The best fats to cook

Solid fats such as lard or tallow are solid at room temperature, while vegetables oils are liquid. What makes them solid is something that we can't see with naked eyes and it's their saturated fat content.

Oils like olive, sunflower seed, corn, etc. are rich in mono and poly unsaturated fats and that's what makes them to be liquid. As you can see in the next image, carbon chains are not straight so the molecules can't be organized neatly.

Unlike unsaturated fats, saturated fats have rigid and straight carbon chains. This allows them to be arranged neatly, one next to the other as you can see in the next image.

What makes the chains of unsaturated fats not straight like those of saturated fats?

From your high school chemistry classes, you should remember that molecules can have three kind of bonds: simple, double and triple. If all bonds are simple, that means the carbon atom is connected to four different atoms, this also means that its capacity of bonding is saturated, it cannot be connected to anything else and that's why they are called saturated fats. If the bond is double that means that the carbon atom is connected to three different atoms and with one of them shares a double bond, in this situation the carbon atom still has one available bond and that means it is not saturated and that's why they are called unsaturated fats.

Atoms always prefer to have all of their bonds saturated. Carbon will always prefer to have four simple bonds rather than having one double or triple, because that gives him stability, it's more comfortable so to speak.

Why am I explaining all of this if the blog post title is "The best fats to cook"? All will make sense now. I don't know if you remember from your thermodynamic classes in high school that chemical reactions are faster and easily carried out with heat. Well, the burner of your kitchen is the heat in this reaction. What happens is that if we heat unsaturated fats, the double bonds in those molecules are willing to react with whatever they find to have all their bonds saturated, so they end up reacting easily thanks to the heat, creating new molecules in the process. These molecules cause inflammation and other problems inside the body.

And that's the reason why the best fats to cook are solid at room temperature. Trans fats are excluded from this rule because trans fats are actually vegetable oils subjected to chemical reactions to make them solid, they are not a natural product and they are very harmful for the body and actually more harmful than heated unsaturated fats.

Examples of solid fats at room temperature:

• Animal fat
• Butter
• Ghee or clarified butter
• Coconut oil

Now that you know all of this, maybe you are thinking that saturated or animal fats are the worst things you can eat, because that's the general opinion, so it must be true, right? Well, that's not true at all, there's no proof that saturated fats cause heart disease and we make most of our cholesterol. If you want to learn more about this, you should read the book Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz or go to the Nutrition Coalition website.

I hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!