Wednesday, April 18, 2007

this is why no one understands the fat/carb dichotomy

.... Including me, really. Although this page discussing the structures of fats is certainly helpful.

Nobel Prize winner Paul Sabatier (1854-1941, at right) is considered the father of the hydrogenation process. He discovered in 1897 that the metal, nickel, catalyzes, or facilitates, the attachment of hydrogen to carbon compounds.

In the actual process, workers heat the oil to very high temperatures and bubble hydrogen gas through it in the presence of nickel or some other catalytic metal. Since the vegetable oils are unsaturated, they can take on a few more hydrogens.

When they do, the molecule stiffens, and the fat is now closer to a solid. They can control just how firm it gets by how long they pump the gas through. That's why you'll sometimes see the term 'partially hydrogenated' on ingredient labels.

Which is precisely why I quit eating margarine and Crisco six years ago. I always thought Parkay had a vaguely metallic taste to it....

If you're interested in natural foods, particularly dairy, I highly recommend reading the rest of the site. Of course I'm the choir behind the preacher, so you may not find it as amusing as I do.

Considering raw milk's role throughout history, it's simple to see that it's not a deadly food. If it were, all those dairy-loving primitive cultures would have died out long ago, leaving their vegetarian cousins to mind the store. At the very least, people would have dropped it from their diets entirely. And we haven't even gotten to germ theory yet...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"It's simple to see that raw milk is not a deadly food."

I am living proof of that. Until I was six, the family obtained our milk from a farm at the edge of the small town where we lived. There was an interlude of a year or so where we got store-bought, but the winter I was eight, my brothers and I cut firewood for a neighbor in the rural community where we lived at the time-our pay: raw milk.
SG