Refined, Processed Fats And Oils Damage And Destroy The Immune System

Sunlight is most beneficial for those who eat a balanced diet according to their individual requirements and body type. Sunbathing may be dangerous, however, for those who live on a diet rich in acid-forming, highly processed foods and refined fats or products made with them. Alcohol, cigarettes, and other mineral and vitamin depleting substances, such as allopathic and hallucinogenic drugs, can also make the skin highly vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation. In particular, polyunsaturated fats as contained in refined and vitamin E depleted products, such as thin vegetable oil, mayonnaise, salad dressings, and most brands of margarine, pose a particularly high risk in the development of skin cancer and most other cancers. According to Archives of Internal Medicine, 1998, polyunsaturated fats increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer by 69 percent. In contrast, monounsaturated fats, as found in olive oil, reduce breast cancer risk by 45 percent.

Untreated, expeller-pressed oils contain both types of fats, with varying ratios. Both kinds of fat are useful for the body. Sesame oil, for example has 50 percent polyunsaturated fats and 50 percent monounsaturated fats. If the monounsaturated fats are removed from the oil through the refining process, its polyunsaturated fats become highly reactive and damaging to cells.

This phenomenon is quite easy to understand. Polyunsaturated fats are more vulnerable to lipid peroxidation (rancidity) than monounsaturated fats. In other words, they rapidly attract a large number of oxygen free radicals and become oxidized. Oxygen radicals are generated when oxygen molecules lose an electron. This makes them highly reactive. These free radicals may quickly attack and damage cells, tissues, and organs. They can be formed in refined, polyunsaturated fats when these are exposed to sunlight before consumption. Free radicals may also form in the tissues after the oil has been eaten. The polyunsaturated fats in refined oils are difficult to digest, since they are deprived of their natural bulk and are no longer protected against free radicals by their natural protector, vitamin E, a powerful anti-oxidant (vitamin E interferes with the oxidation process).

Vitamin E and many other valuable nutrients are filtered out or destroyed during the refining process. Eating a hamburger and French fries can flood your body with free radicals. Both foods are heated with refined oils. Heating these oils greatly increases their oxidation and, therefore, tissue-damaging effects.

Most people have no idea what happens to the oil when it is extracted from a nut or seed. To extend the oil’s shelf life, create a clear color and remove its natural scent, it is bathed in a petroleum solvent, then “degummed” or placed in hot water and swirled at a high speed to separate out various substances. To further refine the oil, it is mixed with an alkali such as lye or caustic soda; then it is agitated, heated again, bleached, hydrogenated to stabilize it and finally deodorized. To increase shelf-life further, manufacturers add preservatives and other food additives. Although all of that improves the oil’s shelf life, it does not prevent it from turning rancid before the expiration date. The chemical treatments it undergoes disguises signs of rancidity, which makes the oil so dangerous to the unsuspecting consumer.

Saturated fats are solid and found in products such as lard and butter. They contain large quantities of natural antioxidants, which make them much safer against oxidation by free radicals. They are also digested quite easily.

The polyunsaturated fats in refined oils (stripped of their monounsaturated fats), on the other hand, are virtually indigestible and thereby become dangerous to the body. Margarine, for example, is just one molecule away from plastic, and therefore extremely difficult to digest. Free radicals, the natural cleansers of the body, try to get rid of the fatty culprit which attaches itself to the cells’ walls. But when the radicals digest these harmful fats, they also damage the cell walls. This is considered to be one of the main causes of aging and degenerative disease. This also shows how something so useful as oxygen radicals can become harmful when we expose the body to unnatural foods and chemicals.

Research has shown that out of 100 people who consumed large quantities of polyunsaturated fats, 78 showed marked clinical signs of premature aging. They also looked much older than others of the same age did. By contrast, in a recent study on the relationship between dietary fats and the risk for Alzheimer’s disease, researchers were surprised to learn that the natural, healthy fats can actually reduce the risk for Alzheimer’s by up to 80 percent. The study showed that the group with the lowest rate of Alzheimer’s ate approximately 38 grams of these healthy fats every day, while those with the highest incidence of this disease consumed only about half of that amount.

Tissue cells that have been damaged by abnormal free radical activity are unable to reproduce properly. This can impair major functions in the body, including those of the immune, digestive, nervous, and endocrine systems. Ever since refined polyunsaturated fats have been introduced to the population on a large scale during and after WWII, degenerative diseases have increased dramatically, skin cancer being one of them. In fact, polyunsaturated fats have made sunlight “dangerous”, something that would never have been the case if foods hadn’t been altered and manipulated, as they are today. When polyunsaturated fats are removed from their natural foods, they need to be refined, deodorized, and even hydrogenated, depending on the food product for which they are used. During this process some of the polyunsaturated fats undergo chemical transformations, which turns them into trans fatty acids (trans fats), often referred to as “hydrogenated vegetable oils”. Margarine can contain up to 54 percent of them, vegetable shortening up to 58 percent.

You can detect hydrogenated vegetable oils in foods by reading the food labels. Most processed foods contain them, including breads, crisps, chips, doughnuts, crackers, biscuits, pastries, all baked goods, cake and frosting mixes, baking mixes, frozen dinners, sauces, frozen vegetables, and breakfast cereals. In other words, nearly all foods that are shelved, processed, refined, preserved, and not fresh can contain trans fats.

Trans fats inhibit the cell’s ability to use oxygen, which is required to burn foodstuffs to carbon dioxide and water. Cells, which are inhibited in completing their metabolic processes, may thus become cancerous. The current movement to get trans fats out of foods has merely led to the replacement of one harmful fat with another harmful, artificially produced, fat. For all practical purposes, the new man-made fats, called “interesterified” fats, are not better than the old trans fats. Research, published in Nutrition & Metabolism (January 15, 2007), indicates that a new method of modifying fat in commercial products raises blood glucose, depresses insulin, and reduces levels of beneficial HDL-cholesterol.

The trans fats also make the blood thicker by increasing the stickiness of the platelets. This multiplies the chances of blood clots and the buildup of fatty deposits, which can lead to heart disease. Research at Harvard Medical School, in which the dietary habits of 85,000 women were observed for over 8 years, found that those eating margarine had an increased risk of coronary heart disease. Further studies have shown that trans fatty acids prevent the body from processing Low Density Lipo Protein (LDL) or bad cholesterol, thereby raising blood cholesterol to abnormal levels. A Welsh study linked the concentration of these artificial trans fats in body fat with death from heart disease. The Dutch government has already banned any products containing trans fatty acids.

Polyunsaturated fats have also been shown to suppress immunity. For this reason, they are used today in patients who have undergone kidney transplant operations or skin grafts taken from other people. This helps the patient’s immune system to not reject the foreign tissue, but of course it also leaves the person vulnerable to infection and other disorders. The same approach is used in the so-called autoimmune diseases where the immune system attempts to kill off some of the body’s own cells, i.e., those that have become toxic and are a risk to the survival of the body. The tragedy in all of this is that such treatments don’t change overall mortality rates; only the cause of death becomes altered.

The message here is that if you don’t want to damage or destroy your immune system, don’t eat refined, processed fats and oils.

——————————
This is an excerpt from my book TIMELESS SECRETS OF HEALTH & REJUVENATION