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I’ve got news for you. Those vegetable oils in your pantry are making you fat. Even the so-called heart-healthy vegetable fats like grapeseed oil should be avoided!
This also includes Earth Balance, the “natural oil blend” competitor to Smart Balance that sells like hotcakes at your local health food store.
These factory fats are expanding your backside with every spread of the knife on your morning toast whether you realize it or not.
Omega-6 Fat Dangers
The reason is that these vegetable oil bottles and spreads are loaded with omega-6 fats. This fat is also called linoleic acid (PUFAs) and is distinguished from the healthy omega-6 gamma linolenic acid which actually helps you lose weight.
Confused yet?
The rancid omega-6 fats primarily found in the Western diet come from soy, corn, cottonseed, and canola oil (which also contains rancid omega-3 fats) and are a category of polyunsaturated oils found in seeds and grains.
While eating seeds and grains is not a bad thing, concentrating the oils from them is.
The fact is that there isn’t a whole lot of oil in an ear of corn or a soybean, so to make an entire bottle of corn or soybean oil takes violent and heavily industrialized processing.
“Earth” Balance doesn’t sound so earthy after all, does it?
Omega-6 vegetable oils are not generally fats that you could easily produce in the comfort of your own kitchen like the simple and age old process of pressing olives into olive oil (a monounsaturated omega-9 fat) or churning cream into butter.
Here’s where the “fat” part comes in.
While a very small amount of omega-6 fats are necessary for health, when consumed to excess as happens with the Western diet, vegetable oils contribute to overproduction of neuromodulatory lipids called endocannabinoids that are responsible for signaling hunger to the brain.
Guess what these little guys do?
They give you the munchies!
You may notice that the word endocannabinoids is similar to cannabis (weed). Weed is famous for giving people the munchies too so you can consider omega-6 vegetable oils the marijuana of fatty acids.
Now you know why you can’t stop eating a jumbo bag of chips made with corn, soy, or sunflower oil.
Aha!
Is that why it’s so easy to eat an entire box of Archway Frosted Lemon Cookies in the blink of an eye!
What about that organic dressing loaded with omega-6 oils that tops your salad at lunchtime? Could it be the reason behind the urge to overeat on the main course or the snack attack at 3 pm?
Just try to gorge yourself the same way with a box of cookies made with butter, coconut oil or palm oil or wolf down a plateful of french fries that were cooked in beef fat (tallow).
No can do.
You see, whole natural fats like tallow satiate you and keep your blood sugar steady so you stay full and comfortable and eat much less. Omega-6 vegetable oils, on the other hand, cause you to keep on eating and eating and eating until you have perhaps even made a complete glutton of yourself in a major way.
What’s most troubling is that food manufacturers are doubling down on the vegetable oil scam. Instead of switching their products to better fats, they continue to use the most damaging ones, even marketing some of them such as CLA safflower oil as a weight loss aid!
It seems with America’s weight problem now at a crisis level, it’s time for a return to the traditional fats of our ancestors which didn’t contribute to overeating or weight issues.
Isn’t it high time to stop listening to the talking heads on TV and take matters into your own hands? Chuck that tub of Earth Balance in the trash and substitute butter for oils that require a factory to produce them.
Your stomach and your backside will thank you.
Get the Skinny on Vegetable Oils and other Fats
Check out my book Get Your Fats Straight to get the whole story about what fats to eat for optimal health and what fats to avoid in an easily understandable, comprehensive format.
References
Why Women Need Fat, William Lassek MD
Yvette
Great site, Sarah, thanks. Just wondering about olive oil. I didn’t really understand whether you said it was ok or not. I don’t cook with it but we use it a lot for salad dressing. Is that ok?
Casey
as long as you aren’t heating it, extra virgin olive oil is great on salads or used as a bread dipping, to my knowledge.
Angela S.
How much is too much cod liver oil? I just read today something that said it thins the blood, and that too much can even cause hemorraghic stroke. I take it daily and now so does my 6 year old daughter for treating her cavities. Any opinion on this?
Sarah, TheHealthyHomeEconomist
I give my children a full tsp each day and have been doing so for years.
Cassandra
Hi Angela, I replied to your post on Facebook, but in case you didn’t see it (or anyone else sees this), I’ll post here too. CLO apparently does cause blood thinning, but I believe that’s why you NEED to get vitamin K at the same time as it has the opposite effect. Your daughter should be getting vitamin K if you are following a proper cavity healing protocol as the vitamin A & D are essentially worthless in that respect without vitamin K, so there shouldn’t be a concern.
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/06/vitamin-k2-menatetrenone-mk-4.html
Gay
Any thoughts on grape seed oil?
Sarah, TheHealthyHomeEconomist
Grape seed oil is high in omega-6. We already have plenty of this in our diet. I do not use it.
Joy
Thanks, Sarah. I heartily agree 🙂 I was just wondering if you know of a way of making chips at home with the proper fats? I know chips are a carb and aren’t normally great or you anyways, but… my husband is extremely thin (and hasn’t been able to gain weight for many years) and so I encourage him to eat healthy carbs. I recently found some corn chips that are pre-soaked in lime, but I’m sure the oil is rancid and bad. I’d much rather make some at home if/when I have the time. Do you know a way?
Thanks so much for your posts. They are most interesting.
Sarah, TheHealthyHomeEconomist
I don’t make chips but I do make french fries … organic potatoes sliced up and fried in tallow. Very yummy. I don’t make them too often though as frying any carb even in a healthy oil results in some acrylamide (carcinogen) being formed.
Joy
Thanks! That’s a great idea. I’d forgotten about tallow.
Nicole
I might suggest that the primary factors precipitating overeating (of anything) are: restrictive attitudes about food, attempts at weight loss, and lack of reliable access to food (as sometimes happens when people diet, or simply fail to plan for their food needs). Fascinating studies have been done on the eating behaviors of children whose food choices were overly restricted. These are the children (and eventually adults?) who overeat highly palatable food (such as the dreaded corn oil fried chips) when offered them. Context is very, very important.
Daryl
Great post. Ever since I started eating traditional whole foods I have lost weight when I wasn’t even trying to. Thanks Sarah for keeping us informed on the dangers of non traditional foods.
Judy@Savoring Today
Excellent, concise post. Thanks, Sarah. Sharing this right away. 🙂
Kara
In regards to overeating, it seems to me that when first switching to a real food diet, I couldn’t get enough! I wanted to always eat, and eat some more! This wasn’t the same as overeating though. I felt hungry, I was craving more butter. I wonder if my body wasn’t making up for all that lost time of low fat eating. Now I think my appetite has regulated and I certainly notice that I get full very quick, that’s not to say that sometimes I don’t eat a little more, because its sooooo good! But even then, its much harder to do that when eating real fats than when eating processed foods.
Sarah, TheHealthyHomeEconomist
Yes, this is a common occurrence. When we first started eating raw grassfed cream in my house, my husband went nuts and was eating 8-9 quarts per month just by himself (I am not exaggerating). 10 years later he eats about 2-3 quarts per month and this is his typical consumption after going wild for a period of time at first. He just had some tissue replenishment to do after being starved of all those fat soluble vitamins for so long.
James Knochel
Unsaturated oils go rancid spontaneously when exposed to oxygen at room/body temperature. Rancid oils facilitate the lipid peroxidation chain reaction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_peroxidation
Vitamin E helps terminate the chain reaction, and saturated fats lend stability to unsaturated oils…
Nice post. 🙂
-James
Linden
Are all these unsaturated oils really rancid? Most health sites suggest this, but is there a proof of it? It is claimed that since they are deodorized we cannot detect that they are rancid.
Still haven’t seen solid proof of this.
Additionally, if it is rancid, can we say with certainty that it will be bad for us?