Importance of Choosing the Right Cooking Oil:
With so many Cooking oil options in your supermarkets and knowing that it's one of the major ingredients in our cooking, you may be left with the panicked question: What oil should I use?
In today's processed world our choices of food products are extremely important, especially since we have so many brands that are filled with chemicals that can actually cause further disruption to health. Whatever you consume gets absorbed and in turn affects your system and so many organs of the human body. So it is extremely important that we explore nature and we arrive at the best ingredients from nature and put it together prioritizing human health and sustainability of the environment.
Our handy oil guide is the answer to all your cooking oil questions and will help you decide what oil to buy.
Knowing more about the ingredients we use to make our daily food takes you one step closer to being a better cook.
“91% of the Indian Families are buying Cooking oils which are cheaper than the Retail price of its Raw Material”
We know that it can be overwhelming to walk down the aisle in supermarkets these days with Heavy discounts. They used to only have Groundnut, Coconut, Sesame and Mustard oils in olden days, but now there are more than a dozen of options and some of which were really unheard earlier.
So, what oil should you use?
“Our choice of Food will always decide our Health in Future”
– Chirag Chaudhari
So, Lets Learn More about it..
The Sad Truth of Today’s Indian Cooking Oil Industry?
In today’s world, refined oils is something that we find in just about every processed food in Supermarkets today. It’s labelled Vegetables oils in the ingredients List which is ironic as there is no such thing as oil from a vegetable. The things that the processed food industry is putting into the foods and labeling as vegetable oils are in fact oils or fats extracted using extreme chemicals, pressure and heat processes from seeds. Seeds that were at a point of time wise products from which oils were extracted naturally through just pressing. These oils were not only healthy but nutritious too.
But times changed and highly processed refined oils took over. Most interestingly, the seeds used in these processes are not the ones through which we can extract oils naturally. They could not be consumed directly and hence required high chemical processing to extract oils from them and then make them edible too. I call these seeds as Waste products, for example, Cotton seeds, Rice bran, Soy beans, Rapeseed etc. Oils from these seeds significantly increase our chances for contracting Cancer, Autoimmune diseases and metabolic disorders. Now that’s a worry. It’s a bigger worry when we realize that our consumption of these oils has increased from almost nothing in the1980s to almost everything now.
What I mean by this is you cannot choose a product from the supermarkets in India which does not contain these processed oils. If the product has fat in it and the product is placed in the processed food shelves of the supermarkets then the fat being used is likely to be from these waste seeds. You can check the ingredients section and find it out yourselves.
Now why this matters is that these refined oils have a different chemical properties altogether than the pure wood pressed oils which we have eaten for generations. Once these fats are inside our body, our body incorporates them into our cell membranes as it does with every fat that we eat or make in the body. The problem with refined oils is that these fats are much more prone to oxidation. When you eat these refined oils, these fats are incorporated into every cell membrane and every cell in our body and those fats are reacting with oxygen and hence it’s pretty bad news given that oxygen is our fuel. When a cell membrane reacts with oxygen, it destroys itself and falls apart. Destroying enough of your cells often enough creates circumstances which are perfect for the development of cancer.
Which is why I am saying, everywhere that we are exposed to these oils, rates of cancer have increased significantly. Younger and younger people are getting Breast cancer, oral cancer, lung cancer, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer and many more. More and more people are dying every day with Cancer. Yes the medicines today are surely better in treating them but that doesn’t mean lesser people having them.
The World Health Organization (WHO) in its report highlighted that one in every 10 Indians will develop cancer and one in every 15 will die of the disease. WHO also warned, if the current trend continues then the Cancer cases will rise by 60% in the next two decades. And one of the primary reasons I believe is that we have massively increased the consumption and our exposure to these processed oils which lead to the development of many and many Health issues.
Now you might say to yourself, I don’t cook in Rice bran oil, or Canola Oil or Palm Oil, I use Olive Oil, I use Butter or ghee. So it’s important to understand that it’s just not the case. Even if you never use rice bran oil or a Cottonseed oil or even if you never go anywhere near Palm oil, you are still using these oils everyday without realizing it. Every Loaf of bread that you eat uses Palm oil. Every packet of chips that you consume uses Palm oil. Every packed sauce you use contains Vegetable oil. Every processed food that you buy contains vegetable oil which you can see on the Ingredient list of packets too.
Even if you think you are not consuming highly processed oils, guess what, You Are.
And you are significantly increasing your risks for Heart Diseases, Cancer and other diseases.