What’s your personal health ranking for cooking oils?
What’s your personal health ranking for cooking oils?
I get that there is probably a more complex answer in reality, and probably an objective ranking, but I’m interested in what people’s perceptions are.
Olive Oil: Healthy
Motor Oil: Unhealthy
Unless your a car, then flip that around
Fwiw, I'm pretty convinced that the anti-seed oil crowd is approximately as grounded in science as the anti-vaccine crowd - that is to say, not at all.
Im not a doctor, but trained in (doing and reading) science. I've read up on this and can pretty confidently say you're right.
- Extra virgin olive oil for anything where the taste is a good thing
- Any oil with high monounsaturates and zero saturates (the rest being polyunsaturates). This may be a seed oil.
Extra virgin olive oil (and it has to be extra virgin) is known and scientifically proven to be very good for you.
Seed oils are today highly controversial - I avoided them for many years - but current science research suggests that they are perfectly safe, and indeed good for lowering cholesterol.
Here's a real scientist, working and published in exactly this area, talking about this exact question: https://youtu.be/VRlleOTBq7k?si=trB8t5xRjOJml5ug
Well, there's a FLAVOR ranking and a HEALTH ranking. :)
Tops for both are avocado oil and extra virgin olive oil.
My general preference is Lucini Olive Oil, they have Italian and Argentinian variants depending on how much you want to spend, and it's readily available pretty much everywhere.
https://www.delish.com/kitchen-tools/cookware-reviews/g46931475/best-olive-oil-brands-ranked/
They are all quite unhealthy and claims about magical compounds within this or that refined oil are largely nonsense. That said, plant-based oils are generally much less bad for you than butter and lard, and increasing unsaturated fat proportion is a good idea.
Oil in general is overused as an ingredient when savory flavors can be achieved with mushrooms, msg, nutritional yeast, tomato, and more. However it is certainly useful as a tool for heat transfer in cooking but can be used in much lower quantities for that purpose than you might expect.
I generally use avocado oil for any very high heat cooking surface like a wok, olive oil or avocado oil for other general high heat cooking surface, and nice flavorful olive oil or spiced olive oil for oil as an ingredient.
- S tier: tallow, duck fat, butter, ghee, lard
- A tier: coconut oil
- B tier: olive oil, avocado oil
- C tier: peanut oil
- F tier: everything else
For frying I use avocado oil, it has a high smoke point.
Avocado, grapeseed, or coconut for high heat. Olive for dressings and marinades. Butter for flavored frying (eggs, rice, etc.). Olive for skin and herbal infusions. Argan for my daughter's hair. Motor for the car. WD40 for squeaks.
In order from least healthy to most healthy:
- Moldy Gym Sock Drippings Oil
- Dumpster Guac Grease
- Three-Year-Expired Sunflower “Oil” That’s Now a Solid
- Fish Tank Backwash Extract
- Hair Salon Sweepings Oil
- Used Frying Oil from a Carnival Deep-Fryer
- Regular Olive Oil (Extra Virgin)
- Plain Old Canola Oil
"don't care taste good"
I hope you don't live in China. Check out gutter oil.
Isn't it common that shitty places, like a fries stand in a village festival or in tourist areas, recycle oil all the time, and the food tastes like bad oil?
My friend once asked a guy at the fries stand if he changed his oil this month. The guy was visibly shaken and said of course he has, this oil is no more than a week old.
Coconut, olive, anything else just for occasional flavor but better if avoided, canola and soy are the worst. that's my personal unresearched ranking.
Researched input on your ranking: canola and soy are healthier than coconut since they're both multiply unsaturated whereas coconut is saturated and has shorter chains. As far as I can tell, canola has a pretty good profile of fatty acids.
Okay, again I haven't read a thing so I'm not saying you are wrong. I've just heard too many times that coconut is better for cooking, especially frying, and also to be eaten raw. Something about oxidation and temperature. Whatever. If canola is healthier I might switch to it, it's far cheaper after all.
FYI, there was a similar thread recently on !yurop@lemm.ee
Mayonnaise
All oils crumble in the presence of the Almighty olive oil
I was in a post on reddit sometime when we all got lectured about how every vegetable oil sucks and it's better to eat lard or duck fat or tallow. "You clearly don't know about lipids". Haven't figured out of that's true or not but I'd definitely rather use butter than margarine.
Veggie oils are totally fine and animal fats, while tasty, are definitely worse for you.
I still use butter in cookies though.
I avoid them if at all possible, including olive oil because it's often mixed with seed oils.
If I'm eating at a restaurant I can't control it and roll the dice, but at home I cook using tallow, lard, butter
My personal philosophy is if I can't make it myself, at least once, I don't want to eat it. So no processed foods at all. I've churned butter, I've rendered lard, but I can't make seed oils at home.
Got any good salad dressing recipes with lard?
Why can’t you make seed oils at home?
Why can’t you make seed oils at home?
Mix every 1/4 cup (59 g) of sesame seeds with 1 cup (237 mL) of oil. Pour your sesame seeds inside a medium or large pot. Then, pour in a cooking oil of your choice, based on the amount of sesame seeds you are using.
You got my upvote not because I like lard but because you're getting downvoted for a personal culinary preference.
Seed oils are probably bad for you but the rest are either good or neutral. Olive or avocado oil is probably at the top but I don't think there's anything wrong with butter either
I really do not see what the point of them are and I don't really taste what 'benefits' they claim to provide. They're almost required for a lot of baking and cooking needs. However, I've found that sometimes, they can be avoided and the food will turn out fine on it's own.
Vegetable, Canola, Peanut, Sunflower .etc don't look or sound healthy to me. I instead use Coconut.