Unveiling the truth: Are vegetable oils truly beneficial for weight loss and health?

The Demon That Makes You Fat: Vegetable Oil

Many families are accustomed to buying large containers of vegetable oil from the supermarket for cooking, believing that vegetable oil is better for weight loss and health than animal fat. But is this really true?

In fact, most of the vegetable oils we commonly consume are extracted from seeds such as soybeans, sunflower seeds, peanuts, and rapeseed. These plants naturally contain very little oil, so other methods are needed to extract more oil.

The most common extraction method is solvent extraction. This method requires the use of chemical solvents. For example, soybean oil is mostly extracted using solvent extraction, and then further processed through deodorization and decolorization to become the clear, transparent cooking oil sold in supermarkets. It is a highly processed refined oil. As mentioned earlier, the higher the degree of refinement of the oil, the lower the content of vitamins and antioxidants, which is very detrimental to health.

Moreover, the vegetable oils commonly found in supermarkets are unsaturated fatty acids. Due to their molecular structure, unsaturated fatty acids are susceptible to light, oxygen, and high temperatures, and are very prone to oxidation and spoilage. These oils, extracted through pressing and then subjected to long-distance transportation and storage, are easily oxidized during the entire process, thus producing harmful substances.

In addition, many people like to heat the oil until it smokes before cooking with vegetable oil. This causes the vegetable oil, which is not resistant to high temperatures, to release toxic chemical substances called aldehydes after high-temperature cooking. These toxic chemicals are closely related to health problems such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and body inflammation. Therefore, compared to vegetable oil, animal fat is a more suitable cooking oil for Chinese cooking methods.

Cooking with vegetable oil is not a healthy choice. In fact, vegetable oil is a highly processed food with low nutritional value, and its consumption should be limited, especially during weight loss.