mesolithic

Fat: Infiltrating the Culinary World
01/22/2010 - 14:09

Last night I heard a lecture by Jennifer McLagan, author of the book Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient With Recipes. The audience members were mostly foodies, who have really embraced fat in the past few years, but Jennifer gave an impassioned lecture on why they should embrace even more fat and throw out industrial oils. She talked about how the government, lobbied by industry, encouraged people to substitute "healthy" oils and margarine for animal fat, but how our health since has gotten worse, not better. 

She revealed how many vegetable oils are so highly processed that you can't even tell if they are rancid or not, and she said most of them are. It makes sense, as in processing they are exposed to heat, and then stored in clear bottle so they are exposed to light. Heat and light are the agents of rancidity. Consuming rancid oils is highly linked to inflammation and to make the deal worse, most of the oils are high in omega-6, which is also inflammatory. She told us to use animal fats from pastured animals, which hold up well to cooking and have a ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 appropriate for humans.

Jennifer talked about the least appreciated animal fats, suet and tallow, and how we are missing out on hearty flavorful foods featuring them. Personally, I just discovered tallow and it's harder to cook with than lard because of its strong flavor. However, when used in a way that accents and offsets that flavor, it is absolutely delicious.

I was shocked to hear that milk laws in Canada, where she lives, do not allow for the production of artisan butter! Jennifer talked about the wonderful complex flavors in grass-fed butter and how much our health has declined since we have discarded it in many baked goods for oil and more sugar to offset the loss of flavor.

What can we do to bring fat back? Jennifer said we all have to lose our irrational fear of animal fat and start cooking with it. She said the loss of home cooking is what has really destroyed our diets, making us serfs of companies that simply use whatever is cheapest. Most people don't know what tallow is and they certainly don't know how to use it.

It's a little distressing in the paleo community how oil still reigns. Even if it's the healthier oils, coconut and olive, they still wouldn't have been a part of our ancestor's diets. Learning how to render and use these fats is something everyone on any diet can benefit from. Her cookbook is a wonderful resource for overcoming fat-phobia. It's also wonderfully appropriate as a gift for friends. It's not preaching a diet, it's just celebrating the wonders of fat.

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I can haz calories
01/20/2010 - 00:39

 

Someone on a forum was going on and on about grains being A.O.K. because traditional societies like the Japanese or some of Weston A. Price's healthy cultures ate them and were not obese. I think he misses the point, but also underscores a very annoying misconception. Many of my friends have told me that they have no need for anything like the paleo diet because they are skinny and always have been. 

But last time I checked skinny does not equal healthy. There are all kinds of health problems a skinny person can have and new studies show that within a single person insulin sensitivity may vary. Skinny programmers chugging Mountain Dew might be lucky enough to have belly fat tissue that is not insulin sensitive, but they might still be damaging other organs.

A paleo diet is about avoiding diseases of civilization. Obesity is just one of those diseases. I think well-planned veganism can do wonders for improving weight, cholesterol, and other basic measures of metabolic syndrome, but I do not believe it is the diet that brings out the best in the human body. I did raw grain-free veganism for time and like many people I initially felt good, probably because of all the wheat and dairy I wasn't eating, but eventually I just felt diminished. I alternated between fruit-induced sugar highs and extreme fatigue. I mainly just felt hungry. I realized that vegetables just don't have many calories and you have a choice of eating massive amounts of sugar from fruit or massive amounts of omega-6 fatty acids from nuts. I feel the paleo diet has the optimal amount of nutrients, in the best ratios, and in forms that are easily utilized by the human body (bioavailable). That's important, because many of us have damaged our bodies with junk and we need to do more than avoid obesity, we need the nutrients to repair. 

Many other raw vegans, including The Raw Model, a popular raw blogger, have found that their health has improved dramatically since they added animal products.

Societies like the Japanese avoided many problems by eating a diet low in total calories, but they did not reach their potential for height and bone development until fairly recently (incidentally as consumption of meat and fish has increased). It's the same with many agrarian societies: they aren't obese, but they aren't completely healthy either. There is plenty we can learn from peasant diets, but we can do better than peasants who worked a backbreaking day on very little in the way of calories. 

I think a sugar-free vegan or agrarian diet is certainly a step in the right direction and an agrarian diet can be made optimal with the careful addition of small amounts of meat and fish and by the fermentation of grains, dairy, and legumes. But the animal component of the diet has to be foods like liver and sardines, not skinless boneless chicken breast.

In the end people can go on and on about fruits and vegetables, but that's not where the calories are. The big question is where you are going to get the calories and whether you want to burn sugars or fats. Plants might enhance your health, but your fuel is going to make a bigger difference. I encourage anyone who hasn't read Good Calories, Bad Calories to get a copy or at least check out the detailed notes. 

 

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