Cooking oils: which ones to use and which ones to avoid

Conventional medicine has for some time vilified consumption of fat, attributing high fat diets to cardiovascular disease and obesity. However more recent dietary research has identified simple carbohydrates and processed foods as the main culprits for poor metabolic health and obesity.

Adding more healthy fats to the diet is essential to wellness, which involves swapping highly processed vegetable oils with more natural plant and animal derived fats.

The commercial vegetable oils widely available in supermarkets can be inflammatory due to processing of these oils in high heat and harmful solvents, as well as their high omega 6 content.

The extraction of oil from vegetables and seeds such as soybeans, corn, canola, safflower, and sunflower involves a chemical solvent called hexane, which is an environmental pollutant as well as regarded to be neurotoxic and disruptive to the endocrine and reproductive systems. Although most of the hexane is removed from the final oils extracted, trace amounts remain in the extracted oils with potentially harmful consequences to human health.

Additionally, these vegetable oils are high in omega-6 fats at the expense of omega-3 fats. Consuming excess levels of omega-6 fats contributes to metabolic disease, as the body functions best with the correct balance between omega-6 and omega-3 . The ideal ration between omega-6 and omega-3 is around 4 to 1, however the typical western diet provides omega 6/3 ratio of 20 to 1 in favor of omega-6. Reducing this ratio through reducing or preferably eliminating the intake of refined omega-6 oils can be an effective strategy to fight inflammation, allergies, and autoimmune disease.

Healthy substitutes to the processed vegetable oils are animal fats, as well as cold pressed plant based fats. Increasingly research is showing that there is no reason to fear saturated fats from plants such as coconut oil, or moderate amounts of animal fats such as ghee or grass-fed butter.

It is true that saturated fats raise LDL (some patients do need to exercise caution ) however they also improve the quality of the LDL particles making them less likely to contribute to clogging blood vessels, as well as raising HDL (which is the protective cholesterol) improving the overall cholesterol panel.

So which oils should you use? Whenever you can go for organic, unrefined, cold-pressed or expeller pressed oils.

Make a healthier choice and switch to these better oils today!

Eat	Avoid or Limit
Extra Virgin olive oil	Canola oil
Almond oil	Corn oil
Avocado oil	Soybean oil
Macadamia oil	Safflower oil
Walnut oil	Sunflower oil
Coconut oil	Vegetable oil, grape-seed oil
Butter (from grass fed cows or goats)	Vegetable shortening
Ghee	Margarine and butter substitutes
Sustainable palm oil	Anything that says "hydrogenated".

Be mindful of heat stability of oils

For high temperature cooking: Avocado oil, ghee

Medium heat cooking/baking: coconut oil

Low heat cooking /dressing : olive oil