Healing Fats Book

As I've mentioned before, we are in an age in which most people don't understand where their food comes from and how to scrutinize their foods. One of the things people understand the least are fats. Fats are an important component in our diet but most of us know so little about them.  We fall prey to believing in things that turn out to be not true.

I grew up in the age of low-fat diet. Have you ever gone onto a low fat diet and then binged afterwards? Or any other diet? I have and I usually didn't eat the right things. With so little knowledge about foods we are victims to food fads, like a high-fat diet, or an all protein diet, or an all-fruit diet. Fats are in bad times. The quality of fats in most people's diets are very low in essential fatty acids and high in deficient fats.

Unfortunately, most oils in a supermarket are low quality and they fats in them have been altered to a dangerous degree.Such information is bad for manufactures and they spend a lot of money to confuse us and public institutions like the American Heart Association recommends we avoid EFA containing oils for fear that what we buy is carcinogenic.

 The American Heart Association wont tell us to avoid these oils, because that would be too controversial to the oil industry but instead will tell us to minimizing them. This makes their advice useless and harmful.

The quality of these oils is low because the inconvenient truth is that these manufacturers make oils for self-life and not quality.

 However, a deficit in EFAs can cause a lot of problems including mental, emotion, physical problems and eventually a degenerative disease, learning, skin growth, happiness, and more. Amd if the oils are carcinogenic they make us susceptible to cancer.

But the book Fat's the Heal, Fat's that Kill offers hope. Written by a nutritionist in the 80s it offers hope through how to distinguish good oils from bad, or unrefined from refined. And since the publication of his book high quality oils have entered the market. This book dispells the misbeliefs and overall is a very good guide.

 What you get from the book is your choice. There is a chapter on chemical structure of fat. After that the science is over. The rest is a guide that primarily what fats are important, what many of us our missing, some history of modern oil production and the political climate, how to buy nutritionally sound fats and their us. Also, It tells the history of manufacturing and offers meal plans of how to cook with and take fats to heal ourselves.

But most important is the knowledge of how to distinguish good and bad oils and how to find them.

I'll give you a scenario I made which is just part of what the book offers.

You walk through an grocer store. You see oils in clear plastic bottles and oils in dark green bottles. Already you can tell that one oil is protected from light and rancidity and another is so processed that it doesn't have EFA's any more. It is a "white" oil.

You have two choices. There is organic sesame oil in the dark green glass bottle. Or Soybean oil on the right in the clear plastic bottle.

You buy the cheap oil to cook with like canola(which didn't exist before the Canadian government genetically modified rapeseed) or soy bean oil and you like them because they have a high temperature. The sesame oil burns easily to you. The oil you bought has no taste and and you wouldn't imagine them putting them raw onto food.

Or you buy the organic sesame oil or maybe even the regular sesame oil. What you notice is that it has a strong smell and a unique taste. You put it on your food raw or maybe you cook with it at low temperature heat so it doesn't smoke. What you have is a better product in terms of nutrition.

The soybean oil should be similar to the sesame oil in it having taste and smell but the soybean oil has been heavily processed. All the essential fatty acids have been burnt away and you are left with deficient oil. Also, its been slight chemically hydrogenated so it won't spoil, because the bacteria don't like to eat something so unhealthy.

I'm exagerating slightly to make a point. That is what's important is that the oil has a taste and smell and that the manufacturer puts care into keeping it from spoiling. The processed oil will not go rancid but thats because there is nothing good that will go rancid in it.(I'm exagerating slightly againto make the point that are body needs good fats). These fats have no function in energy production but in the maintanance of our body and many processed oils lose them oil. A deficit in EFAs can cause a lot of problems including mental, emotion, physical problems and eventually a degenerative disease.

The notion that cholesterol causes heart disease has been dispeeled by These factors many nutritionists believe concerns the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fats, and there inclusion into the diet. A diet in fast food oils is going to miss a lot of EFAs. You can say the same thing about other fat related diseases like diabetes.

Balance and harmony are good themes when discussing the role of nutrition. Udo Erasmus book does well and generally suceeds in presenting good themes. He also wrote abook explaining something fairly complicated in a way that is understandable.  However,  the book is rather a start than a finish.That being said, it's a good start.