My understanding is that most of the oils we use are unhealthy. They are highly processed and inflammatory.
The good oils are avocado oil, extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil.
Is this correct?
The good oils are avocado oil, extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil.
Is this correct?
The first is the fatty acid profile, i.e. the relative quantities of fatty acids.
It is best when the most abundant fatty acid is oleic acid. This is true for olive oil and avocado oil and for certain varieties of other oils which are claimed to be "high oleic", e.g. high oleic sunflower oil.
For the oils with high percentage of saturated fatty acids, it is better to have little palmitic acid and more of either longer fatty acids, i.e. stearic acid like in cocoa butter or shorter fatty acids, like lauric acid in coconut oil.
Besides the fatty acid profile, some oils are known to contain other substances with favorable influences. This is known with reasonable certainty only for extra virgin olive oil, which is good for preventing cardiovascular diseases but it is not known which exactly is the substance with the good effect.
And third, there are oils which may contain other substances with bad effects, as shown here for the soybean oil or as is the case for the traditional rapeseed oil with erucic acid. Such oils must be avoided, at least until the undesirable substance is identified precisely and its removal from the oil becomes possible.
Nevertheless, the same paragraph from Wikipedia says that erucic acid was shown to also cause heart problems in pigs, but at much higher quantities than in rats. Therefore it is dangerous, but only when eaten in larger quantities.
Canola oil is widely used in food and it contains erucic acid. However it contains much less than traditional rapeseed oil, so the current food standards are based on the assumption that it should not have bad effects when eaten in normal quantities.
Nevertheless, someone cautious could avoid it entirely, because the only desirable property of the oils which contain erucic acid is that they are cheap.
Also, there's quite a bit of controversy around the purported health benefits of coconut oil. Personally, I'm rather skeptical about it.
I think this is an important distinction for evaluating oils. For example, you mention avocado oil and coconut oil. Are these processed with heat (and possibly solvents)? Or are they cold-pressed with no other chemicals used to aid extraction?
In the UK, it is very common to find cold-pressed rapeseed oil (canola oil) in supermarkets. The canola oil sold in US supermarkets is highly processed. Is the cold-pressed version still bad?
The problem is that when seed oils are demonised, no distinction is made of the method of extraction. There are hundreds of researchers (and YouTubers) repeating the mantra 'seed oil = bad' without further distinction between heat-pressed and cold-press oil extraction. If extraction methods don't matter, then researchers need to provide evidence to confirm this.
Any method that uses high temperatures may cause various chemical reactions that degrade some of the oil components.
Some of the methods that use solvents for extraction may leave very small quantities of the solvents in the oils (e.g. hexane, i.e. a light fraction of gasoline), which are undesirable.
Nevertheless, cold-pressing is not necessarily the best method, even if it is preferable to most other old methods.
While the extraction using carbon dioxide at high pressure (supercritical CO2) is also classified as a solvent extraction method, it does not leave anything in the oil and it is able to extract any oil more completely and with less degradation than any other method.
However this modern method is encountered only in relatively recent oil production facilities, and unlike cold pressing it is not known by most people so it is not used in marketing.
Thus, except for cold pressing, the buyer cannot know whether the oil has been produced by a worse method like hexane extraction or by a better method, like CO2 extraction.
Avocado oil seems to be the best?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30105062
ghee is a great alternative IMO.
Personally I only purchase California olive oil, I don't trust anything coming out of Europe due to the risk of adulteration. If you want a widely available brand: California Olive Ranch but look at the label carefully, you only want their 100% California olive oil.
> 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
Also what’s the best substitute for vegetable oil for baking?
The reason for olive oil not being used for deep frying is mostly taste and cost, as far as I know.
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/cooking-oils-and-smoke-...
Found the video: https://youtu.be/l_aFHrzSBrM
Do you have a source on that? What is toxic about it? Really curious, because I cook a lot with olive oil.
note that the experiments were carried out without food being cooked. While cooking, the water and steam which comes from the food being cooked aids the process of hydrolysis. The absence of food in these trials may have allowed for a greater impact of oil oxi- dation when compared with other deterioration reactions
They didn't test the affects of water and food contact on stability and note the potential significance of hydrolysis.
But just going by that, I'd avoid all refined oils and heating/frying.
Also note that, oils can oxidize fairly easily. I still don't know how to procure oils from supermarkets that I'm sure are not already oxidized. Then comes the matter of storing it in ways to prevent oils from oxidizing.