At the supermarket you can buy many different types of oil: olive oil, canola oil, coconut oil, sesame oil, flax seeds oil, peanut oil.. some of them are healthier than others but oil is always a highly refined food, and it is not really good for your health.
Here are 6 reasons why you should reduce or eliminate oils from your diet:
1) Calories – oil has 120kcal and 14g of fat per each tablespoon -> the same of 20g of nuts or seeds, which are much richer in protein and minerals. Eliminating or reducing oil to a tablespoon per day you will easily lose weight, because oil doesn’t satiates you but it has a lot of calories!
2) Omega-3 / omega / 6 ratio – oils often contain a lot of omega-6 but little omega-3 fatty acids. In our diet we tend to not getting enough omega-3, whose ratio with omega-6 fatty acids should be about 1: 3.
3) Rancidity – oils are very susceptible to oxidation and is difficult to understand if they are rancid or not. The consumption of rancid products causes oxidation in your body, which could lead to the development of disease.
4) Oil is a refined product – is pure a fat without all the fiber and the nutrients of the whole food, it doesn’t even really fill your gut!
5) Toxicity – at high temperatures fatty acids may release harmful substances, including carcinogens such as acroelin.
6) Hyperglicemia and resistance to insulin – the combination of fat with carbohydrates (for example the oil you add to the sauce for your pasta or in the salad you eat as a side dish) creates insulin resistance: fat interacts with the sugar molecules so that much more insulin is needed to carry them to the cells. The more fat molecules there are in your bloodstream the more insuline our pancreas is forced to produce, but insulin is an inflammatory hormone if in excess: in the long run this can lead to cronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and hiperglicemia.
Cooking without oil is not difficult, just add to your pan a tablespoon of water and keep an eye on it so that it doesn’t get burned. Also making fat-free risotto is possible (recipe here). On my blog Easy Vegan there are a lot of oil-free recipes!
Get your healthy fats from avocado, nuts and seeds instead of oil and, if you really need oil for a particular recipe, use only a good quality, cold-pressed, olive oil or sesame oil (also for desserts!)
The link for the oil-free risotto is broken. Can you post it again?
Thank you.