will be mostly satisfied. Or you may choose to eat eggs and dairy but not outright meat. Or perhaps you enjoy fish and seafood, or you just garnish your meals with meat occasionally rather than featuring it as the main dish. Eating less meat but focusing on good-quality meat (and fish/seafood) provides us with more accessible protein sources compared with only eating plants, yet fits better with sustainable foodstyles that emphasize treating animals humanely.
Many Americans insist they're not getting enough protein (not often the case), and they fall prey to marketing campaigns that tout products with added protein from processed, potentially allergenic sources, such as soy, dairy or wheat. Downing a milkshake replete with powdered soy and whey (and probably lots of added sugars and artificial flavorings) is not an example of eating high-quality protein. Enjoying a plate of fruit, olives and grass-fed cheeses is. Spinach salad topped with strips of sautéed grass-fed steak is another great example of a complete protein-rich meal. So is wild Alaskan salmon, or a free-range poached egg served huevos rancheros–style with fresh salsa. If you stick with protein from natural sources as opposed to industrially added, heavily processed protein powders, you'll have plenty of good-quality protein on your plate.
Carbohydrates
Next up: carbs. Whereas nearly all sources of complete proteins stem from animal and seafood/fish sources, carbs are more readily found in plant foods. When pondering the different types of carbs, it's worth taking note of the macrobiotic principle of upward- and downward-growing plants. Anything that's underneath the soil is usually the storage-storing part of the plant, which means it's the starchy part. Take beets, for example. The bulb is the root, which you can simmer and mash the way you would a potato. The leaves are hearty and green, reminiscent of chard or collards — not starchy at all. Ditto for turnip bulbs and turnip greens. Anything that falls into the downward-growing category of plants is going to be more starchy and break down more quickly into sugar in your bloodstream than most upward-growing plants do.
The giant exceptions to this downward/upward split are grains (which tend to be starchy) and tropical fruits (which have high amounts of natural sugar). But no matter which direction plants grow, they are all whole and unprocessed foods — although some have to be cooked, pounded or otherwise processed before they're edible. These foods are "good" carbs. They're full of fiber, they contain a mélange of vitamins and minerals, and they offer a dizzying array of flavors. These foods are good for you, and they are fun to play with! (Note that you want to focus on upward-growing, non-grain and non-tropical plants if you want to lose weight or are pre-diabetic/diabetic.)
But in the majority of aisles in any grocery store, you'll find "bad" carbs, which is to say processed, refined carbs, most of which are empty sugars in the sense that we expend virtually no energy in breaking them down. They are, in effect, predigested. Think of baby food: It's cooked, mashed and pureed, all in an effort to break the food down as much as possible so that babies can easily access the nutrients in the food. This is great for underdeveloped digestive systems in babies, but it's not a good idea for adults whose digestive systems are meant to have to break down what we eat.
If you eat an apple, for example, you're getting the full nutritional benefits of the apple. But once you've cooked and mashed it into applesauce, you have baby food. Once you've pressed the apple into juice, you have sheer sugar, without any fiber at all and with only a faint suggestion of its former vitamins. You'll also lose the pleasurable satiety of the entire apple. Odds are, you'd just eat one apple (and therefore the natural sugar from just that one apple) and be satisfied, but did you know that one eight-ounce glass of apple juice contains three to four apples? Our natural one-apple stopping point is lost in the rush of amped-up sugar from the instantly digested juice.
These processed carbs are the carbs that spike our blood sugar levels, cause obesity, lead to diabetes and inflammation and, in general, cause our health to suffer. Fortunately, in both this book and my Healthier Gluten-Free cookbook, all of the recipes contain 100 percent whole-grain, whole-food carbs. Plus the recipes containing sweeteners use natural, less-processed sweeteners that don't break down as quickly as processed sugars do.
Something critical to note about carbs and how they fit into the big health picture is that processed, "bad" carb consumption inevitably increases when people go on low-fat diets. That's because when fat is artificially taken out of a product, the full flavor and luxurious mouth-feel of fat is re-created with sugars, gums and thickeners. Also, because fat and protein are often found together — remember, complete proteins mostly come from animal and seafood/fish sources, which are low in carbs and high in fats compared with plant foods — often good-quality protein disappears as the sugar content goes up. Let's quickly compare whole-milk plain yogurt to nonfat plain yogurt. When the fat is removed, the protein drops in half, and the sugar goes up 50 percent. This is an excellent example of the wise adage "Leave well enough alone!"
Fats
We've saved the best for last! Now let's talk fats, or at least how they fit into the trio of macronutrients known as fats, proteins and carbs. We'll talk more about how exactly oils and fats are refined in "How Oils Go Bad" and what the health effects of the refining process are. We'll also talk more about the specific health attributes of saturated fats as well as polyunsaturated fats in later chapters. For now, let's just cover the basic facts about fats.
Fats are derived from animal as well as plant sources. When they're animal-sourced, fat is packaged with protein. When fats are found in plant foods, they tend to come along with a generous portion of fat-rich, fiber-rich, nutritious carbs. (Think of avocadoes and whole grains.) Some plants are pressed to extract their juices, which we refer to as oil. Olives yield olive oil, peanuts yield peanut oil, flaxseeds yield flax oil, etc.
Fats have always been an integral ingredient on our menu, but they fell out of favor in the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century due to a perfect storm of corporate marketing interests and botched research. The sugar industry in particular stood to benefit from pushing the idea that fat was bad, a notion stemming from the not-necessarily-relevant finding that fats contain nearly twice as many calories as proteins and carbs do. Based on this purely numerical approach, ads ran in popular women's magazines promoting the idea that a tablespoon of refined white sugar was one of the healthiest things you could eat, far healthier than the equivalent portion of extra-virgin olive oil or an apple. After all, the apple has more calories! Never mind the fiber, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and the other micronutrients an apple offers. The numbers had sugar as the winner.
You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone today who would agree with this idea. The ignore-the-details formula of "calories in, calories out" is starting to be viewed as a concept that applies more to mechanical engineering principles than to the complex, ever-changing fluctuations of human biology.
Happily, more attention is being given to the idea that the quality of the food is just as important — if not more so — than the quantity consumed. Researchers are continually touting the benefits of extra-virgin olive oil, not pomace oil. (The former is unrefined; the latter is the most-processed form of olive oil on the market.) People are being told to drizzle cold-pressed flaxseed oil into their smoothies and onto their salads. Unrefined virgin coconut oil has made it into mainstream grocery stores. But tragically, despite the recent push for better-quality oils, most oils are still sold in their refined, rancid forms rather than as whole, minimally processed oils that retain their beneficial nutrients and delicious flavors.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how fats are built and what their individual attributes and benefits are, it's worth shedding light on another misconception: the idea that any given food is a saturated, monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fat. We're in the habit of lumping foods into these categories as if an ingredient could be made entirely of just one of these fats (hence the tendency to treat saturated fats as a dietary devil, to be listed separately from all other fats on nutrition labels). But the truth is that all fats are a combination of these types of specific fats. Whatever type of fat happens to make up the majority of an oil or fat defines that oil or fat. While imprecise, this system is a handy way to organize different types of fat into overall categories, especially oils, which all contain 14 grams of fat per tablespoon. The differences lie in the proportions of fats they contain. Let's look at some common examples.
Saturated Monounsaturated Polyunsaturated
Fat
Fat
Fat
Olive oil 15 percent 70 percent 15 percent
Flax oil 15 percent 15 percent 70 percent
Coconut oil 85 percent 8 percent 7 percent
Given their proportions, it's fair to say that olive oil is a monounsaturated fat, flaxseed is a polyunsaturated fat and coconut is a saturated fat — yet in truth, they're combinations of all three. (Lard, by the way, is primarily a monounsaturated fat, albeit by a slim margin. If the lard is from pastured hogs, that margin gets wider.) But even though fats are all a combination of saturated and unsaturated fats, it's worth knowing the general category of whatever fat or oil you're using so that you know what kind of heat it can handle and therefore how you can best use it.
Now let's talk about how fats are built.
Understanding How Fats Are Built
How fats are built has everything to do with how they're best used in the kitchen and therefore how they affect our daily health. That's because of one simple reason: rancidity. We'll explore how processed oils become rancid in "How Oils Go Bad", but for now, it's enough to know that saturated fats are more stable and therefore more resistant to heat and light (and time) than unsaturated fats are. In effect, saturated fats stay "fresh" longer. That freshness translates to improved nutritional benefits as well as better flavor.
It's time to take a brief tour of the structure of fats. First, let's clear up some potential confusion by defining terms. "Fats" and "oils" are both fats, structurally speaking. But like the terms "dough" and "batter," when people talk about fats and oils, they're generally using different words to describe different consistencies. We commonly say "fat" when we mean a fat that's solid at room temperature, and we say "oil" when we're talking about a fat that's liquid at room temperature. So in kitchen-speak, extra-virgin olive oil is an oil, while butter is a fat. (Just as batter is pourable and makes things like pancakes and muffins, whereas dough is thick enough to be shaped into things like cookies and loaves.)
When scientists talk about fats, they mean all fats regardless of consistency. It's like saying "baked goods" instead of splitting them into doughs and batters. In this chapter, when we talk about fats, we're referring to them the way scientists do, not the way cooks do.
Saturated and Unsaturated Fats
Both saturated and unsaturated fats are made of fatty acids that bond together in chains. How they form those bonds and what kinds of acids they are determines whether the final fat is saturated or unsaturated. Without getting into excessive details that might trigger flashbacks of high school chemistry classes, saturated fats are called "saturated" because they're joined directly to hydrogen atoms. They're saturated with hydrogen. Unsaturated fats contain double bonds rather than hydrogen, which is to say they're unsaturated by hydrogen, and they're not as cohesively connected. Monounsaturated fats have one double bond; polyunsaturated fats have more than one double bond. ("Poly" means "many.")
Whenever there's a double bond, there's more of a risk that a bond can be broken, and a broken bond is what leads to oxidation, or what a non-scientist would call rancidity or "going bad." (When you sniff milk, and it smells bad, you probably don't exclaim "Drat! The milk oxidized before I could drink it all!" You say, "The milk's gone bad!" It's the same thing.) Thus, polyunsaturated fats are by nature more prone to oxidizing than monounsaturated fats are, and saturated fats are the least likely to go bad because saturated fats don't have any double bonds. They're less fragile by nature, which means they're less susceptible to being damaged by heat and light.
Practical translation: If you leave unrefined flaxseed oil (which is primarily polyunsaturated), extra-virgin olive oil (mostly monounsaturated), and unrefined coconut oil (mostly saturated) in a sunny spot on your kitchen counter on a hot day, you'll kick-start rancidity in the flaxseed oil and not be doing any favors for the olive oil, but you won't bother the coconut oil. Saturated fats are simply more stable.
Trans Fats
Now you have a basic understanding of how fats are built and why they're sorted into saturated versus unsaturated categories. Before we move on to fine-print details, though, there is one more category of fats we need to address. It's one that's been hitting headlines for the past decade, ever since research started piling up that this fat is indisputably a bad idea: trans fats. Once heralded as a nutrition savior, trans fats are about to get the official boot from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Margarine is out; butter is back!
Trans fats are also called "hydrogenated" and "partially hydrogenated" oils. Other fats are being "interesterfied," which is a relatively new process but is often considered to be similar to hydrogenation. All of these fats are artificially created by using chemical catalysts to force hydrogen atoms between the double bonds of unsaturated fats. The resulting structure looks similar to a saturated fat and can function similarly in food production. That's why trans fats were originally made. They were a cheap substitute for butter, and they made it cheaper to manufacture any product normally made with butter.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Big Book of Healthy Cooking Oils by Lisa Howard, Jenny Castaneda. Copyright © 2015 Lisa Howard. Excerpted by permission of Page Street Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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