David Gillespie - The Good Fat Guide

About The Good Fat Guide

In this fully updated edition of his 2013 bestseller Toxic Oil, David Gillespie reviews the latest research from this rapidly evolving field linking seed oils to a host of diseases, including cancer.

Over the past century, manufactured seed oils canola, sunflower and rice bran oil, among others have systematically replaced saturated fats in our diet. Despite nutrition guidelines stating this is a good thing, our rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are soaring. In fact, recent findings suggest that animal fats are not the villains we once thought them to be.

As most processed foods from breads and crackers to mayonnaise and pesto contain seed oils, David shows us how to identify these toxic products and make healthier choices at the supermarket. He tells us which brands to avoid, which to enjoy and how to create seed-oil free versions of favourite foods at home.

For Lizzie, Anthony, James, Gwen, Adam, Elisabeth and Fin

Vegetable oil makes you exceedingly vulnerable to cancer. Every mouthful of vegetable oil you consume takes you one step closer to a deadly and irreversible outcome. Every mouthful of vegetable oil you feed to your family is doing the same to them. You are eating vegetable oil because it is much cheaper to chemically extract oils from plant seeds than it is to raise and slaughter an animal or grow a coconut tree. And you are being told to eat it for your health by nutrition advocates who have been successfully and thoroughly hoodwinked by the food industry.

I am telling you this not because I am a conspiracy theorist or a herbal-gerbil knit-your-own-food purveyor. I am telling you because if you knew this (and could prove it) and didnt tell me and my family, Id be furious with you. I am not a doctor or a nutritionist. I have no formal training in human biochemistry or even chemistry. I am a lawyer and the only relevant skill I bring to the table is an ability to gather, understand and synthesise evidence. Science is based on people making hypotheses about how things might work and then collecting evidence that will prove them right (or wrong). Just like law, science should be all about the evidence. However, when it comes to the river of gold flowing to the processed food industry, evidence runs smack bang into commercial interest and, unfortunately for us, commercial interest generally wins out.

Two hundred years ago, humans ate approximately what they had been eating for 10,000 (or, in some cases, 200,000) years prior. Where they lived and how much money they had affected the exact mix, but in general the diet was a mixture of vegetables, legumes and nuts, grains, meat, fish and occasional fruit. Fish didnt have fingers and chickens hadnt learnt how to grow nuggets. The only fat you were likely to encounter was in a piece of meat or, if you lived near the equator, in tropical fruits such as avocados and coconuts. Sugar was even rarer and could usually only be obtained after a protracted series of negotiations with stinging insects. If you think you still eat like that, have a quick check of your pantry or fridge. If all you find are cuts of whole meat, whole fruit and vegetables, wholegrains or flours, eggs and milk, then you dont need this book. Put it down and continue to lead a healthy (and probably long) life. If instead you find lots of boxes, tins and bottles with pictures of food on them rather than actual food, then you need to read further.

Youre still here? Well, lets get down to the purpose of this book. In my first book, Sweet Poison, I looked at what science says about the sugar that has been added to our food in escalating quantities since the advent of commercial sugar production in the early 1800s. I documented the scientific evidence, now well-established, which proves convincingly that the fructose half of sugar is a lethal addition to our diet. I also talked briefly about the measures my family had undertaken to find and remove it from our diet. In Big Fat Lies, I started to examine the evidence on dietary fat. I had seen this evidence from the corner of my eye as I was reading about fructose. I knew that fat was not a dietary bogeyman once appetite control was restored (by removing fructose), but I had noticed that something like the sugar story had been happening in the world of fat.

WHAT IS A VEGETABLE OIL?

Well, it aint oil from vegetables. Vegetable oil is edible fat extracted from plants rather than animals. It includes oils from fruit (such as avocado, olives and coconuts), oils from nuts (such as macadamias), oils from legumes (such as peanuts and soybeans), and oils from seeds (such as almonds, cottonseeds, grapeseed, sunflowers, rice bran and canola).

As a rule, the oils from legumes and seeds are the cheapest of these and the most widely used. Theyre also deadly because they tend to be high in polyunsaturated fat and, more particularly, omega-6 fat. Youll find out why this matters below.

Between 1820 and 1920, the worlds population doubled from 1 billion to 2 billion. Nothing like this had ever happened before. It took us a quarter of a million years to get to the first billion but the second billion came in just a century. Not surprisingly, our ability to feed everybody was being stretched to breaking point and prices of food particularly animal-based products began to spiral upward. This provided an incentive to come up with food-like products made from cheaper raw materials.

Humans are endlessly ingenious and when that ingenuity was applied to the problem of expensive animal fat and animal-fat products like butter, a solution was quickly discovered. It turned out that if enough pressure and heat was applied, fats could be extracted from things that were otherwise going to waste, such as cottonseeds. Treated with the right chemicals, these fats could be made to look and behave just like the animal fats we had consumed for millennia. Just like sugar, these new, cheap fats made their way into our food supply. At first they were cooking fats and margarines, and then shortenings used in baked goods, but eventually they found their way into almost every food on the supermarket shelf, because there are very few foods that dont taste better with a little fat.

In commerce, it is rare to do the cheapest thing and be seen to do the right thing. Dumping industrial waste into rivers is cheaper than disposing of it properly, but no one will applaud you for doing it. Using second-hand car parts is cheaper than using new ones but few people will thank you for it if you charge them for new. However, when it comes to edible oils, doing things the cheap way gets you a round of applause from the guardians of our nutritional health. Indeed, the Australian Heart Foundation and the Dietitians Association of Australia, to name two such groups, actively encourage us to consume products that use seed oils instead of animal fats, such as margarine in preference to butter. Their encouragement is based on evidence that could be described as flimsy at best, and there is significant evidence which says exactly the opposite, but it does not force them to alter their industry-sponsored position.

In Big Fat Lies, I looked in detail at the insidious danger that lies in those man-made fats. Fructose is dangerous because our bodies are not genetically adapted to a diet that contains it in industrial quantities. The same can be said for the polyunsaturated fats which dominate the oils extracted from seeds. Our extraordinarily complex biochemistry works on the assumption that we will have a very small quantity of these fats in our diet and that every other fat we consume will come from animals or other sources of saturated or monounsaturated fat (see for an explanation of the different types of fat). That was a reasonable assumption before around 1850, but the recent replacement of almost all fats with their cheaper cousins has meant that it is now almost impossible to buy food that is not full of seed oil.