Welcome to Paging Dr. Gupta.

This is the podcast where I get to answer your health questions and they drive the conversation.

Let's see what's on your mind today.

Kira, one of our producers is here.

Who do we have first?

Hey, Sanjay.

So Will from Passaic, New Jersey, asks, which cooking oils are the worst for your cholesterol

and increase those levels?

And which ones actually help lower your bad cholesterol?

All right.

This has been a topic that's been in the news quite a bit lately.

Seed oils versus animal fats.

Couple things to keep in mind. Saturated fats, and these

are typically going to be made of the tropical fats, such as coconut and palm tree, but also

butter and beef tallow. Lots of saturated fats in there. Saturated fats was something that we

used to cook with a lot up until the middle of the last century,

when it became clear that they were more likely to elevate your cholesterol and were associated

with heart disease.

That is when we started to move more and more towards plant-based fats and seed oils.

Those are things like canola oil and avocado oil and olive oil, but also sesame

oil, soybean oil, peanut oil. You get the idea. Those are generally going to be lower insaturated fats.

Now, there's no question that seed oils are heavily processed, they can be pro-inflammatory,

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