Book review: dark calories
“Did you know that eating a large serving of french fries—cooked in vegetable oil—delivers the toxicity of smoking 24 cigarettes”….
Yup, you guessed it. This book recommends we avoid all vegetable oils. The end. Because in a nut-(or rather seed-) shell, the oxidation reactions to process, bottle, transport, store, cook with, let alone utilise in our bodies, effectively weaponise polyunsaturated fats, enabling them to convert bystander nutrients into toxins. Vegetable oils mere existence to their use sets up a domino effect where neither origin nor outcome of toxic effects can be pin pointed or stopped!
“Like dark matter in the universe, vegetable oil explains otherwise unexplainable phenomenon - and removing it all from our diets resolves otherwise unresolvable health conditions”
I first came across Dr Cate through her book Deep Nutrition in 2008, where she covered just a sliver of the harms that vegetable oil can do to us and was still on the fence as to whether vegetable oil or sugar was worse. With Dark Calories, Dr Cate definitely steers vegetable oil to take the similar trajectory as sugar toward food pariah status.
While Deep Nutrition demonstrated just how much food is information, directing our deepest nutrition (our cellular growth), that what you eat and how you live can alter your DNA in ways that affect your health and the health of your future children, Dark Calories, explains how a group of eight little-known oils cause the cellular damage that underlies virtually all chronic disease, exposes the corruption that deceives doctors and consumers into eating them, and gives us a clear roadmap to recovery and rejuvenation. Our deep nutrition now has dark calories embedded in our DNA.
Why are the calories delivered by refined vegetable oils “dark”?
the molecular structure of ultra-processed seed oils renders them particularly disruptive; in effect, they gum up the works of our cellular machinery.
they are not merely alternative sources of calories, equivalent to other natural fats; rather, by virtue of their unstable chemical bonds, they are highly oxidative and damaging.
because they gum up cell membranes, they interfere with signalling, undermine mitochondrial function, attack arterial walls, promote inflammation, undermine immune function and hasten autoimmunity.
despite the difficulty processing them and their complete lack of flavour, vegetable oils are now the largest single source of dietary fats, accounting for more calories in our diets than sugar and flour. No matter their problems, the share quantity of them in our diets poses a problem in itself!
It’s in Dark Calories that Dr Cate says, “sugary foods are less of a problem than inflammatory fat”.
Through first ushering in refined carbohydrates in by the introduction of cheap high-fructose corn syrup in the 1970s and blaming them for the soaring rates of obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and preventable degenerative diseases that we’re now encountering
Then propagandizing the notion that butter, lard, and full-fat dairy and animal protein are the culprits in heart disease, so that “diet-heart” or “lipid hypothesis” gained ascendancy, contending that it’s cholesterol and saturated fat that are the drivers of atherosclerosis. The pharmaceutical industry responded with statins, and Big Food reaped windfalls with low-fat foods and “improved” versions of fats!
It’s interesting to see the blaming of a single macronutrient for ALL health problems, meanwhile offering profitable products in a remaining macronutrient, that later becomes the REAL culprit? Perhaps it’s just current narratives but it almost seems to be coming full circle again with veganism, trends towards less or even fake meat, even genetically altering humans to be allergic to meat for climate change…?
Suffice to say, stay true to Dr Cate’s four pillars of a human diet:
Eat fresh food from healthy soil raw or gently cooked
Preserve and enhance foods using fermentation and sprouting
Extract nutrients that support healthy connective tissue by boiling animal bones skin and joint material
Use every part of the animal including the organs and fat
“Our genes have come to expect the collection of nutrients these strategies deliver and without them we can’t achieve our health potential.”
Simply, choose food as we’ve always known, what your body expects and not the weird stuff it doesn’t know what to do with except store as fat or fight as an invader. You are your environment; choose your inputs for optimum outputs!
