How Vegetable Oils Affect Our Health?

Vegetable oils have appeared when we invent technological processes that make oil from vegetables. A belief that saturated fats are bad for our health has contributed to their widespread use. Namely, after one insufficiently proved study in 1977, medical experts have decided that saturated fats are harmful to our heart health. Based on that, many people have replaced saturated fats that belong to staple food for hundreds and thousands of years with vegetable oils. Their production increased, and they became one of the most present foods in our diet. They have been advertised as the food that keeps our hearts healthy. However, statistics of the heart diseases among the world population become worse than before the use of vegetable oils. In the last few years, many studies appeared that report not only an insignificant effect of vegetable oils on our heart health but more harmful effects. The main argument against vegetable oils comes from a Paleolithic diet that considers saturated fats as a more natural type of food for humans. It has been there throughout our evolution. The second argument is the very process of vegetable oil production. The process is based on various chemical processes that add to vegetable and seed oils harmful substances that cause oxidation processes in our bodies and contribute to a deterioration of our health. To learn more about vegetable oils and how they affect our health, the article “Are Vegetable and Seed Oils Bad for Your Health? A Critical Look” gives us the following explanation.

The main problem with most of these oils is that they are way too high in Omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Both Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids are so-called essential fatty acids, meaning that we need some of them in our diet because the body can’t produce them.

Throughout evolution, we got Omega-3 and Omega-6 in a certain ratio.

Our Omega-6:Omega-3 ratio used to be about 1:1. However, in the past century or so, this ratio in the Western diet has shifted drastically, all the way up to 16:1 (1).

When the Omega-6:Omega-3 ratio shifts too high in favor of Omega-6, bad things start to happen in the body.

The excess Omega-6 fatty acids build up in our cell membranes and contribute to inflammation (2).

Inflammation is an underlying factor in some of the most common western diseases and include cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis and many, many others.

The worst products of vegetable oils are margarine and plant-based cheese. They go through additional chemical processes to make saturated fats from unsaturated, vegetable oils. These processes add more substances that are harmful to our health.