The Myths of Seed Oils: Why Margarine and Vegetable Oil Might Be Harming Your Health

In this episode of Crunchy Stewardship, cousins Katie Jones and Chrissy Rombach delve into the controversial topic of seed oils. The hosts clarify what seed oils are, their chemical properties, and the health implications of consuming them. They discuss the history and political landscape that led to the widespread use of seed oils and contrast them with more stable, healthier fats like butter, tallow, and coconut oil. The episode provides practical advice on choosing and using healthier oils, the significance of cold-pressed oils, and tips for integrating these into daily life. Chrissy and Katie also share personal anecdotes, book recommendations, and emphasize the importance of making informed, incremental changes to improve overall health and honor God.

Episode Takeaway: 

Understanding the historical and chemical differences between traditional saturated fats and modern seed oils reveals how our dietary recommendations have been fundamentally flipped, impacting our health and highlighting the importance of choosing stable, natural fats for optimal wellness. 

Links & Things Mentioned in This Episode:

• Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats https://amzn.to/3SLKo4b 

Types of Good Oils/Fats 

• Pure Tallow
• Avocado Oil
• Olive Oil
• Coconut Oil 
• Ghee
• Almond Oil 
• Sesame Oil 

Organic & gold pressed are BEST

Chapters: 

00:00 Welcome to Crunchy Stewardship
00:59 Introduction to Seed Oils
02:07 Understanding Unsaturated Fats
07:17 The History and Politics of Seed Oils
09:25 Health Impacts of Seed Oils
21:57 Choosing the Right Oils for Cooking
26:46 Smoke Point of Fats and Oils
32:31 Practical Tips for Healthier Choices
38:28 Final Thoughts and Resources

Connect With Us:

Join Our Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/crunchychristianmama

Follow us on Instagram @crunchystewardship 

FREE How to Afford Non-Toxic Living Workbook: https://crunchystewardship.com/how-to-afford-non-toxic-living

Transcript

Katie: 0:00

Hey, and welcome to Crunchy Stewardship. My name is Katie Jones.

Chrissy: 0:03

And my name is Chrissy Rombach. We are two cousins who are passionate about learning and sharing knowledge to equip others to steward their spiritual, mental, emotional, financial, and physical health in order to honor God in every aspect of their lives.

Katie: 0:19

In this podcast, we are taking a deep dive into what it means to steward our lives as God originally intended for us. With the resources that God has given us, we will look at topics like food, medicine, finances, mental health, and lots more through a natural lens and with a biblical foundation.

Chrissy: 0:40

But before we get started, if you've been enjoying our episode, make sure you like and subscribe to us and leave a five star rating. This helps other people find our show in the future. And, if you're not already signed up for our weekly newsletter, go and take a moment and do that by clicking the link in the show notes.

Katie: 0:59

In today's episode, we are switching gears a little bit. We recently talked about essential oils, and now we are going to look at seed oils. Now seed oils get a very bad wrap today. I think a lot of us kind of know seed oils as this like hot button topic and we know that it's something that we should be looking out for. For me, actually, I had been hearing this a ton, like, don't eat seed oils. If you see seed oils in your foods, avoid it. But I literally think probably like four months ago, I didn't actually know what seed oils were and I was like, well, okay, I don't see anything on ingredients list that says a seed oil specifically. So I was kind of confused exactly what it meant when people said seed oils. So maybe Chrissy, you can help clear it up for those of us who are a little unsure about what seed oils actually are.

Chrissy: 2:07

Yeah, so seed oils, they can be a little bit sneaky sometimes because like you said, it's not specifically mentioned in the ingredients list. Seed oil. Now conveniently some seed oils. Do technically say seed in the case of sunflower seed oil or safflower seed oil or grape seed oil. Those very specifically say this kind of seed oil. But other seed oils like vegetable oil and canola oil, do not say that. Now, what characterizes a seed oil as such is its chemical properties of being an unsaturated fat. Now. Unsaturated fat essentially means that in the chemical compound of the oil, it has some, I don't know how to say this specifically.

Katie: 3:01

Well, so I was reading about this in my wonderful book, which we will add a link to because I love this book already. It's called Nourishing Traditions, the Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition, and the Diet Dictocrats, and

Chrissy: 3:18

Ooh.

Katie: 3:18

I actually really like it. It's kind of like a super nerdy cookbook that brings in science and chemistry with politics and then nutrition, and it's kind of like mind blowing the way that they help you understand like how we got to the place that we're at with things like seed oils and just general nutrition and food and yeah, she was talking about the polyunsaturated fats that have. This is back to chemistry class, right? So you think about all of the connecting molecules when you would do like carbon, carbon, carbon and do the CCCC or whatever, is it hydrogen? I don't even remember. H, H, HH. And then you'd have the lines, either the double bond with the two lines or the single line that has a single bond. And whenever they have the double bond, it's like when there is a kink in the strand, and here I am on our video. I, and you guys can't see this right now as I'm describing it, but there's a little teepee over my head as I'm like, there's a kink in the strand and I'm only showing Chrissy

Chrissy: 4:17

Just creating a crown.

Katie: 4:18

Anyway, it's, it's one of those things that you, you really don't need to know the, specifics of it, but it's, I'll let Chrissy kind of keep going with it like what that means, when there's these spaces and kinks in the, the chemical strands of things. Chrissy, you wanna take it away?

Chrissy: 4:33

So essentially, these unsaturated fats are missing pieces of the puzzle, which causes them to be very reactive and they're unstable, so they're more likely to bind to other compounds, and because of that, it can cause a lot of problems within our body. They bind to other nutrients within our digestive system and can actually prevent us from being able to absorb those nutrients well. Whereas with saturated fats, like animal fats such as, butter or tallow, those are saturated and so they're very stable, especially at high temperatures. And so. They don't try to bind with those other nutrients within our digestive system, which gives us the ability to continue to absorb all of the nutrients that we've eaten effectively.

Katie: 5:25

Just last night when I was reading this book, they were talking about the saturated fats and how they help us to absorb the fat soluble vitamins. Um, Especially things like vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin K, and vitamin E. And like you said, Chrissy, when you have these other polyunsaturated oils, which they go rancid very quickly, and especially when they are exposed to high heat. And so they, they don't allow our bodies to actually absorb these vitamins and minerals and everything very effectively. But, you know, so you think about something like skim milk that's been pasteurized. It's literally like there is no fat in this milk, and we've been taught that skim milk is supposedly the healthier option, but it's really not healthy because they've, they've stripped out a lot of the good stuff and it's not helping our body to absorb things that would be good in the milk as well as like with other foods. And so we actually need like higher fat contents in things like our milk and, you know, cooking oils, so butter or tallow or even like eating the fat on meat. I used to avoid that more for a texture thing, but now I'm like, oh, wow. This is actually really beneficial because it helps to keep our brains growing effectively and our bodies taking in all the vitamins and being able to absorb them and use them properly. And I just, I don't know. Fat has always been made out to be this like terrible culprit. And I actually, in this book, again, it kind of goes through a lot of the politics and history of like, how did we get here? Because clearly when you, when you look at stuff like this, you're like. Well, seed oils are clearly so bad for us and they're destroying our health. Like how did we get to this point? And, I also read some other stuff that was outside of this book, but interestingly enough, like back in, I think World War II Canada was actually contracted to make a ton of canola oil in order for the oil to be used in machines for war, right? So like to oil up and grease up different machines and things. Well, after the war was over, they now had this abundance of canola oil and they're like, what do we do with it? And they're like, let's put it in our foods. And in some ways they're like, okay, we don't want to waste this resource. But they did know that it wasn't really great for us. And they had studies and this book, that I've been reading, the Nourishing Traditions, one kind of talks about how they hid a lot of the actual evidence that shows that seed oils are bad for us. And they tried to cover it up with saying that saturated fats, so the, more natural fats that we see from, animals, especially that those were the culprits for high cholesterol and all these things. And I did see that when you have fats, so like when you eat butter, your cholesterol will take a small spike like right when you have it, but then it actually evens out and then over time these saturated fats actually help your cholesterol to lower. Whereas on the opposite side, seed oils make your cholesterol spike and get way outta control. And so again, it's just like, it's so crazy how. We've kind of flipped the script so badly because people wanna make money off this kind of stuff.

Chrissy: 8:52

Yeah. Another thing that I learned interestingly enough is um, around the end of World War II, just like you were saying, when they had this abundance of canola oil. That's about the same time that the American Heart Association presented their health recommendations of using margarine and unsaturated fats like canola oil and vegetable oil and low fat foods as opposed to these animal fats with butter and, tallow and things like that. And right around that time, as soon as the American Heart Association made those recommendations, the rate of heart disease in our nation skyrocketed. You know, like in the twenties, it was unheard of for somebody to die of a heart attack because they just didn't have heart attacks. People were eating eggs, butter, and tallow on a daily basis, and heart attacks were. Not really a thing until after World War II, when the American Heart Association started recommending these low fat foods using polyunsaturated fats instead of the saturated fats. That's also when we see those heart attacks increasing heart disease increasing, and the true health of our country really took a turn for the worst at that point when we started seeing these unsaturated fats in, our grocery stores. And one thing to think about, you know in terms of like the consumer looking to buy something that tastes good. Fat tastes good. Us as humans are predisposed to have a desire for fat. It's part of our survival instincts because fat gives us long-term energy stores, and so back in the time periods when we didn't have an abundance of food and humans regularly went through periods of forced fasting during famines and things like that, they were reliant upon their fat stores. And so, when food was readily available, they were predisposed to desire fatty foods, which we still have that predisposition. It's just that, especially here in America, we don't have the issue of famine causing problems unless we're talking about the bird flu and eggs right now. But that's a different story. And so, the fat also, gives the food more flavor. And when the American Heart Association recommended to take out these saturated fats and use unsaturated fats, which are more in the form of oil and margarine. I don't know if you've ever like had a spoonful of butter versus a spoonful of margarine

Katie: 11:38

So different.

Chrissy: 11:38

Margarine's disgust. It's disgusting. It tastes like cardboard. And so unfortunately that that's what happens when you take the fat out of food. It leaves it with very little flavor. And so in order to combat that, obviously the consumer's not gonna buy something that tastes bad. The food production companies actually added sugar into the foods in order to make them taste better so that consumers would actually buy the low fat products. And we have learned now that, blood sugar spikes from that sugar and therefore insulin spikes from the blood sugar spikes have continued to lead to an increase in heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, dementia, even. Studies have shown that increased levels of insulin in the body from these increased sugar intake is one of the reasons that we have dementia so much on the rise right now. And so I think it's really important to kind of take a step back and look at the history of. Okay, so this, all these political agendas is what got us to this place to begin with. And so how can I get back to eating food how God created it. You know, if you look at the food that God gave Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they had plants and they had animals, and that

Katie: 13:06

Mm-hmm.

Chrissy: 13:06

is about it. You don't see refined sugar anywhere in there. And so if we bring our diets back to fruits, vegetables, and meat and using animal derived fats in order to cook our food, then we are going to decrease those glucose levels in our body, decrease those insulin levels in our bodies and give our bodies the ability to heal from these heart disease and high cholesterol and diabetes and potentially prevent dementia in the future. And so it, it's really fascinating, all these things that I've learned about it, and I just wanna keep on learning because. It, it's a developing story at this point of we have people who are actually willing to say, hold up. This isn't right. And. You know, the, the doctors who are saying this are actually getting a lot of flack for it. Some of them are even being threatened to have their MD license taken away, which I think is incredibly unfortunate because they're discovering the true realities of our health that these chronic illnesses are reversible, but the American healthcare system doesn't want these chronic illnesses to be reversible because if people don't have the chronic illnesses, then the healthcare companies. Can't make money off of them. I

Katie: 14:29

Exactly.

Chrissy: 14:30

Just like I've said before, you know, healthy people are not beneficial for the healthcare economy because they don't buy medications every single week. They don't go to the doctor six times a year. They go to the doctor once they don't get meds and doctors don't get kickbacks from them buying organic food. And, sorry.

Katie: 14:48

I have I have to take a minute and explain the process of. Creating margarine or shortening. I literally read this to Wes because I was like, this is so disgusting. And in my book, I write on the side, disgusting in huge capital letters. So, it's the process of hydrogenation and it's basically taking the polyunsaturated fats. So they use, you know, cheap oils like vegetable, canola, soy, or corn oils, even cotton seed oils. Actually here it says. And these, these oils, like I said, are already rancid. They've already been oxidized, which, you know, it makes them very highly volatile when they're heated up. so they take them after their extraction process and they mix them with tiny metal particles, usually nickel oxide. And then after that, the next step is they pump in soap like emulsifiers and starch in order to give it that like fluffier consistency that you would see in a butter. And then after that, they heat it up. They steam clean it at super high temperatures. This is to allow them to remove the unpleasant odor. It says. That has come from this process now, but then, so now you have this stick of margarine. However, apparently when you do this, it comes out gray. So you just, it's just a, a really unappetizing gray. So in order to remove the grayness from it. They remove that with bleach, and so they bleach it and then they add in dyes and strong flavors in order for it to resemble butter, and then finally it's compressed and put into those little blocks that we get at the grocery store or the tubs, and they are sold as a health food. Now, I don't know about you, Chrissy, growing up, we actually had the, I can't believe it's not butter in our refrigerator and

Chrissy: 16:48

that. I, I remember going to your house growing up and loving the fact that you always had the, I cannot believe it's not butter, because I never had it. My parents were very intentional. They said we need to have the high quality Irish butter, Kerrygold only. And so I loved going to your house'cause you had, I can't believe it's not butter. And I always wanted toast because then I could have that butter.

Katie: 17:15

is just so funny and, and I don't blame my parents for like feeding us this kind of garbage because again, like the marketing for these things was done so well that pretty much the whole world believes that this is the healthier route, that, oh, saturated fats are the problem to our health, and so we need to remove them and bring in these fats that are derived from, you know, cheap Oils. So they take the corn that they don't wanna actually feed us or even feed to cattle, and they're like, we're gonna make this into oil and call it healthy, and then we're gonna make it into this margarine. And it's just like, oh my gosh. Like I am never going to look at margarine the same after knowing that they put metal into it and then they bleach it and that, I mean, when they said that it turns gray and they have to bleach it just to make sure it's not gray. I was like, huh so gross!.

Chrissy: 18:12

I don't know about you. Last time I checked. There's not very many foods that grow naturally that are gray. Gray is a very unappetizing color. I. Probably because it doesn't show up naturally. They don't like, even in kids' foods, they avoid gray food coloring because nobody wants to eat a gray food. Nobody

Katie: 18:34

wants gray. Yeah, so polyunsaturated. Fats are considered rancid, which means that they are oxidized because they've been subjected to that high heat. And then what I was learning was that rancid oils are characterized by free radicals, which the free radicals are really the things that end up causing all of these issues with us. And on the Far end of the spectrum. It, it causes all these really intense chronic illnesses, but even just things like, you know, free radical damage, causes like skin damage and wrinkles, premature aging, it causes damage to your tissues and organs, and, and really sets the stage inside of your organs for tumors to be produced. I mean, this paragraph here is like going through every area of your body and like free radicals will go and just destroy it all. And, one of the things too that I was learning about fats and oils is we've kind of heard like Omega-3 fatty acids are good for us and there's not a lot of mention to Omega-6 fatty acids and our bodies need a balance of these two, But when we have too much of the polyunsaturated fats, our body, then creates too much Omega-6 fatty acids, and then we have too few of the Omega-3 fatty acids. We need both, but we need it to like a one-to-one ratio. But when we have the polyunsaturated fats, I think it was somewhere in here, it said that there's an imbalance. It's something like 19 to 1 Omega-6 fatty acids to Omega-3. And so when you have an overproduction of Omega-6. it says in this book that it interferes with the production of prostaglandins, and if you don't know what prostaglandins are, but basically, prostaglandins are good for fighting off the bad stuff, such as tumors or you know, cancerous cells, inflammation, it helps fight for high blood pressure it helps fight off the irritation in your gut track it, it does all of the good stuff. It's kind of almost like that added protection for your body. And so if you have too much Omega-6, it's blocking the prostaglandins and your prostaglandins are a good part of your immune system. And so with the seed oils, we miss out on that. And so we need to start dousing things in butter, and I love it right now. So my, my underground crunchy mama friends and I, we joke all the time about like butter and all this stuff. And my friend like made some banana bread and like put like a whole stick of butter and melted it on the top of the banana bread. And she's like, I'm just feeding this to my kids. And then I sent a picture back of like, I just gave Malachi a stick of butter. And he's literally just like eating it and it's just, it is so funny sometimes,'cause like, like even a year ago, me would look at this and be like, you are crazy girl. But the more that I'm learning and the more that I'm actually diving into some of the science and the history of all this, I'm like, how do we get here? This is crazy. And the fact that we all believe this to be the case, that like seed oils are the, the, the healthier route. It's just. It so crazy to me, but what do you, should we do from here, Chrissy?

Chrissy: 21:57

so we, we said the, the fats and the oils that are good to use are tallow and butter, and then behind that would be avocado oil and olive oil. They're not as great as tallow and butter, but they're still good. If you think about the process of how these four oils are created, it's a process called cold pressing where they literally take the fat or the milk fat or the olive or the avocado, and they squeeze it and out comes oil. I don't know if you've ever tried to squeeze an olive. They're oily. If you squeeze fat, it's oily. You could squeeze it with your hands and oil comes out, you know? But these other oils, like, think of sunflower oil. When was the last time you tried to squeeze a sunflower seed and you got oil out of it like that just doesn't happen. And so these seed oils, these seeds cannot be cold pressed in order to create the oil because they're just not oily things. And so that's why they have to go through this super intense process, this super toxic process in order to create these oil from non-oil things. yeah, With that, definitely oils to avoid are vegetable oil, shortening margarine, canola oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, peanut oil, even though peanuts aren't seeds, but it's still a seed oil.

Katie: 23:29

I have heard that things like peanut or even sesame oil. Can be okay as long as it is specifically stated that it is cold pressed. Because if something, and, and even with. Like olive oil, it could be cold pressed or it could not be, and it could go through this highly volatile process where it includes like using bleach in order to get the oils out and, and it uses like a chemical processing. And so if you do choose to do something like peanut or sesame or even like sunflower oil, like it, they specifically have to be cold pressed. And even like I have like an almond oil body, oil I guess it is,

Chrissy: 24:14

Mm-hmm.

Katie: 24:15

It's, it's literally just an oil but it's, yeah, it's almond and it is specifically like an organic cold pressed almond oil. And this was like actually in the beginning of my seed oil journey, I kind of like read a little bit about it and I was like, okay, cold pressed is a better process for things like peanuts and sesames and almonds and anything that's more of like that nut, it's much harder. And so those things become more expensive when you buy them as a cold pressed option because like Chrissy said, they're not necessarily like oily oily, like peanuts do have a lot of oil. Like you think when they mash them up and then they make peanut butter, you really don't need to add in oil because there are oils in it. It's just harder to get to because you have to go through a, deeper pressing and grinding process than something like tallow where it's easier.

Chrissy: 25:04

While you were talking Katie, I did the honors of Google searching whether or not Chick-fil-A's peanut oil was cold pressed. It is not.

Katie: 25:13

Chrissy,

Chrissy: 25:14

I am trying to find any reason to go to Chick-fil-A and they are letting me down.

Katie: 25:20

yeah, I, I had a conversation with some friends at dinner the other night, and our friend jokingly was like. Didn't I hear somewhere that Chick-fil-A adds MSG to their, chicken nuggets and their chicken patties and we're like, yeah

Chrissy: 25:36

Absolutely. Their number one chicken sandwich with bread, chicken pickles. Bread has 50 ingredients in it,

Katie: 25:47

what?

Chrissy: 25:47

including blue and yellow dye. Why? Why, why it, it, it just makes me so sad. Anyway, sorry, we're getting off topic.

Katie: 25:57

The other oil too that I have learned that is really healthy and we've been trying to use a lot more of is coconut oil. It actually has like a natural antibiotic property to it. And so I've actually learned this. This might be. Like could be helpful for someone, but it's also strange, I have not tested this out, but I heard that coconut oil can be a really great natural way to help, fight yeast infections. And so because it has that more like antibacterial property, it can help fight off the yeast. So, coconut oil can also be good just to like eat with a spoon because it also can help fight like infections that you have. So if it's kind of a natural antibiotic almost, then if you have any sort of infections, it can help with that. So, yeah, I don't know.

Chrissy: 26:46

Interesting that, that reminds me that, another way that you can identify whether or not in oil or a fat is good to use for cooking or merely just to like put on things is whether or not it is solid at room temperature. Oftentimes those fats that are solid at room temperature are those saturated fats that are very stable and less volatile. They're not gonna give you those free radicals to damage your cells. And so that goes to show like butter, ghee, tallow, coconut oil, those are all solid at room temperature. So they're very good to use for cooking. Katie, I also wanted to mention like. Important things to think about in terms of the temperature that each of these products is getting to because, you know, each of these good fats that we are talking about nonetheless still do have like a maximum temperature that they are still considered good and they each still go rancid once they get hot enough. Cause you know, think about butter, it turns brown. You can still burn butter and then it tastes disgusting. And so we're looking at either the burn point or the smoke point of these oils. Because each of these oils do have a different temperature at which they do go rancid, unfortunately, like. You add heat to anything, it's going to disrupt the chemical compound of it. And so these animal products, animal oils can still go bad, but it's important to know at what point they go bad so that you can use. These oils appropriately. So the thing that you wanna focus on is the smoke point of each of these oils. And so some oils you're gonna wanna focus on using a lower temperature cooking such as butter, tallow, and unrefined coconut oil. Unrefined coconut oil just means they take the coconut oil and they. Leave it as is. So it has a lot of that, like coconutty flavor to it. But those ones have a smoke point of about three 50 to 400 degrees. So good for just quickly making an egg on the stove, maybe some sauteing of vegetables or, cooking meat or things like that. On a stove, you're not getting super, super hot or anything, but then once you start getting over that 400 degrees, that's when those three, the butter, tallow, and unrefined coconut oil, their chemical compounds can start breaking down because that heat impacts them and changes them. That's just the reality of chemistry and so. Once you're getting above 400 degrees, you can use olive oil. Its smoke point is just about four 10, so just over 400 degrees, but still not great to use if you're getting much hotter than that. If you are getting hotter than 410 degrees. It's important to use virgin refined coconut oil. So refined coconut oil merely just means that they squeeze out the impurities through a cold press process. It is still okay to eat refined coconut oil, but they do cold press process to get out the impurities, which also then takes out that coconut flavor from it, so it's a more neutral flavored coconut oil that does have a higher smoke point because all those impurities that burn have been taken out. So that smoke point is about 450 degrees. And then much higher than that we have ghee and avocado oil, about 480 to 510 degrees Fahrenheit. And so if you're cooking something really, really hot, like you're frying chicken, you know that oil has to be really hot in order to use, and so I would recommend using ghee or avocado oil for those. Whereas if you're just cooking something quick on the stove, you know, an egg or piece of chicken or something like that, you can use those oils with a lower smoked point, like butter tallow or unrefined coconut oil. I also wanted to touch on exactly what ghee is because it's not an oil that we use very frequently in America. So I'm sure most people have actually seen if you take butter and you throw it in the microwave or you put it on the stove, it kind of separates a little bit. You have like a film on the top of like the, fluff, I guess It ki it kind of looks like fluff.

Katie: 31:14

Totally fluff.

Chrissy: 31:15

You know, you have the film on the top and then you get the clearer layer on the bottom. So that layer of stuff on the top is that milk fat, that will get scraped away. And then what's left underneath is a clarified butter. And the higher you heat it up, the more clarified it gets until it goes rancid, of course. But. What that is, that's left is the ghee. So ghee is pretty much like a, a clarified version of butter with less milk fat in it, essentially, but it's more saturated, so it's good So yeah, that, that's just like Recommendation on how to use these oils fats appropriately while you're cooking. It's good to keep in mind. They also have different flavor profiles. So if you're going for more of like a, buttery, like animal kind, like steak kind of flavor, you might use butter or tallow. But if you're going, if you're sauteing vegetables or making like a vegetable soup or something like that. You might wanna stay away from those and use more avocado oil or coconut oil, you know, things that are gonna bring out more like plant flavors, I guess so to say. Or you could just be like me and don't really care which oil you're using because you don't really cook that hot anyways, so you just use whatever you got.

Katie: 32:28

That's a good point

Chrissy: 32:30

I don't fry things very often.

Katie: 32:31

One of the last things that I had to share is just that, and this was something I stumbled upon, but the container that the oils come in, especially if they are more of that liquid at room temperature, so like olive oil or avocado oil or even like now you think of vegetable or canola oil, you want it in a dark bottle that is glass and kind of keeps the light from getting into it because it just helps to keep it better over time. So you think about the fact that vegetable oil or canola oil, when you go and get it at the grocery store, typically in a plastic clear container. And it's like clearly they don't care what is happening to that oil'cause it's already oxidized so much and it's already rancid, it's already bad for you. And so it's just like, you just throw it in a plastic bottle and call it good. And you're like, okay, clearly this thing is not of superior quality. We kind of talked about that too with, essential oils. Like you need to have them in bottles that will keep the quality of it over time because it keeps the light out. So anyway, it's just like one of those things that I never really paid attention to, but even like the olive oil and the avocado oil we have here at our home is in these like darker colored bottles. And yeah, I just never knew that there was a purpose behind it. So if you ever see like olive oil in something clear, then you also know it's probably not a good version of olive oil, and again it's probably not, like cold stuff.

Chrissy: 34:03

Right.

Katie: 34:04

So I just thought that was interesting.

Chrissy: 34:05

Another thing that I am just now remembering that I learned a while ago about olive oil and avocado oil is unfortunately, the price really does buy you the quality, and so if you're getting a lower quality olive oil that's in that plastic bottle, oftentimes if you look on the back of it, you can see where the olives were sourced from, and it's important to look for an olive oil that has one single source. Because if it is sourced from four or five different countries, then it's likely that the olive oil has been cut with other unsaturated oils like canola oil or vegetable oil, just to increase the quantity without. Having to say that it's actually in it, unfortunately. So it's important to look for those single origin olive oils and avocado oils, because that's one way you can also guarantee that the oil has not been cut with other unsaturated oils.

Katie: 35:08

Wow. There's there's so much. I mean, I, I feel like even when, as I'm looking at my book here in front of me, I'm like, man, there's so many other things that I would love to share and that are just like mind blowing things of, of all the benefits of even just needing fat and what it could do for you and everything. But we are kind of running outta time here, Chrissy. So why don't you give our listeners a tip or two to walk away with today of something they can start implementing in their own lives?

Chrissy: 35:39

Yeah, for sure. So, I don't know if I've shared before, but I am definitely in the camp of finish using what you have in your home and next time you buy something new, buy something completely new. You know, I am not one to go and throw out my entire pantry because everything has canola oil in it. You know, finish what you got, then buy something better. And so if you're using canola oil for brownies, then finish it up. You know, it's not, obviously it's not killed you yet, it's not gonna kill you in the next three days. But if you continue to buy it and continue to intentionally use those oils, now that you know better, we have provided the information for you, you know better. It is now your decision to make these choices for your health. And so from this point on, I would recommend next time you go to the grocery store to buy any sort of cooking oil, whether it be olive oil, avocado oil, tallow, ghee, whatever it is, coconut oil. Make sure you're buying yourself the good stuff so that you can take one step towards better health. What about you, Katie? Do you have any recommendations?

Katie: 36:52

I think that the tip I recommend is. It's actually, it's kind of a sneaky thing that I've noticed is that a lot of organic kind of processed foods, so if you think about chips or snacky foods, like granola bars or things like that, even though they are listed as organic, they often still have organic seed oils. And so even though they're listed as organic. They're still seed oils. And so that's been a hard thing for me is finding like good chips to eat and things like that, that are organic, but also don't add in seed oils. So it's been a process for me, but it just reading the labels and not just trusting the ones on the front, the like badges of honor, such as like organic, because even when they're organic, they might be laced with different seed oils and stuff unfortunately. So just like getting familiar with that stuff and being okay with saying yes sometimes to the seed oils, because again, like an organic seed oil is going to be better than a conventional seed oil. So if you really like a granola bar that you found that is organic but also has a seed oil. It's probably much better than like the Chewy brand that is just totally chemicals and not real food. So like being okay with the process, being slow. Chrissy says this all the time, is just like, take those slow steps and, and yeah, just like making the next right choice for you and your family and getting familiar with it all. But those are the tips that I have and yeah, you can also, I don't know if you've taken a look at our show notes before, but we also, we link to a lot of the things that we mention in our episodes, but we also link to our Facebook group, which is Crunchy Christian Mamas on a Budget. So you can always join us there. We link to our newsletter and we also have a wonderful guide to actually affording a non-toxic life. It's something that we recently came out with and it's a free workbook that you can download by joining our newsletter. And we send it to you and it just kind of gives you some tips on how to do all this non-toxic, holistic kind of crunchy stuff, but on a budget because we, we do, we wanna honor God with our bodies and our finances and yeah, just be able to glorify him in that way. So go and grab those things and check out the show notes for each of our episodes'cause we add lots of great resources there for you.

Chrissy: 39:25

We pray over each and every one of you guys, and we hope that these episodes can be helpful in your journey to becoming a better steward of your body, your mind, your soul, your spirit, your finances, and your families. We're praying that this episode was helpful for you and we'll see you next time.