Contradictory statements are often heard when it comes to oil and fat: “Fat makes you heart ill and fat”, “Coconut oil makes you slim” or “vegetable oils are healthy”. What is correct now? And what should you consider from an ecological point of view?
We looked at which oils are really healthy, which ones you would rather avoid and what you can look out for when buying.
You can’t do without fat
Dietary fats have the highest calorie density of any nutrient. With 9 kilocalories (kcal) per gram, they have more than twice as many calories as a gram of carbohydrates or protein. Fats and oils are therefore often demonized and decried as “fat food”.
It’s true that “eating too much fat” can make you fat, but you can’t do without fat entirely. Dietary fats are suppliers of essential fatty acids, they are vitamin carriers and vitamin suppliers and as flavor carriers they also ensure that a dish tastes “round”.
All fat is made up of different fatty acids. Basically, you have to distinguish between saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. Saturated fats are easy to recognize: They are solid at room temperature. This includes all animal fats, palm kernel fat and coconut fat.
Saturated fatty acids are not essential to life and are even harmful to health, since they are responsible, among other things, for the cholesterol level in the blood to rise.
With unsaturated fatty acids, things get more complicated. There are monounsaturated, diunsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids. What they all have in common is that they are liquid at room temperature.
Monounsaturated fatty acids such as oleic acid are found in olive oil, rapeseed oil and many nuts and seeds. The body is able to form these monounsaturated fatty acids such as omega 9 itself; they are therefore not essential.
Essential Fatty Acids
The body, on the other hand, cannot produce polyunsaturated fatty acids itself, so they are essential. A lack of essential fatty acids leads to various deficiency symptoms such as skin changes, susceptibility to infections, growth disorders, hair loss and a lack of blood platelets. Polyunsaturated fatty acids can be found in fish, corn oil, but also in safflower oil or nuts. The doubly unsaturated (omega 6) fatty acids include, for example, linoleic acid, which is contained in thistle or sunflower oil.
Well-known essential fatty acids are “Omega 3” and “Omega 6”, which are now literally “on everyone’s lips” due to advertising: The healthy Omega 3 (for example alpha-linoleic acid) is contained in all vegetable oils and improves the flow properties of the blood. It also lowers blood pressure and blood lipids, which is why it can prevent hardening of the arteries. There is a lot of omega 3 in fish (the cooler the water, the fatter the fish, the richer in omega 3) and in local oils such as rapeseed oil, soybean oil, walnut oil and linseed.
The fatty acid ratio is important
Now it gets a bit complicated: It is not only the intake of such essential fatty acids through our food that is decisive, but also that the ratio of these fatty acids to one another is optimal. The higher the proportion of omega 3 fatty acids and the lower the proportion of omega 6 fatty acids, the more optimal the oil is.
The “healthy olive oil” praised by good marketing comes off surprisingly badly: it has an unfavorable ratio of these two fatty acids, but a healthy proportion of oleic acid.
Local linseed oil has the highest content of omega 3. If you don’t like the intense taste, you can also use rapeseed oil, walnut oil or soybean oil, which are much healthier in their fatty acid ratios than the widespread sunflower oil, corn oil or peanut oil – oils that are often used in gastronomy because they are cheap and can be heated to high temperatures .
