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MiracleNoodle Blog

Viewing posts tagged healthy cooking oil.

What's the Healthiest Oil to Cook With?

The extremely offensive and derogatory insult, “lard ass,” implies that one is most strikingly unhealthy, a ticking-time bomb, perhaps. But could it be that being a lard ass is far healthier than being a veggie butt?


When it comes to healthy cooking, lard lords over veggie oil. It’s far healthier to cook with animal fats and tropical oils than it is to cook with most vegetable oils. Here’s why....

Though lard is comprised of pure, unadulterated pig fat, as long as it has not been oxidized (read: turned rancid), cooking with pig fat--or any other natural animal-derived source or tropical oil--though it may seem counterintuitive to many people, is healthy because the fat is stable when exposed to heat during cooking.

For those who love Mexican food and patronize their favorite restaurant that proudly displays on the menu, “We never cook with lard, we use 100% vegetable oil siempre [always],” the restaurant is doing you a disservice.

Mexican abuelas (grandmothers) cooked with real lard. For thousands of generations, virtually every traditional society cooked with other forms of animal fat and tropical oils, rich in saturated fat. None of these societies ever exhibited characteristics of chronic diseases like heart disease.

Why many of us think vegetable oils are healthier--even though they can be deadly

We need oxygen for life (to breath), but when it comes to cooking, oxygen can be a deadly enemy. Exposing vegetable oils--think: sunflower, cottonseed, corn, safflower, etc...--to heat spoils the oil through rapid oxygenation. Most vegetable oils, as opposed to animal or tropical fats, are chemically unstable and degrade easily especially with heat. The chemical changes that take place during this degredation are very dangerous to your body. l

Several studies link the increase in American consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils to a direct increase in heart disease.

In addition to easily destroying vegetable oil through cooking, most vegetable oils arrive on supermarket shelves already rancid. Storage and transportation of the oils in scorching hot cargo bays, trucks and containers denature the oil, denuding them of any nutritional properties they may have contained in their pre-oxidized state.

Exceptions to the vegetable oil rule is olive oil, which is rich in heart-healthy monounsaturated fat. There’s a good reason why olive oil is an exception to the rule: technically, olives are fruits. Other healthy fruit oils most often lumped with vegetable oils include coconut oil and palm oil (tropical oils).

Many studies failed to take into account the difference between oxidized fats and natural, undenatured ones, vegetable oils have become an industry, worth by 2017, some analysts predict, over 90 billion dollars.

Watching your calorie intake? Skip the oils altogether...most of the time...and add Miracle Noodle!

Just one tablespoon of fat, even stable, healthy ones like butter, coconut oil and certain animal fats, contains several calories and grams of fat. If you’re watching your weight, try to limit your intake of healthy oils like olive oil and coconut oil and clarified butter (ghee) to just one shot-glass worth.   

If you’re wondering why, if the Mediterranean Diet prominently features olive oil, one should strictly limit consumption of even healthy oils like olive oil, keep in mind that the healthiest populations studied lived in small villages and actually consumed a maximum of three tablespoons a day, all while walking an average of seven miles per day!

Natural oils have nutritional benefits far worth too much from which to completely abstain but they are not needed in large amounts to derive the benefits. So unless you’re walking as much as Mediterranean villagers, curb your olive oil consumption.

But there is great news for fans of no-calorie and no-carb shirataki Miracle Noodle: the moisture content of Miracle Noodle products is 97% water, so even if you cook your favorite Miracle Noodle recipe with no oil, your dish will never taste dry. You can also cook with very flavorful, low-sugar, low-carb, low-calorie sauces, herbs and spices.

Make sure you don’t overcook the veggies in your Miracle Noodle stir fry, or any meats. The loss of nutrients and blackening may lead to widespread inflammation in the body. And then people will really call you a ‘lard-ass’. But now you know...it’s not because of the lard--it’s from the oxidation of vegetable oils.

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Is Grapeseed Oil Healthy to Cook With?

What oils do you have in your cabinet?

(If you're thinking, "None, all my oils are sitting out on a shelf," you need a quick health refresher: oils should be kept in dark bottles, in dark pantries to avoid heat and sunlight, both of which, cause spoilage.)

Maybe you've got a jar of organic, cold-pressed virgin coconut oil and local olive oil from a farmer's market merchant, and perhaps some ghee, clarified butter to cook with. 

You've been convinced by other Miracle Noodle Healthy Cooking blog posts that vegetable oils are not good to cook with, especially at low-medium or hotter heats because they spoil easily. 

So that's it, just a few healthy cooking oils. But one oil you may be curious about but haven't gotten around to buying, is grapeseed oil. 

Not nearly as popular as olive or coconut oil, grapeseed oil is nonetheless ubiquitous in larger markets and health food stores. 

Grapeseed oil is commonly regarded as a healthy cooking oil because of its high smoke point, roughly at 420 degrees. High smoke point refers to the temperature it requires for the oil to promulgating carcinogenic properties. In other words, smoking isn't healthy, not from cigarettes, and not from oils. 

But there's a Catch-22 with Grapeseed oil. While it may be a positive trait for a cooking oil to have a high smoke point, should we be cooking foods at such high temperatures anyway? The slow-food movement, which most people would agree makes for a happier lifestyle, rather than cooking rushed dishes, only to be devoured in a few bites, tends to cook foods at lower temperatures. 

Cooking foods at high temperatures tends to kill off at least part of the nutrient profile. 

Perhaps for some foods, where there's no escaping high heat to cook a dish, say, a brick-oven pizza, would be better off coated with grapeseed oil? 

But just because an oil has a high smoke point does not mean it's better for you. Take Corn oil for example. It actually has a higher smoke point than the generally-regarded-as-healthier grapeseed oil (450 degrees) but corn oil is most often refined. Stored in clear bottles, corn oil goes rancid easily.

Grapeseed oil also has a high omega-6 to omega-3 ratio. Both of these essential fatty acids (along with 9's, and the lesser-known 7's, etc.) are needed in small amounts, relative to other nutrients we desperately need. But the ratio between the two should be somewhat close together, say 4-1 maximum difference more 6's than 3's. Omega 6's are polyunsaturated fatty acids, and plentiful in olive oil, which you know by know is super heart-healthy. But 6's are also found in processed flour-filled foods like breads. 

Modern, Standard American Diets (SAD) are way out of balance, with a ratio commonly found of 50- or 100:1 if not way more imbalanced. According to a chart on TheConsciousLife.com, grapeseed oil has 676:1 ratio. That's a lot of Omega-6's! Do we need that much when we're already out of whack? It's tough to say; perhaps we need some of the 6's that are beneficial for heart health, but are we throwing ourselves more out of whack?

The easy answer is to get the heart-healthy benefits from grapeseed oil's omega-6 profile, but make sure you're getting enough Omega-3-rich-fatty acids such as wild salmon  If you think you could benefit from a cooking oil with less omega-6's, walnut oil may be a good alternative, as it has a relatively low 6-3 ratio of 5:1. 

Conclusion: in moderation, grapeseed oil can be a healthy cooking oil, but excess omega-6's, especially from processed foods, causes inflammation. It's not clear if grapeseed oil's high omega-6 content will cause harm; moderate consumption most likely offers some health benefit.

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