Healthy Fats that Won’t Break Down Easily while Cooking
The healthy fats that will not decompose quickly while cooking are saturated fats like butter and palm oil. The best of which is the mighty coconut oil.
In this day and age where most foods are cooked, even overcooked, you need a reliable dietary fat to get the job done, safely. That distinction belongs to fats saturated with hydrogen or simply “saturated fats.”
All fats and oils are made of fatty acids. Each fatty acid has a sequence of carbon atoms. Each carbon atom can carry a maximum of two hydrogen atoms.
If each carbon atom in the sequence has two hydrogen atoms latched onto it, you have a saturated fatty acid (SaFA). Remove a pair of hydrogen atoms, you have amonounsaturated fatty acid (MUFA). More than a pair and you have a polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA).
Because they are saturated or “full” of hydrogen, SaFAs are stable and can withstand normal cooking temperatures, nicely. In the case of MUFAs, taking out even just a pair of hydrogen atoms creates double bonded connections to compensate for the loss and weakens the structure significantly. You can now imagine how structurally weak PUFAs are.
Most unsaturated vegetable oils today, particularly polyunsaturated ones like soybean oil and corn oil, are highly processed and refined, making them very susceptible to spoilage and excessive free-radical production. Even monounsaturated extra virgin olive oil is extremely perishable.
The healthiest fats to cook with are saturated fats like tropical oils. And of all the tropical oils, none can dare challenge the superiority of the great coconut oil.
92 percent of its fatty acids are saturated, making coconut oil the most stable dietary fat on earth. Its ability to resist oxidation (getting rancid) is something unsaturated fats can only dream of.
Its chemical or molecular makeup is so well-built, coconut oil functions as anantioxidant protecting against troublesome free radicals. When heated, coconut oil is 12 times more immune to decomposition than canola oil, 16 times more impervious than soybean oil, and 300 times more than flaxseed oil.
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