Disclaimer: this video is produced by Dr. Eric Berg DC and is shared for educational and entertainment purposes only
So let’s talk about the best oil to deep fry your foods in, which means talking about cooking with beef tallow. Well, you should probably use something healthy like vegetable oil, right? Because you can see these healthy vegetables here, and you can see this one is Clover Valley, so it’s probably a beautiful farm of rolling hills and clover where they make this vegetable oil. It’s pure vegetable oil, actually considered heart healthy on the label. There’s just a little bit of saturated fat in here – I think it’s two grams. There’s no sugar, there’s no trans fats, and there’s no gluten, so this is pretty much the best oil you should use to deep fry your food. Today we’re going to talk about seed oils, and then I’m going to show you what I think you should do regarding deep fried oils.
The Truth About “Vegetable” Oils
Seed oils are called polyunsaturated fatty acids. “Poly” meaning many, “unsaturated” meaning a type of oil that’s very, very fragile and unstable. Now the first thing you need to know is that when they talk about vegetable oils, they’re really talking about seed oils. I know they have pictures of vegetables, but this is not where they’re getting the oil from. It comes from corn, soy, canola – things like that.
They’re considered one part of the ultra-processed food category, which uses industrial processing where they’re heating and adding hexane, which is a solvent that’s in gasoline. So they go through this incredible refining process where you end up with this very refined, empty oil. One of the reasons they do this is so it can sit on the shelf for a long period of time. We consume like 25 to 30 percent of our calories with this right here. Yeah, incredible. You start reading the ingredients and it’s in almost everything.
The Dangerous Combination
When you fry foods in these oils, you’re basically frying other ultra-processed ingredients in this ultra-processed ingredient. For example, let’s say you have a donut, which is pure ultra-processed food, and you’re going to deep fry it in the seed oil. You’re going to heat a starch or sugar with a fat – that’s going to create really sticky proteins in our bodies. It’s called glycation, and that sticky protein is going to gunk everything up and make it dysfunctional.
And let’s say, for example, we’re going to deep fry some chicken. We’re not just going to deep fry chicken – we have to coat the chicken with an ultra-processed ingredient, maybe with a starch. So now we’re combining heat with fat with protein that’s again going to create this sticky substance that’s going to kind of clog everything up.
Now when you go to a fast food restaurant, they don’t just use this oil once. They use it like a hundred times, and they’re going to keep reheating it and reheating it and reheating it, day after day, cooking your food. The more they heat it, the more toxic the food is.
Never Meant for Human Consumption
A couple more things I want to bring up about seed oils before I move on. Seed oils were never meant to be consumed. Even like in 1865, when they kind of found a process to develop these seed oils, it wasn’t meant for human consumption.
These polyunsaturated fatty acids are meant to support our membranes of our cells. Now the membranes around our cells – also if you look inside the cell, you have all these little things that do the work. Each thing has a bag around it, which is a membrane, and they allow things to communicate back and forth. But you also have the mitochondria in here, and the mitochondria is really important because nearly every disease relates to dysfunctional mitochondria.
The seed oils can actually get into the membranes and replace the membranes. So if you’re replacing the membranes with this material, it’s not good. Here’s fascinating data: the oxidative stress that occurs with smoking kind of poisons us for about 6 months to a year after quitting. But when we consume the seed oils, it’s going to poison us for about 3 years after just one serving. These oils were never meant for fuel like other fats.
The Devastating Health Effects
The biggest damaging effect from these seed oils is what they do to your mitochondria, and this is why seed oils lead to insulin resistance. Of course, from there you have fatty liver, obesity, heart disease, increased cancer risk, etc.
So anytime you add heat to seed oils – and by the way, they’re already heated when you get them – you create more toxicity. They actually give off a lot of byproducts that create what’s called oxidation. You can look at oxidation like rusting out something, but the seed oils are not being burned up as fuel in the body, so they kind of get lodged and stored in the body and they just gunk up everything.
The Hierarchy of Damage
If we look at the oils that create the most problems, soybean oil is the highest, so it creates a lot of problems. Then we have corn oil, then we have sunflower oil, and then canola. Then we have olive oil, beef tallow, and coconut oil, which are much better options.
Better Options for Cooking
If you wanted to deep fry something, you have options: Avocado Oil, Coconut Oil, Palm Oil, Olive Oil, then you have tallow, and then you have butter or ghee. So you could potentially use any one of those oils.
Now here’s the problem: you probably shouldn’t be deep frying any food at high heat, because no matter what oil you use, high heat is going to create problems. Avocado oil, if you get it really refined, is going to create more damage. If you get it healthier, where actually the color is green and it’s cold-pressed, you probably should just put it on your salad and not use it with heat.
But Avocado Oil does have higher amounts of monounsaturated fats, which is going to oxidize less, just like olive oil, which is high in monounsaturated fats. You get a lot of the protective factors as well. Same with Coconut Oil and Palm Oil, but those may smoke a lot more when heating, so maybe like moderate heat or maybe a stir fry or even pan-fried would be a lot better.
And then you get to tallow – beef fat – because that’s going to be much better for you. You can also use ghee, which is a little bit better than butter if you’re cooking it to higher heat. But with butter, especially with like eggs and things or stir-frying vegetables, you’re not going to heat it to the point where it’s so hot that you’re going to get smoking, and I think you’re going to enjoy the flavor from just using butter.
The Bottom Line
I think pan-frying is going to be much better. If you can do an air fryer, that would be awesome because you don’t have to use any oils. And then of course you have stir-frying – that’s a good one too.
The key takeaway here is that seed oils – despite being marketed as “vegetable oils” and “heart healthy” – are industrial products that were never meant for human consumption. They’re damaging to our cellular function, particularly our mitochondria, and they stay in our bodies causing problems for years.
If you’re going to cook with fats, stick to the traditional options our ancestors used: butter, ghee, tallow, lard, and cold-pressed oils like olive oil for lower-heat cooking. Your body will thank you for making the switch away from these industrial seed oils.
Disclaimer: this video is produced by Dr. Eric Berg DC and is shared for educational and entertainment purposes only
