Your Body Needs an Oil Change Too

Most people understand that a vehicle needs the right oil. You wouldn't put transmission fluid in your engine and expect it to perform well, and you wouldn't pour in whatever was cheapest and hope for the best. Yet that's exactly what many of us have been doing with our bodies for decades.

We were told that traditional fats were dangerous, that butter was bad, eggs were bad, and saturated fat was bad. We were encouraged to replace them with margarine, shortening, soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, and a growing list of highly processed industrial fats. The result is that many people are now consuming oils their great-grandparents wouldn't have recognized as food.

As the daughter of a farmer and a junkyard owner, I now look at health through the lens of maintenance. A car needs the right fuel, the right wiring, and the right oil, and if you ignore any one of them long enough, performance suffers. So do we.

Not All Oils Are Created Equal

Different engines require different oils because they operate under different conditions, and the same principle applies to the human body. Our cells are literally built from the fats we consume. Your hormones depend on healthy fats, your brain depends on healthy fats, and every cell membrane in your body depends on healthy fats. If you're putting low-quality oils into the system every day, don't be surprised when the engine starts running rough.

The Traditional Fats

For thousands of years, humans cooked with fats that came directly from nature: butter, tallow, lard, duck fat, and coconut oil. These fats nourished generations long before laboratories learned how to extract oil from industrial crops, and many researchers and traditional-food advocates are now revisiting the wisdom of those ancestral fats.

Grass-fed butter is rich, satisfying, and when you find good butter from grass-fed cows, especially from places like New Zealand and Australia, it's an entirely different experience from conventional butter. It's taken a beating in the media over the years, but when you compare it to the highly processed substitutes that replaced it, butter wins every time.

Coconut oil is one of nature's most versatile fats, used by tropical cultures for generations before modern processed oils became common. Choose unrefined whenever possible.

Tallow is traditional rendered beef fat, stable for cooking and used by generations before industrial seed oils became standard. Duck fat is one of the culinary world's best-kept secrets, with rich flavor and excellent cooking properties, and if you've never had food cooked properly in duck fat, you're in for a treat.

Macadamia nut oil is one of my personal favorites, with a high smoke point and mild flavor, and if you've ever had chicken fried in macadamia nut oil, you know it's an experience you won't forget. Pumpkin seed oil, while not for high heat, is incredible in dressings and finishing dishes, rich and nutty and deeply flavored. Sesame oil rounds out my list as a wonderful traditional oil used in both food and body care for centuries.

What About Olive Oil?

I love olive oil but I use it differently. I prefer high-quality olive oil in salad dressings, drizzled over vegetables, or as a finishing oil rather than for cooking. Quality matters here more than almost anywhere else because olive oil is one of the most adulterated foods in the world, so if you're buying it, make sure you're getting the real thing.

The Oils I Avoid

Margarine, shortening, hydrogenated oils, highly processed soybean oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, canola oil, and most of what's sitting in restaurant fryers and packaged foods require significant industrial processing before they ever reach your plate. If your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, it's worth asking why.

The Real Question

People often ask me whether fried food is bad, and I think that's the wrong question. The better question is what was it fried in, and what was being fried? A potato cooked in traditional fat is very different from a highly processed food fried in repeatedly heated industrial oils. Context matters, quality matters, and maintenance matters.

Your Body Needs Maintenance

Nobody changes their motor oil once and expects the truck to run forever, and health works the same way. People are constantly searching for the magic pill, the miracle supplement, the perfect diet, or the one thing that's finally going to fix everything, but health is usually built through maintenance. It's not one meal or one supplement or one workout; it's what you consistently give your body over time. Small choices become patterns, patterns become habits, and habits become your health.

You don't have to be perfect. You just have to start giving your body better raw materials than you did yesterday, because just like a vehicle runs better with the right oil, your body performs better when it's built from real food.

Is your body overdue for an oil change?