This is a weird thing to call out since olive oil isn't a seed oil. Is the point that patients are confused? Does the author (a purported dietitian) not know this himself/herself?
It is. I don’t tend to keep it handy, but I do tend to have bacon drippings I’ll swap into meals. What’s wild is this insistence on herding from one homogenous diet to another.
There's nothing wrong with using beef tallow or bacon fat in your cooking occasionally. I use bacon fat sometimes. But of course consuming saturated fat in excess is not good for you in the long run, so do it in moderation.
I find it extremely unlikely that evolution got us to like foods that are supposedly that bad for us. Our palate is actually a tool for evaluation of what is consumable and has the nutrients we need. If you look at children not corrupted by ideologies, it will become extremely obvious that they naturally crave this stuff without any prompting.
The problem just comes from our modern ultra-abondance. Not that long ago, most people were very limited in the amount they could consume because it was expensive and rare.
… Yeah, on that basis you should consider following your beef tallow fries with a nice cigarette, and maybe a cheeky injection of heroin.
“And what do you do?” [mutters] “What?” [shamefaced] “Misinformation about cooking oil on tiktok”
Like, honestly, how could anyone think this was a reasonable way to make a living?
RFK and friends have health-washed tallow. While their ridiculous new food recommendations claimed to "end the war on protein", it's pretty clear by all the surrounding material that they really wanted to "end the war on saturated fats". Their recommendations are filled with saturated-fat heavy foods (while cowardly sticking to the same old guidelines on percentage of calories from the same).
"Influencers" are pushing tallow as the best oil, despite literally the entirety of the evidence completely annihilating that claim.
Another one was the concern of soy phytoestrogens, and claiming that only fermented soy was safe.
Much of this had some scientific basis, but science isn't perfect and evolves.
On the other hand, there's ideology and it rejects any scientific reporting that falsifies its beliefs. Science is about being falsifiable -- so when confronted with compelling evidence that earlier understanding is rejected and replaced with new knowledge.
RFK Jr. is an ideologue and is the worst person to be in the role he is. He may get some things right (food dyes, etc), but that's the broken clock effect.
According to https://www.imarcgroup.com/united-states-olive-oil-market
10% of olive oil in the US market is refined using the same hexane process as canola or soybean oil, and another 15% is refined using other chemical processes.
It's not a seed oil but for many people concerned about ultra processed food including refined oils, it's not the "seed" part but the "refined" part that's the issue, and specifically how it is refined.
Though there is also a concern many have about cooking unsaturated fats at very high temperatures causing oxidation/rancidity/free-radicals and thus oxidative stress which is a primary driver of disease, and seed oils tend to have a lot more unsaturated fat than animal fat. Olive oil is more saturated than seed oils but not as saturated as animal fat so it is more prone to oxidation - i.e. it degrades much easier with heat and goes rancid faster and thus is more likely to be rancid/oxidized when used since we don't usually get it fresh.
Is there anything to look for on the label to tell what refining process is used for an olive oil? There are so many different brands now that I suspect some of them are just different labels on the same product.
I'm always a little dubious because of the financial incentive to cut unrefined oil with some amount of cheaper refined oil, but I don't have any idea how much this actually is done with olive oil.
The label usually won't say what the process was in my experience, but you can look into what processes are used for refined olive oil. Just avoid refined oil entirely. And if I see "olive oil" as an ingredient in something or at a not-high-quality restaurant, I'd assume it's refined.
FTA: First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category. What we’re actually talking about are vegetable oils high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats