What’s the deal with flax oil? And why exactly is a deep fried seafood basket bad for my body when it seems so good to my mouth? Also, what’s the problem with frying something at high heat in an oil labeled only “for medium heat?”

I have been wondering why some oils are good for you while others are bad so much that I ordered a book by a biochemist named Udo Erasmus called “Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill.” It sounds dry, doesn’t it? Indeed it must not sound very interesting to most people since you can buy a used copy for 5 bucks when the cover price is $23. The copy I bought had a sticker on it that said “50¢” and it doesn’t look like a well-used copy.

That’s kind of astounding when you consider how incredibly important fats are for good health. They should comprise about 30% of your whole diet (though not the 40% Americans are averaging.) If there were an owner’s manual for your unique body, Fats would be the subject of one of the first chapters.

As Erasmus notes, deaths from Cardiovascular disease accounted for only 15% of all deaths in 1900. That rose to 44% in 1990, an increase of almost 300% in just 90 years. In 1900, cancer killed only 3% of the population and that rose to 23% in 1990, an increase of nearly 800% in 90 years! Wow! It’s true that by and large we are living longer, we have a much lower infant mortality rate than in 1900 (which increases our average lifespan statistics) but we are dying of different things now. Not typhus and TB but cardiovascular disease and cancer.

These are the diseases of affluent nations that can, in large part, be attributed to our eating habits and lifestyles. “Refined” people eat “refined” food, right? It looks like peasant food has always been healthier. Apparently in old Europe, each town had an oil press and vendors would go door to door delivering flax oil, much like milk. And like milk, it had to be used right away before it went rancid in the days before refrigeration. Well no wonder there was a market for more “stable” oils. Oils that don’t seem to EVER go rancid because because all their vitamins, minerals, lecithin and phytosterols have been removed and and the oil has been “deoderized” to conceal any rancid smell that might occur. As you can imagine, these oils seem to have been better for business than for our bodies.

Oils are apparently damaged by heat and by light. This damage varies with how MUCH heat and what kind of oil. When a volitile oil like flax oil oxidizes, it goes rancid just by being exposed to air and then tastes gross. When an corn or soybean or canola oil is refined, it goes through multiple high-heat stages, including solvent-extraction (just like it sounds, imagine soybeans soaking in gasoline) and deoderization which takes place at 464˚F - 518˚F. Transfatty acids begin to form at 320˚F and so small amounts of them occur in all refined oils.

If the refined oils described above then go through another high-heat process called hydrogenation, then LOTS of transfats are formed. We’ve heard they are bad, maybe we’ve even heard that the cities of New York and San Francisco have both banned restaurants from using them. But beyond that…hey. If someone offered me a “transfat” popsicle, I’d probably turn it down, but am I willing to sleuth out every scrap of it in my diet? Manufacturers make it difficult to find sometimes. One acquaintance showed me a cookie wrapped in a cellophane packet that read “NO TRANS FATS” on the front label, but showed “partially hydrogenated soybean oil” as one of the ingredients. “So which is it?” she wanted to know.

There’s a provision in the labeling laws that allows manufacturers to “round down” to zero if the content of transfats is .5 grams per serving or less. When do we ever get to round DOWN with the government? Not at Tax Time, that’s for sure. The manufacturers, you may have noticed, also tend to break down the serving sizes on labels to what people used to eat in 1950, or something. That way, this one cookie was actually TWO servings (because you’d stop at eating half of it and put it back into your lunchbox) and thus had “NO transfat” while actually providing up to a gram of solid transfat.

Alberto Ascherio was a co-author of an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1999 that concluded that “Coronary heart disease kills 500,000 Americans each year. According to our estimations, if trans fats were replaced by unsaturated vegetable oils, we would expect to see at least 30,000 fewer persons die prematurely from Coronary Heart Disease each year.” Up to a third of all our edible oils are consumed in the form of hydrogenated margarines and shortenings. Luckily that’s decreasing now that manufacturers have to label for transfat content as of 2006.

Transfats don’t just push all your blood lipid levels in the wrong direction (LDLs, cholesterol and triglycerides go up while HDLs go down) they also stoke inflammation and interfere in the metabolization of essential fatty acids.

“Essential” fatty acids (EFAs) are called essential because your body can’t make them and therefore has to get them from food. These are Omega 3s and Omega 6s. (There’s also an Omega 9, but your body can make that one.) Michael Pollan does a great job of illuminating why the Omega 3 and 6 fats have become such a big issue in an article called “Unhappy Meals.” In short, we eat much more Omega 6s originating from seeds (soybean, corn, wheat) and hardly any Omega 3s originating from leafy plants, and our ratio is now unhealthfully skewed. Even our cows now eat grain (Omega 6) instead of grass (Omega 3.)

He says,

“….without realizing what we were doing, we significantly altered the ratio of these two essential fats in our diets and bodies, with the result that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in the typical American today stands at more than 10 to 1; before the widespread introduction of seed oils at the turn of the last century, it was closer to 1 to 1.”

This imbalanced ratio may have important consequences that will be revealed by research in the coming years. Since Omega 3 has an anti-inflammatory action in the body, its lack can result in a body’s inability to fight infection and extinguish inflammation, with many implications including skin problems, learning disabilities, slow wound healing, even cardiovascular disease and diabetes. If pro-inflammatory transfats are present during an Omega 3 deficiency, the inflammation problem can really spiral. If I have any health problems, then yes, I’d want to sleuth out every scrap of transfats in my diet as well as include more Omega 3 foods in my diet.

Interestingly, the best way to redress this Omega 3 deficiency is flaxseed oil– it’s another seed, but it’s the highest botanical source of Omega 3 around. That said, it has a form of Omega 3 called “ALA” which needs to be converted by the body into EPA and DHA to be used by our cells. Some people are better than others at this metabolic conversion, so if you want the ready-made form, you have to get it from fish.

Flaxseed oil DOES go rancid quickly, so it has to be kept in a lightproof bottle in the fridge. You can’t cook with it without ruining its benefits so you put it on your cooked food or in smoothies or something. As for fish oil, if don’t like fish or you are concerned with the contaminants in fish, you can find purified fish oil supplements. (Handy tip– if they give you fishy burps, just keep them in the freezer and have them before bed.)

Omega 3s should not be taken indefinitely, however. The imbalanced ratio can be redressed with Omega 3 supplementation and dietary changes within 18 months, says Udo Erasmus. Following that, you can veer into Omega 6 deficiency. Then you just have to balance your intake of Omega 3 oils with unrefined sources of Omega 6 oils like sunflower and sesame oils.

What does this mean for the deep-fried seafood baskets? Well, sustained high heat like in the deep fryer vats creates not just transfats as a by product (assuming it’s not a hydrogenated deep frying oil to begin with) but also free radicals and polymers. That’s right. Car wax in your french fries. It’s gross. Sometimes I’m able to put that out of my mind long enough to enjoy some fries, but it’s getting harder.

There’s a special relationship between plastic and oil. Plastic is petroleum based and so a bottle “talks” to the oil it contains. So knowing that real, whole oil should be protected from light and heat, the highly refined, solvent-extracted, bleached, deoderized clear plastic bottles of Canola oil (a genetically modified version of rapeseed oil) are genuinely starting to freak me out when I see them in use. That is not a helpful product to have in your house, much less in your body.

The best oil to use on a daily basis is Extra Virgin Olive Oil, especially if it’s kept cool and away from light, and not fried at high temperatures. If you want to be adventurous, try using coconut oil or palm oil, which are both good with heat. Walnut is another good one to experiment with. It’s a gentle flavor, another good source of Omega 3 oil and is great in salad dressings.

OK, I will own up to being a food geek but in finding Udo Erasmus’s book interesting– even fascinating– I actually don’t think it’s as esoteric or boring as its Amazon reseller price suggests. For anyone who is struggling with health issues, eating more whole grains and vegetables is still a main component, but I would add to that learning about fats and oils. It’s a huge and undervalued key to healing.

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