Understanding Cooking Oils Myths and Facts

Hello Health Champions! How is it that popular advice on cooking oil is not only different between different sources but often completely contradictory? There are few areas as riddled with misinformation as that of cooking oils and what kind of fat to cook our food in. So today I'm going to show you the only way that you can truly know what information to trust and that is To start understanding just a few basic principles about fats and oils. Come and write them. Hey, I'm Dr. Ekberg. I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete. And if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video. If you ask a cooking channel what the best... oils are they'll probably talk about oils that have a mild flavor and a high smoke point and if you look at a health channel now they'll start talking about polyunsaturated versus saturated fats so here was one of the first places that I found and I did a search for healthy cooking oil and this showed up and don't worry if you can't read it because there's nothing worth seeing but basically what they said was That flax oil was one of the best cooking oils because it had a lot of healthy fats in it. And they said that butter was kind of in the middle but toward the lower end of the list and that coconut oil was one of the worst fats to cook in. So how did they come to these conclusions? Because in my mind this isn't just wrong it is 100% completely backwards. And it's because there are so many misconceptions, there are so many myths and we'll go over those today so you'll have it totally clear about what healthy fat is. And the number one misconception is that polyunsaturated fatty acids are healthy. We've been told that for the longest time. Second misconception is that they confuse the source of the food. They think that oh well flax is healthy therefore flax oil must be healthy and apricots are healthy then apricot oil must be healthy they don't understand the source versus the processing and the third thing is that there is so much emphasis on smoke point without considering at all what the oil has gone through to have that kind of smoke point probably the worst cooking oil you could possibly choose would be flaxseed oil and this surprises a lot of people because they know hey flaxseed oil that's the good quality oil it has so many health benefits but bear with me it is because it's very high in omega-3 and now you go wait wait wait polyunsaturated fatty acids they're healthy omega-3 fatty acids are healthy what are you talking about well here's what we need to understand that they are indeed Part of cell membranes, our brains, our cell membranes, the coverings of all our cells are in large part made by polyunsaturated fatty acids, in particular one called DHA, which is extremely important. They also act as precursors for hormones and they participate in different signal pathways, some of which are anti-inflammatory. So there's Many many benefits to polyunsaturated fatty acids. They are essential. However, they are not for fuel. These have very specific tissue properties. They have very specific shapes that allow them to participate in these processes. But they're not supposed to be burned for fuel. So they are not a cooking oil. Cooking oil is supposed to be energy for fuel. But while these polyunsaturated fatty acids have some very important properties they are also extremely unstable extremely so their smoke point is very very low and with flaxseed oil the smoke point is 107 degrees celsius or 225 fahrenheit and that's just barely above that of boiling water so if you were to use something like a pressure cooker that are very popular right now then you would raise that cooking temperature even though you're just boiling things you would exceed the smoke point of flaxseed oil and now you take something that was potentially anti-inflammatory and and beneficial and it becomes damaged and pro-inflammatory. Now in order to understand this you have to understand just a few basics I'm going to get just a little bit technical but promise I'll keep it very very simple and you can't skip over this because This is part of the whole understanding just a few really simple basics. What is something that's saturated? Well a carbon atom has four binding sites and in a carbohydrate or in a fat or a hydrocarbon which these are talking about carbon and hydrogen then three of these are going to be occupied by hydrogen on one end. And then on the other end we're going to have a different group and this group is going to determine the properties whether it's a solvent or a ketone or a fatty acid. So don't worry about what it is just know it's it's a group that's different. And then we can have more carbons linked up in a chain. So this would be the simplest form of a carbohydrate just one carbon but if we add more carbons we build a chain and these chains typically when we talk about fatty acids in the body they're going to be for the most part 16 carbons long but they can be much shorter or much longer also and the chain goes on until we get to the end where there's that group again and the reason this is saturated is that all the positions on the carbon are occupied Except for the end where there's this group all the other places are occupied with hydrogen and these take up space and they kind of push each other in every direction so that this carbon chain becomes straight. And keep that in mind this is going to be really important. Now bear with me this will become very important. Unsaturated is when in this chain of carbons there's at least one place that has a double bond. A double bond. double connection and that means once we hook up all the other atoms and molecules and groups once it's full it looks different because here where there's the double bond and we count these four connections we have one two three four so we can't hook up as many groups anymore because two of the connections are used by the two same molecules and where we have this double connection that's called monounsaturated okay it's not saturated anymore because there are two hydrogens missing and if we have more than one place then that's called polyunsaturated and we could have two or we could have three or four or five or even six and the brain thing the DHA has 22 carbons in one chain and six of those places are unsaturated and the reason these double bonds matter is that it changes the shape of the molecule and it changes the properties and this is what you need to understand to know what to cook with a saturated molecule has hydrogens equally spaced on all sides of the molecule and the molecule ends up straight and if it's straight then we can pack these closer together and when they're tight there's less wiggle room and this is why these molecules why these fats are solid at room temperature they have much higher melting points if we have a double bond somewhere now we're going to have more hydrogens on one side than the other and they're going to push the chain in a different direction so we get a little bend in it and if we have more than one bend it's going to change shape even more and as I said we can have many many of these double bonds but the more double bonds we have the higher the melting point so fish oil for example is liquid in the freezer that's of how many double bonds it has because of the irregular shape these Molecules don't fit close to each other. They kind of push each other away. So the melting point is one characteristic you can observe, but here's why it's really important. The saturated molecule is stable and this has to do with the hydrogens when it's saturated it's satisfied all the places are filled but the more unsaturated it becomes the more unstable it becomes because these double bonds are dissatisfied they are very reactive they're looking for a place they're looking for a way to fill this vacant space so here are some of the worst cooking oils we already talked about the flax seed oil and it's very very low smoke point and this is because the stable fatty acids are very low the saturated is nine percent the mono unsaturated that are sort of in between are also very low and the vast majority of fatty acids are polyunsaturated so this makes the flax seed oil very reactive that's why it goes rancid it becomes oxidized in room temperature in minutes to hours so does that make flax seed oil a terrible thing well not if you cold press it and keep it in the freezer and have it as a dietary supplement it's not my favorite but it does have some benefits but cooking absolutely a bad idea. Then we have three more oils in this worst cooking oil category that's soybean canola and safflower and these are not uniquely bad these are examples of bad oils there's many many others that are similar but if you understand what they have in common and what they've done to them then you can figure out the other oils as well. There's three questions we have to understand and answer. One, why are these oils the worst? Second, how come there's such a different smoke point? Even though these have very similar properties in some regards, they're very very different smoke points. Like flaxseed is less than half the smoke point of some of these others. And third, if smoke point is a good thing in a cooking oil then how come these are all in the worst category? So we're going to look at a couple more things and this will all become clear. This is pretty typical of what you find in most grocery stores and this is the same all around the world even though the brand names are different. You'll see something like pure vegetable oil and that sounds like a good thing because vegetables we've been told they're so good for us. So then vegetable oils must be a tremendously good thing. It says it's cholesterol free. It has no trans fats and we all know those are really great things. And it says it has Over a thousand milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids. So that's all great, right? Well, how can all of that be a high smoke point based on what we just talked about? This one in particular is soybean oil. So it has a smoke point 230 degrees Celsius, 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Very nice high smoke point. So let's look at how they make this oil. So I went online. and there's a website that i looked at and i'm sure it's not the only one but they had it very nicely laid out on how they produce these oils in order to get as much oil out of the seed or the bean as possible they use solvent extraction and the most popular one is called hexane that's kind of like gasoline or diesel it's in the petrochemical family then once they've extracted as much as possible of the oil they have to desolventize it so now they're using heat and steam and pressure to get this solvent out of it again and then they're quick to point out that at this point this oil is not edible even after they've tried to remove the hexane this is not an edible product and we would kind of think that if they started off with something that's supposed to be food then why would it be inedible halfway through well now they have to refine it and that is not refining in the sense that we want to think of it as sophisticated or elegant this just means they're breaking it down and removing things so now they have to degum it neutralize it bleach it deodorize it and even in some cases winterize and de-wax it So I don't know about you but this doesn't sound to me like things I want done with things I'm going to consume but it's a very popular cooking oil among chefs especially because it now has a mild flavor and like most mass-produced industrial products it will be shipped around in tanks and the end result is refined it has a mild flavor which is why it's popular for cooking it's not supposed to add any flavor to the food it has probably some hexane residues and yes it has a high smoke point because they have altered it to the point where when you heat it the next time there's nothing that's really going to come out of it because they already removed all that stuff Now let's look at some of the health consequences of this. Plant oils, seed oils are usually very high in omega-6s. And this is a polyunsaturated oil that is essential in small quantities, but in large quantities it tends to feed into a pro-inflammatory pathway. Unlike the omega-3s, which are potentially, if they're fresh and whole and undamaged, can be anti-inflammatory but once they're damaged now both pathways are pro-inflammatory but that's not even the worst part of this the worst part is something called reactive oxygen species ROS that whenever you have a sensitive fatty acid and you expose it to oxygen and heat and light and pressure now these are going to react. the fatty acid the double bonds are going to react with hydrogen and oxygen and you get something called reactive oxygen species which are very very damaging to tissues they've done studies with this and it is almost as bad as sugar in promoting insulin resistance it promotes elevated glucose levels and most importantly it promotes inflammation And not the acute healthy inflammation that you get when you hurt yourself that's part of healing but you get the chronic low-grade inflammation that is associated with virtually all degenerative disease that we know of. 95% and probably more of all degenerative disease now everything is starting to point together that these diseases are caused by low-grade inflammation. which some of the components are oxidative damage insulin resistance elevated glucose everything fits together they have these common mechanisms now let's talk about avocado oil this is going to be the most asked question after this video it's going to be the most controversial and it's going to upset the most people So what about avocado? It has a super high smoke point 520 degrees Fahrenheit 270 degrees Celsius and it is a plant oil right so it should be the jackpot. Is that one okay? Well avocado is a very very healthy food. I love avocado. recommend it it's keto friendly it's all good it gets a big green check mark if we take this avocado and we grind it up in cold temperature at around body temperature or less and we put it in a big spinner and we extract the oil that way now we have unrefined extra virgin avocado oil I'm still totally okay with that just don't cook with it however what they're selling as cooking oil and what they tell you will have a 520 degree smoking point is not okay anymore this is a refined product that have gone through some or most or all of the previous steps that we talked about in refining in damaging and they have already heated and process and refine this and it has all these polyunsaturated fatty acids and all these monounsaturated fatty acids and in the process of refining this oil to give it the high smoke point they have already damaged it so even though avocado and extra virgin avocado oil would be good healthy things then this oil is not so much And if you want to use an unrefined extra virgin avocado oil, I encourage that if you want to use it for a dressing or something, then it's going to have this color. Look at that carefully. It's very very deep green. It's intensely green. If you find something that's more yellowish or whitish, then you're not talking about the same product anymore. And very often avocado oil is promoted as having a mild flavor but what that means is it is not the kind that you really want. If you want to use unrefined extra virgin avocado oil and use it in a dressing or something then I'm all for it but what you find is it's going to have this very intense green color and it will have a very distinct flavor it will probably completely take over the flavor of your dressing which is not a bad thing if you like avocados but if it is mild then they've changed it and this is something that we want to start thinking more and more about with any kind of oil or really any kind of food that I don't care what it's made from that's one of my pet peeves when you see a product that says made from or made with as if A tiny tiny minuscule portion of something is going to all of a sudden turn that terrible product around like you have pop tarts made with organic strawberries or it's like saying this cardboard is gluten-free now it must be a health food right? It would be like arguing that vodka is a health food because it's made from organic potatoes or that potato chips are great because they're made from organic potatoes and deep fried in this expeller pressed oil well it doesn't matter what the oil was made from once they superheat it they damage it all over again and What we have to start thinking is more about how was this food raised? Is this chicken healthy? I don't know. How was it raised? Is this is beef healthy? I don't know. How was it raised? What was it fed? So it's not the label that we give something. It's not whether it's chicken or fish or potato. It's where has it been and how has it been processed. That has to be more of our awareness because the biggest problem with our food production it is nothing like it was 50 years ago. It's become an industrialized process. Now we're getting to the fats and oils that I would consider using. I don't necessarily use this one a lot but it would be okay and these are fats that occur naturally in meat. These are mostly saturated and and monounsaturated very little polyunsaturated so the polyunsaturated are the super sensitive the saturated are the most stable and the monounsaturated are somewhere in between so if we use moderate heat then we typically don't damage these monounsaturated at least not much so if you look at the smoke points these are not super high but they're fairly high so we can do some medium heat cooking safely with these. At this point in the video a lot of people are getting concerned. Some are outright angry that you shouldn't tell people to eat saturated fat. It's dangerous and other people are more concerned is saturated fat okay because we've been told so long for decades that saturated fat causes heart disease and diabetes and obesity but More recent research shows that the higher your intake of saturated fat, the lower your risk of heart disease, lower your risk of diabetes, and all-cause mortality. So a lot of countries are actually changing their guidelines, and they're removing the upper limit on saturated fat. It says eat as much as you want. The people who most strongly argue against saturated fat They still believe that it is the saturated fat and the cholesterol in the food that somehow gets unprocessed and directly into your arteries and into your tissues and into your fat stores. And they say the reason your fat stores have a high degree of saturation similar to that of a cow is because you eat the cow. The problem here, though... is that if you argue that way then where did the cow get all that saturated fat? Is it because cows run around and eat each other? I haven't seen much evidence of that. When I look into a pasture I see them eating grass. They don't chase each other trying to get a bite because they eat grass. That's what they're supposed to eat and somehow this grass turns into the tallow into the beef fat with 50% saturated fatty acids. Why is that? Because grass is just another form of glucose of carbohydrate. We can't break it down but the cow can and the fat is stored carbohydrate. In the case of the cow It's virtually all carbohydrate because that's all the cow eats. In the case of humans it's a mix of different things. Anything that we have in excess we store for future use. And the best way to store it is in a ratio similar to that of other mammals. So now we're getting to my recommended oils to cook with, fats and oils. So I use a lot of olive oil. and it has a low saturation it's mostly mono unsaturated so it doesn't have a super high smoke point even though some people argue that it's actually a lot higher than this even the extra virgin olive oil might actually be a good bit higher but you can certainly use it for low and medium heat cooking and the reason it's on the top of my list is that it's one of the few fats that are unprocessed. They don't have to use high heat. They don't have to use solvents. It has a strong flavor of the original food because it is close to that original food. I use olive oil for example when I make an omelet and when you put some olive oil very generously I use it in the pan and then you put the egg mix in with it. That oil is never going to get very hot because the omelet cools the pan at the same time. So this is something you want to keep in mind when people talk about high heat cooking that if the food you're cooking cools it then it's still low to medium heat cooking. The next one I use a good bit is coconut oil. I don't use it as much as the others but it is also a natural it is very mildly very gently processed it's very highly saturated and for this degree of saturation you would expect it to have a super high smoke point which it doesn't and that's because the majority of these saturated fatty acids are kind of short they're short and medium chain fatty acids and that's why even though it's saturated you it has a lower smoke point and it is usually in a high room temperature it's liquid even though it's so saturated and number two is my favorite this is the one I cook with the most butter is a natural product it can be processed without solvents at a low temperature you can get it grass-fed it has A wonderful wonderful flavor you could use it for just about anything. Again this smoke point is not very high so you have to be careful you can't use it for stir fries and things like that but one thing to keep in mind is that the reason it has a high smoke point is not because of the fatty acids it's because it has protein residue in it that's just the nature of butter. So if you're careful and you kind of just pay attention to when that protein starts to brown and you're careful then you're still not going to damage the fatty acids in here even if you exceed this by a little bit and the same thing holds true as for the olive oil that depending on what you cook if the food cools the pan then it's not so much of a problem. But if you do want to cook at a higher temperature then you can also use ghee and I put that number one on the list not because it's my favorite but because by the time you remove that protein residue now this has a very high smoke point and this is a very natural fat so if you wanted to do some stir fries or high heat cooking this would be the one to go with. So now a lot of people are going to be asking especially in the U.S. What about deep frying? What if I have to do some deep frying? And the simple answer is you don't ever have to do any deep frying and my recommendation would be to limit that as much as possible. That there's not really a good oil or fat for deep frying so anytime that you do it you're going to be compromising a lot of things. So if you feel you have to then do it for a birthday do it once a quarter and if you do it that rarely it doesn't really matter what sort of oil you use but In general deep frying is just not a good idea. There's something called repeatedly heating cooking oil and this is the worst of all kinds. This is in fast food establishments where they use the same oil over and over and over and this is so bad it's a whole research topic on its own because the more often you heat something the more of these reactive oxygen species you you get but even heating it once you're going to create a little bit of that same process so I just don't recommend deep frying find other ways to cook your food when I cook on the stove when I want to pan fry something I typically use a stainless steel cast iron or a ceramic non-stick pan you want to avoid the teflon because they give off toxic fumes and chemicals And when you use these you typically don't really have to add any or a lot of fats because a lot of the food will have its own fat. So if I cook a steak or hamburgers or ground beef or something I try to find good quality grass-fed is becoming more available and more affordable and oftentimes will have 20-25 percent fat in it and then you don't really have to add anything. So it turns out that the way to go with fat is that saturated fats are good for you not just for cooking that they're stable and they don't degrade so much when cooking with them but also that that type of fat is actually very satiating and it's good for your health that if you eat fat for the purpose of contributing to your energy supply then saturated fat is the best the other side of it the essential fatty acids they are super important but not for the reason or in the form that we have been told the polyunsaturated fats even though they're essential you should get them from fresh food because when they're in the food when they're in the fish when they're in the seed now they're protected in that tissue in that seed until you eat it but you don't eat it for fuel you eat it for those specific properties that you need for hormones and brain and all the reasons you've been told that polyunsaturated fats are good and you find them in seed oils that is a misconception it is wrong it's a lie never ever try to get your unsaturated fatty acids from an oil. If you enjoyed this video and you'd like to learn more about how the body works and how to take care of your health, you're going to love that one next.

So today I'm going to show you the only way that you can truly know what information to trust and that is To start understanding just a few basic principles about fats and oils. Come and write them. Hey, I'm Dr. Ekberg. I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete.

And if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video. If you ask a cooking channel what the best... oils are they'll probably talk about oils that have a mild flavor and a high smoke point and if you look at a health channel now they'll start talking about polyunsaturated versus saturated fats so here was one of the first places that I found and I did a search for healthy cooking oil and this showed up and don't worry if you can't read it because there's nothing worth seeing but basically what they said was That flax oil was one of the best cooking oils because it had a lot of healthy fats in it.

And they said that butter was kind of in the middle but toward the lower end of the list and that coconut oil was one of the worst fats to cook in. So how did they come to these conclusions? Because in my mind this isn't just wrong it is 100% completely backwards.

And it's because there are so many misconceptions, there are so many myths and we'll go over those today so you'll have it totally clear about what healthy fat is. And the number one misconception is that polyunsaturated fatty acids are healthy. We've been told that for the longest time.

Second misconception is that they confuse the source of the food. They think that oh well flax is healthy therefore flax oil must be healthy and apricots are healthy then apricot oil must be healthy they don't understand the source versus the processing and the third thing is that there is so much emphasis on smoke point without considering at all what the oil has gone through to have that kind of smoke point probably the worst cooking oil you could possibly choose would be flaxseed oil and this surprises a lot of people because they know hey flaxseed oil that's the good quality oil it has so many health benefits but bear with me it is because it's very high in omega-3 and now you go wait wait wait polyunsaturated fatty acids they're healthy omega-3 fatty acids are healthy what are you talking about well here's what we need to understand that they are indeed Part of cell membranes, our brains, our cell membranes, the coverings of all our cells are in large part made by polyunsaturated fatty acids, in particular one called DHA, which is extremely important. They also act as precursors for hormones and they participate in different signal pathways, some of which are anti-inflammatory. So there's Many many benefits to polyunsaturated fatty acids.

They are essential. However, they are not for fuel. These have very specific tissue properties. They have very specific shapes that allow them to participate in these processes. But they're not supposed to be burned for fuel.

So they are not a cooking oil. Cooking oil is supposed to be energy for fuel. But while these polyunsaturated fatty acids have some very important properties they are also extremely unstable extremely so their smoke point is very very low and with flaxseed oil the smoke point is 107 degrees celsius or 225 fahrenheit and that's just barely above that of boiling water so if you were to use something like a pressure cooker that are very popular right now then you would raise that cooking temperature even though you're just boiling things you would exceed the smoke point of flaxseed oil and now you take something that was potentially anti-inflammatory and and beneficial and it becomes damaged and pro-inflammatory.

Now in order to understand this you have to understand just a few basics I'm going to get just a little bit technical but promise I'll keep it very very simple and you can't skip over this because This is part of the whole understanding just a few really simple basics. What is something that's saturated? Well a carbon atom has four binding sites and in a carbohydrate or in a fat or a hydrocarbon which these are talking about carbon and hydrogen then three of these are going to be occupied by hydrogen on one end.

And then on the other end we're going to have a different group and this group is going to determine the properties whether it's a solvent or a ketone or a fatty acid. So don't worry about what it is just know it's it's a group that's different. And then we can have more carbons linked up in a chain.

So this would be the simplest form of a carbohydrate just one carbon but if we add more carbons we build a chain and these chains typically when we talk about fatty acids in the body they're going to be for the most part 16 carbons long but they can be much shorter or much longer also and the chain goes on until we get to the end where there's that group again and the reason this is saturated is that all the positions on the carbon are occupied Except for the end where there's this group all the other places are occupied with hydrogen and these take up space and they kind of push each other in every direction so that this carbon chain becomes straight. And keep that in mind this is going to be really important. Now bear with me this will become very important. Unsaturated is when in this chain of carbons there's at least one place that has a double bond. A double bond.

double connection and that means once we hook up all the other atoms and molecules and groups once it's full it looks different because here where there's the double bond and we count these four connections we have one two three four so we can't hook up as many groups anymore because two of the connections are used by the two same molecules and where we have this double connection that's called monounsaturated okay it's not saturated anymore because there are two hydrogens missing and if we have more than one place then that's called polyunsaturated and we could have two or we could have three or four or five or even six and the brain thing the DHA has 22 carbons in one chain and six of those places are unsaturated and the reason these double bonds matter is that it changes the shape of the molecule and it changes the properties and this is what you need to understand to know what to cook with a saturated molecule has hydrogens equally spaced on all sides of the molecule and the molecule ends up straight and if it's straight then we can pack these closer together and when they're tight there's less wiggle room and this is why these molecules why these fats are solid at room temperature they have much higher melting points if we have a double bond somewhere now we're going to have more hydrogens on one side than the other and they're going to push the chain in a different direction so we get a little bend in it and if we have more than one bend it's going to change shape even more and as I said we can have many many of these double bonds but the more double bonds we have the higher the melting point so fish oil for example is liquid in the freezer that's of how many double bonds it has because of the irregular shape these Molecules don't fit close to each other. They kind of push each other away. So the melting point is one characteristic you can observe, but here's why it's really important.

The saturated molecule is stable and this has to do with the hydrogens when it's saturated it's satisfied all the places are filled but the more unsaturated it becomes the more unstable it becomes because these double bonds are dissatisfied they are very reactive they're looking for a place they're looking for a way to fill this vacant space so here are some of the worst cooking oils we already talked about the flax seed oil and it's very very low smoke point and this is because the stable fatty acids are very low the saturated is nine percent the mono unsaturated that are sort of in between are also very low and the vast majority of fatty acids are polyunsaturated so this makes the flax seed oil very reactive that's why it goes rancid it becomes oxidized in room temperature in minutes to hours so does that make flax seed oil a terrible thing well not if you cold press it and keep it in the freezer and have it as a dietary supplement it's not my favorite but it does have some benefits but cooking absolutely a bad idea. Then we have three more oils in this worst cooking oil category that's soybean canola and safflower and these are not uniquely bad these are examples of bad oils there's many many others that are similar but if you understand what they have in common and what they've done to them then you can figure out the other oils as well. There's three questions we have to understand and answer.

One, why are these oils the worst? Second, how come there's such a different smoke point? Even though these have very similar properties in some regards, they're very very different smoke points.

Like flaxseed is less than half the smoke point of some of these others. And third, if smoke point is a good thing in a cooking oil then how come these are all in the worst category? So we're going to look at a couple more things and this will all become clear.

This is pretty typical of what you find in most grocery stores and this is the same all around the world even though the brand names are different. You'll see something like pure vegetable oil and that sounds like a good thing because vegetables we've been told they're so good for us. So then vegetable oils must be a tremendously good thing. It says it's cholesterol free. It has no trans fats and we all know those are really great things.

And it says it has Over a thousand milligrams of omega-3 fatty acids. So that's all great, right? Well, how can all of that be a high smoke point based on what we just talked about? This one in particular is soybean oil. So it has a smoke point 230 degrees Celsius, 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Very nice high smoke point. So let's look at how they make this oil. So I went online.

and there's a website that i looked at and i'm sure it's not the only one but they had it very nicely laid out on how they produce these oils in order to get as much oil out of the seed or the bean as possible they use solvent extraction and the most popular one is called hexane that's kind of like gasoline or diesel it's in the petrochemical family then once they've extracted as much as possible of the oil they have to desolventize it so now they're using heat and steam and pressure to get this solvent out of it again and then they're quick to point out that at this point this oil is not edible even after they've tried to remove the hexane this is not an edible product and we would kind of think that if they started off with something that's supposed to be food then why would it be inedible halfway through well now they have to refine it and that is not refining in the sense that we want to think of it as sophisticated or elegant this just means they're breaking it down and removing things so now they have to degum it neutralize it bleach it deodorize it and even in some cases winterize and de-wax it So I don't know about you but this doesn't sound to me like things I want done with things I'm going to consume but it's a very popular cooking oil among chefs especially because it now has a mild flavor and like most mass-produced industrial products it will be shipped around in tanks and the end result is refined it has a mild flavor which is why it's popular for cooking it's not supposed to add any flavor to the food it has probably some hexane residues and yes it has a high smoke point because they have altered it to the point where when you heat it the next time there's nothing that's really going to come out of it because they already removed all that stuff Now let's look at some of the health consequences of this. Plant oils, seed oils are usually very high in omega-6s. And this is a polyunsaturated oil that is essential in small quantities, but in large quantities it tends to feed into a pro-inflammatory pathway. Unlike the omega-3s, which are potentially, if they're fresh and whole and undamaged, can be anti-inflammatory but once they're damaged now both pathways are pro-inflammatory but that's not even the worst part of this the worst part is something called reactive oxygen species ROS that whenever you have a sensitive fatty acid and you expose it to oxygen and heat and light and pressure now these are going to react. the fatty acid the double bonds are going to react with hydrogen and oxygen and you get something called reactive oxygen species which are very very damaging to tissues they've done studies with this and it is almost as bad as sugar in promoting insulin resistance it promotes elevated glucose levels and most importantly it promotes inflammation And not the acute healthy inflammation that you get when you hurt yourself that's part of healing but you get the chronic low-grade inflammation that is associated with virtually all degenerative disease that we know of.

95% and probably more of all degenerative disease now everything is starting to point together that these diseases are caused by low-grade inflammation. which some of the components are oxidative damage insulin resistance elevated glucose everything fits together they have these common mechanisms now let's talk about avocado oil this is going to be the most asked question after this video it's going to be the most controversial and it's going to upset the most people So what about avocado? It has a super high smoke point 520 degrees Fahrenheit 270 degrees Celsius and it is a plant oil right so it should be the jackpot.

Is that one okay? Well avocado is a very very healthy food. I love avocado. recommend it it's keto friendly it's all good it gets a big green check mark if we take this avocado and we grind it up in cold temperature at around body temperature or less and we put it in a big spinner and we extract the oil that way now we have unrefined extra virgin avocado oil I'm still totally okay with that just don't cook with it however what they're selling as cooking oil and what they tell you will have a 520 degree smoking point is not okay anymore this is a refined product that have gone through some or most or all of the previous steps that we talked about in refining in damaging and they have already heated and process and refine this and it has all these polyunsaturated fatty acids and all these monounsaturated fatty acids and in the process of refining this oil to give it the high smoke point they have already damaged it so even though avocado and extra virgin avocado oil would be good healthy things then this oil is not so much And if you want to use an unrefined extra virgin avocado oil, I encourage that if you want to use it for a dressing or something, then it's going to have this color. Look at that carefully.

It's very very deep green. It's intensely green. If you find something that's more yellowish or whitish, then you're not talking about the same product anymore. And very often avocado oil is promoted as having a mild flavor but what that means is it is not the kind that you really want.

If you want to use unrefined extra virgin avocado oil and use it in a dressing or something then I'm all for it but what you find is it's going to have this very intense green color and it will have a very distinct flavor it will probably completely take over the flavor of your dressing which is not a bad thing if you like avocados but if it is mild then they've changed it and this is something that we want to start thinking more and more about with any kind of oil or really any kind of food that I don't care what it's made from that's one of my pet peeves when you see a product that says made from or made with as if A tiny tiny minuscule portion of something is going to all of a sudden turn that terrible product around like you have pop tarts made with organic strawberries or it's like saying this cardboard is gluten-free now it must be a health food right? It would be like arguing that vodka is a health food because it's made from organic potatoes or that potato chips are great because they're made from organic potatoes and deep fried in this expeller pressed oil well it doesn't matter what the oil was made from once they superheat it they damage it all over again and What we have to start thinking is more about how was this food raised? Is this chicken healthy? I don't know. How was it raised?

Is this is beef healthy? I don't know. How was it raised?

What was it fed? So it's not the label that we give something. It's not whether it's chicken or fish or potato. It's where has it been and how has it been processed. That has to be more of our awareness because the biggest problem with our food production it is nothing like it was 50 years ago.

It's become an industrialized process. Now we're getting to the fats and oils that I would consider using. I don't necessarily use this one a lot but it would be okay and these are fats that occur naturally in meat.

These are mostly saturated and and monounsaturated very little polyunsaturated so the polyunsaturated are the super sensitive the saturated are the most stable and the monounsaturated are somewhere in between so if we use moderate heat then we typically don't damage these monounsaturated at least not much so if you look at the smoke points these are not super high but they're fairly high so we can do some medium heat cooking safely with these. At this point in the video a lot of people are getting concerned. Some are outright angry that you shouldn't tell people to eat saturated fat.

It's dangerous and other people are more concerned is saturated fat okay because we've been told so long for decades that saturated fat causes heart disease and diabetes and obesity but More recent research shows that the higher your intake of saturated fat, the lower your risk of heart disease, lower your risk of diabetes, and all-cause mortality. So a lot of countries are actually changing their guidelines, and they're removing the upper limit on saturated fat. It says eat as much as you want. The people who most strongly argue against saturated fat They still believe that it is the saturated fat and the cholesterol in the food that somehow gets unprocessed and directly into your arteries and into your tissues and into your fat stores.

And they say the reason your fat stores have a high degree of saturation similar to that of a cow is because you eat the cow. The problem here, though... is that if you argue that way then where did the cow get all that saturated fat?

Is it because cows run around and eat each other? I haven't seen much evidence of that. When I look into a pasture I see them eating grass.

They don't chase each other trying to get a bite because they eat grass. That's what they're supposed to eat and somehow this grass turns into the tallow into the beef fat with 50% saturated fatty acids. Why is that?

Because grass is just another form of glucose of carbohydrate. We can't break it down but the cow can and the fat is stored carbohydrate. In the case of the cow It's virtually all carbohydrate because that's all the cow eats.

In the case of humans it's a mix of different things. Anything that we have in excess we store for future use. And the best way to store it is in a ratio similar to that of other mammals.

So now we're getting to my recommended oils to cook with, fats and oils. So I use a lot of olive oil. and it has a low saturation it's mostly mono unsaturated so it doesn't have a super high smoke point even though some people argue that it's actually a lot higher than this even the extra virgin olive oil might actually be a good bit higher but you can certainly use it for low and medium heat cooking and the reason it's on the top of my list is that it's one of the few fats that are unprocessed. They don't have to use high heat.

They don't have to use solvents. It has a strong flavor of the original food because it is close to that original food. I use olive oil for example when I make an omelet and when you put some olive oil very generously I use it in the pan and then you put the egg mix in with it.

That oil is never going to get very hot because the omelet cools the pan at the same time. So this is something you want to keep in mind when people talk about high heat cooking that if the food you're cooking cools it then it's still low to medium heat cooking. The next one I use a good bit is coconut oil.

I don't use it as much as the others but it is also a natural it is very mildly very gently processed it's very highly saturated and for this degree of saturation you would expect it to have a super high smoke point which it doesn't and that's because the majority of these saturated fatty acids are kind of short they're short and medium chain fatty acids and that's why even though it's saturated you it has a lower smoke point and it is usually in a high room temperature it's liquid even though it's so saturated and number two is my favorite this is the one I cook with the most butter is a natural product it can be processed without solvents at a low temperature you can get it grass-fed it has A wonderful wonderful flavor you could use it for just about anything. Again this smoke point is not very high so you have to be careful you can't use it for stir fries and things like that but one thing to keep in mind is that the reason it has a high smoke point is not because of the fatty acids it's because it has protein residue in it that's just the nature of butter. So if you're careful and you kind of just pay attention to when that protein starts to brown and you're careful then you're still not going to damage the fatty acids in here even if you exceed this by a little bit and the same thing holds true as for the olive oil that depending on what you cook if the food cools the pan then it's not so much of a problem.

But if you do want to cook at a higher temperature then you can also use ghee and I put that number one on the list not because it's my favorite but because by the time you remove that protein residue now this has a very high smoke point and this is a very natural fat so if you wanted to do some stir fries or high heat cooking this would be the one to go with. So now a lot of people are going to be asking especially in the U.S. What about deep frying?

What if I have to do some deep frying? And the simple answer is you don't ever have to do any deep frying and my recommendation would be to limit that as much as possible. That there's not really a good oil or fat for deep frying so anytime that you do it you're going to be compromising a lot of things. So if you feel you have to then do it for a birthday do it once a quarter and if you do it that rarely it doesn't really matter what sort of oil you use but In general deep frying is just not a good idea. There's something called repeatedly heating cooking oil and this is the worst of all kinds.

This is in fast food establishments where they use the same oil over and over and over and this is so bad it's a whole research topic on its own because the more often you heat something the more of these reactive oxygen species you you get but even heating it once you're going to create a little bit of that same process so I just don't recommend deep frying find other ways to cook your food when I cook on the stove when I want to pan fry something I typically use a stainless steel cast iron or a ceramic non-stick pan you want to avoid the teflon because they give off toxic fumes and chemicals And when you use these you typically don't really have to add any or a lot of fats because a lot of the food will have its own fat. So if I cook a steak or hamburgers or ground beef or something I try to find good quality grass-fed is becoming more available and more affordable and oftentimes will have 20-25 percent fat in it and then you don't really have to add anything. So it turns out that the way to go with fat is that saturated fats are good for you not just for cooking that they're stable and they don't degrade so much when cooking with them but also that that type of fat is actually very satiating and it's good for your health that if you eat fat for the purpose of contributing to your energy supply then saturated fat is the best the other side of it the essential fatty acids they are super important but not for the reason or in the form that we have been told the polyunsaturated fats even though they're essential you should get them from fresh food because when they're in the food when they're in the fish when they're in the seed now they're protected in that tissue in that seed until you eat it but you don't eat it for fuel you eat it for those specific properties that you need for hormones and brain and all the reasons you've been told that polyunsaturated fats are good and you find them in seed oils that is a misconception it is wrong it's a lie never ever try to get your unsaturated fatty acids from an oil. If you enjoyed this video and you'd like to learn more about how the body works and how to take care of your health, you're going to love that one next.

Transcript for:Understanding Cooking Oils Myths and Facts

Transcript for:
Understanding Cooking Oils Myths and Facts