Animal fats and coconut/palm oil make the best cooking fats. When I was a teenager, the fries and fish filets at fast food joints I worked at were cooked in beef tallow. They filtered the frying vats every morning. The fries were tastier than now and also healthier than now. Probably restaurants used beef fat for deep frying because it was cheap. It also is a stable fat, which is what makes it healthier for frying. Then everyone got freaked out about cholesterol, and they told us to use processed vegetable oil for deep frying, so restaurants switched over. This is helping to fuel the rise in heart disease and diabetes Type 2 (along with HFCS as an industrial sweetener and vegetable oils turned into hydrogenated fats such as Crisco and margarine).

Okinawans have the longest lives of all Japanese. Of course they eat a lot of seafood, including sea vegetables, but pork is their favorite meat. Traditional cooking is not done with vegetable oils. Older housewives render pork fat into cooking lard. They are not hardening their arteries with canola oil. I have a feeling that part of the "French Paradox" may be that they eat real butter and fatty meats along with a bit of wine with their dinner. They haven't got our high rates of heart disease. And French women don't get fat, they say.

Also Okinawans traditionally regularly eat goya (bitter melon in English). It is hard to choke it down, because it is indeed very bitter tasting. One has to add it to recipes that disguise the bitter flavor somewhat. Some grannies make their own goya juice by hand grating it. Hold yer nose and gulp it down. Bitter melon is used in Chinese medicine and Indian medicine to help control blood sugar. In the Philippines, bitter melon is called "poor man`s insulin."

Another food that helps control blood sugar is nopales. These are those big, flat cactus leaves. You can buy them in a Mexican food market with their needles shaved off. You can also find them canned in the Mexican food section of many grocery stores. The flavor is neutral, so you can add them to a variety of dishes. Cut into strips and grilled with a bit of onion and seasoning, it is very tasty.

We should probably all be eating some goya or nopales as we age, and cut out sweet food/drinks along with cessation of starchy foods such as grains. That "grain thing" at the bottom of the "food pyramid" really fattened up Americans.