VEGETABLES

Unhealthy Vegetable Oil

      SATURATED FATS CAUSE HEART DISEASE. Unsaturated fats, especially polyunsaturated fats, balance hormones, strengthen the immune system, and prevent cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, arthritis, and all types of inflammation. Some polyunsaturated fatty acids are so important to health that they are called essential fatty acids, or EFAs — you literally can’t be healthy without them. Polyunsaturated vegetable oils are the safest fats for cooking, especially deep-fat frying, and they’re the key ingredients in healthful salad dressings. Canola oil, flax seed oil, soy oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, and other polyunsaturated vegetable oils are today’s true health foods.

Right?

“Wrong on all counts,” says Ray Peat, Ph.D., a physiologist who has studied hormones and dietary fats since 1968. According to Peat, every one of the above statements is incorrect. In fact, he says, the polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs in vegetable seed oils are the bane of human health — they actually cause cancer, diabetes, obesity, aging, thrombosis, arthritis, and immunodeficiencies. Their only appropriate use, he says, is as ingredients in paints and varnishes.

Peat is not alone, for a growing number of reputable researchers, medical doctors, nutritionists, and health care practitioners share his views. Their discoveries, they say, may save your life.

What’s wrong with vegetable oils? The main problem is that polyunsaturated oils contain long-chain fatty acids, which are extremely fragile and unstable. “The