The Tale of Fats, Cancer, and Heart Disease
The Fats and Oils Story
A hundred years ago, shoppers had few fats to choose from. Usually, only butter and lard were available to consumers.
Today, there are enough fats and oils on the market to confuse anyone. But all of them fall into one of three categories:
- Table fats (butter and margarines)
- Cooking and salad oils
- Shortenings
To make things simpler, remember just one thing. All of these items are high in fat. In fact, the fat content of shortenings and oils is virtually identical. Butter and margarine have slightly less fat because these spreads contain a small amount of water that shortenings and oils lack.
The Different Types of Fat
The only important difference between the many fats has to do with what nutritionists call “type of fat.” Some of the fat in food is saturated, while other fats are monounsaturated or polyunsaturated. The saturated type of fat promotes heart disease, but others do not seem to do so. Somehow, still there are controversies among experts and scientists regarding correlation between saturated fats and heart diseases or/and cancers.
Categories: Cancer Tags: blood cholesterol, breast cancer, cancer, colon cancer, fats, heart disease, High blood cholesterol, margarine, monounsaturated fats, oils, polyunsaturated fats, prostate gland cancer, saturated fats, shortenings
Dangerous Trans Fats
What the Food Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know
Two decades ago I read a study about the analysis of cholesterol in the arteries of people who died of coronary artery disease. It turned out that much of the gunk lining these arteries wasn’t cholesterol at all – it was Crisco - hydrogenated vegetable oil. Since then I have been warning people not to eat anything with vegetable shortening that is chemically more like plastics than food. Today we call these substances trans fats. The industry has known about this for at least that long! Only now, after even more publicity than they could squelch, they’ve started to do something about it.
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