Catharyn Elwood: Nutritionist
(Page 8 of 11)
March/April 1972
By Hal Smith
ELWOOD: Sunflower oil has the most unsaturated fats and is bound to be the craze, but there's much more to it than that. We must know, for example, how the oils are processed and the temperatures to which they are heated during that processing. Heat, you know, destroys the vitamin E complex which is the preservative that prevents the unsaturated fatty acids from making the seriously detrimental hydrogen peroxide in the body. Even cold-pressed oils rise somewhat in temperature during their manufacture but, if the process is done carefully, this heating can be kept at an absolute minimum.
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I once saw olive oil made outside Athens in a 100-year-old press that cut the olives and squeezed the oil into terra cotta jars. Oil processed and stored that way lasts for years and years. Some has been found still good after two centuries. It's fantastic. They haven't taken out the vitamin E and they haven't destroyed anything.
Oil should taste like the product from which it comes . . . but all oils taste alike today, which says something about how they're manufactured. The processors say that the modern consumer doesn't want peanut oil that tastes like peanuts . . . but we'd want it if we could get it and could get used to it.
PLOWBOY: Is margarine preferable to butter?
ELWOOD: Oh no . . . it depends on how each is made. Quality butter from well-fed animals has many nutrients that margarine doesn't contain. There's a "Factor X", to site one example, that's supposed to help prevent arthritis. It comes from cows fed on beautiful, fresh green feed such as is found in Alpine meadows early in the spring. The people in the Swiss Alps make butter from this milk and store it for the rest of the season.
PLOWBOY: You and other authorities on nutrition have often said that pasteurization destroys much of milk's value. If raw milk isn't available, what's the alternative?
ELWOOD: I guess the best thing to do is get yourself a goat. People who have growing families should have some milk, although I think milk has been acclaimed beyond its real value. It isn't as perfect a food as we once thought, perhaps because the soil no longer adequately feeds our dairy animals . . . or because they're penned in . . . or because of the antibiotics and drugs our agri-business now uses on them.
Another complication is the fact that some people just cannot digest milk. If you live in a rural area where milk is definitely a staple — such as Bulgaria and the middle European countries — your body will keep producing the enzymes that digest it. But when you live in a country like the United States where we don't use so much milk, it's quite common for your body to lack the milk-digesting enzymes once you're weaned and have your teeth. You can run into all kinds of trouble-allergies, for example — if you continue to drink milk after your body loses its ability to digest this food.
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