It’s crazy isn’t it. So many foods they market as ‘low fat’ they just took out the good fat and replaced it with sugar- which your body immediately turns into fat anyway, and messes up your hormones and insulin sensitivity along the way.

And the only oil we’ve introduced into the diet is trans fat which the body mistakes for good fat and just starts building stuff with it, and then it all breaks down and you get heart disease.

You couldn’t make it up

>> aversion to dietary fat for the past 3 generations combined with refined seed/bean oils

Aye... This is probably the first medically/scientifically prescribed diet for society at large and it has been a disaster.

And the worst thing is, as we've learned from Big Tobacco, They're -never- going to admit it. Nestle, Kraft, etc. will stop at nothing to make sure they aren't liable for the way they cut costs at the expense of generations of human beings health.

They're definitely bad actors, but the whole thing is/was much bigger than just packaged food companies. National medical authorities. Your local doctor or nutritionist. The food pyramid hanging in your classroom.

We're not good at mea culpas and the baggage hangs around.

Oils are dietary fats though?

Refined seed oils are synthetic chemicals that just happen to use seeds as a feedstock in a relatively novel chemical reaction.

Yes one can quibble that cooking is a chemical reaction, but it’s one that is both simple and that we’re long since evolved to tolerate.

I stick to mechanically produced vegetable oils and animal fats. It’s not only healthier but it tastes better too.

However, a healthy diet depends a great deal on your race. A traditional Inuit diet is observably healthy for Inuit persons, but probably best avoided by people like me. However there are no humans that are evolved to eat seed oils.

> However there are no humans that are evolved to eat seed oils.

I am cautious about these sorts of issues and typically buy the least processed oils (and foods in general) that I can find, however it is my understanding that humans around the world have been producing and eating (mechanically expressed) sesame seed oil for thousands of years. I can't say whether that has any impact on whether people are "evolved to eat it", but it's certainly not something new: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02859136

You’re right. I consider chemically extracted the default, but I should have been explicit that I didn’t mean mechanically expressed seed oils.

There isn't any "chemically extracted" seed oil, at least not with a chemical reaction. The use of a chemical reaction is indicated by "interesterified" or "hydrogenated". That isn't used for extraction; it alters the melting points.

The use of solvents to extract oils isn't a chemical reaction. It's not really different from using CO2 to extract caffeine from coffee, using water to extract tea from tea leaves, or using alcohol to extract vanilla flavor from vanilla beans. The common solvent for oil extraction is hexane, which is removed by boiling it off with a vacuum and/or heat.

The solvent-extracted oil will have unmodified molecules. The proportions of the various molecules may differ because the ease with which they are extracted will depend on the processing conditions. You get different proportions of molecules in the mix if you change the temperature, pressure, time, or solvent. For some use cases you might prefer one mix or another. You could get a different viscosity, melting point, or smoke point.

Maybe I'm being pedantic, but most of the stuff done to refined oils are physical processes, not chemical

Where does one find mechanically produced vegetable oils? I'm piqued, thanks in advance.

Look for “expeller pressed” on seed oils (canola, etc).

Now I see why they’re advertising the method of extraction...

Olive oil is the most obvious one

Big mechanical squishers squishing olives.

> I stick to mechanically produced vegetable oils and animal fats.

Can you give examples of what you use?