Your Guide to Fats: Which Vegetable Oils Are Bad?

On the cover of health magazines in the 80s, 90s and even into the 2000s, you would have seen a lot of hullabaloo about how fat was Public Enemy #1 and it was making us all, well…fat. They demonized fat for obesity rates, rise in cardiovascular diseases, and other chronic conditions. The low-fat craze told us how we needed to avoid fat at all costs; then a plethora of reduced fat processed foods hit the store shelves in response to consumer demand.   

Then in 2002 appeared a seminal article written by the science writer, Gary Taubes, “What if it was a big fat lie?” – which started to turn the tide on the evils of fat. Our collective nutrition consciousness has decided that the scientific evidence is not pointing to fat as Health’s Most Wanted. In reality, fat is an essential part of our diet as humans. Fats help fuel our mitochondria, absorb vitamins and minerals, and keep us satiated after a meal. Did you know that our brains are even made up of 60% fat! And oils are some of the best sources of fats that can support our overall health.

However, understanding which oils are healthy and which should be written off of your eating plan is important in creating a balanced diet. In this blog, we’ve reviewed the different types of fat, and which oils to choose or avoid next time you’re at the grocery store or cooking a meal.

 

Types of Fats

There are three main types of fat: saturated fat, unsaturated fat, and trans fats.

Saturated fats mean that the fat molecule—also called a triglyceride—is completely “saturated” with hydrogen molecules. In the picture below, you’ll see how saturated fat is full of H’s (hydrogens); this allows saturated fats to stack on top of each other and build up easily, causing things like plaque buildup in your arteries. Some of you may remember restaurants transitioning from saturated fat (lard, tallow) to all vegetable oils (corn, soybean) in an attempt to switch to a healthier source. How ironic this is – we all know that saturated fats like lard are less processed and much more stable for cooking or frying. The moral of this lesson is that overall, you only need saturated fats in moderation for health. If I could find a restaurant that serves fried chicken cooked in lard again, I would love to go splurge!

Unsaturated fats have one or more double bonds (=) where the molecule is not saturated with hydrogens. This creates a kink in what would otherwise be a continuous, stackable chain. These kinks created by the unsaturated areas keeps the fat from building up as saturated fat does; as such, unsaturated fats are generally a healthier choice than saturated!

Trans fats: Do you remember when Crisco shortening was a main ingredient in many of the recipes then? Trans fats are formed when unsaturated fats are refined in a process called partial hydrogenation; these are fake oils and should be avoided. Consumption of trans fats has been linked to increases in heart attacks, inflammation in the body, and blood cholesterol levels. The city of New York leading the way with the first ban on trans fats in restaurants has demonstrated improved public health and lower rates of hearts attacks and strokes. Way to go Big Apple!  

 

Healthy Oils

1. Olive Oil

Olive oil is high in monounsaturated fat, which has been linked to lowering LDL cholesterol and promoting heart health. Olive oil which hasn’t been processed with chemicals is called virgin olive oil, and the highest grade of virgin olive oil is called extra virgin olive oil.

Christine Palumbo, a registered dietician, explains, “[Extra-virgin olive oil] contains more than 30 different phenolic compounds, a group of phytochemicals that include many with anti-inflammatory and blood vessel-expanding actions.” Olive oil is perhaps the most common choice for healthy oil, and it’s a clear example of fat that will actually help your heart health. Unfortunately, not all olive oil is actually olive oil – there are many blends and fakes out there. When the world’s production of olive oil does NOT match what is being sold as ‘olive oil’, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion. We will highlight what to look for in olive oil in a later blog.

2. Avocado Oil

Avocado oil is also teeming with monounsaturated fats and all the health benefits that come with them. This oil is especially unique because it retains its nutritional content at high and low temperatures; others, like olive oil, have a low smoke point, so the oil begins to break down sooner while cooking. Avocado oil is a great, neutral tasting option with high health benefits. I tend to use avocado oil for stir-frying as it’s more heat stable than olive oil. 

3. Sesame Oil

Sesame oil has naturally occurring polyunsaturated fats, which are also helpful for heart health! Research has reported that sesame oil has anti-inflammatory effects while also providing antioxidant support. Together, these properties help fight heart disease and plaque buildup in the arteries. Sesame oil has been a staple in Asian cooking for centuries, and is a heart-healthy addition to your own pantry. Keep in mind that sesame oil should only be used as a topping or a seasoning oil as it’s not heat stable for long-term cooking or frying.

 

Oils to Eat In Moderation or Avoid

Although we need fat in our diet for optimal health, there are some oils that we should only consume in moderation or avoid like the plague.  

1. Coconut Oil – Moderation

Coconut oil’s reputation has been up and down in recent years: some dieticians used to claim it was the best fat for your health because of its medium-chain-triglycerides, while others staunchly recommend against it for its high saturated fat content.

The research on coconut oil is mixed, with some studies pointing to it raising your HDL cholesterol (the good stuff), while other research shows that coconut oil might raise your LDL cholesterol (the artery-clogging bad stuff).

Because of its mixed reviews and high saturated fat content, the Cleveland Clinic and many others recommend you use coconut oil in moderation. I like coconut oil when making popcorn but due to the strong flavor, it’s usually reserved for a snack or a dessert dish.

2. Palm Oil – Moderation

Check the label of any jar of peanut butter and you’ll likely find palm oil listed; it’s a popular ingredient in many processed foods. With roughly a half and half makeup of saturated and unsaturated fats, palm oil isn’t as bad as some other options, as long as you’re not eating a lot of it. To me, the bigger issue is that extracting palm oil has been shown to have negative effects on the environment; the World Wildlife Fund reports that it increases deforestation and unethical working conditions. Opt for all natural peanut butter and avoid palm oil next time you’re at the grocery store. Read labels carefully because palm oil is hidden in a lot of snacks and otherwise healthy foods.

3. Vegetable Oils – Avoid

Vegetable oils include corn oil, sunflower oil, soy oil, safflower oil, grapeseed oil, cottonseed oil, rice bran oil, and rapeseed (Canola) oil.

New York Times best selling author and family physician Cate Shanahan, MD, notes how the high level of refinement needed for these oils in combination with their high content of polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) makes them a poor choice. The refinement process makes the PUFAs more unstable, less nutrient dense, and more likely to lead to inflammation in the body.

Shanahan recommends opting for oils that are less refined and closer to whole foods, whether that might be a cold-pressed olive oil or avocado oil as mentioned earlier.

I love how fats give me energy throughout the day without needing to raid the fridge every several hours. It also gives me mental clarity. It’s necessary to have fat in your diet, and when you opt for healthy oils like olive, avocado, and sesame oil, your body and brain will thank you.  It may be time to clean out your cupboard and re-prioritize your vegetable oil shelf!

Are You Addicted to Your Emotions

Have you felt stuck in self-sabotaging patterns? Like you’re constantly trying to break out of old habits, but for some reason, you can’t quite make new choices stick?

If that’s you, I have good news: your biology may be more to blame than your willpower.

When the concepts of habit change and self-sabotage arise, people normally point directly to willpower and discipline; those are the magic keys that you simply need in order to stop smoking, eat more vegetables, or get your 10,000 steps in each day.

Though willpower and discipline are parts of habit change, the fixation on them overlooks a key need for your body and brain: safety.

Your body and brain evolved to seek out relationships and environments which feel familiar to relationships and environments you’ve experienced in the past. These provide a sense of “predictability” – if you’re around people and in places where you can feel like you “know” what will come next, life feels more predictable.

With a perceived sense of predictability, your brain and body get what they’re really after: safety. Because if you can “predict” what comes next, you can more adequately prepare for it, and you find a perceived sense of safety and control.

This makes sense when we think about evolution; with more predictable environments and relationships, it was easier to survive and create the next generation. In today’s world, however, the brain and body’s grasping need for predictability can be more limiting than helpful.

Let’s take an example: Kayla is looking for a healthy, peaceful relationship. She’s eager for something that’s mature, loving and reciprocal. Growing up, however, Kayla always witnessed chaos and drama in her parents’ relationship, and in adulthood, she found herself in similar, toxic partnerships. And then Kayla meets Craig. He’s sweet, respectful, and sends her flowers after their second date. At first, it feels heavenly: Kayla is so excited to finally be in a healthy, respectful relationship. After a few weeks, however, Kayla begins to feel… bored. Almost apathetic towards Craig. It doesn’t quite make sense to her, though, because when she’s actually with Craig, they have great conversations, she’s laughing out loud, and she’s anything but bored. She gets a feeling that she’s sabotaging this relationship, but she can’t understand why or what she can do about it.

When we think about the brain and the body’s skewed sense of safety, here’s what is often happening in situations like this:

Kayla feels safe in relationships that harbor chaos and drama because that’s what’s “predictable” for her. Those relationships feel familiar, which creates a sense of safety for her brain and body (even if emotionally she feels miserable; the misery is “safe” for her brain).

When she enters the new, healthy relationship with Craig, her brain and body go on high alert because it’s not “predictable.” It’s cued as unsafe, and through a convoluted process called emotional addiction, her brain and body work together to sabotage the new relationship with feelings of boredom.

The sudden disinterest in a long-term goal is just one way that the brain and body can sabotage something new. Other common methods include procrastination, replaying old painful memories, avoidance, seeking out people or habits that are familiar to old patterns, and plain old giving up.

This brain-body-fueled self-sabotage can happen in the macros of our life – our relationships, jobs, and friendships – as well as the micros – our daily schedules, the foods we eat, and more. Your brain’s overarching goal is to keep you safe, and it feels it can most successfully do that by creating a predictable life full of the same patterns, regardless of how those patterns make you feel emotionally.

What can Kayla then do to overcome this sudden disinterest in her goal of being in a healthy relationship?

The first step, naturally, is by creating an awareness of her body and brain’s need for safety. She can begin noticing how the pattern of chaotic relationships has arisen throughout her life, and how it’s showing up with Craig now. With this awareness, she can actively choose new patterns and recognize the old, helping her move over the hump of self-sabotage and into a place where healthy relationships feel safe for her body and brain.

The second possibility comes from a book called Evolve Your Brain by Joe Dispenza. In it, Dispenza outlines the body and brain’s need for predictability as we’ve recounted here, and he posits that we can provide our bodies and brains with the safety they need through a process called “mental rehearsal.”

Mental rehearsal has been used by musicians, professional athletes, and public speakers to improve their performance and reach their goals. It’s the simple process of visualizing yourself practicing a new skill in your mind. Research has shown that mental rehearsal can improve performance in a music performance, healthcare delivery, and sports.

Dispenza takes this a step further and outlines how mental rehearsal can help people create a sense of safety for their bodies and brains in new habits, relationships, and environments. When you visualize yourself in healthy relationships, successfully reaching your goals, and taking on new habits, you begin to give your brain a sense of “predictability” for what that experience will feel like, thereby making it “safe” (Evolve Your Brain, Ch 11).

What’s especially important here is tuning into the emotions of those visualizations – when you imagine yourself reaching your goals, how do you feel? When Kayla uses her imagination to visualize herself in a healthy, reciprocal relationship, what emotions does that bring up? Pride, gratitude, joy, contentment are common answers.

As these emotions become more familiar, the new habits, relationships, and environments triggering these emotions become more predictable and safe; as a result, the brain and body have less of a need to self-sabotage the newness.

If your goals for a healthy lifestyle for disease prevention keep going off track, take the time to create awareness of the old habits and the rationale behind them. This analysis will help you ‘safely’ form new habits. And each day, imagine yourself reaching your goals and how that makes you feel. Whether it is weight loss, better nutrition, positive mental outlook or disease management, these mental rehearsals will teach your brain that these habits are ‘predictable’ and ‘safe’.

In my next blog, we’ll dive even deeper into how the body and brain work together to enact self-sabotage.

I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls – Decoding the Importance of Dreams

When I think about dreams and dreaming, my mind takes me to the hypnotic voice of the diva, Joan Sutherland, singing the aria “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” from The Bohemian Girl Opera. Whether it’s opera, Les Mis (“I Dreamed a Dream”) or Aerosmith (“Dream On”), dreams have so much meaning in our lives – especially the ones that happen as we slumber.

Dreams can be bizarre, scary, exhilarating and seemingly nonsensical all at the same time. They’re one of the most unique experiences of consciousness (rather, unconsciousness), and research is exploring the potential benefits of REM sleep—the sleep stage we’re in when we dream—and of understanding our dreams. Today, we’re taking a deep dive into both, with tangible tips on how you can start reflecting on your dreams for personal growth and self-understanding.

What are the different sleep stages?

For starters, you should know the general sleep stages we move through while we’re asleep. They don’t always occur consecutively, and we can float back and forth between various phases. They are listed below:

Stage 0 – Awake: This stage refers to the time in bed preparing for sleep. It can also exist as the brief moments you may lightly awaken during the night or a nap.

Stage 1 & 2 – Light Sleep: Typically, we start our sleep cycle in light sleep mode. Your muscles relax, heart rate slows, and body temperature decreases. Your body is preparing to move into deeper sleep stages or to awaken.

Stage 3 & 4 – Deep Sleep: This phase is where healing and repair happens. Your body focuses its energy on releasing various hormones, boosting blood flow, and repairing damaged cells. Your brain activity is slow and focused on pruning unnecessary information and data from the day.

Stage R – REM Sleep: In REM, your body takes on a unique set of characteristics. You may have dreams that are fantastical and vivid. Your body moves into atonia, where the muscles are essentially switched off (this keeps you from acting out your dreams).

Why is REM Sleep important?

REM Sleep is an especially important phase for a variety of reasons. A recent article in Sleepline outlines that getting adequate REM sleep has been shown to:

  • Increase ability to read others’ emotions
  • Heighten ability to manage stress
  • Improve memory
  • Boost mood
  • Bolster creativity and problem solving skills

In addition to the benefits of getting enough REM sleep, having a deficit of REM sleep has been shown to correlate with a decreased ability to cope with negative emotions, weight gain, more migraines, increased anxiety, and declining memory.

Lastly, in REM sleep we dream, and many psychologists believe reflecting on these visions in our REM sleep can provide genuine psychological value and benefit.

Why should I care about my dreams?

Dreams are often a marker of what’s troubling you most intensely right now. Your concerns from the past day or two days are likely to arise in your dreams, a phenomena known as the day-residue effect. Similarly, prominent issues can arise in dreams about 5-7 days after the issue occurs; this is called the dream-lag effect. In either case, your dreams are often signaling to you the parts of life most stressful and needing the most reflection or attention right now.

Many also believe that dreams are a way to consolidate memory and new information. As we already reviewed, adequate sleep, especially REM sleep, is important to boosting memory. Some theorize this memory boosting effect is actually due to dreams. A recent Harvard study has shown new learnings are more easily recalled if those learnings were incorporated into a dream, making our dreams a way that the mind seeks to embed important information.

Combining these two pieces, dream expert and psychologist Dr. Sue Llewellyn notes that our ability to spot patterns increases after dreaming. Dreams can feel extremely bizarre and random, but when we begin to notice how the bizarreness of our dreams is strung together with similar emotions, characters, or themes, it can help our ability to notice hard-to-spot patterns in our waking lives. Some even see this as the subconscious mind attempting to relay messages or warnings about what to give more attention to in the waking state (No – we’re not in The Twilight Zone!)

How can I record my dreams?

Psychologist Dr. Jason Holland recommends recording information about your dreams with a dream diary or journal if you’re curious about really getting to the heart of what your dreams mean, and what they may be trying to tell you.

Not only can recording your dreams provide you with insight on your daily highs and lows – it can also show you general patterns in what’s been affecting you.

Recording your dreams can be very simple. It essentially consists of writing down the main points, characters, and emotions of your dreams. When considering the meaning of these different aspects, focus on the significance they hold to you based on your own lived experiences, rather than meanings you might read on various dream dictionaries online.

You can record your dreams in:

  • A journal or notepad
  • The notes app on your phone
  • A voice memos app (Apple phones have this built in; it’s a great substitute if you don’t like writing)
  • A number of iPhone and Android apps: Dream Journal & Lucid Tool and Dreams are two great, free options (note: both include optional in-app purchases)

I started journaling my dreams upon waking and was surprised to learn of the things I dreamt about: giant white snake trying to eat a goldfish, someone looking for their cut-off toe, getting on a plane made of paper, etc. I haven’t figured out what all this means yet but it sure makes great conversation!

Start recording your dreams and see what insights it brings you! When you string together the seemingly nonsensical, you just might find the key to the questions keeping you stuck and the patterns you’re ready to break out of.

To Integrate Virtual Care, Start By Redefining The ‘Visit’

As a result of the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve already laid the foundation of a new way of operating and blending both in-person and virtual care. Regulators and policy makers can facilitate this by fostering policies for asynchronous—and not “building-bound”—billing layers on top of the current fee-for-service infrastructure.

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