The questions are, what's going to take you out, and will it be sooner rather than later?
In the middle of the 20th century, concerned by the growing heart-attack epidemic, Americans ditched butter and other saturated fats in favor of vegetable oils.
According to Dr. Catherine Shanahan, author of the new book “Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food” (Flatiron Books, out now), that was a fatal mistake.
She's the director of the L.A. Lakers nutrition program, and the Denver-based physician is no fan of most vegetable oils. And research now seems to validate her concerns:
While unsaturated vegetable oils seemed healthy at first, recent research has shown that the processed oils may be more destructive than the fats they replaced. One re-evaluation of a heart study from the 1970s, published in April in the British Medical Journal, questioned the original finding that consuming vegetable oils instead of saturated fats can lower the risk of heart disease and death. In fact, it found that consuming too much vegetable oil may actually increase the risk of heart disease.
So drop the canola oil, use peanut oil. Forget the palm oil (which also helps you save habitat for orangutans); go with coconut oil. Olive oil seems to be fine, but drop margarine in favor of butter. Crisco? Forget it - use lard instead.
Both Girl Scout cookies and Nutella contain palm oil, a type of vegetable oil found to be potentially carcinogenic.
These recommendations will likely change next week. Everything you were told is bad for you is now good for you again. My advice:
Oh, and by the way, you might want to stock up on bacon while you can:
The pork used to make bacon is at the lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.
Excuse me; I need to head to the grocery store.
