by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
When you see “FAT FREE”, “LOW FAT” and “SUGAR FREE” think – and pardon my language here – “Chemical Shit Storm”, for all those options are not healthy at all and are full of, often dangerous, chemicals.
According to studies our obesity epidemic may even be due to the low sugar and low fat foods that we are being told to be so good for us.
In addition to that when one considers Aspartame one also will have to consider serious health risks as this chemical sweetener, which has now been given a different name, and which also is under the Splenda and others, is linked to a rather large number of deaths in the USA.
For years and decades we have now been told that animal fats and full fat milk are bad for us but the truth turns out to be the one that our grandparents and great-grandparents knew already. Namely that animal fats are in fact better for us than many plant oils, especially when it comes to frying and especially on bread. Margarine is rancid fat and actually very bad and butter is better by far. Olive oil and other must not be heated above 160-180C as above that they become carcinogenic and release transfats and free radicals. The only plant fat that is as safe as butter, dripping or lard for frying is coconut fat.
When you go to the Mediterranean areas, the diet of which is always said to be so good for us because they use olive oil, the people there do not fry in that oil (or any other plant oils) but in animal fats. Olive, grape seed oil, and others are only used in salads and some other applications.
Even Indian vegetarian diet uses ghee, that is to say clarified butter, butter per se, milk and yogurt, thus animals fats and animal protein. They do not cook, in general, with plant oils. Guess they know what they are doing.
The question now arises, obviously, why we have been, for a century almost, and may be even longer, that margarine is better for us than butter, that we should drink low fat milk (which while the calcium content is the same as in full fat milk the human body cannot absorb this calcium without the milk fat), and that we should use sugar substitutes, that is to say artificial chemical sweeteners.
Margarine was never intended to be food originally but was an industrial lubricant. Only when oil-based ones became cheap the industry was looking for a new market and the “healthy option” of margarine was born. Add a little food coloring to make it more appetizing and looking like butter, add a little flavoring and then a great deal of marketing and government lobbying and voila, enter the “margarine is healthier for you than butter” story.
Any vegetable fat, bar coconut fat, that is solid at room temperature is rancid and thus not a healthy option, and this goes also for the other “healthy” spreads marketed to replace and be healthier than butter.
And, as said, the question remains as to why we have been told not just by marketing but by our very governments that those options are healthy. Thus we come to the “quo bono” question and there we will find the answer.
Don't follow fads, follow the ways of our ancients...
© 2013
