Lard hurts blood vessels？ Vegetable oil is less nutritious？ Which oil is the healthiest？ What you really want to eat less is these five oils!

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Eating and cooking can’t be separated from cooking oil. Some people say that eating lard is good. In the past, the older generation ate lard every day and had few cardiovascular diseases. Some people say that vegetable oil is healthier and suitable for daily consumption. Which oil is the healthiest? Which oil should I eat less?

Is it good to eat lard often?

Many people think that "lard has good nutrition. In the past, people often ate animal oil because of lack of material, and fewer people suffered from heart disease and cardiovascular disease, so eating animal oil is more conducive to health".

In fact, this idea is wrong. Xie Xinhui, the chief physician of Jixi Chicken Mine Hospital in Heilongjiang Province, introduced in the People’s Daily Health Issue in 2021 that the main component of animal oil such as lard is fat, and relatively speaking, there are more saturated fats, which is also the reason why animal oil is criticized as unhealthy. Because the saturated fat content is too high, it may lead to abnormal lipid metabolism, cause people’s obesity and induce cardiovascular problems. ①

Lard advertisement of an e-commerce platform

Is vegetable oil suitable for daily consumption?

Some people think that people eat more vegetable oil now, but more people suffer from heart disease and cardiovascular disease. Is vegetable oil not suitable for daily consumption?

Dr. Xie Xinhui said that cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases are not the result of one risk factor, but a combination of multiple risk factors, such as our common bad living habits such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hyperglycemia, high-salt diet, smoking, excessive drinking and genetic factors. ①

Zhi Jiehua, deputy chief physician of the Department of Gastroenterology, the First People’s Hospital of Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province, introduced in the People’s Daily Health in 2022 that vegetable oil is indeed better as a common oil from some components in vegetable oil and animal oil, mainly because vegetable oil contains monounsaturated fatty acids, while animal oil contains mostly polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Although the two substances are saturated fatty acids, they are different in nature. One is beneficial to the cardiovascular system, and the other is easy to damage the cardiovascular system. In this way, it is not difficult to see that eating vegetable oil often is obviously more beneficial to health. ②

Health Times Chart of Vegetable Oils on Supermarket Shelves

What you really want to eat less is these five oils!

Compared with lard and vegetable oil, the following five oils really suggest that you eat less.

1. Palm oil

Palm oil is a natural oil, which comes from the tropical plant oil palm. Maybe it doesn’t appear directly in your kitchen like soybean oil and rapeseed oil, but if you often eat instant noodles, puffed food, pastry and other processed foods, it is almost inevitable to consume palm oil.

In 2021, Nature, a top academic journal, published a study closely related to daily edible oil. Scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology in Barcelona, Spain, have shown through animal experiments that foods rich in palm oil will promote the high metastasis of cancer. ③

2. Re-frying oil

Many families in life have this habit. It’s a pity to throw away the oil after frying food, and they will continue to fry things and stir fry. However, repeatedly fried oil is easy to produce carcinogens, such as trans fatty acids, benzopyrene, acrylamide, heterocyclic amines, etc., which will bring health hazards if eaten for a long time.

"No matter what cooking method is used, (oil) is used once. I hope everyone must use the latest oil when using it. " Yu Kang, director of the Clinical Nutrition Department of Peking Union Medical College Hospital, said in a CCTV program in 2023 that from a nutritional point of view, I hope that everyone can eat as little fried cooking food as possible. Repeated use of taboo oil will produce a large amount of peroxide, which is harmful to our health in theory and can constitute a risk factor that directly attacks the cardiovascular system. ④

3. Self-extracting oil

Some families prefer to eat self-squeezed oil, thinking that self-squeezed oil is more mellow and the cooked food is more fragrant and safer. But this is not the case. Those small oil mills don’t clean their machines all the year round, so they will leave some grease on them. Over time, these residual oils will deteriorate, which may pollute the newly squeezed oil when using this oil press to squeeze oil. At the same time, the pressed oil materials may be moldy, and aflatoxin may also be brought into the oil squeezed with moldy peanuts, corn, etc., which may increase the risk of liver disease or liver cancer.

However, some small workshops’ presses or household oil presses are simple in process, lacking the process of removing harmful substances, and cannot refine raw materials.

4. Hydrogenated vegetable oil

Hydrogenated vegetable oil, a kind of artificial oil, is catalyzed by adding hydrogen to ordinary vegetable oil at a certain temperature and pressure, including well-known creamer, margarine, cocoa butter substitute and so on. The harm of hydrogenated vegetable oil is mainly that the trans fat content is relatively high, which is not good for cardiovascular health. Even some countries have not allowed the application of hydrogenated vegetable oil in food processing.

5. Long-term unsealed oil

Edible oil also has a shelf life. Long-term unsealed edible oil will oxidize with air, which will accelerate the deterioration of oil. Therefore, cover the oil every time you use it, and it is recommended that you eat it within 3 months after opening the edible oil. It is also harmful to your health to ingest the deteriorated edible oil.

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