Before I begin to discuss oil derivatives and its relation to your health, I want to quickly recap the oil processing steps taken by big businesses where your dollar is the bottom line. Oil is pressed from seeds, then degummed, refined, bleached, and deodorized. These processes remove many of the beneficial nutrients that keep the oil fresh and safe from free radicals. These processes also destroy the good essential fatty acids by rearranging the double carbon bonds into unusable trans fatty acids that have no beneficial value.
Certain methods take place after the above to make the oil "supermarket friendly." That is, to give the oil a long shelf life. New unnatural ingredients are introduced to the oil so it won't spoil on the shelves. This would have been avoided if all of the natural ingredients like vitamin E and lecithin were never taken out in the first place!
So now that the oil is supermarket friendly, what's next? Well, big businesses want to take the processing a little further and create products similar to butter. Margarine and spreads are created by catalyzing the reaction of oil with hydrogen using metals like nickel and aluminum at very high temperatures. This process can either create partially hydrogenated or fully hydrogenated oil meaning every double bond is saturated with hydrogen. Both forms raise health concerns because trace amounts of the nickel and aluminum can be detected in these products. Aluminum intake is linked to Alzheimer’s disease and Osteoporosis. They are serious illnesses that might be avoidable if you take charge of your health.
Let's deconstruct partially hydrogenated oil:
Partially hydrogenated products contain intermediate substances from the result of double bond shifts, alteration from cis to trans configuration, and other changes that have not yet been found by scientists. The reaction creates unnatural substances that cannot be beneficial to our health. These oil derivatives rob our body of the remaining essential fatty acids we ingest from other foods and coin them useless. Partially hydrogenated products have also been shown to raise cholesterol, decrease the beneficial high density lipoprotein (HDL) and disrupt the detoxification system of the liver.
Completely hydrogenated products are bad too because they have been shown to increase cholesterol and interfere with prostaglandin regulation.
