I think only Australians of a certain age will understand the title of this week’s blog! So sorry about that to all you others…
We had a family dinner last night and, as seems to be the case for all dinner parties, the talk turned to health and saturated fat. And, as usual, my views that saturated fat is good for you always take people by surprise! This time it was brother who I was having the discussion with. I told him I would give him my summary on fats and oils to read for himself. I’m also going to give him the book by Dr Kendrick, ‘The Great Cholesterol Con’ to read. I’ve added the articles here as new pages:
Taking the fear out of eating fats
The chemistry of fats – part 1 , The chemistry of fats – part 2
In summary, the good fats are the most natural and least processed oils such as:
- Butter
- Beef and lamb tallow
- Lard
- Chicken, goose and duck fat
- Coconut, palm and sesame oils
- Cold pressed olive oil
- Cold pressed flax oil
- Marine oils
The following ‘new’ fats can cause health problems, such as cancer, heart disease, immune system dysfunction, sterility, learning disabilities, growth problems and osteoporosis:
- All hydrogenated oils
- Soy, corn and safflower oils
- Cottonseed oil
- Canola oil
- All polyunsaturated fats heated to very high temperatures in processing and frying
I’ve also just realised that I’m not sure if he knows that I got dad to stop taking statins. So it would be another good reason for him to read that book.
On that note about dad, I asked him yesterday how he was feeling now that he’d been totally off statins for 2 weeks. He replied that although there were a number of personal events still going on which used to really distress him, he was actually not getting overly stressed anymore. So that’s a good start.
The other good recent illustration was also last night at dinner – a heated discussion started between my father (a retired engineer), me (an ex-engineer) and my nephew (who’s studying engineering at University) regarding the reliance of engineering on computers these days. It became very animated, particularly between dad and my nephew who have totally differing views. In the past we would have expected dad to get very annoyed and aggressively angry, but not this time! It was a very civilised debate…
From these 2 examples it appears that dad is getting better at logical thinking again plus his irritability levels are decreasing – all good news… I suppose I need to ask mum if she sees any changes!
I’m looking forward to watching the next 2 weeks.