Many people sit down and enjoy food either cooked in, topped with, or with a side of olive oil. You pour it over your salad, dip some bread in it while waiting for your meal at a restaurant, or cook almost everything in some type of oil. It is promoted on television health shows as “good fat” or a “good source of omegas”, but is it actually healthy? Is there one type of oil that is healthier than another?
All oil, including olive and coconut oil, are pure refined fat. 100 percent of oil is from fat. This itself should be a red flag for people. All whole foods contain all three macro nutrients: carbs, protein, and fat, so it is concerning that we would promote a product that is pure refined fat. This is, at least, my first take on it. Below is a chart of the calorie and nutrient breakdown of a single serving of olive oil:
Now that you have the calorie and nutrition breakdown let’s get into how oil impacts us and what it does to our body. One major disruptance that oil causes in our body is called Postprandial Lipemia or in short, Sludge Blood (after meal fatty blood). What this means in simpler terms is that when you ingest foods high in saturated fat, your red blood cells start to clump or stack upon each other. Red blood cells have a negative charge to repel each other in order to flow smoothly in your blood, but when they are so thickly coated in fat they end up sticking to each other and clumping. This results in your blood flowing thicker and heavier and will often put you into a food coma. Animal fat is also a cause of Postprandial Lipemia, but so is oil and oil tends to have a more positive image making it very dangerous. Here and Here are my sources.
In addition to less blood flow this fat in the blood also lowers oxygen. Lipemia causes Tissue Hypoxia, or a lack of oxygen to tissues such as your brain. This is what causes the fatigue of a food coma. Lipemia is stated in this article as being an “overlooked cause of tissue hypoxia” which has several negative effects. The most devastating is that “oxidative stress plays a pivotal role in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular diseases through impairment of endothelial function.” source. Essentially it is a contributor to cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis and heart disease, our leading cause of death.
So putting all that information together you can now see that ingesting high fatty foods (or worse, a food that is only fat!) such as oil, can cause fatigue, food coma, and contribute to atherosclerosis. Oil is not a health food and should be ingested as minimally as possible. If you need a very small amount to oil a pan or tray you wont get as sick, but try cooking and baking oil free! Some simple ways I try to cook oil free is by using parchment paper instead of oiling a tray, or replacing oil in baked goods with applesauce or a small amount of nut butter. You should consider purchasing a non stick frying pan if you use your pans a lot in cooking. I hope this post will shed some light on oils and how dangerous they are to consume. Going oil free is a process but it is well worth it in the long run.
Planetary Veganism 
