In spite of today's date, I promise this is NOT an April Fool's post...in spite of the fact that the idea of lard being better for your body than canola oil seems, well, frigging ridiculous. Read on brave reader!
Before I move into the next infomercial for dairy products (ha!), allow me to quickly point out one item I completely forgot to mention in my previous post. I spent a LONG time going on and on about raw milk. But I never bothered to point out one critical fact: when you buy milk, whether it's raw or pasteurized, please do yourself and your kids a favor and buy it WHOLE (and organic, of course). As in not "low-fat" or, God forbid, "skim". Yes, I do realize how hard it is to wean yourself away from equating "fat" with "bad for me"...but you've got to trust me on this one. IF you are purchasing organic milk from grass-fed cows, then there is no reason why you can't drink whole milk. Still don't trust me? Here's a little tidbit I spotted recently...from a relatively mainstream news source.
Before I move into the next infomercial for dairy products (ha!), allow me to quickly point out one item I completely forgot to mention in my previous post. I spent a LONG time going on and on about raw milk. But I never bothered to point out one critical fact: when you buy milk, whether it's raw or pasteurized, please do yourself and your kids a favor and buy it WHOLE (and organic, of course). As in not "low-fat" or, God forbid, "skim". Yes, I do realize how hard it is to wean yourself away from equating "fat" with "bad for me"...but you've got to trust me on this one. IF you are purchasing organic milk from grass-fed cows, then there is no reason why you can't drink whole milk. Still don't trust me? Here's a little tidbit I spotted recently...from a relatively mainstream news source.
Cooking Oils vs. Butter, Animal Fats
You probably already have a pretty good idea which one is going to come out a winner here. But I feel compelled to go through the motions anyway, just so you can educate yourself as to the "whys" and the "hows".
In the mid-19th century, Emperor Napoleon III of France offered a prize to anyone who could come up with a good substitute for butter. The idea was to produce something inexpensive to make and buy that the military and the poor could use. Et voila, margarine. (I confess I am amused the French, who--rightly so--pride themselves on their delicious cuisine and wide-armed embrace of fatty foods, are who we ultimately have to thank for introducing butter substitutes into the world. Ah well).
Margarine was the beginning of some very bad times for butter, lard, and olive oil. Because once the cooking fat substitute window opened, all hell broke loose. In 1911, Crisco arrived on the scene. Made of hydrogenated cottonseed oil and originally created as a soap substitute, Crisco's inventors realized they'd stumbled onto something big when they noticed the product had a lot in common with lard -- at least texturally and visually. Lard, a byproduct of pigs, had always been readily available to people up until the Industrial Revolution. It was commonly used in place of butter in food prep and as an excellent baking fat (flavorless leaf lard in particular is prized for creating flaky pie crusts). Lard has a relatively high smoke point...you can heat it to 370 degrees before the flavor and nutritional elements begin to break down. But once folks started to move away from the family farm and into bigger towns and cities, lard became a luxury. Crisco entered the scene at the perfect time -- it was cheap, made entirely out of vegetable oils but looked and acted like everyone's favorite cooking fat. Of course, there was the small problem of trans fatty acids....but no one knew about that for decades...and by that time, the use of vegetables oils as substitutes for the fats and oils we'd been cooking with for eons was well entrenched. (take a look at this fascinating and more detailed post about the life and times of Crisco).
So let's quickly talk about vegetable oils. Yes, olive oil and coconut oil are technically just that. But they've been in use since long before the first pyramids showed up in Egypt. That food experiment has had more than enough time to play out and the verdict is that both are very good for you, in moderation and with certain foods (coconut oil, for example, is only best used unrefined although this means the coconut taste will be more present). Aside from those oils, most vegetable oils have only been part of the human diet for a very short period of time.
Let's take Canola oil, for example. Canola, made from rapeseed, was used for hundreds of years by Asians and Europeans as lamp oil. After some time, people began to use it in limited forms as a cooking oil and in foods. Then when the Industrial Revolution arrived, factory owners noticed the oil was an excellent machine lubricant and the crop boomed. WWI and WWII occurred and demand for rapeseed oil went through the roof to keep munitions factories running smoothly. But after the wars, demand dropped sharply, leaving a lot of rapeseed farmers desperately searching for another market. Which is when it got re-branded as Canola and started entering family kitchens around the world. This happened in 1980.
A tour through other vegetable cooking oils reveals much the same thing: aside from rare cases where people used these oils to cook food in place of unavailable fats, none of these were in widespread use until the second half of the 20th century.
Now, if I were going the whole hog in this post, this is where I'd write a lengthy educational bit about the differences between polyunsaturated fats, monounsaturated fats, and saturated fats. I might even talk about cholesterol a bit....as well as heart disease. But darned if I can figure out how to drill into all this stuff in one paragraph or less. So I am going to rely on my good, if sometimes wacky, friends at the Weston A Price Foundation to give you the specifics. This is a LONG read...but well worth your while if you can get through it without falling asleep.
So where am I going with all of this? You now know the history of cooking oils (the abbreviated version) but unless you took the time to click through to the link I provided in the last paragraph, you probably haven't a clue why you should stick with traditional cooking oils and fats and steer clear of the more recent stuff. Will you simply take my word for it that the newer stuff just isn't all that great for you? I know...it's so hard to imagine, after years and years of programming, that lard and butter are actually good for your health whereas "heart healthy!" canola and other vegetable oils aren't. Go back to the previous paragraph and at least skim the post I linked to. And maybe check this out too (and if you get far enough, try not to laugh at the hair and glasses on the poor gal at the bottom...goodness me, someone needs a "What Not to Wear" intervention).
A Quick Word About Ghee
If you, like me, love Indian food...then you already know what ghee is even if you've never heard of it before. Ghee, AKA clarified butter, is -- you heard it here first folks! -- the next big thing in terms of cooking fats. What's the big deal? Try this on for size...ghee has a long shelf life (unlike butter), doesn't need to be refrigerated (unlike butter), and has an incredibly high smoke point (unlike butter. Butter = 350, Ghee = 485). In a nutshell, ghee has all the benefits of the butter it was made from (if organic and pastured, it'll have all sorts of good stuff like CLA in it) but it lasts longer and you can use it to cook just about anything at super high temps and don't have to worry about oxidation. Dude! There's a lot more to say about ghee but as usual, someone else has done a much better job of it. I currently use ghee when I need to cook on the stove (butter is still for baking). I rarely use olive oil for cooking these days....mostly on salads and with bread now. If you decide to give ghee a chance....be sure to get ghee that comes from pastured cows and one that is preferably organic. I use this brand.
Margarine was the beginning of some very bad times for butter, lard, and olive oil. Because once the cooking fat substitute window opened, all hell broke loose. In 1911, Crisco arrived on the scene. Made of hydrogenated cottonseed oil and originally created as a soap substitute, Crisco's inventors realized they'd stumbled onto something big when they noticed the product had a lot in common with lard -- at least texturally and visually. Lard, a byproduct of pigs, had always been readily available to people up until the Industrial Revolution. It was commonly used in place of butter in food prep and as an excellent baking fat (flavorless leaf lard in particular is prized for creating flaky pie crusts). Lard has a relatively high smoke point...you can heat it to 370 degrees before the flavor and nutritional elements begin to break down. But once folks started to move away from the family farm and into bigger towns and cities, lard became a luxury. Crisco entered the scene at the perfect time -- it was cheap, made entirely out of vegetable oils but looked and acted like everyone's favorite cooking fat. Of course, there was the small problem of trans fatty acids....but no one knew about that for decades...and by that time, the use of vegetables oils as substitutes for the fats and oils we'd been cooking with for eons was well entrenched. (take a look at this fascinating and more detailed post about the life and times of Crisco).
So let's quickly talk about vegetable oils. Yes, olive oil and coconut oil are technically just that. But they've been in use since long before the first pyramids showed up in Egypt. That food experiment has had more than enough time to play out and the verdict is that both are very good for you, in moderation and with certain foods (coconut oil, for example, is only best used unrefined although this means the coconut taste will be more present). Aside from those oils, most vegetable oils have only been part of the human diet for a very short period of time.
Let's take Canola oil, for example. Canola, made from rapeseed, was used for hundreds of years by Asians and Europeans as lamp oil. After some time, people began to use it in limited forms as a cooking oil and in foods. Then when the Industrial Revolution arrived, factory owners noticed the oil was an excellent machine lubricant and the crop boomed. WWI and WWII occurred and demand for rapeseed oil went through the roof to keep munitions factories running smoothly. But after the wars, demand dropped sharply, leaving a lot of rapeseed farmers desperately searching for another market. Which is when it got re-branded as Canola and started entering family kitchens around the world. This happened in 1980.
A tour through other vegetable cooking oils reveals much the same thing: aside from rare cases where people used these oils to cook food in place of unavailable fats, none of these were in widespread use until the second half of the 20th century.
Now, if I were going the whole hog in this post, this is where I'd write a lengthy educational bit about the differences between polyunsaturated fats, monounsaturated fats, and saturated fats. I might even talk about cholesterol a bit....as well as heart disease. But darned if I can figure out how to drill into all this stuff in one paragraph or less. So I am going to rely on my good, if sometimes wacky, friends at the Weston A Price Foundation to give you the specifics. This is a LONG read...but well worth your while if you can get through it without falling asleep.
So where am I going with all of this? You now know the history of cooking oils (the abbreviated version) but unless you took the time to click through to the link I provided in the last paragraph, you probably haven't a clue why you should stick with traditional cooking oils and fats and steer clear of the more recent stuff. Will you simply take my word for it that the newer stuff just isn't all that great for you? I know...it's so hard to imagine, after years and years of programming, that lard and butter are actually good for your health whereas "heart healthy!" canola and other vegetable oils aren't. Go back to the previous paragraph and at least skim the post I linked to. And maybe check this out too (and if you get far enough, try not to laugh at the hair and glasses on the poor gal at the bottom...goodness me, someone needs a "What Not to Wear" intervention).
A Quick Word About Ghee
If you, like me, love Indian food...then you already know what ghee is even if you've never heard of it before. Ghee, AKA clarified butter, is -- you heard it here first folks! -- the next big thing in terms of cooking fats. What's the big deal? Try this on for size...ghee has a long shelf life (unlike butter), doesn't need to be refrigerated (unlike butter), and has an incredibly high smoke point (unlike butter. Butter = 350, Ghee = 485). In a nutshell, ghee has all the benefits of the butter it was made from (if organic and pastured, it'll have all sorts of good stuff like CLA in it) but it lasts longer and you can use it to cook just about anything at super high temps and don't have to worry about oxidation. Dude! There's a lot more to say about ghee but as usual, someone else has done a much better job of it. I currently use ghee when I need to cook on the stove (butter is still for baking). I rarely use olive oil for cooking these days....mostly on salads and with bread now. If you decide to give ghee a chance....be sure to get ghee that comes from pastured cows and one that is preferably organic. I use this brand.
