Is the calorie-free sweetener erythritol safe? The FDA did not evaluate long-term use, and new research suggests it may cause blood clots in people with high blood pressure and other risk factors.
Can You Really Cook with Olive Oil?
The short answer is yes. Of course you can. Trouble is, the Canola and Soy oil industry are threatened by olive oil, and want us to ignore olive oil’s multi-thousand year track record of serving as a delicious and life giving food for the Romans, the Greeks, the Albanian–and the rest of the Mediterranean. So the edible oil barons had to get creative to convince consumers to mistrust culinary history and tradition as ample evidence of safety.
What did they come up with?
“The edible oil industry cooked up a scary sounding problem: smoke point.”
You’ve probably heard the term “smoke point” and probably correctly guessed what smoke point means. The smoke point is the point at which an oil literally ignites and burns, creating a visible wisp of blueish smoke. The RBD (Refined Bleached Deodorized) seed oil industry makes the claim their products are better to cook with because they have a “better” (higher) smoke point–meaning that their products have a better ability to tolerate higher temperatures without literally smoking.
“The smoke point of an oil is believed to be correlated with the safety and stability under heat, although technical evidence to support this is limited“
Authors of the 2019 article “Evaluation of Chemical and Physical Changes in Different Commercial Oils during Heating”
We’ve probably all had our moments in the kitchen when we forgot something on the stove, and the whole pan started smoking–the food, the oil, who could tell?–but I don’t think anyone seriously expects that an oil be flame proof just to be able to cook with it
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For the last month, I have really been reading all labels on everything. I have completely remove those 8 oils you talk about. I must tell you, I feel great! I have more energy and I am now 197 lbs (have always been around 205 to 210lbs). I eat potatoes with real butter, grass fed steak, pasta with the right toppings. I eat everything! I seem to crave less sugar. I love it!
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I’ve lost 20+ pounds (also fasting 16-24 hours daily) and haven’t had palpitations except for one occasion — I had a mini bag of Fritos for the first time in July. And, I feel better now on a daily basis than I ever did all through college.
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I’ve lost over 50 pounds. I’m 56 years old. Cutting processed food and unhealthy fats from my diet was one of the first things I did on my health recovery journey...I went cold turkey off the bad oils. Emptied my pantry into the trash and just started eating real food
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I have lost a solid 20 lbs and my bloodwork (after 3 months of eating your way) was even better! I was metabolically healthy (per your book) before I read your book, but barely. Lowering my weight, sealed the deal! I have been talking about you and your book to anyone who will listen...Thank you for all you’ve done and what you continue to do! You are changing lives for the better!
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I love your Fatburn Fix! Has helped me so so much! I have had the dreaded weight all my life - 20 or so pounds I could never shed. I have lost that now. I only eat 2 meals a day lunch and dinner with a glass of milk or cappuccino around 4 to hold me over. No snacking and not bad oils. It has been the key to unlocking my fatburn. I work out in the am and believe I am burning fat for energy not from food!
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Completed Dr Cate's online course
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Dismantles the lie
Dr. Cate dismantles the lie that seed oils are healthy, which may the biggest lie about nutrition and health because it’s so insidious.
Ken D Berry, MD
Author of Lies My Doctor Told Me
She knows the chemistry
Dr. Cate alerts us to the harms of seed oils and she’s convincing because she knows the chemistry better than anyone.
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Globally recognized internal medicine and addiction medicine specialist, media personality, LoveLine Host, and New York Times bestselling author
No one is better at communicating nutritional truth
Dr. Cate has had the single greatest impact on how we talk to people about fueling for both performance or durability. While we all are a little unique, the foundational principles of human nutrition are immutable. If you are looking to create a more durable, resilient body, no one is better at communicating nutritional truth than Dr. Cate.
Dr. Kelly Starrett
Physiotherapist coach and New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author
Highly recommend The Fatburn Fix
Dr. Shanahan has had a significant impact on my practice of medicine. I am known as a Low Carb Doctor, but I never really appreciated the negative effects of processed seed oils on the health of my patients. I highly recommend The Fatburn Fix to my patients and have a loaner copy in my waiting room. It is amazing how quickly blood sugars and overall health improves with cutting seed oils. It is not just about the carbs!
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CEO of LowCarbMD San Diego, co-host of Low Carb MD Podcast and host of Life's Best Medicine Podcast
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Dr. Cate reordered my diet when I was with the L.A. Lakers, and the benefits, for me personally, were felt immediately and have served me to this day. I’ve come to take real food so seriously I started a small family farm. I know of no M.D./nutritionist more respected in the sports world than Dr. Cate Shanahan.
Chris Kaman
NBA Player
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Cate brought the seed oil issue front and center. Healthy fats matter. So much so that I created an entire product line to swap out bad fats with good.
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Pull up a chair…
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Author of the Bulletproof Diet
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I love your Fatburn Fix! Has helped me so so much! I have had the dreaded weight all my life - 20 or so pounds I could never shed. I have lost that now. I only eat 2 meals a day lunch and dinner with a glass of milk or cappuccino around 4 to hold me over. No snacking and not bad oils. It has been the key to unlocking my fatburn.
Lauren Smith
Saved my life
I would like to thank you for literally saving my life. Back in February, I had to be hospitalized while on vacation in Phoenix with an A1C of 11% and had to start taking 2 types of insulin and 2 other meds. I read the Fatburn Fix in April, and followed the program to a tee, and I’m down by 15 pounds, 6.8 A1C, and only one once weekly diabetes medicine.
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Still, to a chef, or a household cook, smoke point may sound like a reasonable concern. To an organic chemist, however, the claim that smoke point is in any way relevant smells like a propaganda campaign.
Firstly, most food contain enough water that it will start to sizzle around 212 degrees F, the boiling point of water, which is well below the smoke point of any oil. That sound is a warning that it’s time to stir or flip or turn down the heat, and it’s a far better indicator than the smoke rising from the pan or fire alarms going off.
“Focusing on smoke point draws our attention away from what really matters about cooking oils: their ability to endure heat”
Smoke point is actually a very unhealthy idea for two reasons. First, it’s been so effectively used to sell cheap, less nutritious cooking fats that these flavorless factory foods (that meet every definition of junk food) have now largely replaced olive oil in restaurants, even in pizza joints and fine Italian eateries. Second, smoke point draws our attention from the real point of chemistry that impacts human health, and that has to do with it’s polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) content. (#vegoilsucks)
The edible oil industry has so effectively drilled home this false idea that for an oil to be suitable for cooking it needs to have a high smoke point that it is now very tough to convince chefs otherwise. Unfortunately, even if an oil has a high smoke point, the PUFA fats in the oil, which are present in abundance in canola, corn, soy and other so called ‘vegetable oils’ are invisibly breaking down in a harmful way long before they start smoking.
Imagine what would happen to a glass hit by a mallet; it would explode into a thousand shards. That’s what happens to PUFA fats when they’re heated. Now imagine a sheet of metal hit by a mallet. The mallet bounces right off and the metal sheet is unchanged. That’s what happens to saturated fats when they’re heated. Butter, coconut oil and olive oil are high enough in saturated fat that they do not break down under normal stovetop cooking conditions.
It’s the PUFA content of the oil, not the smoke point, that most powerfully determines how well a given oil tolerates heat and therefore whether the food you cook in it will be healthy and delicious. Long before an oil smokes, it breaks down in a way that’s invisible to the eye and toxic to our cells. The higher an oils PUFA content, the faster it breaks down. This occurs because the double bonds in PUFAs are highly reactive with oxygen.
(Deep frying and especially repeated use deep frying is another animal that deserves its own article. While olive oil still does better than the high PUFA seed oils in deep fryers, no oils stands up for a week–which is how long many restaurants go without changing their oil. Ick.)
Whenever polyunsaturated oils are heated, and long before they start to smoke, they start to oxidize, meaning oxygen breaks individual molecules apart, into smaller molecules. The end product of the broken down PUFA fats are highly toxic, new compounds that don’t normally exist in nature in any significant quantity and that our bodies cells can’t handle.
We can see and understand smoke. But the concept of molecular deterioration is too abstract, and we can only measure it with sophisticated lab equipment. Until recently, nobody had actually run a comprehensive comparison of high smoke point, high PUFA oils to olive oil. And they found exactly what any serious student of organic chemistry could have predicted: That high PUFA Canola, grapeseed and rice bran produce a ton of break down products called polar compounds. See below, from “Evaluation of Chemical and Physical Changes in Different Commercial Oils during Heating”
What we see is how well the 10 different oils stand up to heat. As the temperature increases above 150 degrees C, there is a rapid rise in polar compounds. Polar compounds are bad for our health. So bad that when present above 25% an oil is considered unfit for human consumption. The highest concentration of polar compounds was found in Canola oil, at 27.5%, followed by grapeseed (19.3%) and rice bran (13.0%) oils.
You might think from looking at this one graph that this is the whole story of which oils are best. And if you’re a fan of sunflower oil, you might be mislead into thinking that sunflower oil performs better than one of the lower grades of olive oil. But polar compounds are only one category of PUFA break down products; there are many others and taken as a whole even the lower grades of olive oil outperform sunflower. If you’re interested, the full text with figures are available from ASNH (Acta Scientific Nutritional Health) https://actascientific.com/ASNH/pdf/ASNH-02-0083.pdf
Finally, I’ll give the last word to one of my favorite chefs. Debby Lee who caters out of her company MindBodyFork.com. She started her own health journey after reading my second book, Food Rules: A Doctor’s Guide to Healthy Eating and eliminated the seed oils forever after.
Debby was glad to say goodbye to the high-smoke-point concept because “As a chef taste is always the most important thing. In using the high smoke point RBD oils, there is a definite wax like aftertaste on the food. So now, when I fry foods, I always veer to natural animal fat or avocado oil if a client is vegetarian.”
To hear a fun and informative podcast on the topic of olive oil, from one of the worlds leading authorities on what it takes to give olive oil the best flavor, check out this interview from Ben Greenfield: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/nutrition-podcasts/extra-virgin-olive-oil/
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This Post Has 11 Comments
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This is excellent! I have wanted to cook with my favorite EVOO but have read over and over that it is not safe. It is also almost impossible to find mayo without seed oils of any kind, and we do not like the avocado mayos currently on the market. I’d like to make it from scratch, but most mayo recipes state that EVOO is too strong and recommend using “light olive oil” or a more “neutral-tasting” oil. Dr. Cate, is there a company that makes a ‘light olive oil’ that follows the Olive Oil Certification Standards? Or is scratch mayo with avocado oil the best option? Avocado oil has also been found to be adulterated with inferior seed oils. What is everyone using?
Generally, if the bottle does not say unrefined then it’s refined.
Hello! Just wondering if the olive oil companies are required to specify on their labels if the oil is refined. I bought an olive oil which showed under ingredients “pure olive oil” with no reference to unrefined or otherwise.
If we had to rate the Hateful 8, I’d put high oleic sunflower in the least un-wanted category. If that helps.
Muchas gracias.
Yes. Every corner of the planet is now infused with seed oil. And Italy’s population is skewed elderly
I watched part of the interview with Bill Maher. I am curious, why then so many people were dying in Italy. Is it that in Italy they also use seed oils?
dr cates1 iam from argentina! I am olive oil producer. We are producing extra virgen olive oil of premium qualities… I want to thank all the information you give into the world. It was so difficult for my to find good information on how to respond to chefs, friends, and to people in the industry that speak about the smoke point… and more difficult is to find it in spanish!! And also so sad to see how the industry misleads information only for their profits…Iam right now translation your text to spanish, and studiyng all the great source of knowldege you have put out there! So my message is just to tell you how much i apreciatte your work. I wish you would give a course on nutrition and FATS!! Best regards! Laura
I learned about the oils years ago from Dr. Cate. I don’t like the taste of olive oil, so I use EVAO – A=avocado, which is high in mono-unsaturated fats, low in poly, and has from one scale I found, the highest smoke point of all, in case anyone is still concerned about that.
Also, I buy it for $8.50 Liter At Sunland Produce in Sun Valley, California.
Hi,
Thanks primarily to Dr. Cate’s indelible research and expertise I have successfully avoided toxic oils for more than five years. I’m at least five times healthier because of it and my genes are forever grateful.
During an exchange with a local food co-op grocer recently, he expressed a belief that there is a misconception about sunflower and safflower oils containing polyunsaturated fatty acids, suggesting instead that most safflower and sunflower oils are actually high oleic and therefore contain monounsaturated fatty acids.
I realize that most foods containing sunflower and safflower oils are highly processed and best avoided regardless of their PUFA content. However, there are some organic granolas and other foods that might not be entirely banished to the junk food category if it weren’t for their stubborn sunflower or safflower oil as an ingredient.
Does anyone have any insight about whether it might be true that most sunflower and safflower oil strands may actually be MUFA-based and not PUFA-ridden?
Thanks very much,
-Jared
Excellent article, thank you for speaking directly about this! It’s always saddening to see people do what they think is best for their health by following misinformation.
Using “smoke point” to determine an oil’s suitability and safety for cooking is one of the food (especially catering) industry’s biggest problems – replacing traditional oils and fats simply cannot be reasoned with health in any regard!
The study you linked makes it clear:
“Peanut oil, with high oleic acid content showed a similar behaviour than EVOO. Avocado showed lower induction time values than EVOO. Seed oils, such as canola, grapeseed, sunflower and rice bran oils showed lower oxidation stability. These results are related to seed oils’ fatty acid composition with higher PUFAs content, such as linoleic and lino-lenic acid and lower levels of natural antioxidants.”.
Polar compounds are one unhealthy factor. Add in oxidation when cooking and you have dangerous results.
Keep writing great content and making a difference!
James