Your Cooking Oil - Healthy vs Unhealth.A truth that may surprise you!

Today, I wanted to give you my take on a confusing subject to most people:

...why some oils and fats you may use in cooking, baking, or other food use are actually harmful to your body, and why some are healthful.

Here's the deal...

A lot of people seem to think that anything labeled as "vegetable oil" is good for you. NOT A SHOT!

Most of what is labeled as "vegetable oil" is simply heavily refined soybean oil (processed under high heat, pressure, and industrial solvents, such as hexane)... sometimes perhaps it may also be heavily refined cottonseed, safflower, corn, grapeseed, or other oils too.

In most instances, almost all of these processed oils are NOT HEALTHY for you.  I'll explain why below...

If you buy processed food or deep fried food, you can usually be certain that these unhealthy oils are used to prepare your foods (or worse, it may use hydrogenated versions of these oils... aka - trans fats). 

You may have even bought some of these oils for your own cooking or baking at home.

The problem with soybean oil, cottonseed oil, corn oil, grapeseed oil, safflower oil, and other similar oils is that they are mostly composed of polyunsaturated fats (the most highly reactive type of fat) which leaves them prone to oxidation and free radical production when exposed to heat and light. 

Processed polyunsaturated oils are the most inflammatory inside our bodies because of their high reactivity to heat and light. This inflammation is what causes many of our internal problems such as heart disease, diabetes, and other degenerative diseases.

Note: It's ok if a polyunsaturated fat source isn't processed such as in whole foods like various nuts and seeds... In that case it's usually not inflammatory (as long as it's not been exposed to high heat), and is a great source of healthy polyunsaturated fats for you. By the way, omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids are both polyunsaturates, and a healthy balance of approx 1:1 to 3:1 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 is considered healthiest. Your best bet is to choose raw nuts and seeds whenever possible to avoid the oxidation of polyunsaturated fats that can occur during roasting of nuts and seeds.  Keep in mind though that some nuts are mostly monounsaturated, (for example, macadamias), so the issue of roasted vs raw nuts is less of an issue for highly monounsaturated nuts.

However, all of the vegetable oils listed above are generally heavily refined during processing, so that makes them already inflammatory before you even cook with them (which does even more damage).

Here's the actual order of stability of a type of fat under heat and light (from least stable to most stable):

1. polyunsaturated
2. monounsaturated
3. saturated

Here's something that mainstream health professionals will never tell you...

Saturated fats are actually the healthiest oils to cook with!

Why?  Because they are much more stable and less inflammatory than polyunsaturated oils.

This is why tropical oils such as palm and coconut oils (and even animal fats such as butter) are best for cooking... they have very little polyunsaturates and are mostly composed of natural saturated fats which are the least reactive to heat/light and therefore the least inflammatory in your body from cooking use. 

That's also why natural butter (NOT margarine) is one of the best fats for cooking. This all goes directly against what you hear in mainstream health talk... because most health professionals don't truly understand the biochemistry of fats, and falsely believe that saturated fats are bad for you... when in fact, they are actually neutral in most instances... and saturated fats from tropical oils are actually good for you as they contain mostly medium chain triglycerides (MCTs) which are lacking in most people's diets.

In fact, lauric acid is one of the abundant MCTs in tropical oils and is known to strengthen the immune system.  Lauric acid is even being studied currently in medical studies for controlling contagious diseases.

To summarize... your best cooking or baking fats are generally butter or tropical oils such as palm or coconut oil.  Olive oil (extra virgin preferably) is ok for lower cooking temps as it's mostly monounsaturated, so moderately stable.  The mostly polyunsaturated oils such as soybean, grapeseed, cottonseed, safflower, etc, are the least healthy for cooking or baking.

My choices for top healthy cooking oils that I use:

• Virgin Coconut Oil
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil (only for low temp cooking)
• Real Butter (grass fed if possible) 

Of course, with all of that said... we should keep in mind that trying minimize our cooking with oils can help to reduce overall calories. Cooking with oils in moderation is ok and can actually help satisfy your appetite more, but be careful not to overdo it as the calories can add up fast.

Also, please don't be fooled by deceptive marketing claiming that canola oil is healthy -- it's NOT! If you enjoyed this article, feel free to share this with your friends or family on face book, twitter, email, etc.

The Salad dressing you must never eat, replace with my alternative a super healthy recipe

If you want to eat truly healthy, support your fat loss goals, and sidestep some of the horrible additives in processed food, one thing you should eliminate is typical store-bought salad dressing.

I personally NEVER buy pre-made salad dressings from the store anymore, and here's why:

1. Almost all store-bought salad dressings contain fairly large amounts of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Unless you're in a health food store, it's almost impossible to find a salad dressing that doesn't contain large amounts of HFCS.

2. Almost all store-bought salad dressings contain heavily refined soybean oil and/or refined canola oil... both of which are VERY unhealthy. Yes, that's correct, canola oil IS unhealthy, despite the marketing propaganda you've been fed claiming that it's healthy. You can read more about why canola oil is NOT healthy here.

Due to the refining process of both soybean or canola oils, the polyunsaturated component of the oils is oxidized and makes these oils very inflammatory inside your body. In addition, soybean oil is WAY too high in omega-6 fatty acids which throws your omega-6 to omega-3 balance out of whack.

We recognize that olive oil is healthier, but when it comes to store-bought dressings... Even salad dressings that request to be "made with olive oil" on the FRONT label are deceptive, because if you read the ingredients on the BACK label, they are almost ALWAYS made of habitually refined soybean oil or canola oil as the main oil, with only a very small amount of actual olive oil as a secondary oil.

So here's how to avoid all of these horrendously unhealthy store-bought salad dressings and make your own quick and easy SUPER-healthy dressing...

My Quick and Easy Recipe for Super-Healthy Salad Dressing

Geary's Healthy-Fat Blend Balsamic Vinaigrette Dressing

Fill your salad dressing container with these approximate ratios of liquids:

·      1/3rd of container filled with balsamic vinegar

·      1/3rd of container filled with apple cider vinegar

·      fill the remaining 1/3rd of container with equal parts of extra virgin olive oil and "Udo's Choice EFA Oil Blend"

·      Add just a small touch (approx 1 or 2 teaspoons) of real maple syrup

·      Add a little bit of onion powder, garlic powder, and black pepper and then shake the container to mix all ingredients well.

This homemade salad dressing mixture is delicious and healthy, and I pretty much never get tired of it!

The reason I choose to blend the extra virgin olive oil half & half with the Udo's Choice Oil is that they make up for what each lacks... Although extra virgin olive oil is healthy and contains important antioxidants, it is mostly monounsaturated, and is low in the essential fatty acids (EFAs). The Udo's Choice Oil is higher in unrefined polyunsaturated oils with a good healthy balance of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids. 

There are several variations of the Udo's Choice Oil, and one of them (labeled DHA 3-6-9 Blend) even contains a DHA algae oil blended into the mix along with organic flax oil, coconut oil, evening primrose oil, rice bran oil, oat germ and bran oil, and a few others.

Global, blending Udo's Oil with extra virgin olive oil makes nearly a complete oil combination for salad dressings with a great taste and maximum health benefits. If you can't find Udo's Choice Oil Blends (you can find Udo's at almost any health food store), there are other EFA oil blends on the market...just make sure that they are COLD-processed to protect the EFAs. You should never heat an EFA oil blend!

Give this homemade super-healthy salad dressing a try! You'll do your body a favor by avoiding the unsafe additives in store-bought salad dressings.

 

A new type of agricultural is extremely easy to implement, very cost effective, a food consumed 100% organic cultivated one self

Nowadays there is this growing trend of eating only organic food. Yet, not all the products claiming to be organic are always this way. Moreover, you can spend more on products claiming to be organic and get lower quality than the normal vegetables grown with pesticides. The only way you can be sure that the food you are consuming is 100% organic is to start growing it yourself. Now it is extremely easy with aquaponics. 

This new type of farming is extremely easy to put in practice, highly convenient and profitable. There are very few things you will need in order to set it up, things which are also quite affordable, so you will not have to spend a fortune on costly equipment. In addition to that, it is so easy to mount and start the aquaponic farm that you will need only few minutes to understand the principles and another few to put them in practice. In a matter of days you will place your aquaponic system and start growing your fish. Their role is that of producing the bio-nutrients for the plants. Once there are enough nourishing substances in the water, you will be able to propagate the seeds and then wait for them to grow. Meanwhile you will have to take good care of the fish, so that they continue to produce food for the plants. The good this is that you will not have to clean the water for the fish yourself, as this is what the plants will do with their roots.  Thus, it will be easier not only to grow plants, but it will also be easier to grow fish this way than if you were setting only an aquaculture. 

Another advantage of the aquaponic system is the fact that it is easy to assemble and disassemble, so that you can take it with you if you change houses. You can put it everywhere in your house or in your garage as long as the plants have the necessary amount of light to produce their food. Yet, make sure that you harvest all your crops, as you lose all the plants when disassembling the aquaponic system.

Getting organic food has never been so easy! Just set up your aquaponic farming system and you will feel the real taste of organic food. A true delight for you and your family!

What is the problem with traditional vegetable gardening?

Customary vegetable gardens require an massive quantity of hard work and attention - weeding, feeding and strict planting schedules.  There is as well the problem of seasonality, allowing beds to respite during the cooler months producing nothing at all. Then we are told to plant green fertilizer crops, add inorganic fertilizers and chemicals to adjust imbalanced soils.  It acquires a lot of time, commitment and a year-round devotion to produce your personal food the traditional way. 

But does it really need to be that difficult?

Let me ask you this question.  Does a forest need to think how to grow?  Does its soil need to be turned every season?  Does someone come along every so often and plant seeds or take pH tests?  Does it get weeded or sprayed with toxic chemicals?

Of course not!  

Traditional vegetable gardening techniques are focused on problems.  Have you noticed that gardening books are full of ways to fix problems?  I was a traditional gardener for many years and I found that the solution to most problems simply caused a new set of problems. In other words, the problem with problems is that problems create more problems. 

 

Let’s take a look at a common traditional gardening practice and I will show you how a single problem can escalate into a whole host of problems.

Suppose a Habitual vegetable garden, planted with rows of various vegetables.  There are fairly large bare patches between the vegetables.  To a usual gardener, a bare patch is just a bare patch.  But to an ecologist, a bare patch is an empty niche space.  An empty niche space is merely an invitation for new life forms to take up residency.  Nature does not tolerate empty niche spaces and the most successful niche space fillers are weeds.  That’s what a weed is in ecological terms - a niche space filler.  Weeds are very good colonizing plants.  If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be called weeds. 

 

Now back to our story. Weeds will grow in the empty niche spaces.  Quite often there are too many weeds to pick out individually, so the traditional gardener uses a hoe to turn them into the soil.  I have read in many gardening books, even organic gardening books, that your hoe is your best friend.  So the message we are getting is that using a hoe is the solution to a problem.

However, I would like to show you how using a hoe actually creates a new set of problems.  Firstly, turning soil excites weed seeds, creating a new explosion of weeds.  And secondly, turning soil upsets the soil ecology.  The top layer of soil is generally dry and structureless.  By turning it, you are placing deeper structured soil on the surface and putting the structureless soil underneath.  Over time, the band of structureless soil widens.  Structureless soil has far less moisture holding capacity, so the garden now needs more water to keep the plants alive. 

In addition to this problem, structureless soil cannot pass its nutrients onto the plants as effectively.  The garden now also needs the addition of fertilisers.  Many fertilisers kill the soil biology which is very important in building soil structure and plant nutrient availability.  The soil will eventually turn into a dead substance that doesn’t have the correct balance of nutrients to grow fully developed foods.  The foods will actually lack vitamins and minerals.  This problem has already occurred in modern-day agriculture.  Dr Tim Lobstein, Director of the Food Commission said. "… today's agriculture does not allow the soil to enrich itself, but depends on chemical fertilisers that don't replace the wide variety of nutrients plants and humans need."  Over the past 60 years commercially grown foods have experienced a significant reduction in nutrient and mineral content.

Can you see how we started with the problem of weeds, but ended up with the new problems of lower water-holding capacity and infertile soils.  And eventually, we have the potentially serious problem of growing food with low nutrient content.  Traditional gardening techniques only ever strive to fix the symptom and not the cause.  

However, there is a solution!  We must use a technique that combines pest ecology, plant ecology, soil ecology and crop management into a method that addresses the causes of these problems.  This technique must be efficient enough to be economically viable.  It also needs to be able to produce enough food, per given area, to compete against traditional techniques.  

I have been testing an ecologically-based method of growing food for several years.  This method uses zero tillage, zero chemicals, has minimal weeds and requires a fraction of the physical attention (when compared to traditional vegetable gardening).  It also produces several times more, per given area, and provides food every single day of the year.

My ecologically-based garden mimics nature in such a way that the garden looks and acts like a natural ecosystem.  Succession layering of plants (just as we see in natural ecosystems) offers natural pest management.  It also naturally eliminates the need for crop rotation, resting beds or green manure crops.  Soil management is addressed in a natural way, and the result is that the soil’s structure and fertility get richer and richer, year after year.  Another benefit of this method is automatic regeneration through self-seeding.  This occurs naturally as dormant seeds germinate; filling empty niche spaces with desirable plants, and not weeds. 

 

Unfortunately, the major challenge this method faces is influential traditional gardeners of its benefits.  Like various industries, the gardening industry gets stuck in doing things a certain way. The ecologically-based method requires such little human intervention that, in my opinion, various people will get frustrated with the lack of needing to control what’s happening.  Naturally people love to take control of their lives, but with this method you are allowing nature to take the reins.  It’s a test of faith in very simple natural laws.  However, in my experience these natural laws are 100% reliable.  

Another reason that traditional gardeners may not like this method is that it takes away all the mysticism of being an expert.  You see, this method is so simple that any person, anywhere in the world, under any conditions, can do it.  And for a veteran gardener it can actually be quite threatening when an embarrassingly simple solution comes along. 

I have no doubt that this is the way we will be growing food in the future.  It’s just commonsense.  Why wouldn’t we use a method that produces many times more food with a fraction of the effort?  I know it will take a little while to convince people that growing food is actually very instinctual and straightforward, but with persistence and proper explanation, people will embrace this method.  

Why?  Because sanity always prevails…

…eventually!

System Acquaponics a new way to grow practically every all plants: cucumbers, strawberries, tomatoes, squash, okra, peppers…

Nowadays traditional farming is starting to lose found in favor of the new ways of increasing plants. Most people have directed their attention to hydroponic farming which allows them to cultivate vegetables in their private house or their garage just using water and some specially designed pots. Yet, the drawback of the hydroponic farming is the fact that you will need to use chemical substances to feed the plants and make them grow normally. This significantly affects the taste and the quality of the crops.

With aquaponics this does not happen. Aquaponic relies on the symbiosis between plants and fish. Thus, you can define aquaponics as a mixture of aquaculture and hydroponics, where you get to grow both plants and fish in a perfect interdependence. Because of this, you will never need to use any type of chemical substances, thus resulting tastier and healthier crops.  Only placing a small amount of chemicals in the water will immediately have serious effects on the fish, endangering their lives and you do not want that to happen. 

You may wonder what type of vegetables are you able to grow using the aquaponic system. Well, almost any plant you can think of, excluding, of course, the plants whose fruits grow inside the ground, like potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic and so on. Fruity vegetables like cucumbers, strawberries, tomatoes, squash, okra, pepper, melon; herbs like basil and oregano; different types of beans and peas as well as green leafy vegetables grow very well in this type of system. 

What will amaze you even more is the great taste your veggies and legumes will have. You will not believe that something so good can be grown in your garage or in your living room. They have a far better taste than the veggies you buy from the market as they are all natural, organic and have no other chemical “improvements”. Just what is best of the plant! Your meals will be healthier and tastier! 

If you want to attain great results create sure you purchase organic seeds, so that you know exactly that your crops will be 100% organic. This way you will enjoy the real taste of freshly harvestedvegetables in the comfort of your home.  

What can be better than that?!

Different ways to eat nut butters

Here are some  favorite ways to use different nut butters…

1. Almond Butter with apple sauce with cinnamon sprinkled on top – a great after dinner snack if you’re looking for something sweet.

2. Almond or Walnut Butter on pretty much any fruit.  My new favorite is almond butter on fresh figs…yummy!

3. Nut Butter and Apple Butter Sandwich – one of my favorite on-the-go breakfast options.  I use 1-2 tbsp of nut butter and 1 tbsp of apple butter on 2 slices of sprouted grain bread and out the door I go.

4. Cashew Butter  on celery sticks – add a few raisins for a little sweet taste.

5. Walnut Butter in oatmeal – I mix the walnut butter right into my warm oatmeal.  Sometimes I add 1 tsp of honey as well.

All of these options are a great way to get a ton of healthy fats, especially Omega 3’s, into your daily meal plan