When one think of calories from Ice Cream, Cake, Doughnuts, chocolates or Indian sweets such as Ghulab Jamun, Jalebi etc what comes to the mind? If your guess was Sugar, you are mistaken. All of the above have more calories from FATs/oils (Saturated, unsaturated & trans fats) than carbohydrates (sugar). Even a slice of pizza or a vegetable samosa has more calories from Fats than carbohydrates. In addition to these, the most commonly consumed packaged chips, cereals, crackers and even breads have large % of their calories from of oils (fats). So, even if one drastically cuts down the daily consumption of oil in the home cooked meals (which I highly recommend), oil can sneak into our diet from many other sources.
Intake of vegetable oils and saturated fats from dairy and meat are primarily responsible for causing inflammation in the body. When the inflammation becomes systemic (Acidosis) in nature, it starts damaging the various organs, eventually leading to diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, fatty liver, arthritis and even cancer. When the body gets inflamed from inside, it ends up retaining lots of fluid (water retention) to buffer the acids. In fact, much of the excess weight that people are now carrying around is water weight due to high inflammation in their bodies.
Why are Oils so harmful to the body?
Think about this. If you keep water in open it evaporates very quickly, but if you keep any oil or saturated fat (e.g. coconut oil/ghee) it will stay as is even for months & years to come. Now if you have been eating oily foods since childhood, how much of that oil/fats and its residue is still left in the cells of your body and how much toxins are trapped in them?
Oils due to their very nature are dense and hence not easy for the body to eliminate. Because of their sticky nature they clog our cells as well as thicken (coagulate) the blood (resulting in blocked arteries). Also, because of their sticky nature, the toxins from our various foods/drinks gets trapped and end up depositing in our joints, organs, and inside the cells (intracellular lipids). The body's inbuilt safety mechanism treats these toxic elements as potentially harmful and start reacting against them thus causing all sorts of auto-immune issues.
As soon as one starts to take out oily & sugary food from the diet (both from cooking & snacks), and eat more fruits, vegetables, lentils, beans and whole grains one starts to lose weight and recover from their chronic illnesses.
It is very important to learn how to read labels behind a bottle or package to find the hidden Fats/oils. Just because a package says “all natural”, “low fat” or even “organic” it doesn't mean it has less fat or processed sugar. Take 2% milk as an example. Most people think, it has only two % fat. Wrong! 35% of the calories in 2% milk comes from FAT (mostly saturated fat). Also, always read the caloric size per serving and number of calories from fat in those servings before deciding to buy a product. No more than 10% of the total calories in a serving should come from Fat sources. As oppose to carbohydrates and proteins which have 4 calories in each gram, FAT has 9 calories per gram. In two tablespoons of oil (as in one samosa or 1 pizza slice) , there are 240 calories. One needs to walk 40 minutes to burn these calories.
Though it might be hard to believe but the vegetable oil industry is just 100 years old. It requires a massive amount of force/pressure to get the oil out of tiny seeds and the machinery to do just that was not available 3 generations back. But since we have grown up cooking our foods in oil, it might seem that they were always around. The dishes/meals that we are so accustomed to eating now were simply not present in their current state few generations back because the medium in which they are prepared oil / ghee was not available commercially.
Last but not least, “There is no such thing as a heart healthy oil. In fact, it is an oxymoron. We must learn to prepare meals in their whole form using spices without reaching for a bottle of oil in order to lose weight and recovering from many of our chronic illnesses.
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