The FastDay Forum

The problem with low fat cooking is we need fats in the food to dissolve fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K, and nutrients like carotene, lutein and lycopene. It is why a tomato won't stain your clothes but tomato sauce from a pizza or pasta dish makes a terrible mess. All that brightly coloured goodness dissolves in the olive oil and soaks straight in your best outfit.

The question is how much fat do we need in a meal to help us absorb these nutrients? Is there an optimum level to get the maximum fat soluble nutrients for the least calories?

D_C

[carorees]

I think on the whole we are coming round to the idea that we should not be trying to cook low fat but to cook low carb and actually not worry about the fats so much. As to how much fat you need to carry the nutrients I have no idea at all! But, as you say on fast days it's good to maximize the amount of food one can have for the limited calorie allowance. I do keep fats down on fast days to conserve calories but on feed days I have butter, cream etc if I want and so I don't really worry too much about missing a few vitamins on fast days. I'm pretty sure I make up for it on feed days!

I am pretty fat aware, I eat oily fish for long chain omega 3s, though probably not often enough, I use butter rather than spread which I hate anyway I love cheese especially on pasta, munch nuts and seeds when I can afford them. I cook with rapeseed oil which while processed has a better short chain omega 3 to 6 ratio than sunflower oil. I use olive oil when I can, but some people in the family can't handle it so I mainly use veg oil.

Before the 5:2 diet I was into (but not always managing) eating healthily. I saw processed vegetable oil as mainly empty calories, I had cut it down to a minimum cooking. But then I started wondering about all the fat soluble vitamins I was missing, so I increased the amount. So even on feeding days I would like to know the optimum, the most nutrition from my veggies for the least empty calories from cooking oil. Anyway, a lot of my fast meals are lower carb versions of meals I have already cooked; freezing a portion of chicken paprika and noodles without noodles; the chicken stew and crusty bread without the crusty bread.

I suspect it may be a question that has never actually been researched.

I come from an oil producing country and I love olive oil. 99% of the times I use oil it is olive oil but 99% of the times I don't cook it.
I cook my food and add it in the end. The reason I this is because olive oil turns into a poison for our bodies if we cook it in a high temperature.
Not to mention that good olive oil's taste will be ruined if the oil is cooked in high temps for too long.

I am unable to eat fish and so rely on almonds for my fat intake - usually have 6 at a time as a snack every day. Here is some nutrtitional information
http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/nut ... cts/3085/2 They are also full of other nutrients

I looked up the US recommendations, which are 20-35g of fat per day. This is 180 - 315 calories. Within that 5-10g of n-6 and about 1g of n-3 polyunsaturated.

UK numbers are 70g of fat per day for women and 95g for men, 50 and 60 of which should be unsaturated.

In the mediterranean diet it's 2 TS of olive oil daily if you're eating other fat sources (meat, fish, dairy etc) as well.

Thanks TML for the reference to the problem with cooking with olive oil at high temperature.

We do this all the time at home on the basis that extra virgin olive oil is the healthiest, but googling around after reading your comment it is clear that you are right and the low smoke point of olive oil, especially extra virgin, makes it a bad choice for anything fried or my son's 'patent' oven potato wedgies.

Seems like organic rapeseed (canola) or sunflower is better for this purpose.

That's where my post was going to end, then I found a contrary view (as one always does on the internet!) - here. They say that extra virgin olive oil (smoke point 208C) is fine for cooking and that '(extra) light olive oil' has one of the highest smoke points of any oil at 242C (though refined avocado oil at 271C is higher still). Figures agree with the much more extensive table here (though here the temps are all in old-fashioned Farenheit).

Back to Google again. Olive oil brand Filippo Berio state on their website: '(Our) Mild & Light (olive oil) has a high smoke point (200 – 210 degrees C)'. This I do think is probably reliable since I can't see why the maker would understate the smoke point, yet it is 32-42C below the figure above.

So... I'm thinking avocado oil is the safest choice when it is hard to be sure what temperature the oil is reaching (especially with frying). And keep the extra virgin olive oil for uncooked or low heat situations or as TML suggests for adding at the end of cooking.

When you mentioned 'mediterranean diet' TML were your referring to a specific diet or just the way that people in the Mediterranean eat (or should eat, or did eat in the good old days)?

Smoke point in a frying pan isn't that difficult - if it smokes turn the heat down !

IKWYM about the Med diet, seems it's a misty eyed nostalgic view of what Greek peasants ate in 1960 or something similar. It was picked upon by the notoriously selective Keys based on low reported cardiac illness in that population, much of which may have been down to the absence of trans fats.

"Subsequent controlled feeding studies have shown that compared to carbohydrate, both monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats reduce LDL and triglycerides and increase HDL cholesterol. Importantly, these beneficial metabolic effects are greater in the presence of underlying insulin resistance." according to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16512956

The essence of the original concept was a diet high in poly and mono unsaturated fats, a message which got lost in the fat phobia of the 70s and 80s. The key message should have been that in order to reduce saturated fat you should change the type of fat / oil and not that you should go to a low fat regime.

As far as I can tell up to 35% of fat calories in the diet with a high ratio of unsaturated to saturated fats with fish at least twice a week seems to "count" but there's little on the protein percentage.

Smoke point in a frying pan isn't that difficult - if it smokes turn the heat down !

Yeah, I usually wait for the smoke alarm to go off

Refined avocado oil seems to be unobtainable in UK (per Google). Avocado oil for massage is easy to get, but putting that into a frying pan would be just too weird (and expensive)...

As far as I can tell up to 35% of fat calories in the diet with a high ratio of unsaturated to saturated fats with fish at least twice a week seems to "count" but there's little on the protein percentage.

You mean to qualify as a 'Mediterranean diet'?

You mean to qualify as a 'Mediterranean diet'?

Indeed.

" A more precise and quantitative definition of the Mediterranean diet is required if the adherence to such a dietary pattern is intended to be more accurately measured"

still reading............

Gooooooood moooooooorning Dominic and a very happy weekend to you and all!

I am referring to virgin (if it's of good quality no need for extra virgin, honestly) or extra virgin olive oil made in Greece. The producers advise not to cook it AT ALL or at least keep it under 150 degrees C. I know this because I know a few producers and I completely trust my uncle who is one of them.

Indeed sunflower or corn (maize) oil are better for frying/deep frying still I confess that when cooking in the oven I use olive oil and don't heat my oven over 175C (that means that the oil reaches around 160 degrees which is not very bad).

The Mediterranean diet is a modern way of eating which is based on what people in Greece (mainly) and in other Mediterranean countries ate in the old ages. It is similar to the Cretan diet but with less meat.

The main concept of the Med diet is that we eat whatever is in season and it's mainly veggies, dairy products, pulses and grains. Red meat is eaten once or twice a month, fish and chicken once or twice a week (although in mountain villages you don't see any fish and if you do it's cured in salt) and the rest of the days it's pulses, veggies and pasta/rice. Bread is on the table everyday and so is cheese.

In spite of what is the today's concept and practice, breakfast was very important since people were waking up very early and were working very hard all day so skipping breakfast was not an option.

As you can see, this diet is quite different with what people from the UK refer as the Paleo diet and that's why everytime people mention "the diet of our ancestors" I mention that it is depended on where our ancestors were from since there is not one Paleo diet, not even in the same country, since people mainly ate what they had. Even if someone was living next to the sea, a lake, or on a mountain made a whole lot of difference in their diet.

Phil, the Med diet is quite older than the 1960s. In fact, due to poverty, in the 1960s the diet was quite different than the Med diet.

BTW, if the oil smokes then you've lost it...

When you say "the" Med diet I wonder which one you're referring to.

I'm using the term as used in the nutritional world which was AFAIK first used by Ancel Keys. I'll start another thread.

good morning TML I hope it is a bright and sunny one in Greece as it is I am pleased to say in UK - for once!
I will leave you and Phil to tussle over your "Med"s . But here is a post I remember about how eating in the Mediterranean is not necessarily healthy.

I wasn't being quite serious about the smoke alarm, though it does go off occasionally especially when a steak is on the griddle. But while one does have some idea about the temperature inside an oven (ours however tends to be hotter than it says judging from the oven thermometer), it's pretty hard to know when one is frying and I think 'hot spots' could easily develop where the oil gets overheated but any smoke is hidden in the general melee (steam etc coming off the stir fry say). Hence my concern.

Another problem is that some of us quite like the slightly 'burnt' bits of roasted food. But I believe they are really bad for us (acrylamides) Maybe some more taste bud re-training still needed? I'll start a new thread on this one (as it's got lost at the bottom of a page here!)