by Nancy Mehlert, MS
When you think about including fats in your diet, remember that you are a living being. Your cells are smart and cannot be fooled. They are filled with DNA and memory. Your cells recognize and utilize undamaged fats in highly productive health-giving ways if you consume them in their natural state. Beware that man gets engaged in doing things that damage the structure of fats including applying heat, bleaching, esterifying, hydrogenating, and using chemical solvents.
Once you’ve purchased undamaged oils, be sure to not destroy them with your own cooking methods. There is great controversy and discrepancy about temperature tolerance when cooking with oils if you search on line and explore resources for this information. The safest most conservative approach for good health is to rely on saturated fat sources for cooking and save monounsaturated fats such as olive oil for cold preparation only.
We recommend that your everyday cooking fats/oils for good health be a saturated (a strongly bonded molecular structure) fat such as butter, ghee, tallow, or coconut oil. It is important to choose a good source where animals have eaten their natural diet (pastured), where the animal has not been given antibiotics or hormones and has been raised in a humane and natural environment. This includes beef tallow, duck fat and pork lard. Epic is a brand you can look for in the market or online. Coconut oil should be organic, pressed, and free from refining, bleaching or deodorizing. If the producer knows and cares, it will usually be well described on the packaging. See our Product of the Month in this month’s newsletter for more details. For the highest temperatures on the stovetop, oven or on the grill, coconut oil and ghee are your best bet; however, we recommend that you limit or avoid extremely high temperature cooking as a matter of routine due to the damaging effect it has on the food and thus your health. Low and slow cooking is healthier.