Talk:Animal fat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Food Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Food and drink, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of food and drink articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Start This article has been rated as Start-class on the quality scale.
Mid This article has been rated as mid-importance on the importance scale.

A little bit more of reality would not be bad in this article. Cholesterol is a normal constituant of mammals, and is produced by some of our cells. Excess of it has impact on the quality of our arteres, among others, but it is also an essential lipid, part of our brain, it is also a constituant of cell membranes. And though not essential in nutrition, animal fat is certainly not only *bad*.

I didn't say it's bad, only that it's generally considered unhealthy - that's certainly the prevailing view among the US medical community. The good thing about butter, clearly, is its amazing ability to make practically anything taste much better. Mkweise 17:45 Apr 18, 2003 (UTC)
Hello Mkweise. Sorry, I put the comment above without realising you were just editing the article at that point. Please, remember that the encyclopedia is not only a list of views prevailing among US medical community. The view you put is certainly not prevailing in african community, where people starving and lacking basic nutrients, included fats and vitamins would benefit from these much needed fats. Animals fats are essential to some cultures.
Umm...you can't seriously be suggesting that starving people spend their limited resources on such luxuries as butter or meat instead of millet and pulses to sustain them?! (Reminds me of Marie Antoinette's famously ignorant statement: "What, the peasants have no bread? Let them eat cake, then!") Mkweise
Yes, I like that Marie Antoinette comment a lot. But, hum, in some places, animal fats are (or were) more available than vegetable fat. I am thinking of eskimos there...or...people living in desert, who rely on herds for energy and fat intake. Also, I think (if I am not wrong on the word translation), that millet is a cereal, and that cereals show rather little content in fats. These are more interesting for the cellulose content and the glucide (sugars ?) content. Fats are more likely to be found in oleic plants, such as rape, sunflowers, arachid, soja...but, right, I guess it was just an example you gave perhaps.
Yes, millet is a cereal - it's indigenous to Africa and much better suited to be cultivated there than wheat or maize etc., as it needs much less water to grow. Cereals do contain small amounts of fat and fatty vitamins in the germ, but most of their energy content is in the form of starch. Fat is not essential to human nutrition, anyway - your liver can produce all the fat you need from carbohydrates (sugar, starch) - but some vitamins that occur only in conjunction with fat are. In a warm climate, all it takes to prevent a human being from starving is a handful of cereal grains and a tablespoon of pulses (double those amounts for growing children.) Fat are only necessary to survive in cold climates, where the body must expend thousands of calories per day just to maintain body temperature. That's why Eskimos need to eat blubber and such. Mkweise 19:56 Apr 18, 2003 (UTC)
Hum. I disagree with the fact we need no fat except in cold weather (though I certainly agree we need more fat in cold areas). There are some polyinsaturated fats our bodies are not able to synthetise, such as some you can find in rape oil (canola ?). Our liver just doesnot know how to produce them and I don't think you would find these in cereals. Or at least not in big enough quantities. I am not sure you can find these lipids in leguminous plants. We call them acides alpha-linoléniques
You've got to distignuish between starvation and malnutrition. A handful of grain and a tablespoon of pulses is the minimum one needs to stay alive, but not enough to maintain ideal health.

Well, malnutrition is also a major issue ! And we should aim to every living person on Earth not only *not* starving, but also be in good health, which comes first from a good nutrition.

Still, there are people in Africa who don't even get that. Most cereal grains contain between 1% and 2% fat, which is plenty to provide the microscopic quantities of vitamin A, vitamin E and essential fatty acids one needs.

Sorry, but here, I really disagree. There are plenty of people in bad health because they are missing the much needed vitamin A. Otherwise, some labs would not be so busy trying to make GMO golden rice (and lying about it, for it contains far less vitamin A than they claim). It is not because a cereal contain 1 or 2 % fat (they actually contain a bit more than that if I recall well) that it provides enough essential fats. These ones are not available from all cereals, and certainly not in high quantities enough for someone to be in "good health". Even in developed countries, many nutrionnists (perhaps not the americans ?) insist the key is diversity; using different oils in turns (or depending on the food you put it in) to ensure you get all the different nutrients your body does not know how to synthetise.

Wheat germ oil is actually one of the healthiest oils there is, you can buy it in very small bottles for very much money.)

very true. But, wheat is not available everywhere. And it is quite expensive

Pulses (dried legumes) contain between 4 and 12% fat. People die every day because they don't get enough total calories or enough protein/amino acids, but I've never heard of anyone dieing from lack of alpha-linoleic acid. So if we're going to send something to help the people starving in central Africa, $1 worth of beans or grain would help them a lot more than $1 worth of fat - not to mention $1 invested in a well to provide safe drinking water.Mkweise 22:13 Apr 18, 2003 (UTC)

I agree with the fact proper drinking water and enough beans is a more important issue, and worth solving. However, you might have not heard of it...it was about 15-20 years ago, some organisations had decided to sent refined oil to some african countries where famines were occuring (I think it was Ethiopia, but I am not entirely sure of this) and little oil sources were available. After a bunch of months, they had to realise it was a very bad move as many kids were lacking vit a. Providing palm oil quickly solved the pb. And I repeat, it is not a certain amount of fat which guarantee the amount of essential fats.

If I dare add, I do not agree at all with your position on butter. A fresh slightly salted butter is something absolutely delightful. And fried potatoes can only get a very brownish color when saute with both vegetable oil and butter. That's a culinary secret.:-) User:anthere
As previously indicated, my position on butter is that it makes everything taste better, and I can wholeheartedly agree with its description as delightful. Ghee (clarified butter) is an irreplacable ingredient in nearly everything I cook; I even use it for deep frying. Mkweise 18:26 Apr 18, 2003 (UTC)
oups, sorry, I understood the opposite. My mistake. I do not dare deep frying with butter. This is a little too decadant for me. Besides, butter lactose degrade at high temperature, and it gives a strange taste. Have you tried clarified butter for deep frying ? I heard it was divine...just need time to prepare it...
Sorry if I was unclear above - I use only clarified butter (ghee) for cooking; the only thing I use raw butter for (aside from making ghee) is to spread on bread. And yes indeed, breads and sweet pastries deep-fried in clarified butter is probably what the gods eat. Mkweise
Do you do the clarified butter yourself, or are you able to buy it somewhere ? I heard it took quite a lot of time to do it by yourself. Have you ever tried to do your puff pastry yourself ?
I make it myself - it's fresher and cheaper that way, although you can buy clarified butter (called ghee) in cans at any Indian or Asian food market. It does take some time, but I do it in a very large pot so it'll last me about half a year even after I give several jars away to friends. Watch the article at ghee, I'll put some detailed instructions there when I get a chance. Mkweise 22:13 Apr 18, 2003 (UTC)
Oh, yes please do ! Several months....my...no indian and asian food market here...clarified butter is hand made, or it is not :-)

(Written before you posted the above reply) Anthere: I personally don't believe that dietary intake of cholesterol significantly affects blood cholesteral levels (and my personal experience with blood cholesterol tests before and after a dietary change supports that), but AFAIK the mainstream view is otherwise. I thought I was being boldly NPOV (despite the prevailing anti-fat bias) when I wrote the bit that you seem to consider too anti-fat. We could use some input from someone who takes the other view and can supply arguments in its favor. Mkweise

The mainstream view in developped countries is probably this one. But...at least in mine, doctors agree it does not affect so much. But, they do not dare say it very loud after many years saying otherwise :-) What about adding something about culture relying on animal fats such as those mentionned above perhaps ?

[edit] Edits

I changed the phrase "generally accepted" to "often claimed" because the former implies a scientific consensus that does not actually exist. See Taubes, Gary (2001), "The Soft Science of Dietary Fat" Science 291(5513):2536 - 2545

I also changed the phrase "by definition essentially zero" re vegan cholesterol consumption to "very low," as plants are a source of a small but non-zero amount of dietary cholesterol. See Cholesterol in plants. Verbivorous 19:41, 23 August 2006 (UTC)