Pandora's Lunchbox by Warner Melanie

Author:Warner, Melanie [Warner, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2013-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

Something Fishy

The science of dietary fats has got to be one of the most eye-glazing and head-spinning things in all of human nutrition. The whole business is laden with contradictions and changing viewpoints. First all fats were bad, then it was just saturated fats. The polyunsaturated varieties like corn oil and soybean oil (PUFAs) and monounsaturated fats like canola oil (MUFAs) were laid out like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Companies championed their use. “The moofas and poofas reduce your bad cholesterol, so not only did we take out the bad, we added in something good,” Rocco Papalia, then Frito-Lay’s senior vice president for research and development, told me in 2005, not long after the company replaced its partially hydrogenated vegetable oils with a mix of unhydrogenated ones.

Today, if you listen closely, you’ll hear talk that would have been unimaginable a decade ago—suggestions that some saturated fats, such as stearic acid, which is found in chocolate, among other things, might be beneficial. In 2010, the government’s Dietary Guidelines stated that “stearic acid has different metabolic effects than other SFAs [saturated fatty acids] and does not raise blood cholesterol.” Some nutritionists have also begun to acknowledge that coconut oil, that most saturated of fats, might also have benefits.

The more you look at it, the better those saturated fats—the ones that don’t need to be chemically extracted or molecularly rearranged—start to look. As scientists like Tom Sanders at King’s College in London will tell you, saturated fats are nowhere near as hostile as we once thought. In fact, they appear to have little to no correlation with heart disease. If anything, the highly processed vegetable oils we’ve been consuming by the boatload for at least three decades may be much bigger culprits.

The biggest reason for considering this actually has nothing to do with soybean oil on its own. Rather, it’s the monumental quantities we’re ingesting that distort our bodies’ critical ratio of omega 6 and omega 3 fats. The ideal proportion is somewhere between one and three omega 6 fats to every one omega 3. That’s roughly what it’s been in most cultures throughout human history. Today the ratio in the American diet is about ten to one, and our cells are flooded with omega 6s. This dietary imbalance is thought to have a number of far-reaching implications for human health. Many in the medical community think it is a contributor to heart disease, many forms of cancer, depression, and various other diseases that stem from inflammation. Soybeans in our diet are the primary reason for this dangerous imbalance.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the taste of soy milk in lattes, and there’s nothing wrong with a little (unhydrogenated, unheated) soybean oil, though other oils offer much more flavor. Tofu with the right seasonings can be delicious, and tempeh is incredibly nutritious, in part because it contains healthy bacteria. But with soybean oil, which is about 55 percent omega 6 (35 percent when it’s partially hydrogenated) flooding the market, the powerful soybean industry has made our health the victim of its success.

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