Question
Austin Trapani
What is so bad about using cooking oils? Which would you recommend over others, if any?
Answer
you know, it's the a couple of things about cooking oils the first especially in our country where you know more than 70% of our population is overweight or obese and in some cities and state third of our children are actually obese excess calories are an issue and people that need to lose weight need to eliminate those added calories from their diet and cooking with oil is one of those places where we can add a lot of excess calories as we've said before, you know, one oil is 4,000 calories per pound. It's 120 calories per tablespoon. And so when you cook with oil the oil is naturally absorbed into the food and becomes a part of the caloric density of the food that you're serving. And so, you know, it's not uncommon I've done this taking care of many patients who have had difficulty losing weight and we start adding up the places where they use cooking oil or oil and they're, you know, eating five six seven tablespoons of oil in a day, which is you know, six seven eight hundred plus calories additional in their diet that they don't even know they're getting because it just slips down has no effect on satiety or fullness and it gets absorbed and stored. Right away. I always like to joke with people at my emergence and I'll tell them you know, it's lips to hips in three minutes because that oil is classically prepared to just go right into storage. So the first reason not to use oils is looking to minimize that excess caloric density that doesn't add any real health benefits, you know oils have very few phytochemicals. They have no fiber they have very little health benefit to the body and so eliminating those as an excess source of calories. It's really important. The second thing is when we heat oil becomes oxidized it can become inflammatory. So especially heating oil to really high temperature. And so can become an inflammatory Source in the body as well. And so it's for those two reasons that I just generally don't recommend that people use oils, you know, if you're preparing a special meal and you want to use an extra virgin olive oil that's fine, you know absolutely do that. If you're baking something and you need to use a small amount of oil you can absolutely do that. But I really try to encourage people not to use oil on a regular basis. It's just extra calories that you don't need. So I hope that gives you some just general guidance and you know from our experience what we've seen.
