12 Steps to Whole Foods

CHAPTER 4
Avoiding Bad Fats,
Enjoying Good Fats
Your Goal:
To throw out refined oils and learn to use and enjoy the good fats in your diet and beauty regimen
necessary for silky, shiny hair; dewy, clear, unlined skin; and robust cells in every organ and tissue of
your body. We will focus on three extremely nutritious oils that have different virtues and uses, both
internal and external.
What You’ll Need:
You’ll want to buy some refrigerated flaxseed oil (at the health food store); some extra virgin olive oil;
and some virgin, organic coconut oil. See “Robyn Recommends” on www.GreenSmoothieGirl.com for
coconut oil—and if my source is out of stock, try again shortly, as they keep only small, fresh
quantities on hand.)
Fat in general was unfairly maligned for about 10 years in the “low-fat” obsession that damaged the
American psyche. Even otherwise-sensible proponents of a plant-based diet continue to operate under
the fallacy that fats should be avoided and that a low-fat diet is a natural one. To this day, people in my
community come up to me everywhere I go and, in an effort to tell me about their own interest in
nutrition, catalog their meals of skim milk and oatmeal, low-fat yogurt, egg substitutes, spray salad
dressings, and other denatured or fake foods engineered to avoid fat
.
Long before I undertook to study the issue for myself, long before good research replaced the “low-fat”
craze, I was brainwashed (like you, I’m sure) by the constant barrage of illegitimate information we
were fed that we should avoid foods with fat in them. I still struggle a bit to put coconut, olive, and flax
oil in my food—or eat an entire avocado—because of the way I was influenced in those years.
© Copyright Robyn Openshaw 12 Steps to Whole Foods 95