FATS AND OILS FOR HEALTH AND HEALING

CLEARING UP THE FAT MYTHS

By Lawrence Wilson, MD

High-quality fats and oils are one of the most essential foods to consume every day. They are needed for your brain, for energy production and for making many vital hormones in the body. Children absolutely require EPA and DHA, in particular, for nervous system growth. Quality fats and oils are also essential for transporting all vitamins, minerals and hormones in and out of every one of your body cells.

Fats do not drive up your insulin level, create insulin resistance and make you fat, as do sugar and carbohydrates. They also do not rob your body of minerals, as does eating sugars and many starches as well. Last but not least, fats and oils make our food taste good.

The idea of avoiding all high-quality fats because they may make you fat or that quality fats clog your arteries is nonsense, one of the worst nutritional errors of our time. Even the government ‘food pyramid’ is absolutely wrong when it comes to eating quality fats and oils.

SOURCES OF HIGH QUALITY FATS AND OILS

Meats. Excellent sources of quality fats and oils include hormone-free and preferably grass-fed meats, especially lamb, high-quality eggs and healthful poultry such as dark meat chicken and turkey.

Fish. Oily fish such as wild salmon, halibut, sardines or baby tuna also contain excellent oils, but also contain some mercury, even if they are wild-caught. For this reason, they are not as good as the other products above.

Tuna fish contains so much mercury today it is basically toxic. Please avoid all tuna and other large fish for the same reason.

Dairy products such as whole milk and high-fat cheese and butter are excellent if they are raised naturally and organically and are certified and raw. I prefer goat dairy because most cows today are hybrids and their products are not as healthful as in years past. Many people are sensitive to cows milk, although they may not be aware of it.

Nuts and Seeds. Nuts such as walnuts, pecans, almonds and brazil nuts also contain good quality oils. However, they are not quite as good as the meats, dairy and eggs. The same goes for seeds and especially seed butters, such as sunflower butter, sesame butter, tahini and others. These are good in moderation, once or twice weekly, but not as high overall quality as the ones above.

Vegetable oils can be a good source of the omega-6 oils. However, most are boiled and processed, and for this reason only olive, flaxseed and hempseed oils are recommended. The latter two are excellent sources of omega-3 oils. However, they go rancid very fast and must be refrigerated. Olive, coconut and palm oils are somewhat saturated, so they stay fresh much longer. Coconut oil and palm oil are okay in small quantities but are much more yin in Chinese terminology, so their use should be strictly limited to occasional use.

Canola oil is not only refined but is slightly toxic. It used to be called rapeseed oil and was genetically altered to remove most of a toxic substance it contains.

Primrose and borage oils are other excellent oils. Generally they come only in capsules and are useful for women who suffer from premenstrual tension and other menstrual-related complaints. Avoid cottonseed oil, which is often contaminated with pesticides, even if labeled organic.

WHAT ARE FATS AND OILS?

Fats and oils are chains of molecules called fatty acids that are composed mainly of carbon atoms. Fats are generally solid at room temperature, while oils are liquid at room temperature.

The reason fats are solid at room temperature is they have more double bonds among the carbon atoms. When there are many carbon double bonds in a fat, it is more saturated. Examples of more saturated fats are beef tallow, lard, chicken fat, and coconut and palm oil. All these tend to be solid at room temperature.

Other fats have fewer carbon double bonds. These are called unsaturated fats. They are more liquid at room temperature. They include most of the vegetable oils such as peanut, safflower, sunflower, soy, corn, flaxseed and sesame seed oil.

Some fats are somewhat saturated, including butter and olive oil, for example. These will be hard if you place them in the refrigerator, but will become soft or liquid at room temperature. This is important because the more unsaturated an oil, the faster it goes rancid. Rancid oils can be very harmful to eat.

Fish oil and flaxseed oil contain more of a configuration called omega-3 that can help reduce inflammation in the body. Most other vegetable oils, in contrast, contain more omega-6 configuration that tends to be more pro-inflammatory.

Evening primrose and borage oil contain a fat called gamma-linolenic acid, which may also help alleviate inflammatory conditions such as premenstrual syndrome. Cod liver oil is a rich source of vitamins A and D, making it very helpful for many conditions.

CHILDREN AND FATS

Babies and children have a critical need for high quality fats for the development of their brains and nervous systems. It is most unfortunate when parents do not feed their children fat, for fear the children will become overweight.

Instead of quality meats, eggs, yogurt and other fat-containing foods, they substitute soymilk, grains, fruit juice or even worse, soda pop. These contain much more sugars, the foods that tend to make children overweight.

There is an outcry against baby formula that contains cheap soymilk or soy oil, when babies desperately need all the essential fatty acids for their brain development. Babies who cannot drink mother’s milk, which is over 50% fat, often do well on raw cow or goat milk. If not, one can create a baby formula based on other fats or oils. An excellent book that offers several excellent baby formulas you can make easily at home is Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon with Mary Enig. This is a good cookbook.

After they are weaned, children need eggs, butter, meats, poultry, oily fish such as salmon, halibut and sardines, nuts, nut butters or fish oil. The grass-fed meats are better, including lamb and dark meat chicken, turkey, natural beef in moderation and preferably goat milk and cheese or organic milk products.

Fats to avoid for everyone, particularly children, are French fries fried in vegetable oil, fast-food milk shakes, which are mostly chemicals, restaurant fried fish, processed cheeses used in fast-food pizza and other foods fried in vegetable oils. These oils are usually old, overheated and quite unhealthful.

I cannot emphasize enough that babies and children must have high-quality fats and oils every day to nourish their brains and avoid many kinds of developmental and behavioral problems.

REFINING OILS

Most vegetable oils are refined to prevent them from going rancid. They are boiled, deodorized and at times preserved with chemicals. This gives them a good shelf life in the supermarket, but damages the nutritional quality of the oil.

Hydrogenation. Another common way oils are refined is called hydrogenation. During World War II, shortage of butter and other fats occurred, as they were needed to make rubber tires for the war effort.

It was found that by bubbling hydrogen through vegetable oil at high temperature using nickel as a catalyst, one can change an oil from a liquid to a solid. It will then not go rancid and it will ‘feel’ like butter. The new fake fat was called margarine. A huge public relations campaign convinced the public to eat margarine instead of butter because it does not contain cholesterol.

MARGARINE, CRISCO AND OTHER HYDROGENATED OILS

More recently, we have learned that margarine is the worst type of fat or oil to eat. Hydrogenation creates something called trans-fatty acids that are quite harmful to the body. Also, the nickel used to produce the margarine is a very toxic metal that does not belong in our bodies.

Margarines, some claiming to contain no trans fats, are still sold at many health food markets and at supermarkets. Also, partially hydrogenated oils are still used in many, many processed foods such as commercial peanut butters, dips and spreads, cookies, candies and more. Hydrogenated oils are good for bicycle grease or can stop your car doors from squeaking. However, they are lower quality foods.

SATURATED VERSUS UNSATURATED FATS

Most knowledgeable nutritionists agree that fats and oils are essential for health. However, they debate whether saturated fats like butter and coconut oil are better than unsaturated oils like soy or canola oil.

My conviction is, and has been for quite a while, that the fears about saturated fats are quite overblown. Last year the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a review of saturated fat studies from the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of California. The authors concluded that reducing saturated fat does not prolong life or lower the incidence of coronary heart disease.

The authors wrote: “The conclusion of an analysis of the history and politics behind the diet-heart hypothesis was that after 50 years of research, there was no evidence that a diet low in saturated fat prolongs life…Overall, dietary intervention by lowering saturated fat intake does not lower the incidence of nonfatal coronary artery disease; nor does such dietary intervention lower coronary disease or total mortality.”

This is not the only scientific group to catch on to the truth. In 2002, a report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded there was no evidence that a diet low in saturated fat prolongs life. They went on to say that the real killer is trans-fatty acids. The report stated, “the only safe intake of trans fat is zero.”

Trans fats are slowly being removed from processed foods and restaurant frying fats at places like McDonalds. While one can overeat on any type of food, the causes of heart disease are most likely due to chlorine in the water we drink, toxic metals in the food, water and air and other factors. Saturated fats have been eaten for generations, long before cancer and heart disease were common.

THE LOW-FAT CRAZE

“Low-fat” everything has produced an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, hypoglycemia, and even some of the ADHD and perhaps cancer that are so common today. These diseases were not as prevalent before people began believing the lie that quality fats are bad for you.

What few people realize is that if you do not eat fats and oils, you must consume many more sugars or starches to obtain the calories you need. This easily exceeds most people’s carbohydrate tolerance level and leads to many diseases.

Also, prepared foods that are low in fat usually contain many more chemicals in order to give the food the flavor that fats normally provide. Many of these chemical additives are of questionable safety.

THE VEGETABLE OIL CRAZE

Another horrible dietary change has been the substitution of cheap soy, corn and other vegetable oils for the traditional fats used for cooking and frying. These oils are less healthful because they are highly refined.

They are also far lower in the critical omega-3 fatty acids than traditional fats such as tallow from grass-fed cows and even lard that used to be used more often, but today is not very rich in omega-3 fatty acids either because the pigs are fed mainly corn and are not grass-fed.

Vegetable oils have another problem in that they are often somewhat rancid. Also, they form highly toxic chemicals when reused over and over, as they are in most restaurants. Saturated frying fats such as chicken fat, lard, butter or coconut oil are much more stable at high temperatures used in frying foods.

Frying, by the way, is not all bad. It actually holds in certain nutrients and properties of foods quite well. It is just that the oils used are not generally that healthful today and it should be eaten in moderation, as with all fats and oils.

CHOLESTEROL MYTHS

Cholesterol is an essential fat compound manufactured in our livers that is needed to make all of your sex hormones and steroid hormones. It is mainly made in our bodies. However, a little, relatively speaking, is found in animal fats.

Odd as it sounds, I have had vegetarian patients with high serum cholesterol, although they ate no cholesterol at all. The reasons are explained below and in the article referred to below.

Saturated fat is not the same as cholesterol. Coconut and palm oil, for example, are quite saturated fats (solid at room temperature) but contain no cholesterol. This is because they are vegetable products and only animal fats contain any cholesterol at all.

Eating cholesterol does not necessarily raise blood cholesterol and does not automatically clog your arteries. In fact, the connection between elevated cholesterol and heart disease is much more tentative than we are led to believe. Some studies show no correlation at all between high levels of cholesterol in the blood and coronary heart disease.

It now appears that much better methods of monitoring the condition of your arteries are by testing for elevated homocysteine, C-reactive protein (which measures inflammation), and such non-invasive tests as ultrasound or Doppler tests for blockage of the carotid or other arteries.

Minerals such as calcium, copper, iron, cadmium and others may also build up in the arteries and contribute to heart disease. These can, at times, be revealed on a hair mineral analysis or perhaps with a urine metals challenge test using EDTA. I believe these methods are much better than checking cholesterol if one suspects or wishes to prevent heart disease.

However, an elevated cholesterol level in your blood is not good, either. It is mainly a liver stress indicator. It will come down on its own, however, as your health improves on a nutritional balancing healing program based on hair mineral testing.

CHOLESTEROL-LOWERING DRUGS

A recent medical nightmare is the widespread use of cholesterol-lowering drugs, often called “statin drugs”. Their names include Crestor, Zocor, Lovastatin and a dozen others from different companies. They are all basically similar to each other.

“Statin” is a misnomer as the drugs have nothing to do with stasis. It is just another lie of the pharmaceutical industry to increase sales of these quite awful drugs that kill people regularly.

These are now prescribed to millions of Americans and others worldwide. They have few benefits in most studies and are quite costly, with the total in the several billions each year.

The adverse effects of the statin drugs used to lower cholesterol are most often much worse than the elevated cholesterol. So I advise everyone to avoid these drugs completely if you value your health at all.

Before even considering such a drug, first try natural methods for lowering cholesterol. The best is a nutritional balancing program, hands down.

However, you may try just a simple symptomatic remedy as these can help to some degree. They include red rice yeast, niacin, chromium, vitamin C and policosanol, among other products found at your health food store. However, we don’t recommend any of them, as none of these go to the cause of the elevated cholesterol.

VEGETARIANS DEFICIENT IN ESSENTIAL FATTY ACIDS

Vegetarians often do not obtain enough quality fats and oils for proper nutrition due to their limited diets. Vegetarian fats include avocado, nuts, nut butters, seeds (if you eat a lot) and vegetable oils. Eggs, milk, cheese and oily fish are also excellent if one will eat them.

I encourage vegetarians to at least eat eggs and, if possible, unpasteurized goat dairy products or fish to get enough high-quality fats into their diets. Otherwise, vegetarians are extremely prone to fatty acid imbalances.

These can manifest as skin problems and rashes, dry skin, boils, joint pain, irritability, mental problems and much more. This is an important reason why I do not recommend vegetarian diets, though it is just one reason why these diets are today not healthful for anyone for very long.

SPIRITUAL ASPECTS OF FATS AND OILS

Fats and oils play a critical role in the spiritual development of human beings. Here is what they do. They coat the nerves and the skin with a protective coating that prevents the escape of etheric energy to a surprising degree.

This allows the person to control and accumulate this etheric energy. It is especially important in the earlier stages of etheric development. It permits a person to move along much faster than they otherwise could do. This is a critical benefit.

For this reason, we suggest that anyone who is moving in this direction in his or her life must be sure to eat some fats and oils each day. This is not in opposition to the principle that slow oxidizers should not overeat on fats and oils.

CONCLUSION

Fats and oils should form an important part of everyone’s daily diet. Some authorities, such as William Campbell Douglass, MD suggest that fats are one of the most important food groups.

This is no doubt the case with growing children, whose brains and nervous systems absolutely require sufficient amounts of high-quality saturated fats for optimum brain development.

Obtaining quality fats and oils is not difficult, except for strict vegetarians. Good sources are quality eggs, butter, meats, poultry, goat dairy, some fish and to a lesser degree fresh nuts and seeds.

For optimum health and longevity, don’t cut off all the fat, have your chicken soup, cook with butter, coconut, palm or olive oil, and fry with these as well. Stay away from foods that say “low-fat” or “no-fat”, and avoid most of that tasty fried fast food and fried food in restaurants.

Finally, if you value your health stay far away from any “statin” drugs for high cholesterol. Natural methods, especially nutritional balancing using our methods, work great to lower an elevated cholesterol.

Resources

1. Fallon, S., Nourishing Traditions, New Trends Publishing, Washington, D.C., 2001.

2. Douglass, W.C., Real Health Breakthroughs Newsletter, Vol. 5, #10, March 2006.

3. www.health-heart.org/causes.htm (scientific studies about diet and heart disease).

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