Hey there and welcome to Pursuing Health. I'm Dr. Julie Fouche, family physician and

former CrossFit Games athlete. Here is your bonus weekly CrossFit Health Tip, which

was originally published on CrossFit.com. Enjoy!

I am here today with Sarah Happing, Australia, who is a CrossFit Level 3 trainer. She also

holds a Master's in Nutrition and Human Performance, and we're going to be talking about oils.

So we know that fats in general and oils are an important part of our diet. They're

important for things like vitamin absorption, brain function, nerve function. And so we want

to make sure that we're incorporating healthy oils into our diet, but there are a lot of

options out there. So how do I distinguish between an oil that might be healthy or good for

me and an oil that I might want to avoid?

Sure. The main difference is the degree of processing in these oils. So some oils like

sunflower oil, canola oil require a pretty high degree of processing, and that processing removes

the natural nutrients from the oil can lead to some oxidation, and that isn't very good for you.

And those oils tend to be a lot more pro-inflammatory, and we tend to see then people who consume a

lot of those processed oils to have some degree of chronic inflammation. And chronic inflammation is

associated with a variety of chronic diseases, things like cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes,

cancer, arthritis, a whole host of other ones. So we want to really try to avoid those highly

processed oils and focus on others that are going to be minimally processed in more nutrient

tense. So what are those oils that I should be focusing on?

Yeah, so better choices of oils tend to be avocado oil, coconut oil, olive oil,

grass-fed butter isn't an oil, but could be a good choice as well, depending on the application.

Awesome. So if I focus on those and I avoid things like vegetable oils and canola oils,

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