Why I Avoid Buying Things With Hydrogenated Oils

Today’s post will be my explanation of why our family avoids partially  hydrogenated and hydrogenated oils as pointed out in my post about the 5 ingredients we avoid.

Let me just start by saying that oils are not necessarily bad for you (at least some oils). However, when man…or woman, I’m not trying to discriminate here ;) …comes in and changes the natural state of that oil by significantly increasing the temperature of that oil, it is now in a state that is unhealthy for human consumption.

The website, Natural News, has a wonderful article about hydrogenated oils. Here is an excerpt of it that will explain better than I ever could how the state of the oils are changed and what they do in our body:

“They take these naturally healthy oils such as palm, kernel, soybean, corn oil or coconut oil and they heat it anywhere from five hundred to one thousand degrees under several atmospheres of pressure.  They then inject a catalyst into the oil for several hours. The catalyst is typically a metal such a nickel, platinum or even aluminum. As this bubbles up into the oil the molecular structure changes and increases in density and rearranges it’s molecules so that instead of a liquid at room
temperature we now have either semi-solid or solid oil. This creates either partially hydrogenated or fully hydrogenated oils.

The molecules in this new product are now closer to cellulose or plastic than to oil. In fact hydrogenated oil is only one molecule away from being plastic. When you eat anything containing this material, just as the oil is now thicker and more viscous (dense), so too does your blood become thicker and more viscous right along with it. The heart now has to work so much harder to pump blood throughout the system. This is one of the major ways that consuming hydrogenated oils contributes to high blood pressure.

As you can imagine, this thicker blood with this gummy substance flowing with it can easily lodge in the arteries and build up the arterial plaque.  It doesn’t take anywhere near as much time as you may think for this to occur. Some studies have shown that negative health effects of eating processed foods occurs within only minutes of consuming such foods.”

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like a good thing…

Bottom line… we shouldn’t be eating foods with this stuff in it.

Manufacturers put it in our foods because it makes it so that it can stay on the shelf longer and that increases their profits.

This is just a taste of why I don’t like to have this in my family’s diet.  If you would like to read a very detailed article on hydrogenated oils I highly recommend you read the full article quoted above. You can find it here.

Tune in tomorrow for the next ingredient on my list!

Have a great day!