Is Nigella’s trendy oil a recipe for heart trouble?
SHE’S never shied away from tradition and the use of fattening dairy goodies in her recipes.
But for her latest book Nigella Lawson has taken a different approach – filling many of the pages with dishes featuring ‘healthy’ fad foods.
In doing so, however, she has cooked up a row with dieticians.
Top of her list of favourites is coconut oil, which has become a fashionable alternative to butter or olive oil.
The 55-year-old recently revealed she uses it for frying, baking and even as a foot moisturiser.
But experts warn it has high levels of saturated fat and could be bad for heart health.
Other ingredients in Simply Nigella:
‘No nutritional benefits’
Feel Good Food include chia seeds, goji berries, cocoa nibs and eyewateringly expensive matcha green tea powder.
All are supposed to have health benefits but scientists are yet to agree on how beneficial they actually are.
Many of her latest recipes are a departure from those in her earlier books, which included the familiarsounding sticky toffee pudding, chocolate fudge cake and chocolate hazelnut cheesecake.
In this book she offers a green-tea ‘Matcha cake’ and several gluten or dairy-free options such as buckwheat muffins or pancakes made from oats.
Matcha green tea powder, which costs around £25 for 1oz, also features in recipes for ice cream and a latte. Fans of the expensive powder believe it to contain very potent antioxidants.
Coconut oil is currently one of the most popular grocery items available on Amazon. Miss Lawson uses it in recipes such as cauliflower and cashew nut curry, prawn and avocado wraps, a vegan chocolate cake and Indianspiced shepherd’s pie.
She recently said: ‘It has quite a high smoking point so it’s good for frying things. It’s got a richness that I rather like, and it’s great in baking and makes things quite light. I like the taste of it too.’
She tells readers that it must be ‘cold-pressed’, which she says is superior because it has not been refined.
But specialist dietician Emer Delaney, a spokesman for the British Die- tetic Association, warned it is actually worse for you than other oils.
She said: ‘It’s a food fad. People do think it can be good for them but a l ot of that is j ust the power of marketing.
‘Coconut oil is really quite high in saturated fats.
‘It contains about 85 to 90 per cent saturated fats and we know there’s a strong link between saturated fats and heart disease.
‘I would recommend using other oils for cooking, like olive oil or flaxseed oil. They’d be much better for heart health. Coconut oil doesn’t really have any nutritional benefits.’
Miss Lawson has been criticised in the past for including a cheesecake with a whopping 7,000 calories in her BBC2 cookery show Nigellissima.