Fry with animal fat and not with vegetable oil or margarine
By Michael Smith (Veshengro)
For, the gods only know how many, decades we have been lied to as regards to what to spread on our bread and what to fry and cook with. The truth is, once again, that the old ones knew best.
When it comes to frying food in cast iron or other materials, though I would give cast iron skillets and such the preference any day, whether you fry and egg or your bangers or whatever else, using margarine or vegetable oil, including and especially olive oil, is the worst thing you can do and it is indeed very unhealthy.
While olive oil, and especially virgin olive oil, is one of the best things you can use in other cooking applications and especially for salads and that kind of cooking where it is being traditionally used, frying in such oils is harmful to you.
Vegetable oils, and margarine is but set (rancid) vegetable fats, with whatever else they throw into it, sets free transfats and free radicals which are both very bad indeed for your health.
The best fat to use for frying, cast iron or otherwise, is butter, including Ghee (clarified butter), closely followed by beef dripping and then lard. Butter is also best for putting on bread and not margarine or whatever name the vegetable or low fat spread may be called.
It has even been suggested by some health experts that our obesity epidemic – for lack of a better word – may, in fact, be due to us using the wrong kinds of fats for frying (and cooking).
Margarine has always been – in my mind at least – rather a questionable product, whether for frying or for putting on bread and food in general. To properly understand that, however, we will have to look at what margarine was actually created/invented for. It was not as a butter substitute, that much is definite, to go into your sandwiches, and such.
Lets put it that way, a food product it was never designed to be. It was designed to be used, during the First World War, as an axle grease for wagons and trucks and general grease for other applications, in lie of petroleum/based grease.
After the Great War, as it is also called, with petroleum products going very cheap the makers of margarine needed a new outlet for their stuff and thus enter the story of butter being bad for your heart and health. Just the opposite is the case.
An old doctor told my grandmothers NOT to eat margarine, even though both had a problem with their ticker, but to keep with butter. Butter, he said, is food for the heart. Mami reached the age of 83 and did not die of a heart problem but of complications associated with an operation to her hip.
Transfats and free radicals, released when frying (and possibly also cooking) using vegetable oils and/or margarine are, apparently, a serious health risk, including cancers, and possibly obesity, etc.
So, why are so many in the medical profession – for we cannot call is health profession now can we – and even governments, such as Denmark, trying to tell us that butter and other animal fats are bad for us?
I guess if we'd all be healthy then there would be no income for the medical services and research. They cannot make money – the doctors and hospitals that is – from folks that are not ill.
Same reason, no doubt, why they, basically, want to outlaw all herbal remedies and such.
One can but wonder... The world has gone mad and very few seem to have noticed.
© 2011
