Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food

by Catherine Shanahan

You can get off the sugar and vegetable oils that would block your child’s genetic potential. That means cutting out processed food, fast food, junk food, and soda.

That is not science; it is science fiction. So is the idea that heavily processed food can be healthy.

You’ll understand what lipid scientists have been telling us—and what the research has supported for years—cholesterol and saturated fat are not your heart’s enemy; industrial fat products, the vegetable oils, are.

So, as lipid scientists have long argued, I submit that natural fats and cholesterol have been a part of the human diet for millennia and are not the problem.

The historically recent rise in arteriosclerosis and heart disease is the result of an historically recent invention of the food industry—refined, bleached, and deodorized vegetable oils.

an upsurge in consumption of two major categories of pro-inflammatory foods: vegetable oils (a.k.a. unnatural fats) and sugar. Cutting both from your diet will not only protect your heart, it will help protect you from all chronic diseases.

GOOD FATS AND BAD Good Fats These traditional fats can handle the heat involved in processing or cooking. Olive oil Peanut oil Butter (Yes, butter!) Macadamia nut oil Coconut oil Animal fats (lard, tallow) Palm oil Any artisanally produced unrefined oil Bad Fats These industrial-era fats cannot handle the heat involved in processing or cooking. Canola oil Soy oil Sunflower oil Cottonseed oil Corn oil Grapeseed oil Safflower oil Non-butter spreads (including margarine) and the so-called trans-free spreads

because animal fats contain cholesterol—a natural appetite suppressant—they satisfy in a way that little else can.252

My conclusion: get your omega-3 fix from real foods, like sushi, oysters, grass-fed butter, raw nuts (especially walnuts) and seeds, and lots of green leafy vegetables.