Study finds 82% of avocado oil rancid or mixed with other oils | Hacker News Reader

Study finds 82% of avocado oil rancid or mixed with other oils

ucdavis.edu

81 pointsgvashishtha84 comments

How does the FDA not have a standard that any oil with a plant in the name has to have the percentage of the oil that came from that plant?

"We can't regulate soybean oil labeled as avocado oil because we don't have a standard for avocado oil" is literally stupid. Hopefully it isn't quite the case.

Perhaps they simply don't have the manpower to define standards for everything.

Also presumably donations and counter lobbying by various “Oil Councils” and trade groups.

Yeah, that's why I pointed out there could be a broad labeling standard (if the name implies a plant oil, provide the percentage...).

Then they would at least be able to take action against violators.

EU food labeling regulation has following requirement (Article 22):

1. The indication of the quantity of an ingredient or category of ingredients used in the manufacture or preparation of a food shall be required where the ingredient or category of ingredients concerned:

(a) appears in the name of the food or is usually associated with that name by the consumer;

(b) is emphasised on the labelling in words, pictures or graphics; or

(c) is essential to characterise a food and to distinguish it from products with which it might be confused because of its name or appearance.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

There is also the general base requirement of not being misleading in Article 7:

1. Food information shall not be misleading, particularly:

(a) as to the characteristics of the food and, in particular, as to its nature, identity, properties, composition, quantity, durability, country of origin or place of provenance, method of manufacture or production;

(b) by attributing to the food effects or properties which it does not possess;

(c) by suggesting that the food possesses special characteristics when in fact all similar foods possess such characteristics, in particular by specifically emphasising the presence or absence of certain ingredients and/or nutrients;

(d) by suggesting, by means of the appearance, the description or pictorial representations, the presence of a particular food or an ingredient, while in reality a component naturally present or an ingredient normally used in that food has been substituted with a different component or a different ingredient.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

This is something that has standard in every developed country at least, not some niche weird product.

If this is indeed the case, wouldn't it make sense to force companies to indicate that that there is no quality standard on the label?

False advertising might fall more in the FTC's wheelhouse, or the FBI's for fraud.

> But since avocado oil is relatively new on the scene, the Food and Drug Administration has not yet adopted “standards of identity,” which are basic food standards designed to protect consumers from being cheated by inferior products or confused by misleading labels. Over the last 80 years, the FDA has issued standards of identity for hundreds of products, like whiskey, chocolate, juices and mayonnaise.

...

> Avocado oil isn’t the only product without enforceable standards. Honey, spices and ground coffee are other common examples.

The FDA should wait until there's sufficient interest/demand for such a standard before implementing such a thing. We should not expect the FDA to be on the frontend of trends in food products. And clearly - if honey and coffee aren't standardized, not every food product needs to have such a standard.

What about some kind of fraud/false-advertising catch-all? Do we really need to wait for popularity in order to have a more generic regulation?

There are multiple ways to come at the problem, we could just say that the species origin of any oil included at greater than 1% concentration is required to be labeled in the ingredients and any oil not composed of greater than 95% concentration of single source must be labeled as "mixed"

I'm sure the legalease version of the above is a 100 page doc, but the FDA does provide similar generic rulings.

We're better off without any FDA standards of identity. Even maxerickson isn't asking for one; he's asking for a regulation that limits the use of ingredient names in general, not the names of individual products specifically. There is no public interest -- not in the sense of improving public welfare, and not in the sense of public demand -- in FDA standards of identity.

Standards of identity made the news recently, when the FDA granted an obvious petition after thinking for just 24 years: https://reason.com/2022/01/12/the-fda-finally-liberates-fren...

I think standards of identity (or other FDA action that isn't necessarily a standard of identity) for things like single-ingredient products like these oils is probably not really problematic... straightforward concrete rules about the point you can no longer call the product "avocado oil" because it's so much something else are to me a perfectly reasonable exercise of the government's power. To some degree this kind of thing is at least theoretically covered by existing general provisions, but enforcement is likely to be laxer than necessary where the "line" is fuzzy and there's a likelihood of litigation over it.

This is especially true for cooking oil, a major part of the differentiation between types and grades of oil is down to health benefits the consumer can't really detect on their own. Having solid rules that allow simple comparisons of the labeling that actually provide useful workable information is just providing the necessary framework for consumers to make informed choices.

This is different from, say, being able to tell whether or not you like your frozen cherry pie in the absence of the puzzlingly unique and specific frozen cherry pie food standard. We definitely have a variety of legacy standards that aren't productive.

> I think standards of identity (or other FDA action that isn't necessarily a standard of identity) for things like single-ingredient products like these oils is probably not really problematic... straightforward concrete rules about the point you can no longer call the product "avocado oil" because it's so much something else are to me a perfectly reasonable exercise of the government's power

So, the minor point is that this isn't a standard of identity. It'd be something different.

The more important point is that what you're talking about doesn't make sense. There is no particular reason to think that "avocado oil" is a single-ingredient product any more than you would think the same of "pomegranate juice". By volume, most juices are apple juice or grape juice, for the excellent reason that, in order to even be palatable to most consumers, pomegranate juice (for example) requires heavy dilution. Apple and grape juice are used because their flavors are so weak. But you're not getting ripped off when you buy pomegranate juice; you're getting exactly what you want.

The place to note that something is a single-ingredient product is in the ingredients list, like here: https://www.amazon.com/Kevala-Avocado-Oil-Fluid-Ounce/dp/B00... . And if the ingredients list is fraudulent, that isn't the same problem as the fact that some people are aesthetically opposed to the product's name.

I agree that the basic "authenticity" part of this situation (where the product in fact claims to be entirely avocado oil and isn't) is already covered by existing authorities, and is basically a different problem.

As for the rest of your post, well for one, "pomegranate juice," a product you buy that's 100% pomegranate juice and nothing else, isn't exactly uncommon: Pom Wonderful sells it all over the place. My grocery store store brand will also sell you something like "No Sugar Added 100% Juice Cranberry Pomegranate" followed by very small letters reading "flavored blend of 5 fruit juices with added ingredients"... Welch's settled a lawsuit several years for doing this very thing with a product that at least was being even a little more up-front about being primarily white grape juice.

As for there being no reason for people to think that something is what it claims to be, well I suppose that is a widely held belief that accounts for much of what we see in food labeling. I happen to think if you sell something that's 99% soybean oil and 1% avocado oil you shouldn't be able to call it "avocado oil" even if you are correctly listing the soybean oil first on the ingredients list. Or if it's 50/50 or 49/51 (and you can therefore list the avocado oil first) for that matter.

Ultimately names do matter. There's a reason the manufacturers care at all about what they're able to call their products, because it does actually affect how consumers act. Feel free to sell an otherwise accurately labeled 50/50 blend, just actually call it a blend. I really don't think it's unreasonable that if you give something an unqualified name of something that is a single ingredient that consumers should expect it to in fact be that thing.

> well for one, "pomegranate juice," a product you buy that's 100% pomegranate juice and nothing else, isn't exactly uncommon: Pom Wonderful sells it all over the place.

You're saying it's widely available. I'm saying it's not widely consumed.

And I stand by my opinion that naming a blended product after its most prominent flavor is both normal and desirable. But I see no issue with requiring blends to be labeled as blends. The regulation described sidethread here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30106290 ) seems pretty reasonable to me.

> 1. The indication of the quantity of an ingredient or category of ingredients used in the manufacture or preparation of a food shall be required where the ingredient or category of ingredients concerned:

> (a) appears in the name of the food or is usually associated with that name by the consumer;

> (b) is emphasised on the labelling in words, pictures or graphics; or [another clause]

But even in that case, you're free to sell something as "avocado oil" when it's 50% avocado-derived or even 20% avocado-derived [consider something like "garlic olive oil"]; you just need to disclose the amount.

I'd say "garlic olive oil" is a different category where its name already implies a mixture of these two things, and from that name you'd expect the resulting product to contain both garlic and olive oil, and be mostly olive oil (and would be mislabeled if it's actually artificial garlic flavor, or actually canola). It's the unqualified naming that I'm objecting to, in general.

Anyway, I think the EU regulation quoted sounds pretty reasonable also, assuming something about how reasonably prominent such information would need to be.

> I'd say "garlic olive oil" is a different category where its name already implies a mixture of these two things, and from that name you'd expect the resulting product to contain both garlic and olive oil

OK, granted, but that isn't true of "chili oil". It could refer to oil pressed from chili, but it doesn't.

Why do we even need a standard? This is deceptive advertising. They said they were selling something but were caught selling something else. Must be some kind of fraud.

Because, unless there is a standard or they are explicitly claiming it is unmixed, being mixed with something else isn't legally deceptive. (Nor is it being rancid, though the defective product liability / warranty of merchantibility may come into play there.)

The 2 extra-virgin and one "pure" avocado oils here that are apparently just soybean oil probably at a minimum aren't listing soybean oil on their ingredients list.

Sure, and I am not saying that some of them aren't covered under current law, just that the set of them that are is narrower than the set that people seem to think (and I would agree) are problematic, and that even for the ones that are covered dealing with them is far less straightforward than with identity standards.

Careful of trivializing easy-sounding solutions. "Of course it's a good idea to monitor the quality of oil". Now it's regulated in the European Union, it's illegal to sell olive oil in an open container, such as in a restauraunt or refill shop.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/05/24/what-the...

I'd rather people took time and thought of the unintended consequences (or more likely, consequences intended by masquarading vested interests)

Right, but instead of defining what can be called avocado oil, they could just require a list of ingredients, maybe even percentages.

> Right, but instead of defining what can be called avocado oil, they could just require a list of ingredients

FDA labeling requirements already do that.

The article you linked explains in the first paragraph that they withdrew that law immediately

My fault for posting in haste and not dobule checking. The bit about restauraunts was retracted. But not, as far as I know, the law against selling refills still stands.

My attention was drawn to this law by a refill shop which as far as I (and they!) know, are not still not allowed to refill a container. Here's a UK legal guidance page:

e.g. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/olive-oil-regulations-and-inspec...

This article shows that a legislative body can regulate things for its citizens, and by retracting the law a week later, that a legislative body can learn about its mistakes.

Per my other comment, my fault for not double checking. But it's still illegal to sell refills.

Defining a standard isn't that simple, you'd have to decide:

1) what all qualifies, every avocado type, are there variants that should be excluded, etc.

2) how pure is pure enough, when you're dumping truckloads of stuff into a hopper some other stuff is always along for the ride

3) what if pure xxx oil has some problems in processing or with shelf stability, etc. - what do you allow and what not

None of these questions are easy to answer so by default standards don't exist until there's a big push

None of these have a single right answer, but all of them have sensible ranges of answers. (And allowing soybean oil to be sold as pure avocado oil is not in that range. In case that was in doubt.)

“Allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good” is a recipe to not get anything done.

> (And allowing soybean oil to be sold as pure avocado oil is not in that range. In case that was in doubt.)

Yes, and for that reason what those oils are doing is already against the law.

Identifying a current practice that is currently illegal is a weird way to argue for making other practices illegal too. It suggests that (1) the first thing will keep happening; and (2) so will the other things. You didn't have a problem with the law to begin with; how is changing it supposed to help?

Can't they be sued due to truth in advertising laws?

I would imagine that a product labeled as avocado oil which contains no avocado oil at all is illegal already even without a standard of identity. The food safety laws have general provisions for adulteration and misbranding, and products doing this are probably lying on the label and ingredient list.

Ones where there's half some other oil or something along those lines, maybe less clear-cut. Depending on the labeling that might or might not be illegal. And whether the FDA feels confident or interested in going after any of this is a whole other story.

Right, "hopefully it isn't quite the case", but the article states that the FDA can't regulate the authenticity of the oil.

Like I'd be on board with banning the import of goods from companies that employ people that were principles at a business found to be adulterating food. Throw them out of the industry entirely the first time they get caught. Probably hard to enforce, but I'd be fine with that being the law.

What the article states is not necessarily true though. They definitely do have existing authorities on misbranding and adulteration that work for nonstandardized foods.

The quote from the researcher is that "But because there are no standards to determine if an avocado oil is of the quality and purity advertised, no one is regulating false or misleading labels." I'm sure there's truth here when it comes to oxidation and rancidity, more detailed characteristics like that, or claims of "extra virgin" which I'm not sure are defined to mean anything at all for avocado oil.

But the article's un-cited statement "Without standards, the FDA has no means to regulate avocado oil quality and authenticity," I'd want something more backing that up, particularly as to authenticity. I'm not convinced at all that the FDA really lacks the tools to police that what claims to be avocado oil merely is (or at least contains) avocado oil, if they wanted to. The statues and regulations on the names of foods and the accuracy of the ingredient list, they have those tools already.

It's possible a standard or something similar might be needed for some other quality issues, or to enforce some meaning behind common marketing terms like "extra virgin," though.

Makes you wonder how many other common foodstuffs are wildly mislabeled and contain harmful ingredients. It's hard to imagine any US government agency having the manpower to conduct the scale of testing required to find standards violations, even if the standards themselves were perfect.

I know nothing at all about the law on this topic, but would a producer of contaminated/illegal food be able to avoid responsibility for violating standards if they just shifted blame onto suppliers that are out of US court jurisdiction?

With olive oils you can prevent this by purchasing PDO or PGI olive oil. If you cook often it's worth the slight bump in price to know you are getting good oil. I love me a nice peppery Sabina olive oil.

Or just buy Costco. They don’t fuck around with sourcing

And they sell Avocado Oil in huge half-gallon jugs.

Olive oil is wildly adulterated with blended cheap oil.

Vitamins and "supplements" are almost completely unregulated, which is one reason despite known benefits from a limited number of supplements, I've hesitated to use any. There are third party services that test some products, but I gave up on them because many of the certifications were years old and you really have no fucking idea; the company could switch to cheaper manufacturing/suppliers right after getting "certified."

Vegetables have to be washed because food pickers aren't given proper bathroom facilities so they shit in the fields and have no way to wash their hands or clean themselves, so there's both soil and product contamination with feces. Could be fixed by the federal government mandating field-accessible bathrooms with hand-washing stations, which you think farmers could afford given the trillions of dollars in subsidies they get, but...nope.

Most fish sold in the US is wildly mislabeled - tilapia, which is cheapest, is the most common fish substituted. Particularly annoying since it often causes gastric distress for some. Only DNA testing is reliable.

Baby food contains a shocking amount of heavy metals.

Packaged chicken products (and I believe eggs?) are washed in bleach, because the poultry industry has managed to gaslight us and regulators into thinking that a)salmonela is just a fact of life with chickens and b)it's the consumer's fault for not properly "handling" said food (in Europe, for example, salmonella is actively controlled, and there's a vaccine.)

American cheese doesn't contain any actual cheese (though I think the FDA finally cracked down a bit on this one, so it's now called "cheese product" or something.)

Chinese baby formula manufacturers figured out that melamine faked out protein tests to allow them to water down the formula. In the US, melamine and cyanuric acid were found in every formula mix, though supposedly at ~1ppm levels, but no level of either chemical is safe, and there was no reason for either to be in formula.

There was huge outbreak of lead poisoning in mexican kids who were eating hard candies made from a fruit - tamarind, I think? - where growers supplying the candy company were getting paid by weight and the assholes were putting lead weights in their containers, and the lead weights were going through the fruit-crushing machines.

The list goes on. Libertarians talk about how the free market will solve everything, but time after time when business is trusted or allowed to regulate itself, it doesn't. Greed almost always wins over civic duty and ethics.

WRT vitamins and supplements - My rule of thumb is to stick to ones that you can test for in the blood that’s actually correlated by peer review scientific literature for appropriate level ranges. So for instance I take D3 since there is a test for that as well as methylated B9/B12 (homocysteine). Fish oil as well (omega 3). It doesn’t solve the adulteration issue but at least I can tell if I’m getting sugar pills.

> It's hard to imagine any US government agency having the manpower to conduct the scale of testing required to find standards violations, even if the standards themselves were perfect.

But i'd think that lawyers would be all over this, sending out samples to labs, so that they could file class action suits. Why is that not the case?

I used to keep oils around forever, and somebody once said something about oils going bad over time. I hadn't really noticed anything, but being a foodie and a chemist, I got curious.

Now I wish I had never learned that oil can go rancid. You cannot imagine what it's like to live in a world where oil is rancid but most people can't tell. I don't think there are any true negative health effects, but now that I can detect (smell and taste) rancid oil I see it everywhere. My parents and parents in law both have 5+ year old oil containers that they use maybe once a year.

> Only two brands produced samples that were pure and nonoxidized. Those were Chosen Foods and Marianne’s Avocado Oil, both refined avocado oils made in Mexico. Among the virgin grades, CalPure produced in California was pure and fresher than the other samples in the same grade.

What is the difference between "pure and nonoxidized" and "pure and fresher"?

Nothing? They both mean:

1) The oil is actually from the plant advertised and hasn't been adulterated

2) The oil hasn't gone bad yet

"Fresher" is relative. It might be a little oxidized.

They state explicitly that it is partially oxidized. Only two brands produced nonoxidized samples, and both of those brands were refined oil. Thus, every virgin oil was not nonoxidized.

It's saying that there were two pure and nonoxidized samples, the two Mexican refined oils.

There were no "extra virgin" samples that were both pure and nonoxidized, though of the pure extra-virgin samples, the CalPure one was the least oxidized. They had 2 samples that were low oxidization but were apparently roughly 100% soybean oil.

Disappointing but not surprising, it's certainly long been the case that a lot of olive oil is adulterated[1] (I avoid buying imported oil here in the US, even though in theory some of it very good, just because I am hoping that California is keeping a better eye on the local stuff).

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2016/02/10/the...

I agree 100%, I only buy California olive oil.

Clearly the FDA and state agencies are either incompetent or corrupt here.

It's surprisingly that some private organization (Consumer Reports?) hasn't come along to do this kind of testing for oils, honey, spices, etc.

I'd pay more for food with certification of purity that I could really trust. It's sad that even a "Product of USA" isn't good enough in these cases.

In the case of honey, it's actually very simple: if it's viscous outside of summer, it's not honey. Natural honey crystalizes into (near-)solid form quite quickly.

Maybe at a particular temperature is a better yardstick, summer and not summer are not the same everywhere.

I have pounds of honey from my parents hives that isn’t crystallized even after sitting in my cold basement when it’s sub zero out.

Has it been treated in any way? I've been working with bees for over 20 years now, and I haven't seen honey keep the viscosity for more than a couple of weeks past harvesting, at room temperature. The duration varies based on the blossoms of course, with some such as rape going solid in 10 days while clover can last 4-6 weeks, but in the end, it always crystalizes.

Huh, not that I know of, I’ll ask. They’ve been keeping bees for several years and I’ve never seen the honey crystallized.

That's true, but how "quickly" depends on the kind of honey. Acacia honey and other honeys with high amounts of fructose and low amounts of glucose can take decades to crystallize, normal forest honey or dandelion honey can crystallize in under a day.

Idk real honey from my beehive still hasn’t crystallized since august . Really depends on what the bees are eating

As with any false labeling in the US, this seems ripe for a class action suit.

Last year, I had a several months bout with painful GI issues. I couldn’t be far from a bathroom, and I had stomach pain when I wasn’t full.

The GI doctor didn’t find anything wrong. I figured it must be something in my diet. I tried eliminating all the standard stuff. It wasn’t until I realized that I tolerated ordering out much better than cooking my own food that I isolated the problem.

I had a glass bottle of evidently rancid avocado oil that I’d refill from a large plastic bottle.

I use avocado oil in everything. I swapped it out and the problem was gone in a few days.

82%, in case anyone else was curious about the number.

I would recommend anyone looking at this post read into the harm seed oils do to your body and gut fauna. Labeling seed oils as olive oil should be criminal.

Or worse, oil "recycled" from the gutter.

I'm always amazed at the amount of rancid oil people eat. Peanut Butter in particular. People will be happily munching away on it and I can smell the rancidity from a mile away. Blech, it's an awful smell.

Me too, nuts are terrible in general (although technically peanuts are a legume). Mine go in the freezer right away until I need them.

I did an interesting experiment the other day: our admin had stashed snacks in late 2019 and I recently discovered them when we returned to the office. The little bags of hipster packaged nuts were unbelievably bad, especially walnuts. Interestingly, the expensive but major brand almonds are still good, must be higher-tech packaging.

I don't see the full list of brands, am I missing it somewhere?

Some of the examples they found seem to not even have any avocado oil. Is there a reason trial attorneys aren't jumping at the chance for a class action suit for this?

Probably not. Exaggerating but I could sell "Awesome Oil" without any actual awesome in it. Using Avocado in the name apparently is no different.

Perhaps though I think a jury would disagree

They might and maybe that would be good. However, to get to a jury the prosecutor would have to prove that a law was broken and that there's enough evidence against the defendant. If there's no such law there will never be a case.

If I sell Awesome Oil and then under the name, i put in "made from 100% extra virgin avocado oil" and put avocado oil in my ingredients list but it's really soybean oil, that's different than selling Awesome Oil but putting in actual ingredients in the ingredients list.

15 USC § 1125 gives civil liability to anyone "who in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of his or her or another person's goods, services, or commercial activities". I've seen state laws that cover this as well.

Proving actual damages. Unless the law stipulates punitive damages, it’s too hard to prove how you were “damaged” by it not being avocado oil and the dollar amount. This is why many lawsuits aren’t filed even when companies have harmed people.

False advertisement.

So what’s the solution here? Using butter maybe?

Animal product but at least that seems less vulnerable to tampering

I just bought Primal Kitchen "pure" avocado oil. Hopefully its not the fake stuff.

"in the US"

Looks like the title was munged by HN's filter that strips out numbers at the beginning. (82 Percent)

Thanks, that really confused me

The filter only runs once on first sumbission. OP can edit the title afterwards to fix it up.

Fixed now. Thanks!

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