I was inspired to write this post after discovering the concerning amount of harmful ingredients in many food items. During my weekly grocery shop, I scanned the ingredient list of numerous items and noticed that they all had certain unhealthy ingredients in common.
Did you know that there is vegetable oil in virtually everything! From bread to cereal, roasted nuts to ice cream, most packaged foods, and even salad dressings.
How many of us actually check the ingredients before buying food? How many of us actually know what we’re feeding our bodies or understand the harm that it’s doing on the inside?
(Hopefully more people by the end of this post!)
So, what are vegetable oils?
They are oils that have been unnaturally extracted from the seeds of corn, canola, soy, sunflower and grapeseed, to name a few. The seeds are processed and refined, damaging the fats in the oils, resulting in a variety of harmful molecules.
What happens when you eat foods containing vegetable oils?
Oh dear. Where shall we start.
Let’s start with the gut – the oils actually initiate their attack by first attacking the gut. Vegetable oil gets into the body via the gut. Every bite of food you swallow lands first in the stomach. The stomach releases acid which mixes with the food, helping to break it down and move it forward through the digestive tract. The acid aids digestion by activating digestive enzymes and killing off pathogenic bacteria, ultimately enabling us to extract as much nutrition as possible from our diets. But in the presence of vegetable oils, stomach acid interacts with otherwise beneficial compounds in our food in such a way as to incite oxidative reactions that cause damage to the stomach lining. However, the stomach lining is just the beginning, there’s another 28 feet of digestive tract to go and vegetable oil can irritate and inflame every inch!
In addition, vegetable oil attacks your brain by:
Disrupting the regulation of blood flow through the brain, affecting your arteries,
disarming the brain’s antioxidant defense system and depleting it of its antioxidants,
turning your immune system against you, causing food and infectious diseases to trigger
nerve degenerating reactions.
In a nutshell,
Vegetable oils are detrimental to your health. They have been linked to several serious health problems, such as heart attacks, stroke, birth defects, and can even contribute to Alzheimer’s disease. But don’t worry, there are plenty of healthier, tastier alternatives! Keep reading to find out more.
What can you use instead?
Healthy oils are those that have been used for generations. Look at what your grandparents and great-grandparents used for some good ideas.
| Healthy Oils | Oils to Avoid |
| Olive Oil Coconut Oil Peanut Oil Avocado Oil Walnut Oil Butter | ‘Vegetable Oil’ Canola Oil Sunflower Oil Corn Oil Rapeseed Oil Soy Oil |
In Conclusion,
Removing vegetable oil from your diet is probably one of the best things you can do to improve your health immediately. However, it’s always best to start with small steps, for example, start checking the ingredients of the food you’re buying, if it contains any harmful vegetable oils, put it down and back away slowly (you were probably in the wrong aisle, go back to the vegetable aisle), or you could start by replacing the harmful oils with healthy oils in your cooking.
Afiya Holistic Healing 