One of the important characteristics of oils is that unlike animal fats they don't contain vitamin D that influences on the condition of bones and teeth. Vitamin D comes not only with food. Exposure to the sun and artificial sources of ultra-violet rays also generates vitamin D. For example, in northern regions the deficit of vitamin D among seniors turned out to be a latent epidemic. Most of seniors, especially vegetarians, get insufficient amount of this vitamin from food. Additionally, they spend little time in the sun. This results in bone softening and contributes to osteoporosis. Investigations in the USA and Great Britain show that 30-40 % of patients with thigh fracture suffer from vitamin D deficit. Physicians recommend to seniors at least three glasses of milk a day to compensate this deficiency. They say that milk shouldn't be law-fat and should be natural. But there is little vitamin D in milk. The highest concentrations of it can be found in marine foods. Therefore vegetarians and naturists who "don't eat anybody" and exclude animal fat from their diet should pay much attention to the sun since they don't get vitamin D with their food. It is clear that humans cannot do without it.
The absence of vitamin D in oils is just one more bluff used to talk people out of vegetarian diet. In fact, even for Englishmen who live on their "foggy Albion" the sunshine is a source of more vitamin D than any food. However, the diet is a very important source of this vitamin for those who spend little time in the sun.
The diet of modern people contains fat in abundance, and it is not hard to understand that one shouldn't increase the calorie content of meal adding much oil to foods. Oil can spoil all your meal: excess fat "steals" calcium and magnesium from the human body. They are transformed into soaps and are lost with excrements. Such a wrong diet increases a demand for magnesium three times more and it cannot be satisfied already. In fact, magnesium defends us from cardiac infarction. Fat deficit is even less dangerous. An adult person can be healthy consuming just 30 gram fat or even less. But we prefer to follow our habits of high fat consumption. It just tastes good. It is especially common for naturist-women who pour a lot of oil in their raw salads to avoid weight loss, often for cosmetic reasons. Another extremity, which is less common, is a diet consisting only of fruits and vegetables, especially among those who suffer from digestive disturbances and therefore reject seeds and nuts making their diet fat-free.
Scientific recommendations on fat consumption are changing very rapidly. Just recently it was recommended
eating more plant oils instead of animal fats. But it turned out that both fats and oils shorten our life. It is obvious now that a lot of harmful free radicals are formed in the body due to oil oxidation. They are aggressive molecule rests that are able to affect protein molecules and break biochemical reactions.
Not every oil has the same harmful effect on human body. Oil is a combination of various fatty acids. Say, the most widely used sunflower oil contains 60% of linoleic acid that is highly oxidable and therefore provides a lot of free radicals. By the way, they can completely destroy vitamin E that is used for their neutralization. However, we got used to believe that sunflower oil is a good source of vitamin E. Indeed, we get certain amount of this vitamin with oil. But we can fully neutralize vitamin E received from other sources just by pouring much oil in our food.
Not so long ago we were fed with facts that oils have healing effect. And still some people drink glasses of corn and sunflower oil to "avoid sclerosis" having no idea that they do exactly the opposite. Actually, the symptoms of ageing and vitamin E deficit coincide and now free radicals theory of ageing seems to be the most proved.
Experiments on animals demonstrate that if the amount of linoleic acid is 2% of calorie content, it leads to infertility because of full absence of vitamin E in the body. There are enough reasons to call this vitamin a reproduction vitamin: it is very important for good functioning of female and male reproductive system. Of course, it doesn't mean that sunflower oil can be considered as a mean for family planning. But it is possible that a woman, who loves sunflower oil, would be able to get pregnant after excluding oil from her diet. What are 2 % of calorie content? If your diet provides 2700 calories, it is 54 calories, contained in 6 gram of linoleic acid and this is
just 10 gram of sunflower oil!
What do the scientists from Nutritional Institute of USSR Academy of Medical Science recommend? In newspaper "Moskovskaya Pravda" on the 1st April 1989 in the rubric "Home doctor: recommendations for coming days" the head of Vitaminology Institute, doctor of medical science and professor convinced: "Get accustomed to oil. Remember, that adding it to boiled potato,
salads and vinaigrettes not only provides you with necessary amount of vitamin E but also decreases the risk of arteriosclerosis."
If it only were a First April joke! Alas, such instructions are given also on other days when there is no need to play a trick on readers.
The body itself cannot manage to reduce the increased level of free radicals that appear due to physical activity, influence of chemical substances and radiation and, as we could observe, due to worthless nutritional recommendations. The substances that assist the body in fighting free radicals are natural antioxidants that can be found in raw plant food in abundance. They include some amino acids, various vitamin groups: B, P, PP, C, vitamin A and mentioned vitamin E as well as carotin that generates vitamin A, and
some elements such as selenium, magnesium, zinc, iron, copper, beet coloring matter, caffeic acid (for example, in
apples) and substances of aromatic and spicy greens and herbs.
Four years before the "April joke" Zh. Abramova and G. Oxengendler, the authors of the book "Man and antioxidants", published data about the danger of lenoleic acid consumption. They gave the example of rarely used corn oil, trying to avoid speaking about sunflower oil that is widely consumed by people. Probably, they believed that there is no need to speak about this nutritional problem so openly and seek enemies. It is known that corn oil contains even a little bit less lenoleic acid than sunflower oil. Bu it is not so that nobody paid attention to this disadvantage of sunflower oil. Indeed, agricultural scientists, without raising panic among consumers, have selected a new sort of sunflower that gives oil, which contains five times less lenoleic acid (as olive oil). In Russia it is called "Kuban salad oil" and I would recommend this very sort, but naturists still should use it carefully.
Alexander Chuprun, 1991
