My Dear Pigassus...

As always you manage to both entertain and amuse me. I love your writing. Guess that's why we're doing a blog together!

I started to make a comment on your latest post and when it exceeded the maximum allowable characters, I realized I needed to dash off a quick blog entry to make one important observation vis à vis your view of palm oil. Repeat after me: Palm oil is GOOD! Palm oil is GOOD!

My dear friend, the question you pose, "What Next?" is a question I struggle with every day, the food version of the man stranded alone in a boat in the middle of the vast ocean who says to himself right before he dies of thirst, "Water! Water everywhere, but not a drop to drink!"

That's how I feel when I go into a grocery store or restaurant. Food! Food everywhere, but almost nothing fit to eat. I am so hungry all the time but can only rarely find anything in a grocery that piques my interest or desire.

So back to the palm oil thing. You have succumbed to our government's oft published false statements about the dangerous nature of palm oil. It was all part of a campaign of dissinformation disseminated by the government when it was pushing liquid oils after World War II. Their mantra was, "Solid oil=BAD; liquid oil=GOOD!"

We now know this is simplistic and wrong. Hydrogenated solid oils are BAD; they are solid at room temperature only through chemistry, the addition of a hydrogen molecule to the oil lowers the temperature required to make the oil solid. Trouble is, these artifically solid oils don't easily melt and liquify at body termperature, so they fill your digestive system and your arteries with artificially hard particles that do real damage, causing injury like nicks in the walls of blood vessels as they careen through your body. The body's response to these injuries is to rush to repair them. The bandaid it uses to patch over these nicks is cholesterol, so eating hydrogenated oil starts the process of artery clogging that eventually results in heart attacks and bypass surgery.

As for liquid oils, read my previous post, "My Own Private Raisin Bran," and you'll see that not all liquid oils are safe or healthy either. Olive oil, yes, because the cold pressed variety is natural and doesn't contain any added chemicals or solvents. If you buy the "lite" olive oil however, look out, because that stuff is adulterated with chemicals to make it "lite."

Your body understands how to handle oils that are naturally solid at room temperature. Room temperature is usually 25 to 30 degrees lower than your body temperature, so solid oils melt and liquify when you ingest them. Even though they are solid on your kitchen shelf, they are liquid and soft after you eat them. Does this mean you can eat palm oil in huge quantities? No, but don't believe it is unhealthy. It is loaded with antioxidants and tocopherals that are natural preservatives; therefore it does not easily go rancid like some chemically extracted vegetable oils. Rancid oils are bad because ingesting them causes enormous free radical damage to the cells of your body, damage that accelerates aging and disease processes.

On the down side, the growing demand for palm oil in the United States is leading to the massive clearing of natural habitats in Malaysia and Indonesia to make room for more palm plantations. This is of particular concern in Indonesia where the clearing threatens both the Orangutan and the Sumatran tiger.

Like anything in life, there are trade-offs, but my one inviolate rule is, I NEVER put anything in my mouth that came from Dr. Frankenfood's chem lab.

Eh, so what's for lunch?

Planet Fat Cat