Category Archives: Healthy oils

Healthy oils

Flaxseed Diet

Leave a comment

Flaxseed has some wonderful properties as well as tasting good when added to food. It has light nutty flavor which is sure to enhance any food that you make. You can simply add it to salads by sprinkling a few seeds over your usual green salad items. In a lot of respects you can use it where you would normally use sesame seeds. Flax isn’t just a seed for salads though. You can use ground flaxseed, otherwise known as flaxseed meal, rather like flour. You can also use flaxseed oil in the same way as you would use other oil including in salad dressings.

Brown Flaxseeds
Brown Flaxseeds

The benefits of flaxseed are great in number. For a start of there are lots of good nutrients in each little seed. These include a wide spectrum of vitamins and minerals and lots of really good Omega 3 fats. In fact they have so much Omega 3 that they rival fish as a source of these valuable fats. This is good news if you are a vegan! More good news for vegans is that you can make a very good egg substitute using the gel found in flaxseeds. This gel is also found in the ground meal. It is very easy to use flaxseed meal as an egg substitute. You should also use it if you have an egg allergy.

Another neat thing about flaxseeds is that they contain practically zero amounts of carbohydrate. This is because the stored energy of the seed is in the form of oil. As a result they are great when it comes to producing food to fit in with a low carb diet.

You can use flaxseed meal in the same way that you use flour. This means that it is great for baking. Exchanging part of the flour for flaxseed meal when baking will add valuable nutrients to your food such as fiber and omega 3 fats. If you use flaxseed meal instead of wheat flour you can also make baked goods that are gluten free. This is then great for people who have a gluten allergy or celiac disease.

Go to Flaxseed Recipes if you want to find out more about how to go about changing existing recipes so that you can add valuable flaxseeds to them. There are also 36 flaxseed recipes included in the book showing how you can make gluten free, low carb and egg substituted meals

Healthy oils

Virgin Coconut oil and the good saturated fats

2 Comments

Virgin coconut oil is full of saturated fats. That is a fact. An undisputed fact. So, having said this at the start, it should have you running for the hills in fear! But hang on, I haven’t finished yet, so come back and read some more. You might be pleasantly surprised!

When exactly was it, when we became terrified of saturated fats? I’m not really sure, but it certainly changed the way that we think about certain foods like butter and cheese. The trouble is, that in this sound byte age we only really hear one part of any message. However, it could also be that vested interests want us to believe that things have only 2 sides: one side good and one side bad. Saturated fats are bad and all other fats are good. On the basis of this we all ditched butter and headed for margarine, only to find out that there is actually another side to the story: the deadly trans fats found in margarine.

virgin coconut oil in coconut husks
Coconuts ready for extracting the virgin coconut oil

Sometimes we don’t know which way to turn or which things to believe. Some of it is science that is made up of half complete knowledge and at other times it is slick advertising. Where do we turn? One thing we do know, is that ‘Saturated fats are bad for us’. Wrong again! What it should say is that ‘most saturated fats are bad for us’. The thing that is missed out is that there are certain saturated fats that appear to be very good for us indeed. Where do we find these good saturated fats? Why, in virgin coconut oil of course!

To appreciate this we have to first understand why ordinary saturated fats are bad for us. It is not that the saturated fats themselves are bad; it is the fact that they get converted into bad cholesterol. This bad cholesterol causes heart and vascular disease. So, if there is bad cholesterol there must be good cholesterol. Right? Well in this case, it is right: the bad cholesterol and good cholesterol fight it out and the winner does what it wants. Yes this is true! When there is too much bad cholesterol you get heart disease and when good cholesterol is the winner you get less or no cardiovascular disease. Coconut contains a different kind of saturated fat. This particular fat does the opposite of ordinary saturated fat. It acts a little more like a polyunsaturated fat and in doing this it leads to an increase in good cholesterol which in turn reduces the amount of heart and cardiovascular disease in the body.

virgin coconut oil split husks
coconuts contain many other useful health giving substances

Hopefully you should now know one reason why coconuts are really good for us. The good saturated fats in virgin coconut oil can help us in many ways and there are also many other helpful substances in coconuts. To find out all of the other ways that coconuts are used to improve our health take a look at: How to use coconut cures for a healthy life