Hacker News Reader

Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

I think there should be a distinction between heated and raw oils. According to (DOI: 10.1016/j.vph.2014.02.004),

"Prolonged consumption of the repeatedly heated oil has been shown to increase blood pressure and total cholesterol, cause vascular inflammation as well as vascular changes which predispose to atherosclerosis."

When I was a teenager, I worked in fast food where there was a deep fryer, and the policy of the restaurant was to use the oil until it turned a deep brown (or customers complained). Believe me, that oil was reheated dozens of times. I can only imagine what it's like in a chip factory.

On the other hand, if you're just putting it in a salad dressing, the effects might be different, and there actually seems to be relatively few studies on this topic.

Anyway, this is definitely not the whole picture, but something to think about.

View on HN

I spent a short stint while cooking in my early twenties doing a second job at a wing joint, and they regularly added oil stabilizer to the deep fryers: https://www.webstaurantstore.com/noble-chemical-9-5-lb-2g-fr...

Main ingredient: aluminum silicate. Not exactly something I want to sprinkle on my salad.

>Main ingredient: aluminum silicate. Not exactly something I want to sprinkle on my salad.

It's pretty obvious you're trying to imply that it's harmful in some way, but I checked wikipedia and I can't see anything bad about it aside from the generic "eww chemicals" feeling. Sure, technically speaking I wouldn't sprinkle that on my salad either, but that encompasses a wide variety of substances that aren't exactly bad for you. I wouldn't sprinkle sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) on my salad either, but it's not exactly bad for me.

What is harmful about aluminum silicate? That chemical is about as benign as they come.

Who is using seed oils unheated? There’s almost zero use cases for that.

You could maybe argue store bought salad dressings but any real homemade or high quality dressing is not going to be made with canola or sunflower oil but most likely olive oil.

But yes I suspect the health problems from people with heavy seed oil diets comes from consuming foods prepared with seed oils heated at very high temperatures because they quickly degrade and release free radicals in your body. The worst is vegetable oil that is being used over and over again for frying.

he's talking about every time your reuse it you make ever more carciniogens as opposed to at home most people use it once or a few times at most, and usually under the smoke point.

if you’re already aware how easily vegetable oils can turn bad with heat why bother using them at all when there’s so many better options these days.

Salad dressing, it's like 50% soybean oil.

that’s only true for a store bought dressing, which frankly no one should ever really buy if you are health conscious. there is no “real” homemade dressing recipe that has seed oil in it.

Yes, no one should be buying it... but a lot of people are. Let's reduce their health risk if we can

> there is no “real” homemade dressing recipe that has seed oil in it.

Most sesame dressings appropriately use sesame oil.

And others use tahini.

In the Netherlands, rapeseed oil is invariably sold as 'saladoil'.

Mmm. Sounds like you've never come across black sunflower oil.

If the main manner of consuming seed oil is via eating fried food (which sounds mostly right, though there are smaller amounts in some baked goods, and it may be used in sauteeing etc.), research into its health effects is to some degree superfluous. We already know that fried food is bad for you and that if you want to be healthy you should minimize how much of it you consume.

ok why is deep frying inherently “unhealthy”? it’s because most fried foods are fried repeatedly in vegetable oils that degrade over repeated use.

there’s nothing inherently unhealthy about fried potatoes fried in beef tallow outside watching excessive caloric intake.

Isn't there still some not quite healthy stuff that happens even with fresh oil, just because of the high temps?

Also having calories without also having something you're deficient in and need more of might be enough to qualify as unhealthy, unless it's displacing something worse. Does tallow do anything specifically beneficial for the majority of people who don't need added energy?

Let me assure you, my tallow gets pretty dirty before it gets thrown out.

> outside watching excessive caloric intake

Yes.

> Americans eat an average of over 3,600 calories a day ... The long-time recommendation is for you to aim for 2,000 to 2,600 calories per day if you’re a sedentary adult male and 1,600 to 2,000 if you’re a sedentary adult female. [1]

[1] https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/average-calorie-intake-huma...

Unrefined sunflower seed oil is a popular salad dressing in Eastern European cuisine and included as an explicit ingredient in a variety of traditional dishes.

I use it too in Greece, sometimes in combination with olive oil in salads. But mostly for baking and not frying.

The French use seed oils in salad dressings all the time, often daily.

> Who is using seed oils unheated? There’s almost zero use cases for that.

Everybody. Eating raw peanuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds or pickled olives as snacks is extremely common.

Cold pressed oils could also fall in this category (more or less).

It was nice to see the article include some studies with reheated oils - not sure if they're the same as the one you mentioned. I'm curious on what chemical changes and stuff occur after re/heating

Yeah, the evidence seems more like "heavy deep frying is bad" than a general "seed oil is bad".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com