The parent comment "should reduce oils" is silly. Oils as a category are hugely important to good health. Presumably, eliminating the bad oils is the way to go.
The way I do it is to have a palette of base ingredients for each of fat, acid, and heat. You can create a lot of beautiful, artful meals with a very limited palette. My fat palette, for instance, is primarily rendered animal fats (pork lard, then beef tallow, then chicken fat, in order of frequency of use--we sautee and sear in, and even eat on toast, almost exclusively rendered animal fat). Then olive oil for finishing and occasionally cooking (e.g. some kinds of fish poached in olive oil is heavenly).
Acid palette is limes/citrus and rice vinegar.
Heat palette is certain peppers and some hot sauces.
All healthful ingredients that can be applied to endless proteins and veggie combos.
The standard American pantry of like a billion different spices and sauces and the United Nations of possible ethnic food types means invariably lots of preservatives and in general mediocre (at best) meals. No non-pro cook can crank out high-quality carne asada one day, then a penne vodka, then an injera platter.
But the answer is: Rendered animal fats are the best substitute, and the real answer is, don't eat processed bullshit food. (Aside: "Lab grown" branding is doing a great job tricking smart people into believing "highly-processed factory-made" is somehow healthy).
What do you think oil is? It's processed food. And I never said you have to get rid of it entirely. But there's no doubt we use too much of it. Why is that controversial?
And there is too much consensus around saturated fat being involved in both cardiovascular disease and diabetes for me to say animal fats are a good substitute. It's a step in the wrong direction, even. The only thing worse might be palm oil.
I found both your and GP's comment very interesting. The one thing that drives me crazy about nutrition is that everyone is literally saying exact opposite things. It makes it impossible to know what is actually right. It's crazy to me how little we actually seem to know about nutrition.
I don't get the same feeling from other areas of study. Most physicists seem to agree on pretty much everything besides the super new, cutting edge discoveries. Same with engineers, chemists, etc.. But in nutrition it's the exact opposite. Google "is milk good for you" and you'll get equally convincing arguments for "yes" and "no". And that's the story for almost any nutrition based question.
It seems like the only option for a non-expert like myself is to just kind of wing it and try to eat vegetables and whole grain, and avoid things like sugar. But if there is one area in life that would be worth hyper-optimizing, I'd have to think it would be eating insanely healthy. It just doesn't seem feasible because I'll spend 10 years eating "healthy" only to discover that what I was eating is insanely bad for you.
Why is it so hard to figure out exactly what I should be eating? Especially since billions of us are doing it, and have been doing it for thousands of years.
Part of the problem with nutrition is it's hard to get quality data, like how do you get long-term studies where you can control every aspect of each participant's diet and lifestyle? The best data we have is all over relatively short periods.
Saturated fat is one thing there is strong consensus on.
I'll point out that regarding "healthy" fats, what you see in most recommendations is that replacing unhealthy fats with healthy fats improves heart health, not that adding healthy fats improves heart health.
I've made similar comments before, but this is a neutered attitude. Needing some studies before you agree or disagree with something as fundamental as healthful eating. You can do your own scientific studies by changing your diet and feeling the results.
Nutrition "science" is, like all science these days, inherently untrustworthy.
"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."
Richard Horton, current editor of The Lancet.
When it comes to nutritional studies, which are basically impossibly to ethically control, and are most often funded by large agribusiness concerns, and with a huge problem of only publishing studies that agree with a certain incentive set, you not only CAN but SHOULD ignore it all.
And finally, anything that winds up saying meat is bad for you should raise huge amounts of skepticism. Our entire history as a species indicates that we were built for healthy meat. (Obviously notwithstanding garbage, factory-farmed tortured flesh.)
If you're of the mind that you can't make decisions about your health without a bunch of highly-motivated sophists telling you what's right, you should probably take a step back and rethink.
I'm not being absolutist. Eat your meat now and then. But if you're interested in longevity, cardiovascular disease is the #1 cause of death. So, I personally make diet decisions with that in mind.
There are a lot of bunk studies, but that doesn't mean you should ignore all scientific studies altogether. If you have multiple randomized controlled trials with good sample sizes saying certain things, and funded by public health institutions, I want to pay attention to those.
You're right about the agricultural industry and its influence. The beef, chicken, and dairy industries are chief among them.
True, oil is processed food. By that same argument, all cooked food is processed.
The animal fats I eat are from my own farm, processed by me, lard rendered by me. I realize not everyone can do this, but quality control (and lack of preservatives and other bullshit) is much easier to do when you're the one doing the cooking.
Just like roasting a chicken yourself is making "processed food", there's a big difference between that and, say, getting some chicken from Chili's, or some canned whole chicken.
When I speak of "processed foods" I guess what I mean is highly processed foods, usually processed in factories, surrounded by incentive structures directly opposed to healthful food production (because it's invariably more expensive).
I guess I'm specifically referring more to refined foods, where you often strip away other healthy components of the food. Oil falls under that category, and is always an important component to the highly processed foods you're talking about.
Olive oil is considered a better oil, but it doesn't mean you can have as much as you want.
It's surprising what you can cook and still get good results without oil. Not that I don't ever use oil, but a lot of times it doesn't actually add much to the dish.
Edit: You can for example saute veggies in water, maybe relying more on spices for flavor. And if you're really looking for some browning/charring, use dry heat from an oven or air fryer.
You could try bison fat, although I believe bison are, on average, less fatty than other cattle. The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) forbids the use of hormones and antibiotics in farm-raised bison:
Q: Can hormones and antibiotics be used in bison raising?
A: Antibiotics and growth hormones are not given to bison.
