What's the Healthiest Oil to Cook With?

The extremely offensive and derogatory insult, “lard ass,” implies that one is most strikingly unhealthy, a ticking-time bomb, perhaps. But could it be that being a lard ass is far healthier than being a veggie butt?

When it comes to healthy cooking, lard lords over veggie oil. It’s far healthier to cook with animal fats and tropical oils than it is to cook with most vegetable oils. Here’s why....

Though lard is comprised of pure, unadulterated pig fat, as long as it has not been oxidized (read: turned rancid), cooking with pig fat--or any other natural animal-derived source or tropical oil--though it may seem counterintuitive to many people, is healthy because the fat is stable when exposed to heat during cooking.

For those who love Mexican food and patronize their favorite restaurant that proudly displays on the menu, “We never cook with lard, we use 100% vegetable oil siempre [always],” the restaurant is doing you a disservice.

Mexican abuelas (grandmothers) cooked with real lard. For thousands of generations, virtually every traditional society cooked with other forms of animal fat and tropical oils, rich in saturated fat. None of these societies ever exhibited characteristics of chronic diseases like heart disease.

Why many of us think vegetable oils are healthier--even though they can be deadly

We need oxygen for life (to breath), but when it comes to cooking, oxygen can be a deadly enemy. Exposing vegetable oils--think: sunflower, cottonseed, corn, safflower, etc...--to heat spoils the oil through rapid oxygenation. Most vegetable oils, as opposed to animal or tropical fats, are chemically unstable and degrade easily especially with heat. The chemical changes that take place during this degredation are very dangerous to your body. l

Several studies link the increase in American consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils to a direct increase in heart disease.

In addition to easily destroying vegetable oil through cooking, most vegetable oils arrive on supermarket shelves already rancid. Storage and transportation of the oils in scorching hot cargo bays, trucks and containers denature the oil, denuding them of any nutritional properties they may have contained in their pre-oxidized state.

Exceptions to the vegetable oil rule is olive oil, which is rich in heart-healthy monounsaturated fat. There’s a good reason why olive oil is an exception to the rule: technically, olives are fruits. Other healthy fruit oils most often lumped with vegetable oils include coconut oil and palm oil (tropical oils).

Many studies failed to take into account the difference between oxidized fats and natural, undenatured ones, vegetable oils have become an industry, worth by 2017, some analysts predict, over 90 billion dollars.

Watching your calorie intake? Skip the oils altogether...most of the time...and add Miracle Noodle!

Just one tablespoon of fat, even stable, healthy ones like butter, coconut oil and certain animal fats, contains several calories and grams of fat. If you’re watching your weight, try to limit your intake of healthy oils like olive oil and coconut oil and clarified butter (ghee) to just one shot-glass worth.   

If you’re wondering why, if the Mediterranean Diet prominently features olive oil, one should strictly limit consumption of even healthy oils like olive oil, keep in mind that the healthiest populations studied lived in small villages and actually consumed a maximum of three tablespoons a day, all while walking an average of seven miles per day!

Natural oils have nutritional benefits far worth too much from which to completely abstain but they are not needed in large amounts to derive the benefits. So unless you’re walking as much as Mediterranean villagers, curb your olive oil consumption.

But there is great news for fans of no-calorie and no-carb shirataki Miracle Noodle: the moisture content of Miracle Noodle products is 97% water, so even if you cook your favorite Miracle Noodle recipe with no oil, your dish will never taste dry. You can also cook with very flavorful, low-sugar, low-carb, low-calorie sauces, herbs and spices.