Vegetable oil is a kitchen staple, and a key component of home-cooked meals, salad dressings, and baked goods. But while some types of vegetable oils are healthy choices, others can be as dangerous to our health as sugar, a top nutritionist says.
“We’ve been told that polyunsaturated vegetable oil is good for us, but it’s actually more toxic to our brain than sugar,” Dr. Catherine Shanahan tells Newsmax Health.
In fact, the promotion of vegetable oil – and its substitution for saturated fat – may be behind many common chronic diseases and ailments today, says Shanahan, author of the newly revised book “Deep Nutrition: Why your Genes Need Traditional Food.”
“This one idea that saturated fat is bad for us was like releasing an atomic bomb, disrupting culinary information that had been passed down for generations,” says Shanahan.
According to her, the natural foods Americans ate a half-century ago were actually better for our bodies than the modern-day meals that have replaced them.
“In the 1950s, women were pulled from the traditional path and told to leave behind the foods and cooking methods that had served us well forever,” says Shanahan.
“We were told that microwave dinners and multivitamins would take care everything, obliterating the respect that had served our bodies well.”
But the problem is that our bodies are genetically programmed to require certain nutrients that our modern diet no longer supplies, says Shanahan, who studied biochemistry and genetics at Cornell University before earning her medical degree at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
“We need to go back to those earlier days. The knowledge of how to eat to survive was no small thing,” she says.
Much of the blame for today’s ills can be traced to processed foods, and chief among them is vegetable oil, says Shanahan.