Why No Oil Cooking?

I find people are very curious about why we don’t use oil in our cooking, many have never even considered the idea.  People think oil is good for them, but when I ask them what bad things happen to a person who stops eating oil, they don’t have any answers!

We haven’t used oil in our kitchen since 2013 and I recommend you don’t either, starting now.

This post outlines the reasons.

Oil is not natural – it was a food, then we strip almost all the nutrients out.

Oil is the opposite of a whole food.  It is one of the most processed things you can eat.

What is left in oil is: too many calories, harmful inflammatory properties, and artery clogging sludge.  It is bad stuff.

To make cooking oil, companies take 1000’s of whole food items – like beautiful olives or corn or coconut – and crush them, strip out the fibre, the color, the phytonutrients, the taste,  the protein, the carbs, until we are left only with the fat. Nutrient empty fat.

1 tablespoon of olive oil is equal to about 45 olives, and very little vitamins and minerals.  It takes more than 1300 olives to make a 32 ounce bottle of olive oil. Why not just eat the olives instead?  Then you get all the nutrients in the whole-food package – the way nature intended.

You are WAAAY better off to blend or add olives, seeds or nuts to your cooking, than to add oils.  

Eating whole foods gives us little doses of the fats we need, in low-calorie amounts, and healthy disease preventing packages, that our body recognizes and can use to make us healthy.

The fat that makes up oil is not shelf stable, so we process it more.

Oil would go bad within days, so companies process it more to make it last longer – altering it’s chemical makeup again.  Making it less natural and less of a food our body can benefit from.

You have probably heard of Trans Fats?  They are not safe for human consumption.

• Natural trans fats occur in ALL meat and dairy products.  Bet you didn’t know that…
• Artificial trans fats are created by bubbling hydrogen gas through vegetable oil, to make it solid at room temperature and give a longer shelf life.

Trans Fats are killers, for every 2 percent of your daily calories that come from trans fat, your risk of heart disease increases by 23 percent.

Artificial trans Fats were banned in New York City restaurants in 2006, and the food industry has until 2018 to remove artificial trans fats from all packaged foods sold in the USA.

Please, don’t tell yourself your oil is ok because it is not very processed.

If oil is not as processed – like cold pressed, unprocessed, bottled in glass, and stored away from heat and light, these types of oil “once ingested and warmed to body temperature disintegrate even faster… they bind with cells and interfere with every chemical reaction in the body.  The results are hormone imbalances, inflammation and all kinds of illness.” Physiologist Ray Peat

Oil consumption leads to inflammation in your blood.

You can’t always judge health by how fit or thin a person looks.

• A study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition found that a high fat diet raised inflammatory proteins in the blood by 25%, even though the study subjects lost weight.
• Subjects who lost the same amount of weight, but ate low-fat and high-carb, lowered their inflammatory blood protein levels by 43 percent.
• High inflammation leads to disease including heart disease and cancer.

Oil causes plaque and clogging in your blood vessels.

Studies have shown that blood flow decreases drastically for many hours after a fatty meal.

Bringham and Women’s Hospital researchers reported, after studying more than 2,000 cardiac patients. the risk of heart attack jumps by 400 percent immediately following a heavy, fat-rich meal.

In the Mediterranean, people who ate the most olive oil, were far more likely to have heart disease.

Crete University found that subjects who ate the most olive oil, had the most heart disease.

Olive oil is NOT heart healthy.  

People are healthier on a Mediterranean diet because of eating more vegetables, not because of oil.

Oil suppresses your immune system.

According to the National Institutes of Health – making you vulnerable to infections. and reduces your body’s ability to stop the growth of cancer cells.

No oil is safe.

Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn says: “oil is the gateway to vascular disease”.  Cardiovascular disease leads to a shorter life, and lower quality of life, due to problems like strokes, dementia, heart attacks, erectile dysfunction, and a number of other degenerative diseases.

Multiple studies have found that eating all oils – including saturated (coconut, animal fat, dairy), monounsaturated (olive, canola, peanut, avocado oil) and polyunsaturated (flax oil) increased artery plaque that leads to heart attacks.

It doesn’t matter whether it is olive oil, corn oil, coconut oil, canola oil, flax oil, fish oil, or any other kind – avoid ALL oil.  Oil hurts you from the inside.

Plant-based foods contain fats!

Whole foods bring multiple benefits to our insides, oil only brings harm.  So why eat oil?  There is no good reason.  Instead of oil, eat a whole plant.

All plant-based foods contain healthy essential fats – just like they have protein and carbohydrates. For example, Oats – 16% fat  Kale – 11% fat  Grapes – 9% fat.

Please – dump out your oils and never buy them again! 🙂

For a great source about oils and why eating a whole foods plant based diet is so good for you, look at any of the Engine 2 books, by Rip Esselstyn – he is great at explaining nutrition concepts in easy language, and cites all the sources for the research.  His family has eaten this way since the 1980s and they are thriving too.

US Amazon

Canada Amazon

Check out the whole-foods no oils Recipes my family eats here.  Whole foods taste awesome, and give you all the fats your body requires to glow, and shine, and grow, and be moisturized!

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave