Thread: NY Times
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Old Wed, Jan-31-18, 08:07
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Calianna Calianna is online now
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Calianna
I wouldn't call those natural vegetable oils, unless they're still in their natural form - as in the whole corn kernel, the whole soybean, the whole safflower, sunflower, peanut, walnut, grape, and pods of canola (brassica/mustard?) seeds.


Hate to be one of those people who quotes myself, but had another thought on the desirability of "natural" vegetable oils.

It's not just that none of those vegetable oils are in their natural form. If those are such natural oils, then why do they need to be industrially refined from their natural state in order to be used in our diet?

How many bushels of corn does it take to make a quart of corn oil? How about canola oil - how many bushels of those teensy-tiny seeds does it take to produce a quart of oil? How many bushels of grapes would you need to pick to finally get enough grape seeds to produce a quart of grape seed oil? (I'm thinking you'd probably feel the need to drink all the wine produced from all those grapes just to deal with how many seeds you'd need to extract from the grapes)

Then let's consider what kinds of very unnatural processing the seeds of grapes, thistles, mustard, etc need to go through, with an assortment of very unnatural chemicals, in order to extract and refine those "natural" oils?

How can anyone call them natural oils after all that?

By comparison, what needs to be done to milk to produce cream, butter or cheese? Mostly, just milk the cow, then if you want cream, skim the cream off the milk. If you want butter, churn the cream you skimmed off the milk. If you want cheese, take the whole milk, allow it to curdle, drain off the whey.

How about beef fats, pork fats, and other meat fats? No refining necessary for any of those either. All you need to do is butcher the animal and cook it. During the cooking process, some of the fats will drip off, the rest will remain to be eaten with the meat. If you want pure fat for cooking, you simply cut off fatty tissue and cook that separately to render the fats. No extraction chemicals or refining necessary.

Somehow this worked to sustain humankind for thousands of years, and those who didn't succumb to infection, contagious disease, or accident might actually die from heart disease when they were very old. And yet it has been decided that diet isn't good enough for us now.

Utterly ridiculous.
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