There is a lot of confusion nowadays as to what fat to cook with or indeed whether to cook with fat at all, especially when trying to ‘eat clean’. The best advice I can give is – yes, do cook with fats… just make sure they’re the right fats. Some fats are very good for you for many reasons, but some don’t hold their nutritional value when they are heated up.

What people don’t realise, is that many of the amazing nutritional elements of vegetables are fat soluble, which means they need a bit of fat to be used and absorbed by the body. This ensures the fat is not only adding to the taste but also maximises the nutritional potential of your veggies.

When most fats are heated they ‘de-nature’ and become corrupted – they change their molecular structure and so become something different to what they were before. This is the problem with the fats that are in processed food – they are are changed and become hydrogenated. Hydrogenated fats are a mere one molecule away from the molecular structure of plastic… and that isn’t anything that the body recognises as food… because it’s not! (More on that another time)

Some fats have a high threshold before they loose their integrity and are still beneficial to us nutritionally when we turn up the heat.

One of my ‘go-to’ fats to incorporate into cooking is coconut oil. Not only is coconut oil all the rage now (and rightly so, it’s a wondrous thing), it’s good for you on the inside and outside of the body. Coconut oil is ‘safe’ to use for cooking and works equally well for both sweet and savoury dishes like stir fry’s, roasted vegetables and the starting point for casseroles or dhals etc, as well as being great for anything sweet and of course baking.

Sesame oil is another ‘safe’ oil for cooking – it has a very distinctive flavour (so you might not want to add it to every meal) but is great for things like stir fry’s.

Another ‘healthy fat’ that I love to cook with, for whatever reason had some relatively bad press in recent years. Good old organic butter from happy cows (despite what you might have heard) is a wonderful source of fat. For cooking – I often mix coconut oil and butter in the pan, I love the flavour that butter brings to almost any dish.

There are other oils and oil combinations that are good for cooking but I like to keep things simple, so tend to stick to Organic Butter and Organic Coconut oil with the odd flirtation of Sesame oil, generally when I think the flavour would be a good addition.

The key is to always go for quality with your fat choices (I could say that for all food of course), we want to make sure that we are not adding to our toxic load… fat can contain a lot of toxins, so choose wisely and keep it clean!