12 Steps to Whole Foods

Avoiding Bad Fats, Enjoying Good Fats
Fortunately, my vain desire to have healthy skin, hair, and nails usually wins out, and I put that avocado on my
salad after all. It feels like a guilty pleasure, and it shouldn’t be! I wish I could undo the damage to my health of
that decade of my 20s I spent buying artificial foods to avoid the natural, good ones: butter, olive oil, nuts,
seeds, olives, avocados, and—gasp!—even saturated fats like coconut oil.
I know a number of people, and you probably do as well, who still embrace eating “low-fat” as being
synonymous with “healthy.” They are thin, but they don’t look good. That’s because we need fats to protect
every cell membrane to keep it hydrated, elastic, and youthful. People who avoid all fats look dry, prematurely
aged, leathery, and unhealthy.
The first year I began using coconut oil and flax seed oil in my diet regularly, my longtime problem with
wintertime dry skin and eczema disappeared completely. Further, my lifelong circulation problems (cold hands
and feet) stopped that winter as well.
Now, of course, we’ve been enduring a decade of silliness about how carbohydrates are going to kill us. It’s
pure marketing genius, of course, to decide every 10 years to tell the American public that one-third of the
nutrition in natural foods is bad for them (fats, carbs, and protein making up the three parts). I wonder if an
anti-protein fad is next.
Still, most of the fats used regularly by Americans are destructive rather than nourishing. These include all
refined and processed oils, which are often heated above 400°, deodorized, and purified. They are also
sometimes made into “trans fats” by bombarding them with extra hydrogen atoms to make them solid at room
temperature. They are already rancid and, therefore, carcinogenic (full of free radicals) when they arrive on the
store shelf. Additionally, they are heavy in Omega-6 fatty acids and deficient in Omega-3s), leading to extreme
imbalances in our Essential Fatty Acid stores.
In particular, avoid processed canola, corn, safflower, sunflower, soybean, and cottonseed oils. Canola oil has
some linoleic acid (which is good) but, unlike flaxseed and olive oils, it doesn’t have a venerable history of
being used for centuries by healthy populations. It was discovered in Canada and derived from the rape seed,
and many negative health effects have been linked to it. In particular, store-brand peanut butters often have
rapeseed oil added to stabilize the natural oils in the peanuts that would otherwise separate and cause people to
spend a minute stirring. The hydrogenated version of this oil is the worst of the bad, and you would do well to
avoid processed canola oil completely.
So, eat nuts, avocado, flaxseed oil, coconut oil, and olive oil daily—not necessarily all of those every day, but
some of them every day! That said, a word to the wise is in order: excess fats are stored as fat deposits on the
body—so, as a guideline, 1 Tbsp. daily of each of these oils, or 1-2 oz. of nuts, is plenty for an adult or a child.
If this month you continue to eat all the bad fats from your “former life” and add only some good fats, you may
not see weight loss. Let the good stuff bump out the bad!
96 12 Steps to Whole Foods
© Copyright Robyn Openshaw