Start Cooking with These Healthy Fats & Oils Right Now!

avocado oil butter coconut oil olive oil Apr 12, 2023

Did you know that what you cook your food in is just as important as what you're cooking?  Because it totally matters!

What type of cooking fat or oil do you like to use?

  • Butter?
  • Vegetable oil? 
  • Olive Oil? 
  • Coconut oil?
  • Margarine?
  • Canola oil, or canola oil in a spray like PAM?
  • Nothing, you’ve been steaming everything for 30 years trying to avoid fat?

What do you cook your eggs in?  What do you roast your veggies in?  What do you spray or line your baking sheets and loaf pans with? 

For the last 40 years or so, we’ve all been brainwashed into believing that fat is bad. It’s bad for our health and makes us gain weight. So, in an effort to eat less fat, we should use as little as fat as possible for cooking or we should switch to vegetable oils.
 

This is terrible nutrition advice.

Fats are a critical part of our health.  Our brain is nearly 60% fat. We've learned in recent years that fatty acids are among the most crucial molecules that determine your brain's integrity and ability to perform.

We need fat to absorb critical vitamins like Vitamin A, D, E, and K. We need fat for hormone production supports cell growth and ironically is critical for heart health.

I am here today to encourage you to cook with fats and oils again because it is healthy for you.  You will love it. Food will taste better, you will absorb more nutrients, and feel better all around.

But not every cooking fat or oil is good for us.

Let’s talk about the three cooking fats you should cook with every day for a healthy heart and a healthy weight.

In our house, we use two types of fat and oil for all our cooking.

Extra-Virgin Olive Oil

The first one, the one we use most often for everything from sautéing in a pan to high-heat roasting in the oven is… extra virgin olive oil.  Yes,  you can absolutely cook with high heat with extra-virgin olive oil.  It’s not the smoke point you need to worry about, it’s the stability of the oil.

A recent Australian study published in the ACTA Scientific Nutritional Health Journal studied how common cooking oils and fats broke down when heated for a very long time, or heated past their smoke points. 

The study found that extra virgin olive oil was more stable than oils with high smoke points such as canola oil, which is commonly touted as the oil to roast your veggies with. 

The bad polar compounds that cause cancer are made more abundantly when we cook with canola, grape seed, and sunflower oils.  All of which have very high smoke points.

So, to clarify, we have very good science that supports the use of extra virgin olive oil at high cooking temperatures and warns against using canola and vegetable oils at high temps.

Most of us were taught that the smoke point was the most important, but it’s not.  The bad compounds we are trying to avoid when cooking is only produced when the oils and fats are unstable, not when they start to smoke.  The smoke is not the problem. The polar compounds are.

Salted Butter

The second fat we use in the Freese household is… butter. Salted butter.  By the pound.  

Butter is a wonderfully healthy and natural saturated fat that provides a ton of flavor and healthy fats to our foods.  We fry our eggs in butter, line our baking pans with real butter, and cook our veggies in a mix of both butter and olive oil.

Butter was once thought to cause high cholesterol and heart disease, but we know now, that’s not true.  Saturated fat from butter actually raises our good cholesterol the HDL and helps us stay full and happy so we aren’t craving sugar or snacks all the time.

Grass-fed butter is going to have more nutrients than standard butter, but all butter is good.

Did you switch from butter to margarine now or in the past because they told you that butter was bad for you?  If you are currently eating margarine, I encourage you to turn back to natural salted butter and enjoy your food again!

Because here’s the new scientific truth about all fats and oils, whether you cook with them or they are ingredients in foods that you eat.

The more stable, the better. 

The less refined, the less messed with, the less deodorized and filtered the oil and fat, the higher the stability and the better they are for your body to burn at the cellular level.

 

It’s not the smoke point.  It’s not even saturated vs. poly vs. monounsaturated, although that usually correlates with stability.  It’s how stable is that fat once it gets into your body.

Unstable fats like margarine, soybean, or canola oil, can cause big-time damage to your metabolism and flare-up inflammation.

Trendy fats like avocado oil and coconut oil can be tricky because it’s difficult to tell how processed and unstable they are as consumers.  Butter and extra virgin olive oil are regulated so you always know you are getting the best stable fats and oils.

Cooking with extra virgin olive oil and butter is something you can do right now.

We want to cook with these healthy fats not because of their smoking points, but because of their healthful stability.

They are not only stable while we are cooking with them, but they are also stable when we burn them for energy in our bodies.

And butter doesn’t cause heart attacks.  Inflammation does.  And butter isn’t inflammatory. Margarine is.

Once again we are circling back to what creates a healthy metabolism.

Because if you are suffering from excess belly fat or can’t seem to get the weight off or don’t have the energy you want to have, you are suffering from a damaged metabolism.

So you need to repair your metabolism by eating the right foods at the right times so that you can be healthy and your metabolism can work like it’s supposed to.

You have what it takes to lose weight, achieve glowing health, and never stress about your weight again, we just need to repair your metabolism first.

 

PMID: 20329590

JOIN FREESE METHOD TODAY