Dark Calories
How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 13 Jun 2024
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- £11.99
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- Pre-Order
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
'Mind-blowing - will change the way you eat forever.' Davinia Taylor, Sunday Times number one bestselling author of It's Not a Diet and Hack Your Hormones
Did you know that eating a single large serving of french fries cooked in vegetable oil delivers the toxicity of smoking 24 cigarettes?
Somewhere between 25 and 45 percent of the calories in your diet are likely coming from a substance most people know nothing about, a seemingly innocuous oil with no colour or flavour, that is quite possibly more harmful to your health than smoking cigarettes.
Whether you shop at a health food store or a discount supermarket, the ingredient labels on most products in your kitchen right now may contain the following phrase: Vegetable Oil (contains one or more of the following: cottonseed, corn, canola, rapeseed, soybean, sunflower, safflower). And they're leading to uncontrollable hunger, inflammation, blood sugar swings and mental illness.
Family doctor and New York Times bestselling author Dr Catherine Shanahan walks us through the science of how vegetable oils affect the body, exposes the corruption that deceives doctors and consumers into eating them, and gives us a clear and hopeful roadmap to recovery and rejuvenation.
Dark Calories is the first book to definitively show that refined vegetable oil is the defining ingredient in both junk food and the entire modern diet and makes the case that eliminating it is the single best thing you can do for your health.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vegetable oils are terrible for one's health, according to this troubling warning. Physician Shanahan (Deep Nutrition) explains that they contain polyunsaturated fatty acids that undergo a chemical transformation when heated during the manufacturing process, creating "brand-new compounds within the oil that... are mildly to extremely toxic." Such toxins can cause oxidative stress, a "cellular imbalance that disrupts everything the cell is trying to do" and leads to chronic inflammation. Shanahan's assertion that vegetable oils are the primary reason why inflammatory diseases have ticked upward in recent decades doesn't quite persuade, as it relies on circumstantial evidence that vegetable oil use has increased over the same period, and she admits that there's relatively little research studying a direct link between vegetable oil and inflammatory disease. Still, readers who want to err on the side of caution and steer clear of the substance will benefit from tips for replacing it with healthier fats. For instance, she recommends substituting butter, ghee, or unrefined coconut oil for vegetable oil; loading up on almonds, avocados, and pecans; and eating meats with low polyunsaturated fat content, such as beef and lamb. Shanahan also lists vegetable oil–free meal ideas, recommending steak, roasted vegetables, and hummus made from olive oil. Though this perhaps overstates vegetable oils' evils, it provides sound guidance on how to reduce one's intake of the stuff. Health enthusiasts will want to take note.
