Topic: A heathier alternative to Vegetable Oil?

[natterjak]

KTC Veg oil says "Produced from genetically modified soya", no mention of rapeseed. Also no one has mentioned Corn Oil in this thread yet, isn't that marketed to have health benefits?

[Peripatetic Phil]

KTC Veg oil says "Produced from genetically modified soya", no mention of rapeseed. Also no one has mentioned Corn Oil in this thread yet, isn't that marketed to have health benefits?

Lunch (working lunch : project deadline looms) was a sandwich consisting of six slices of streaky bacon (rind-on) + 4 slices of Clonakilty black pudding and one slice of buffalo mozeralla, all fried in beef dripping.  I don't think there's a lot of point my worrying about which oil I use

** Phil.

[spiceyokooko]

Has anybody regularly used any of these without any detrimental effects on your end curry? What are the cost comparisons? Or do you still use cheap veg oil?

A lot depends on how you want to define 'healthier'. As far as curry cooking oils go, they're all about as bad as each other health wise. I generally tend to use Sunflower oil which is a step up from your bog standard generic vegetable oil (for most read Canola, as others have said) in terms of quality but underneath the more expensive nut oils.

In terms of taste I don't think there's any (or I've never detected any) difference between Veg, Sunflower and nut oils.

The healthiest oil to use is Extra Virgin Olive Oil from the first olive pressing but it's not at all suitable for cooking curries in for two reasons: 1/ the low smoke point and 2/ the taste, it's too strongly flavoured for curries.

The healthiest option therefore is undoubtedly, use less oil! But that's almost an anathema to BIR style cooking which needs a lot of oil to carry those spice flavours. There's a very good reason many BIR take-away curries have oil floating in them - they use a lot of oil to cook them in and as moisture/water gets removed from the gravy/sauce the oil separates from it.

So if you're really looking for a healthier option, use less oil (which won't get you the same taste) or eat less curries!

[PaulP]

Warning - longish post!

I thought I'd bring this up again as I've spent years in my spare time on the internet trying to find some answers and the way lipid (fat) research seems to be going is quite surprising.

Most of you will have heard of the 3 categories of oil or fat: Monounsaturated, Polyunsaturated and the devil's stuff itself, Saturated oil or fat.

A little bit of history:

Up to about the 1950s nobody ate industrial seed-based oil such as soya, sunflower, rapeseed oil, cotton seed oil etc. etc. These products were used to make oil paints, varnish and were used as industrial lubricants. In those days people ate olive oil, lard, butter, beef tallow, palm oil and coconut oil.

At this time it was discovered that it was cheaper to use petroleum oil products to manufacture paints, varnish and lubricants. This left a big problem for the agriculture business as to what to do with these industrial seed oils. To cut a long story short, due to some appalling science we ended up eating these oils at the advice of our governments because they told us these oils were heart healthy, unlike the old fashioned saturated fats we used to eat.

The most recent research paints an entirely different picture. Polyunsaturated oils are becoming the "bad boy". Most of the poly oils we eat are classed as Omega 6. Too much of this stuff is implicated with heart disease, cancer and slow metabolism (that's not a good thing by the way).

Many scientists now agree that we need a ratio of omega6 to omega3 of between 4:1 and 1:1.
The standard American diet creates a ratio of at least 50:1 omega6 to omega3 poly oils, and a UK diet is hardly different.

On top of this, we are only talking about a recommended quantity of polyunsaturated oil in the region of about 6 grams daily in total.

The problem with excess polyunsaturated fats is of oxidation. These oils are highly unstable  and oxidise in the body very easily. This causes inflammation in the body hence the links to cancer and heart disease.

More research seems to be debunking the bad science of knocking saturated fats and how they will cause heart disease. This link has never been proven.

The facts are, the body converts excess sugars to saturated fat. Out bodily fat make up is similar to lard, i.e. about 50% monounsaturated and 50% saturated, very little polyunsaturates in the human body.

If these statements turn out to be true we should be wary of eating sunflower oil, rapeseed oil or any industrial vegetable seed oil that is high in polyunsaturated fats.

I switched recently to making curries with light olive oil that only contains 10% polyunsaturates.
That is the oil I now use for most frying.

I've also switched to 100% butter instead of a 70/30 butter/veg oil mix.
I use butter ghee for my dals. (Highly saturated)
I also use virgin coconut oil for some curries. (Highly saturated)

I'm planning to return to lard and beef tallow for making home made chips. Actually easier said than done as supply exceeds demand for quality lard and beef tallow.

I take an omega 3 fish oil supplement and I actively avoid anything that may contain omega 6 poly oils.

Bring on the old school sat fats!

[natterjak]

Interesting stuff Paul but as I'm sure you know you have to be careful researching things on the Internet due to the frequent vested interest of activists and groups promoting one theory over another. You haven't mentioned your sources so I'm having a hard time assessing how seriously I should take your conclusions. However I appreciate you have the best of intentions in sharing your thoughts so thank you for making the effort to make such a long post.

Ps why is it hard to use lard of supply exceeds demand.? Or did you mean the other way around?

[PaulP]

Hi NJ,

Yes that was the wrong way around!

[Peripatetic Phil]

(selective snip)

I've also switched to 100% butter instead of a 70/30 butter/veg oil mix.  I use butter ghee for my dals. (Highly saturated).  I'm planning to return to lard and beef tallow for making home made chips. Actually easier said than done as supply exceeds demand for quality lard and beef tallow.  Bring on the old school sat fats!

For some of us, they never went away.  I have never forsaken butter for a butter/oil mixture; I continue to cook pancakes in lard, and virtually everything else in dripping.  But for my curries I generally use rapeseed oil for the same reason that I use it to fry chips :  I use it in quantity, it is cheap, and it contributes no unpleasant (or even unwanted) overtones.

Interesting stuff Paul but as I'm sure you know you have to be careful researching things on the Internet due to the frequent vested interest of activists and groups promoting one theory over another. You haven't mentioned your sources so I'm having a hard time assessing how seriously I should take your conclusions.

I've copied it to a friend who is a professor of nutrition for her expert comments; I will report back if she replies.

** Phil.

[spiceyokooko]

PaulP

Very interesting post.

It's hard to know what to believe any more, they seem to keep changing their minds about what's bad and what isn't. If they were wrong once before, what makes anyone want to believe they're right this time?

Personally I'm extremely sceptical of pretty much anything I read these days with regards to what's good and what's bad as I believe many of the people putting out this information have either their own or a government agenda to follow. Cynical I know, but I know just how much and how often our government at worst lies and at best misrepresents information it puts to the general public to not believe very much at all about what it says any more.

The bottom line here as always as far as I'm concerned is that pretty much all fats are unhealthy in some way or another, particularly in the quantities your average person generally consumes. The answer is of course to try and eat a balanced diet that doesn't contain too much fat, salt or sugar and particularly too much processed food. Processed food as far as I'm concerned is the real evil.

And as natterjack mentioned, I assume you mean demand outstrips supply for lard and beef tallow.

[PaulP]

Yes Spicey, I meant demand exceeding supply re: Lard.

I'll post some links when I have time which may not be this evening.

Paul

[PaulP]

Here are a few links:

Natural news Article

http://www.naturalnews.com/029194_cancer_risk_fats.html

The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics
 
http://www.thincs.org/

Unsaturated Vegetable Oils Toxic

http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/unsaturated-oils.shtml

http://thehealthyadvocate.com/2011/11/07/polyunsaturated-fat-linked-to-tumor-growth-and-greater-cancer-risk/

http://www.westonaprice.org/know-your-fats/good-fats-bad-fats-separating-fact-from-fiction

I don't want to bore people with this or even get into pointless arguments. I just find it interesting and It's enough for me to modify my diet accordingly.

I don't expect any government to echo these concerns to the public anytime soon.

You can't escape the fact that over the last 50 years people have been persuaded to abandon saturated fat and butter etc. to improve their health.

In fact the opposite is true and heart disease and cancer and obesity have never been so high despite people abandoning the old fats.

Two things have changed: Large intake of polyunsaturated vegetable seed oils and a massive increase in sugar intake, particularly fructose which is bad news in itself.

Paul