The path of true knowledge seldom runs smooth.
Ever since people began turning the eye of suspicion on cholesterol,the general public has been subjected to contradictory recommendations about what to eat. A recent blog post in the New York Times draws attention to a study from some 40 years ago that seems to suggest that eating less meat and saturated fats did not necessarily increase your expected length of life. Read the article carefully for yourself; often the studies and their aims are not what you expect from the titles of the articles.
I myself recently almost had a heart attack, and I’m obviously interested in what an ideal diet should be, both from the point of view of eating stuff that tastes good to me, and from the point of view of increasing my chances of avoiding a painful, and potentially harmful heart “event” as much as possible. A full-blown heart-attack can end up restricting your activities, especially in your work, and in your fun, as well. And it is no joke going through an almost attack; I can hardly imagine a complete heart attack.
[Any restriction in blood flow into the heart muscle—in contrast to reduction of blood through the heart, which is also troublesome; when the heart doesn’t do its job, you need to have those little nylon Oxygen tubes going into your nose—causes pain, because the heart needs a constant supply of Oxygen to do its work. A minor reduction is slightly painful, but doesn’t injure the heart. A complete blockage of one of the blood supply vessels (arteries) results is terrible pain, and actual injury to the heart.]
Anyone who has lived through the last three decades has got the general impression that
- Cholesterol is bad generally, and the LDL Cholesterol is the worst.
- A lot of heart artery blockage actually consists of Cholesterol.
- There is something called Plaque in the artery walls that also blocks them.
- Saturated fats are bad.
- Fats in red meats are the worst. Fats in eggs and dairy are also pretty bad.
- Unsaturated fats and monosaturated fats are good for you.
- Omega fatty acids are ... what? Maybe good for you. These are found in eggs, and Avocadoes, and some sorts of fish, e.g. Salmon and Trout.
Now, you’re not supposed to fry under high heat if you can avoid it. High temperatures are bad for most foods, because it changes the chemistry of the foods in a bad way. (It’s supposedly worst when you fry cured meats, e.g. bacon and ham. I’m not completely sure that I’ve got that right.) But I seemed to read that the high temperatures made unsaturated oils themselves dangerous, whereas saturated oils didn’t change very much when heated. This is called the stability of the oil; saturated oils are more stable, precisely because they’re saturated. So Coconut Oil was considered a good oil for frying, stir-frying in a wok, etc. To date I have not seen anything to contradict that belief.
