Comment by declan_roberts
4 hours ago
> Back in the hospital, my patients are replacing olive oil with beef tallow
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?
The “seed oils” movement has grown beyond seed oils. People who follow seed oil influencers usually subscribe to a cluster of ideas. The superiority of beef tallow is one of them.
I mean, cooking with beef tallow is better though. It makes everything taste awesome.
> cooking with beef tallow is better though. It makes everything taste awesome
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.
A few paragraphs into the article, the author addresses the "seed oil" misnomer; it's better to keep reading before jumping to the comments to do a knee-jerk comment to a single statement.
I read it and still was confused. The author flips back and forth on what they're purporting their patients think are bad
Much olive oil is not refined or ultra processed, but in the US market, 25%+ is.
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.
Avocado oil is good for high temperature sautéing,
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.
Technically extra virgin olive oil should not be refined.
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.
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>Does the author (a purported dietician) not know this him/herself?
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
That may have been the dumbest line in the article, the oils in question, are made out of seeds.
Olives are a fruit and yet they are disfavored by the movement. Coconuts are a seed but they are considered acceptable. And within seeds, maíz, soy, and safflower are all very different botanically.
It really isn't weird, and given the entire rest of the article clearly the author understands.
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.
I read about book called "the big fat lie" years and years ago. There are some indisputable problems specifically with how canola and flaxseed oils went from being an industrial product that was in excess in the post war economy, to being on everyone's table at every meal. There are meta studies that show benefits from animal fats from healthy naturally fed animals, which of course is not a qualification in the guidance RFK provides. The truth is that separating the most calorically dense part of a whole food and adding it to other foods is never a good idea. Not with tallow, not with canola, not with white rice, or orange juice and really not even with olive oil, just put some olives in there!
Nutritional science has failed us before -- the low fat movement and the panic over salt. And then there's ye olde Food Pyramid which was marketing for Big Ag.
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.