malik@galaxy.DEC (Karl Malik ZK01-1/F22 1-1440) (11/30/84)
Subj; how healthy is sauteing? I'm not that good a cook - mostly, when I do cook, I do so in order to eat a healthy meal. While I'm not a vegetarian, I do eat very little red meat and only a bit of chicken and fish. Mostly, I'm into brown rice and lots of veggies. All my life, I've heard that fried food is no good for you. Even when I lightly saute vegetables in 'no-cholesteral' 100% sunflower seed oil, I feel guilty. What's the truth about eating foods fried in oils said to be 'no-cholesteral'? Thanks, Karl ...decwrl!rhea!helos!malik
act@pur-phy.UUCP (Alex C. Tselis) (12/03/84)
> Subj; how healthy is sauteing? > > All my life, I've heard that fried food is no good for > you. Even when I lightly saute vegetables in 'no-cholesteral' > 100% sunflower seed oil, I feel guilty. > > What's the truth about eating foods fried in oils said > to be 'no-cholesteral'? > The thing about cholesterol is that too much of it in the blood is a definite risk factor for arteriosclerotic disease (heart attacks & strokes). I think that it's still somewhat controversial whether dietary restriction of cholesterol helps in all cases. (It definitely helps in most, so we all should restrict our intake.) The reason for the controversy is that the liver synthesizes cholesterol, which is the precursor to many of the steroid hormones in our bodies. These include the sex hormones, the hormones which regulate sodium balance in the blood (aldosterone), the glucocorticoids (which do a number of things, among them regulate the metabolism of sugar), and so forth. There's a condition known as familial hypercholesterolemia, in which the liver's synthesis of cholesterol is unregulated, and the liver just pours tons of cholesterol into the blood stream. Most of its victims die by their 20th birthday of heart attacks & strokes and other nasty things like that. Now, cholesterol is not really a lipid. It is synthesized from lipids, which are fatty acids, in which there is a long hydrocarbon chain. All oils contain lipids (essentially, that's all an oil is: a mixture of fatty acids), sunflower seed oil, olive oil, anything you like. Lipids are essential to the body's functioning because they are precursors to various chemicals the body needs (as is true of cholesterol; if we had no cholesterol in our bodies, we would die. Too much cholesterol is bad, but so is too little. If you don't get any in your diet, your liver will make enough for you to live on.) The bad things about fats are well known. They increase the level of certain kinds of lipids in your blood (High density lipoproteins HDLPs), which is a definite risk factor for arteriosclerosis. If you eat too many of them, you get fat, which puts an increased work load on your heart (another risk factor). Another problem is that they require more work from your body to be digested. The thing is that fats don't dissolve in water (which most of your food is), so they must be made to. The way this is done is that the stomach has to churn the food really well, to break up the fats, and inject it into the duodenum (the first part of the small intestine past your stomach). Once that's done, the fat particles must be dissolved and this is achieved by bile which is squirted into the intestine by the gall-bladder. The bile acids have a detergent-like effect on the fat and thus dissolve it, so that it can be absorbed by the intestine, and further processed by the liver. (This, by the way, is why eating fried or fatty food causes pain in people with gall bladder stones. In squirting its load of bile into the intestine, the gall bladder has to contract. If there are stones in the gall bladder, it will try to squeeze them as well. That hurts. If the stones are sharp at all, which some are, that hurts even more. If there is a stone blocking the bile duct, well ...) I hope this answers the question above. Eating a reasonably small amount of fat (if you don't have high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol or HDLPs, or heart disease, or gallstones or are overweight, which too many of us are ) doesn't really hurt you. So don't feel guilty. But don't overdo it, either. And remember, there are such things as essential fatty acids which you must get in your diet, so keep your diet balanced. (Most diets will give you enough of your essential fatty acids, so you don't need to have steak every day to get them.)