I used to consume foods that had a lot of oil. Even when I would try to eat healthy salads, I always had oily salad dressing with it. Vegetable and other seed oils are a major part of the “Western” diet. Normally, you think oils may only mean fried foods, but even people who try to eat healthy will drown the vegetables in a seed-oil-based dressing. A quick web search charts that vegetable oils make up about 15-20% of the modern “Western” diet. Think about that. ONE FIFTH of all the calories consumed by the average person daily is purely from vegetable oil — not vegetables! No wonder we are having an obesity crisis.
Vegetable oils were originally developed to grease machinery, not to eat. They were never meant to be eaten.
Consuming vegetable oil has severe damaging effects on the body. Eating these oils causes inflammation. They contain high amounts of AGEs (Advanced Glycation End products) which contribute to raising insulin resistance and raising the risk of heart disease. Vegetable oils also kill good gut bacteria, so eating a salad after drenching it in ranch dressing will do more harm than good.
If you are going to consume an oil, choose cold-pressed olive oil. Cold-pressed means that heat and chemical solvents aren’t used to extract the oil, meaning the oil is still in its natural state. This doesn’t mean it’s healthy to consume exorbitant amounts of it, but it is less damaging.
One thing that I did over the course of two years to eliminate vegetable oils from my diet was not even using salad dressing. That all tastes gross to me now. This is because the gut microbiome will slowly alter our taste buds to an extent so that you are more likely to eat foods that will help the bacteria survive. This is also why you may have cravings for fried foods. When I started to cut oils from my diet, I craved them more than ever. That is because the gut bacteria — a living thing within me — was literally being killed. After I got through that period and developed a healthy gut microbiome, I not only do not crave oils and greasy food, I also do not want them.
Getting away from vegetable oils takes time. I don’t think going cold turkey is a good idea, it will usually lead to failure. It is the progression over time that will lead to achieving health goals. It is always the hardest at the start because you think, why not put it off one more day, there isn’t going to be a change in one day. The issue is if you start down that track of reasoning, you will never achieve anything because nothing great happens in a day. Achievements are from good habits and activities that have compounding effects over time