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Comment by berjin | Hacker News Reader

The extraction process turns the oil rancid but it's supposedly okay because there is a process to remove the bad odor. The main concern is that when heated polyunsaturated fats convert to transfats which are bad; the article claims it's fine to cook with as you're renewing the oil frequently but I have doubts it's safe as they admit the process is still happening. Old fryer oil smells odly nasty - do you want even a fraction of that in your home cooking?

Anecdotally, a family member gets headaches from consuming uncooked sunflower oil but olive oil and other fats are fine. I noticed this years before the anti seed oil memes.

Virgin olive oil (not the mafia fake crap) is really great, as is beef tallow.

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That's pretty interesting since in my home country, Morocco, cooking with virgin olive oil is not recommended at all.

In fact, even in though my family has owned olive tree farms for centuries we still make sure to buy "modern oil" (as it is called in moroccan) for cooking even if fresh, pure olive oil is available in literal tons. I've heard that it is mostly a persistent myth, and olive oil is perfectly safe for cooking (even at high temps), but my mom would still never let me cook or fry anything with olive oil :). Interesting contrast!

In Spain everyone and their mother cooks / fries with olive oil. Nonetheless, there’s this idea that we shouldn’t be doing it as much, but mainly because of the strong flavor and low smoke point; better to cook with other oils and then add olive oil for the flavor if needed.

Ideally you would cook with a saturated fat like tallow, lard, coconut fat etc as they don't have a double bond to break. Monounasturated fat like (real) olive oil at least has fewer double bonds than polyunsaturated fats (seed oils). Cheaper olive oil is extracted with heat and solvents or even blended with seed oil.

not sure that tallow and lard are necessary, but here's an interesting article that does suggest frying with saturated fats such as coconut oil or ghee, or alternatively, unrefined mustard seed or canola oil. It also has a table with data for several kinds of fats. The disadvantage to animal-derived fats, according to this, is the long-chain saturated fatty acids.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4990724/

Interesting table - very easy to see which fats are the worst. It's a pity they don't include animal fat in there but I guess it's all from an Indian context. Coconut seems like a good option but it can still go rancid if you don't refrigerate it. Some the early citations [2 &3] are not the best quality as they are based on questionaries. In the Minnesota Coronary Experiment which involved 9400 institutional participants eating controlled meals they found that cutting saturated fat can reduce blood cholesterol but that doesn't actually make one live longer. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/records-found-in-...

Is it with virgin olive oil? And yes you might be right, the taste is much stronger with olive oil. It might be just that, but now I realized I never asked my mom why we don't do it!

Cooking with virgin olive oil is fine and may actually be more safe relative to other common oils.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092422442...

https://actascientific.com/ASNH/pdf/ASNH-02-0083.pdf

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