The Oiling of America
I was first introduced to this concept way back when I went low carb and finally started exercising. The title of the book means just that, how America came to be oiled, or more essentially how America replaced saturated fats (butter, ghee, coconut oil) with refined vegetable oils and margarine. It all started when the low fat craze began after Ancel Keys came out with his study and claimed that high ingestion of saturated fats causes heart disease. Since then, numerous studies have disproven the idea but the low fat diet craze still holds. What's the problem with these oils? Free radicals. The argument is this: eat more sat fats and your LDL will increase which will eventually clog your arteries. Sounds reasonable enough, but why would such a vital substance to our bodies want to cause us harm? It just doesn't seem right does it? It's not. LDL isn't the bad guy per se. It's what LDL can become that makes it so dangerous. The problem with vegetable oils is that they're polyunsaturated. Now any chemist or biochemist can tell you that polyunsaturated fats have the most double bonds because of their lack of a complete structure. This essentially means that polyunsaturated fats are much less stable than monounsaturated and saturated, saturated being the most stable. This instability is probably the biggest cause of affluent disease in the world behind maybe gluten and other things. The problem is when vegetable oils are packaged, they go through a very highly processed procedure that raises their temperature to a very high level. Being unstable, these fats become rancid and harbor free radicals left and right. How do packaging companies get around this? They bleach oils yellow and then remove the odor with extra chemicals. What you're using to cool your foods is not only already rancid but being put through even more heat in the cooking process which will only break it down even more. All those free radicals inside your body have nothing to do but wreak havoc on you, and a lot of the havoc is on LDL. When LDL becomes oxidized, it loses it's internal balance and begins acting erratic. LDL by itself is a healing agent but oxidized it becomes a threat as it sticks to arterial walls which increase your risk for heart attack. These free radicals are inflaming your blood vessels so LDL comes to do its job and heal them but they have already been "infected" as well. It's a never ending cycle. If you want to cook with fat, ditch the canola, veggie, peanut, all that jazz. Stick with butter, coconut oil, palm oil, ghee, lard, tallow, olive, etc. These are real oils/fats, not that processed stuff you're using. Food: celery/cucumber/carrot salad with olive oil and grilled meat, two eggs, fermented veggies, pickle, cheese Exercise: morning 4 rounds 20 pushups 20 situps 20 squats Night 5x5 squat at 215 and 3 sets of 10 walking lunge steps at 60