If anyone has ever gone grocery store shopping with me or handed me a box of snack food they would know I am label checker. I am not looking at calories/fat/cholesterol directly; I am looking at hydrogenated oils. I hate them. I think they are evil and if we wanted to cure the obesity epidemic we should make them illegal to add in any food.
Partially Hydrogenated Oils and Hydrogenated oils cannot be digested. They were invented to make good oil into oil that could live forever on grocery store shelves. In a world where no one cooks anymore, there needed to be easy way to eat food with no preparation. This change in food culture started in the 1950’s when marketing directed at housewives emphasized having a speedy meal on the table, keeping a clean home and the kids well controlled so her husband would want to come home from work instead of going to the local bar. They created an infinite amount of products to reduce the time a woman would have to spend cooking, cleaning and managing the home so she could spend more time catering to her husbands needs. It is absolutely outrageous but that is history. So this is where the sneaky hydrogenated oils got into the food chain. There was massive marketing about natural items, such as butter, or even baking bread at home because there was more germs at home than in a nice clean factory where bread was baked. Margarine became the new spread for the Wonder Bread.
So what do they do to you? They lower your HDL cholesterol (the good kind) and raise LDL cholesterol (the kind that clogs your arteries). All that hydrogenated oils can be digested so it just sits in your arteries waiting to give you a heart attack. It triggers diabetes, heart disease and obesity.
Go here for Harvard’s word on the evil oils.
Still not convinced that I’m giving you some valuable information? Try and go a week without eating any. First you will see that you can’t eat the majority of foods in your pantry. Second, you might feel ill, or even get sick. Taking your body off of these is similar to quitting a drug. You will feel side affects. Perhaps a week isn’t enough so try and go longer. Then try and eat something with them…you will feel sick, I’m sure. Every time I eat anything with these oils in them, my stomach hates me.
So what is the alternative to a life of fast food? Eating whole foods, learning to cook and reestablishing a connection to where your food comes from.
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1 comment:
Nice post. I'm fascinated with food politics and the nature of our dietary habits. It's so complex though it's really disheartening that so many people don't care about what they consume, and don't pay attention to the way their body reacts to it. But in America convenience has always trumped taste in people's food choices, and it's spreading that way throughout the world. It's kind of reverse-ethnocentric (I just made that up) to believe that other culture's dietary habits are superior to ours; everyone has unhealthy food and most people in the world build their diet on what's readily available to them. However we as a society have never been as exposed to so many dietary choices, for better or for worse. It sometimes feels unnatural for me to have so many disparate ingredients readily available. But then I get over it and enjoy delicious food.
In a related note: I strongly believe that nutrition has to be a regular part of the school curiculum from an early age. It's just as important to our collective and personal health as sex-ed. As a part of that everyone would learn how to prepare simple, wholesome food, so that no one would be "cooking iliterate."
Sorry for clogging up your comments section. Maybe I should start my own food blog. Then we could be rivals.
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