Suffering from diabetes? Your cooking oil is the culprit!

Your cooking oil may be sabotaging your efforts to stay healthy and ward off illnesses such as diabetes, a recent study has suggested.

Sanjoy Ghosh, a Michael Smith Health Research Foundation Scholar and a professor at UBC’s Okanagan campus, recently published a research that concluded that a high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) but not monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA) can lead to sedentary, in fact, lazy behaviour especially in women.

Ghosh says not that long ago, heart disease was linked to saturated fats, an idea that has become increasingly controversial in recent years.

This thinking instigated the intentional removal of saturated fatty acids from most food supplies in favour of MUFA and PUFA. Essentially all fats in our ‘convenience’ foods like potato chips, energy bars, crackers or burgers use cooking oils like corn, sunflower and soybean and margarine–all rich in MUFAs and PUFAs.

For his research, Ghosh collaborated with first-author Jason Pither to examine data from 21 countries in Europe. They worked specifically with data relating to pre-teen girls and then, in a second study, the blood glucose levels of adult women.

In putting details such as the amount of time each week spent watching TV along with other filters like a country’s per …read more