I was flipping channels earlier today and happened across a PBS show (can’t remember the name) that made 2 claims I’ve never heard before:
Coconut milk is very good for you (within moderation, of course). This is an ingredient in most Thai curry dishes, for example. I thought you were supposed to avoid that ingredient because it had too many of the bad fats in it.
Canola oil bad for you. They claimed that recent evidence points to the refining process (aimed at taking the bad taste out of rapeseed oil) ends up adding too many trans fats, so canola oil is no longer recommended. Trans fats??? Canola oil is supposed to be the best oil for you, I thought. Better even that olive oil.
So, does anyone know what these guys were talking about and is there some on-line analysis of this info?
What took the bad taste out of the rapeseed oil was extremely extensive selective breeding. Canola is pretty much genetically engineered, albeit using old-fashioned techniques instead of gene splicing. Canola isn’t just a politically correct name for rapeseed. It’s nutritionally a completely different crop. There’s no special refining involved in making canola oil. It’s just plain old pressing/crushing, same as any other oilseed.
Plain, freshly pressed canola oil has zero trans fats and lower saturated fat content than any other commercially available cooking oil. Where trans fats come in is in partially hydrogenated canola oil. Hydrogenation is done to extend shelf life, and to thicken the oil for use in margarines and such. That said, you’re unlikely to find any hydrogenation going on with cooking oil, and I routinely buy margarine made from non-hydrogenated canola oil. Course, I live in the birthplace of canola, too.
Here is a nice, unbiased cite from the Canola Council of Canada.
Funny you should mention that site. NutritionData.com is one of my favorite sites for figuring this kind of stuff out, and I actually did a search for “coconut” and “coconut milk” there before posting this thread. I got nothing, though. I guess it must be indexed under “canned”… Anyway, it’s high in saturated fat (good fat), so the key is not to consume that much.
Saturated fat is not the good kind, unsaturated fat is much better for you, as long as it is the commonly occuring natural, cis-unsaturated fat, not the trans- type produced by partial hydrogenation.
I don’t know if this is relevant, there was an anti-canola oil internet screed that got a lot of publicity about 2 years ago. I suspect that it was a plot by the vegetable oil manufacturers of America (canola = Canada Oil). I think it was thoroughly debunked, as I’ve been using canola oil as my generic default cooking oil for years.
I have also heard of a study that showed Thai people to have a very low incidence of heart disease despite one of the highest consumption rates of coconut oil.
I’d be interested to know whether the study was controlled to take genetics into account. That is, it’s conceivable that Thais have a low rate of heart disease genetically, and that their consumption of coconut oil isn’t high enough to overcome this.
Also, it seems to me that what matters is not the consumption of one type of oil, but the total dietary profile. Thais eat a lot of fish and little butter and margarine, for example. It’s possible that their total consumption of saturated fat is low despite a high consumption of coconut milk.
BTW, I spent a month in Thailand some years ago, and my impression is that their diet is fairly low in fat. Most of the food there isn’t loaded with coconut milk.
Hasn’t butter been shown to be “better” than margarine in recent years? It is certainly superior in taste for cooking, albeit more expensive. I don’t eat much fried food, so I don’t have much need for high smoke point oils. Canola tends to leave pans and lids with a near epoxy-like substance that is the devil to remove.
There is a contingent of folks who believe that Dr. Keys, who developed K-rations for the army and did some of the most influential work on fats, was a bit hasty in grouping plant based saturated fats in with animal based saturated fats as “bad” fats. His research, as pointed out in the wiki article, was entirely statistically and anecdotally based, not research based.
There are a lot of wild health claims out there about unrefined coconut OIL right now. One of the more interesting ones is that it stimulates thyroid hormone production, so people who eat a lot of it are slightly hyperthyroid, which leads to weight loss. There are coconut oil weight loss books, even! Anecdotally, my own mother lost hundreds of cholesterol points and 60 pounds in 6 months switching her olive oil diet to coconut oil (and has kept it off for 6 years with little effort). You can find lots of anecdotes and testimonials (but I haven’t found any good studies, only small, poorly run and conflicting studies by groups with dubious neutrality) by googling coconut oil good for you.
I think the jury is still out on this one. They’re way, way out, in fact, until some decent studies are done. I doubt that coconut fats are a panacea, but I also doubt they’re as harmful as transfats in partially hydrogenated oils.
Jeff Lichtman’s point about the total dietary profile is a good one, as well. I’m afraid with eliminating partially hydrogenated oils, we’re going to see refined coconut oils put back into the same crap we’ve been eating all along (because it’s shelf stable), and not much will change in our collective health. A Thai diet, even high in fat, it also higher in vegetables and lower in meat and dairy - much like the Mediterranean diet, but with the fat from coconuts instead of olives.
Common Tater, butter is better than margarine because most margarine contains large amounts of transfats (in partially hydrogenated fats), which are the boogeyman of the day. Nobody has anything redeeming to say about transfats, except that they’re the unfortunate byproduct of very shelf stable prepared foods - you want Twinkies that last 20 years, you get transfats.
Yes, I agree, and I was somewhat hesitant to ask the question in isolation because of that. The whole omega-3 fatty acids thing is an example, as we find that the ratio of this and other fatty acids (omega-6, at least) seems to be more important than the absolute amount of the former in your diet.
I know that there is a movement toward looking at the value of ethnic culinary habits in toto rather than trying to break them down and extract only the “good” parts. Probably the most prominent book out there on that subject is “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, but I don’t believe the conclusions in that book were scientifically researched.
You know, I don’t think they really know effall about nutrition. Everything they “knew” 20 years ago has turned out to be false (ok, I exaggerate). The trouble is that most of the knowledge is gained by in vitro studies and what is really needed is to take two matched groups of people and give half of the them, say, canola oil regularly and the other half coconut oil for, say, ten years and keep their diets otherwise identical. You can see how impossible such a study is.
For example, my mother used to use gobs of margarine. When I got married, one of my requirements was that no margarine cross our doorway. We do use butter, but so little that half the time we throw a half used stick away because it is getting to taste refrigerator-y.
You remember (well maybe you have to be as old as me to remember) how Adele Davis used to talk up vitamine E and Linus Pauling vitamin C? Well both, taken as supplements, appear to be correlated with more heart disease. Of course, the studies are not well-controlled, as I said. But I have given up on them.
Milk and blood is a large part of their diet, but not their whole diet (if it were, they’d all be dead of scurvy in a few weeks). The supplement their diet with food they get by trading with hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists who live in the region. Land encroachement in the 1970’s disrupted that trade and resulted in serious nutritional deficiencies among the Masai.
Well, it’s easy to “survive” on a diet of almost anything, if you’re willing to accept a life expectancy of (m42/44 (M/F , Masai in Tanzania) I’ve actually seen a range of figures, but all are several years less than the current WHO life expectancies for the total (diverse) populations of Tanzania and Keny, which are 46/48 and 50/51 [and headed back down, due to AIDS], IIRC. In short: they live in a population where the life expectancy is low, or they’d stand out as short-lived, but they don’t even quite reach even the low life expectancies of their neighbors.
However, there are clearly so many factors dragging down the life expectancy of people in those areas that it’s a poor place to go for conclusions about longevity in general. The long term effects of various foods or nutrients, in particular, don’t really get to emerge – but they are widely cited (often contradictorily) by both sides of many food debates.
One of the funniest reasons given to avoid canola oil is this:
Obviously the people who said tomatoes were poisonous were right, too- tomato-sauce stains have ruined a few of my clothes.
I’ve known since I was a little kid that any oily stain is hard to get out of clothes (I remember getting yelled at for accidentally getting greasy stains on my clothes).
I usually use olive oil for cooking, but when I don’t want the flavor of olive oil, I use canola.
Me, too. Canola is especially good for making popcorn-- olive oil has a lower smoke point so you can’t get the corn as hot. But… you can put olive oil on it afterwards instead of butter. It’s really good that way!
Personally I love fresh coconut milk. I learned to love it while I was in the Western Pacific. I used to drink probably four or five green coconuts a day. A local Asian market has relatively fresh coconuts trucked in once a week and so I drink probably three a week.
In my years in the Pacific I only knew of one islander who died of heart problems. At least that’s what we thought it was. No doctor or nurse around. That being said they were in fantastic shape and ate a lot of fresh seafood and the occasional pig and dog.
