The Only 3 Cooking Fats & Oils You Should Be Using 99.9% Of The Time!

Today, I want to share with you the only three cooking fats and oils you should be using 99.9% of the time. Yes, it's can be that simple.

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

What you are cooling your food in? 

Butter?

Vegetable oil? 

Olive Oil? 

Coconut oil?

Margarine?

Nothing?

Canola oil, or canola oil in a spray like PAM?

Really go through your routine.

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? 

So in our house we use two, maybe three fats and oils for allllll of cooking.

The first one, the one we use most often from everything from sauteing 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.

Who is surprised by this information? 

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 are 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.

Ok, the second most used fat in the Freese household is… butter.

Salted butter.  By the pound.  

Butter is a wonderful 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, 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.

Who switched 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!

The last oil that we use in the Freese household is coconut oil. 

Now, we don’t use this often because my youngest doesn’t like coconut.  I know!  And coconut oil definitely has a coconut flavor to it.  So, I use it as the base of a curry which also has coconut milk in it or I’ll add it to a hot cup of coffee or tea for a little energy boost.  

Now, a note here, not all coconut oils are the same.  You only want to buy unrefined coconut oil.  The front of back of the bottle should indicate if the oil is refined or not.

If your coconut oil doesn’t get hard at room temperature in the winter, you can bet that’s refined coconut oil.  Any coconut oil that’s super clear or always liquid is not good for you.

Because here’s the 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 about the smoke point. 

It’s not saturated vs. poly vs. monounsaturated, although that usually correlates with stability. 

It’s how stable is that fat once it gets into your body. Once it gets into your bloodstream and either burned by your mitochondria or stored in your body fat.

If it’s not stable like margarine, soybean or canola oil, then it causes damage to your metabolism, damage to your cells.

The reason I don’t cook with vegetable oils, grape seed oil, or other fancy oils is because they’re not stable and they’re bad for my metabolism and the metabolisms and health of my family.

To recap, you really only need two, maybe three cooking fats to do 99.9% of your cooking with:

Extra-Virgin Olive Oil

Butter

and maybe coconut or avocado oil, but those are expensive and have a strong taste.

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, they are stable when we burn them for energy in our bodies.

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

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

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

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. 

Alright, go cook your food with Extra-Virgin Olive Oil and butter at high temps and enjoy your food!