This is adapted slightly from an article I wrote for the solar plexus chakra mini-cookbook. This energy center is in your upper abdomen, two finger-widths above the bellybutton. It’s where your gut sense of a situation resides, where fiery determination arises, where the digestive system is most influenced. If you want a week’s worth of recipes that are great for powering it up, check that cookbook out!
It seems like more and more of the recipes I see are harping on a common point: how to “lighten up” your food. How to use applesauce in your brownies instead of oil, or cook your chicken without the skin, or (I am not even kidding) substituting water for most of the olive oil in a vinaigrette.
Fear of fat is tremendous in our society. And as we know – I think Yoda explained this – fear comes from ignorance.
Fat is GOOD. Bad fats are bad, of course, just like a rotten tomato is bad. Tomatoes themselves are still good, and so are olive oil, lard, butter, and coconut oil.
Those are your four fabulous fats. Coconut oil, in particular, boosts the digestive and immune systems and the metabolism. It has been used in all kinds of alternative healing; its cousin palm oil is supposed to be just as good, but is harder to find here in the United States.
Olive oil is crammed full of antioxidants. It also lowers cholesterol! Much like cacao butter, which should really be in here as a fifth fabulous fat for its cholesterol-lowering, skin-moisturizing, antioxidant-laden fabulousness – but I was thinking of savory dinner-type applications when I wrote this.
Lard and butter’s presences on this list may come as a surprise. This is what fatphobia does to our society – leaves us eating low-fat over-processed foods, choosing trans fats over saturated fats, and all ignorant of how much fat is healthy. Lard is actually better for us than butter, not quite as good as olive oil.
Michelle Gienow of the Baltimore City Paper explains, “As it turns out, the government’s nutritional sat-fats data used to lump natural fats together with industrial fats like hydrogenated vegetable oil. When you split out the different kinds of fat, the artery clogger was not butter but trans fats.
“Butter–so long as it comes from grass-fed cows–may actually help keep arteries clear, thanks to newly discovered vitamin K2. K2 has been shown to both strengthen bone and prevent arterial calcification. Coconut oil, long shunned as one of the most highly saturated of all fats, has been shown to improve the HDL/LDL ratio, raising the level of ‘good’ HDL cholesterol in the blood while lowering ‘bad’ LDL. And, interestingly, lard– rendered pig fat–is mostly unsaturated oleic acid, the same exact fat in olive oil–monounsaturated, the healthiest of all fats.”
And nutritionist Julia Ross, author of The Diet Cure, observes that fat intake increases the amount of serotonin and tryptophan available to us, and cites a study that showed participants’ moods deteriorating on a 25-percent fat diet, unlike their 41-percent counterparts. Here are some of her “fat facts”:
A Harvard study of forty thousand nurses found that the 20 percent with the lowest fat intake had the highest rate of cancer.
[Inuits] had normal cholesterol levels for thousands of years on a diet consisting of 75 percent animal fat.
Mediterraneans, too, are notably free of heart disease, although they consume diets containing 40 percent fat (mostly from olive oil).
Scandinavians, the Celtic, Irish, and north coast Native Americans, among others, have high genetic requirements for
the fats that they traditionally got from their original fish-based diets. Depression and alcoholism are two conditions that they suffer now that their diets are much lower in fish and the natural fats that fish contain.
We all need the essential fat-soluble vitamins A and E that low-fat diets jeopardize. Some of the most dramatic functions of vitamins A and E are to maintain our immune system and our eyesight
and to protect against stroke and liver disease.
Every cell in the body is protected by a lining of fat.
The brain is 60 percent fat.
Look for humanely-raised lard at Niman Ranch, or from any producer at your local health food store, food co-op, or Whole Foods. My local farmer’s market carries it at the Prather Ranch booth. You can often find coconut oil in the same places. (Except for ranches!) And of course butter and olive oil are easy to find; look for organic extra-virgin olive oil, and butter that comes with some kind of assurance that the cows producing it were treated humanely and grass-fed.
And if you have any other fats lying around (I’m looking at you, margarine!) consider using them to make your own fat-based sculpture like the one above.
