I mentioned earlier that my discovery of the books of Adele Davis in 1970 was one of the most important influences on my cooking and eating. Lately I have been researching the science behind a low carbohydrate diet and have found that due to Adele I have been doing some things right. I have also realized she was wrong in other ways.
Davis taught that Crisco was a dangerous product. She pointed out that it was made from vegetable oil, which had been chemically altered to make it stable and to cause it to be solid. She said that plain old lard was much safer to cook with. I heeded her advice, and over the years the only solid shortening I had in my pantry was a small can I used to grease cake pans. This can of Crisco sat on my shelf for years. Davis also explained that butter was much better than margarine. In fact, she taught me to get rid of margarine completely. Now we know that Crisco and margarine are trans fats--a term Davis may not have ever heard as she died 30 years ago.
Where she was wrong was in advising people to use vegetable oils that were cold-pressed. Yes cold-pressed vegetable oils are much preferable to oils which have to be chemically extracted in factories. By this I mean all of the oils you see on the shelf in your grocery store except for the cold-pressed ones and the olive oil. Except for olive oil, vegetable oils are omega six oils. They can easily become rancid due to be opened bonds on their atoms. When ingested, they can oxidize causing damage to blood vessels. Now we know that omega sixes should be used only a little. We know that olive oil--an omega nine with only one open bond--is good for us.
But only recently have I discovered that the saturated fats we have been scared away from are necessary for many processes within our bodies, not the least of which is the brain. I am glad that I had still been following Davis's advice to mix butter with olive oil to make it more spreadable and more healthy; however, now I am cooking with butter and coconut oil--both natural and healthy saturated fats.
I also earlier mentioned the Swank diet for multiple sclerosis. Dr. Swank, beginning in the 1950s, put his MS patients on a diet free of saturated fat on the theory that people with MS have difficulty breaking down the saturated fat in the body. He theorized that small globules of fat may cause a breach in the blood brain barrier close to spinal cord nerves in the brain and allowing toxins to get through and damaged the myelin. I tried to follow this diet when I was first diagnosed, but found that eventually I drifted a way from it. I always felt that I should have given it more time, but recently my reading of the the importance of saturated fat in the brain and the discovery of an Austrian doctor who puts MS patients on a low carbohydrate, high fat diet with good results has sent me in a different direction.
My current diet and research has led me to limit my carbohydrates drastically. I am eating meat, eggs, cheese, and low starch vegetables. As my weight had continued to climb since I became restricted to a wheelchair and as I was having no success losing weight with a low-fat diet, I am happy to see the weight beginning to melt away. I will continue with this diet until I see a strong reason not to.
I am not giving advice really. Instead, I am chronicling my own discoveries about nutrition. What I have found and what I had learned forty years ago in reading Davis's books, is that when our diet began to be full of processed and changed foods, are national health began to decline and we began to put on weight. I am continuing to research this contradiction about saturated fats and will report back as I make discoveries.
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