5
2

Which oils to avoid?


 invite response                  
2023 Jan 21, 7:13pm   38,958 views  326 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (59)   ignore (2)  

I'm increasingly frustrated at the rapeseed oil (euphemistically called "Canola" oil by Canadian producers) and palm kernel oil that seems to be in almost all food. Pretty much everything at Trader Joe's seems to have one or the other. I was even at a Russian shop in Palo Alto today (Samovar, fun place) and found the poppyseed cake my grandmother used to make - except it was with margarine instead of butter, ugh.

Which of them are worth avoiding entirely?

Here are the fats and oils I think are bad:

- margarine (which is just canola and other crap oils hardened to make them stick in your arteries better)
- canola oil
- cottonseed oil (especially bad)
- palm kernel oil

I'm undecided about these:

- soybean oil
- sunflower seed oil
- avocado oil
- coconut oil
- peanut oil

I'm sure these are pretty good for you:

- olive oil
- butter
- lard (yes, I think lard is OK to eat)


« First        Comments 313 - 326 of 326        Search these comments

313   Maga_Chaos_Monkey   2025 May 18, 10:49am  

HeadSet says


That happens naturally with ocean fish around here. Part of nature that fish turn from male to female as they age.


Happens in my reef tank. You can buy a pair of decent clownfish 'mated' for ~$150. Or you can take the risk and buy two unknowns for around $50 each and wind up with two females that fight each other. Usually the larger fish becomes female if you start out with two males. Mine are black and white (I risked it) and the female has a trace of orange like Nemo on it's lips. Like lipstick haha..
318   HeadSet   2025 Jun 23, 1:24pm  

Patrick says





Kings and Emperors are mentioned also, but not democracy.
319   Patrick   2025 Jun 23, 1:39pm  

Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mention democracy either.
320   HeadSet   2025 Jun 23, 3:00pm  

Patrick says

Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mention democracy either.

You knew what I meant, but I will rephrase:

Kings and Emperors are mentioned also, but not republican government. The point is that not being in the Bible can be a matter of the era it was written rather than any proof of a deity's will. Otherwise, one should only ride on an ass or in a chariot and not in a car.
321   Patrick   2025 Jun 23, 3:33pm  

I know, just having fun.
322   HeadSet   2025 Jun 23, 6:06pm  

Patrick says

I know, just having fun.

Hmm, maybe I can get even by making fun of you in a comic strip.
326   Patrick   2025 Aug 8, 10:45am  

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/greasy-friday-august-8-2025-c-and


The New York Times wheeled out economist Emily Oster to inform America that, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might technically be right about chronic disease and our broken food system, he is definitely totally wrong in blaming seed oils. Oster claimed the science pinning obesity and other health problems on omega-6 oils like canola, safflower, and sunflower is “flawed” — just another case of correlation, not causation. (Even more guffaw-producing, she admitted that “better data” might later prove RFK Jr. was right.) The real villain, Emily insisted, isn’t the oil, it’s the deep-fried Oreo it slid in on.

Dr. Oster is obviously a greasy science denier. ...

Seed oils are exactly what they sound like — oils squeezed from the tiny seeds of plants like soybeans, corn, canola, cottonseed, and sunflowers. That all sounds very natural and healthy. ...

The snag is, seeds don’t easily surrender their oil. They greedily prefer to keep it for themselves. So extracting the oils requires an all-out industrial assault: high-pressure mechanical rollers, solvent baths in hexane, repeated heating, chemical refining to strip out unpleasant odors and revolting colors, and finally “deodorizing” to make the end product palatable. By the time the bottle hits the supermarket shelf, it’s been through more processing steps than a gas-station chicken nugget and looks more like industrial waste than anything found in nature.

That’s why critics call them “factory foods.” They’re not pressed like olive oil or churned like butter, they’re manufactured, the byproducts of an industrial chemistry set built to turn valueless agricultural waste into profitable, shelf-stable cooking fat.

Emerging science —the same kind of imperfect-but-actionable evidence Dr. Oster once cheerleaded— has been painting a consistently ugly picture of seed oils. High-omega-6 industrial oils like soybean, canola, safflower, and sunflower aren’t just inert cooking mediums; their polyunsaturated fats oxidize easily under heat and in the body, spawning reactive aldehydes that inflame tissues, damage cell membranes, and scramble mitochondrial function. They skew the body’s omega-6 to omega-3 ratio toward a chronic, low-grade inflammatory state, priming the immune system for misfires and front-loading the metabolism for insulin resistance.

Animal models and controlled feeding studies have linked high seed-oil diets to fatty liver, obesity, impaired satiety signaling, and cardiovascular dysfunction— especially when combined with refined carbs and sedentary living. In other words, they’re not the lone assassin of American health, but they’re definitely in the getaway car.

« First        Comments 313 - 326 of 326        Search these comments

Please register to comment:

api   best comments   contact   latest images   memes   one year ago   users   suggestions   gaiste