Real Food University: All About Fats
By Heather Lionelle
We are discovering that sugar makes us fat and real fats help us slim down. It sounds contradictory, but our bodies are made to process very small amounts of carbohydrates and to process and store lots of fats. If we eat a lot of sugar we can only store a small amount of the energy in our body as sugar stores. We have to store all the rest of our energy as fat. When we eat a lot of carbohydrates of any kind any excess energy has to be stored as fat in the body. That's also what we do with excess energy we take in from eating fat, we store it as fat tissues throughout the body. It is a mechanism designed to protect us in times of famine. Think of it as storing up for a rainy day. There are some fats that our bodies need in order to make certain hormones and to stay healthy in general. Keep in mind your body is comprised mostly of saturated and mono-unsaturated fats. Only 4% of the fat in your body is comprised of polyunsaturated fats.
- Saturated Fats The most familiar of these are traditionally known as Lard and Tallow. Lard comes from rendering pig fat and tallow is rendered fat from cows. The main plant source is Palm Oil, but Coconut Oil is also available. Lard, tallow and coconut oil are all solid at room temperature while palm oil is semi-solid. Saturated fats keep for a long time without refrigeration. Saturation is what makes them solid at room temperature and allows them to be heated to higher cooking temperatures without going rancid or denaturing. When we want to fry foods or heat them in a skillet at high temperatures these are the fats we want to use to impart flavor and crispiness. Another great spreadable mostly saturated fat is butter. We all remember butter on our toast in the morning.
- Unsaturated Fats These fats are found mostly in the plant kingdom and generally don't stand up well to heating, especially not at high temperatures. When purchasing these fats you want to buy cold pressed and unrefined whenever possible. You are probably already familiar with Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Another good choice is Sesame Oil. Sesame oil is one of the few unsaturated fats that you can easily cook with. It does have a very distinct flavor and a little goes a long way. You generally want to use unsaturated oils after you have finished cooking your dish or as a raw topping. They make great salad dressings or when steeped with herbs as flavorful dipping oils.
Why aren't Vegetable oils listed here? Plant oils generally fall into the unsaturated fat family and are not particularly heat stable. When big companies process these oils they are usually done at a very high temperature which turns the oil rancid. In order to make the final product appetizing to us they are deodorized and bleached. Then color and flavor are added back into the final product. Think about it... almost all canola oil is bleached and deodorized before you eat it. Sound appetizing to you? When was the last time you tried to eat a spoonful of vegetable oil by itself? Plenty of people like to eat plain extra virgin olive oil on their bread, but I can't remember anyone ever eating plain vegetable oil on anything. Also, most of the canola crop in the US and Canada are in fact GMO plants.
Take a journey today and try a new healthy fat. Coconut oil tends to be readily available and imparts a lovely mild tropical flavor to anything fried with it. One of our favorite uses is in smoothies or shakes, it makes a stellar pinacolada.
