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Comment by permo-w | Hacker News Reader

but then when you buy “vegetable oil” it invariably contains olive oil

edit: okay maybe “invariably” is a bit strong. “often in my country” is perhaps more accurate

The opposite is sometimes true - shady vendors adulterate olive oil with vegetable oils to cut costs. Apparently it’s a bit of an epidemic: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2016/02/10/the...

I just checked my "vegetable oil", and it is further labled as 100% soybean. I can't imagine why would waste the more expensive olive oil by using it as an additive for cheap vegetable oil.

That's another issue, "vegetable oil" in different places means different things. In Europe it's usually a mix of rapeseed and corn oil.

it doesn’t really matter though because they all share the same common characteristics that make them unhealthy…eg high polyunsaturated fat content that easily degrades in high heat.

what country do you live in?

USA

maybe in your country, but certainly not in the USA, it's too cheap to put in soy/canola for them to even consider olive oil

That's not most places. Vegetable oils are expected to be able to be used as frying oils. Olive oil has too low of a smoke-point to be used in frying.

That's also a confusing point. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/is-olive-oil-good-for-c... says it has a moderately high smoke point and possibly more importantly has a composition that is more resistive to oxidative damage than vegetable oils.

I usually fry and cook with olive oil.

>Olive oil has too low of a smoke-point to be used in frying.

this is a common myth

you also hear stuff about whether extra virgin is better or worse for cooking than just basic, with people coming out strongly on either side

> this is a common myth

Do you have a source for that? It's pretty easy to google the smoke points and most charts indicate olive oil is fine for sautéing but not for frying.

Do you fry in >400 degree oil? There are many foods that are fried in olive oil for example in Spanish food. It seems fine since most frying is done well below the smoke point.

"Monitoring of Quality and Stability Characteristics and Fatty Acid Compositions of Refined Olive and Seed Oils during Repeated Pan- and Deep-Frying Using GC, FT-NIRS, and Chemometrics"

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf503146f