grape sed oil is the best high flash point hard to burn
Actually sunflower oil is lower in saturated fat and higher in monosaturated fat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_oilOriginally Posted by CLeamon
100g of Sunflower oil has:
10g of sat fat
84g of monounsat fat
4g of polyunsat fat.
100g of Olive oil has:
14g of sat fat
73g of monounsat fat
11g of polyunsat fat.
However, there's a note about Omega-6 fatty acids:
Negative health effects
A high consumption of omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are found in most types of vegetable oil including sunflower oil, may increase the likelihood that postmenopausal women may develop breast cancer.[9] A similar effect was observed on prostate cancer.[10] Other analysis suggested an inverse association between total polyunsaturated fatty acids and breast cancer risk.[11]
But after reading other things about this issue I have to say that it kind of reminds me of all the other food warnings we've seen come-and-go over the years. There's even evidence that counters the "Negative health effects" warning.
Who would have guess so many natural things are so harmful to your health.
"The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."
-- Paul Dirac
Botulinum toxin is natural.Who would have guess so many natural things are so harmful to your health.
Ricin is natural.
Digoxin is natural.
Cyanide is natural.
Alpha Amanitin is natural.
If you eat too much salt you will die.
Drinking too much water will kill you.
Never equate "natural" with "healthy". Just don't eat castor beans, foxglove, the wrong mushrooms, etc... For the rest, moderation is the key. But given a choice, I go with natural over artificial.
As for oils, it seems to me that for the most part, when backpacking, oil in your diet is there mostly for calories (most per gram) and flavor. So if you like the taste of olive oil, use it. If you want something neutral, use something else. If it is a liquid at room temperature, it will be relatively rich in unsaturated fats. Differences among fat profiles among the various vegetable oils will be an insignificant, as are trace amounts of "antioxidants, etc..." . Just avoid trans fats (anything that says "partially hydrogenated"). You are better off eating butter. It won't hurt you either.
Canola oil is about the cheapest, and is as healthy as any other vegetable oil. Not the most flavourful for salads and such, but good for cooking, and very good as fuel. I prefer olive oil for flavour, but will use cheap canola oil when experimenting with using an ediblle fuel for oil lamps and oil stoves. For stir frying something I will use one or the other, depending on what sort of flavour I want. Canola oil is ok for fish. For lamb I would use olive oil for sure.
I haven't had time to look into this issue; I came across these links on a gardening website. Basically, it's about the ingredients used in olive oil...maybe misleading.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...a_fact_mueller ; http://www.berkeleyside.com/2011/12/...our-olive-oil/ ; http://www.extravirginity.com/
"The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."
-- Paul Dirac
I prefer canola oil over olive oil when frying fish or browning oats or making granola.
I prefer light extra virgin olive oil for other cooking, and dark extra virgin olive oil for salads.
As a lamp or wicked fuel oil, canola oil and light extra virgin olive oil work equally well.
I like the price of canola oil. That has a very strong power of suggestion for me. :-)
Who is john gault????
"Something hidden. Go and find it. Go, and look behind the Ranges. Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you . . . Go!" (Rudyard Kipling)
From SunnyWalker, CDT hiker starting April 27, 2013.
Please visit: SunnyWalker.Net
Excellent olive oil is truly great. Italian olive oil is very good but much Italian branded olive oil is grown in other countries and just blended and bottled in Italy. It's hard to find the really good Italian olive oil in the USA and it's rarely in grocery stores. Stuff like Bertolli EVO is decent for cooking but there is much better OO. My current favorite is a Greek olive oil from a Greek deli in Worcester, MA. Many cooks won't use the best olive oil for cooking because it loses some of its flavor when heated. I often add a little of the good stuff as a flavoring. One measure of quality in olive oil is to look at the acidity, the lower the better. My Greek olive oil is max acidity 0.3%; 1% is good, above that is mediocre.
For frying at high temps, olive oil is not the best because it smokes at a lower temp than corn oil or peanut oil. Chinese stir fry with olive oil is "interesting". Italian eggplant fried in sesame oil would also be "interesting".
It's funny my that this thread just got bumped (btw, you're thinking of Galt, not Gault), just yesterday I read several articles about the disturbing level of adulteration that is common among manufacturers of these posed Extra Virgin Olive Oil that so many people, including myself pay a premium to buy. I've pasted one of the articles below.
Oh, and FWIW, I agree with previous posts, that olive oil is good for lots of things, but pan frying is best to other more heat resistant oils.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandsty...oil-real-thing
- Jon Henley
- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 January 2012 14.59 EST
- Comments (…)
Fresh olives, being harvested in Umbria Photograph: AGF s.r.l. / Rex Features
Last month, the Olive Oil Times reported that two Spanish businessmen had been sentenced to two years in prison in Cordoba for selling hundreds of thousands of litres of supposedly extra virgin olive oil that was, in fact, a mixture of 70-80% sunflower oil and 20-30% olive.
- Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
- by Tom Mueller
- Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
Search the Guardian bookshop
- Tell us what you think:Star-rate and review this book
In 2008, Italian police arrested over 60 peopleand closed more than 90 farms and processing plants across the south after uncovering substandard, non-Italian olive oil being passed off as Italian extra virgin, and chlorophyll and beta-carotene being added to sunflower and soybean oil with the same aim.
Most alarmingly, a study last year by researchers at the University of California, Davis and the Australian Oils Research Laboratory concluded that as much as 69% of imported European olive oil (and a far smaller proportion of native Californian) sold as extra virgin in the delicatessens and grocery stores on the US west coast wasn't what it claimed to be.
In Britain, of course, it wasn't so very long ago that the most likely place to find olive oil was the chemist. Today, thanks partly to the health claims made on its behalf and partly to the fact it tastes good, the oil Homer called "liquid gold" is in half of all UK homes and we get through 30m litres of olive oil every year – more than double than we did decade ago. We're now, in fact, the world's 10th biggest olive oil-consuming nation. So with a litre of supermarket extra virgin costing up to £4, and connoisseurs willing to pay 10 times that sum for a far smaller bottle of seasonal, first cold stone pressed, single estate, artisan-milled oil from Italy or Greece, can we be sure of getting what we're paying for?
The answer, according to Tom Mueller in a book out this month, is very often not. In Extra Virginity: the Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, Mueller, an American who lives in Italy, lays bare the workings of an industry prey, he argues, to hi-tech, industrial-scale fraud. The problem, he says, is that good olive oil is difficult, time-consuming and expensive to make, but easy, quick and cheap to doctor.
Most commonly, it seems, extra virgin oil is mixed with a lower grade olive oil, often not from the same country. Sometimes, another vegetable oil such as colza or canola is used. The resulting blend is then chemically coloured, flavoured and deodorised, and sold as extra-virgin to a producer. Almost any brand can, in theory, be susceptible: major names such as Bertolli (then owned by Unilever) have found themselves in court having to argue, successfully in this instance, that they had themselves been defrauded by their supplier.
Meanwhile, the chemical tests that should by law be performed by exporters of extra virgin oil before it can be labelled and sold as such can often fail to detect adulterated oil, particularly when it has been mixed with products such as deodorised, lower-grade olive oil in a sophisticated modern refinery. Nor do national food authorities appear particularly bothered as long as the oil isn't actively harmful, which is rare. In Britain, says Judy Ridgeway, one of the UK's leading olive oil experts, the Food Standards Agency has not done any checks on olive oil in five or six years. "And it only does chemical tests, not taste tests," she adds.
The EU now also requires extra virgin oil to pass assorted taste and aroma tests, assessed by panels of experts: the oil has to be suitably fruity, bitter and peppery, and cannot display any of 16 different defects, including "grubbiness", "mustiness" and "fustiness". But bad stuff still gets through.
Ridgeway says it is "hard to say what percentage of faulty oil gets through" to Britain. "It will vary seasonally – there will be more at this time of year than in March or April, but it's appreciable. They buy in good faith, but there are faulty oils on our supermarket shelves, without any argument."
The olive, in more than 700 varieties or cultivars, has been grown for its oil in the Mediterranean since 3000 BC. Unlike most vegetable oils, which are extracted from seeds or nuts, good olive oil is made using a basic hydraulic press, or more modern centrifuge, so it is more a fruit juice than an industrial fat. It comes in several qualities, including lampante, or "lamp oil", which is made from damaged or ground-gathered fruit and cannot be sold as food; virgin; and extra virgin, the highest grade. This has to be made by a physical (rather than chemical) process, and meet strict chemical requirements, including levels of oxidation and "free acidity" (a measure of decomposition).
Like any fresh product, olive oil deteriorates over time. "The trouble," says Ridgeway, "is that it's quite easy to clean up, say, an oil that doesn't quite pass the acidity test, and to do it without leaving any chemical markers. It could even taste pretty good, for about three months. Then it will go horribly wrong."
Michael North, an expert who runs a fresh seasonal olive oil club, says the problem is "huge. The public are just not aware of what's going on. There's plenty of oil out there that's rubbish: last year's oil or older. Or not even olive oil."So how can consumers best ensure they're not being ripped off? Ridgeway recommends paying a sensible price. Unfortunately, a 50cl bottle costing £15 is, on balance, "less likely to have problems" than one costing £2. North urges people never to buy olive oil in a clear bottle ("It oxidises and goes rancid far faster"), and to buy from somewhere you can taste it first.
Both he and Ridegway, though, stress the prime importance of buying young. "Look for a harvest date," North says. "They're starting to appear now, albeit on only a few bottles, and they'll tell you how old the oil is. It's not an absolute guarantee of quality, but half the battle."
How to buy olive oil
• Find a seller who stores it in clean, temperature-controlled stainless steel containers topped with an inert gas such as nitrogen to keep oxygen at bay, and bottles it as they sell it. Ask to taste it before buying.
• Favour bottles or containers that protect against light, and buy a quantity that you'll use up quickly.
• Don't worry about colour. Good oils come in all shades, from green to gold to pale straw – but avoid flavours such as mouldy, cooked, greasy, meaty, metallic, and cardboard.
• Ensure that your oil is labelled "extra virgin," since other categories—"pure" or "light" oil, "olive oil" and "olive pomace oil" – have undergone chemical refinement.
• Try to buy oils only from this year's harvest – look for bottles with a date of harvest. Failing that, look at the "best by" date which should be two years after an oil was bottled.
• Though not always a guarantee of quality, PDO (protected designation of origin) and PGI (protected geographical indication) status should inspire some confidence.
• Some terms commonly used on olive oil labels are anachronistic, such as "first pressed" and "cold pressed". Since most extra virgin oil nowadays is made with centrifuges, it isn't "pressed" at all, and true extra virgin oil comes exclusively from the first processing of the olive paste.
For further information, see extravirginity.com. Extracted from Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller.
• This article was amended on 5 January 2012. The original referred to Bertolli as owned by Unilever. This has been corrected.
It's called "Lyme" disease, not "Lymes" disease! (Hint: There's only one Lyme)
"This sucks and I love it"
Sarcasm the elf, the author of that book had a very interesting interview on NPR. He mentioned that there is excellent olive oil from California. To bring the discussion closer to the AT, there is an olive grower that makes olive oil in Lakeland, Georgia; since it's likely to be very fresh it's probably good. http://georgiaolivefarms.com/store.php
A review of supermarket brands of OO: http://www.cooksillustrated.com/tast...asp?docid=9812
They ranked them as:
Columela premium EVO (Spain)
Lucini EVO (Italy)
Colavita EVO (Italy) (I've had this and it's decent but not as good as my Greek olive oil).
Bertolli EVO (Italy, Spain, Greece and Tunisia) a big step down from the others according to Cooks Illustrated.
Philip Berio EVO (Italy, Spain, Greece and Tunisia) a step down from Bertolli according to CI.
We might have to hike trails in Italy, Spain and Greece to find really good oil in trail towns.
In case it's not obvious, I love olive oil and olives.
A couple of posts have referred to oils as going "off" with time after opening. Just thought I would add that when oils go "off" after opening, they are not spoiling (contaminated by microbes), but rather are being oxidized in a chemical reaction by oxygen in the bottle. So it isn't opening the bottle, per se, that causes this. It is storing the half empty bottle (now half full of oxygen) for some time. The oxidized oil won't hurt you (as food spoiled by microbes can), although you may marginally decrease some of the health benefits of the unsaturated fats and antioxidants that have been oxidized. Mainly, it just doesn't taste as good.
I'm a Greek -American so I have 3500 years of olives and olive oil history in my veins
Despite it's current " hipness " olive oil is still very much an esoteric oil that should only be used in very appropriate and very limited situations
Since non -Mediterranean people have " discovered " it olive oil has become really expensive
Expense is one disadvantage of using olive oil , it's strong taste is another and it's low smoke point is another .
Since heat destroys the flavor of EVOO it's a waste of money and ingredent to cook with it
For all purpose el cheapo oils your best bet is to go w/ a neutral oil that can handle heat such as Canola ( rapeseed) or Vegetable ( soybean)
Clarified butter aka ghee is also a good alternative to OO
And packs much more easily for backpacking because it is generally a solid (gel?) at most (if you ignore this past weekend, geez!) hiking temperatures, so you have no worries about it spilling all over your pack.
One other clarification. John Gault's post (#22) about Sunflower Oil being higher in monounsaturated fats than OO only applies to the high oleic sunflower oil. Standard sunflower oil is only about 20% (according to the reference he cited). Also, olive oil had the lowest amount of the omega 6 fatty acid (linoleic) among the vegatable oils listed (unless you can find the high oleic sunflower oil).
Last edited by Odd Man Out; 07-02-2012 at 13:24.
Ghee is always my oil of choice and its easy to make yourself and load into a squeeze tube. You can use a meet injector to get it into a tube real easy.
Coconut Oil and sunflower oil the best I think its also on the Paleo Diet if anyone is doing that
If you can’t fix it with duct tape or a beer; it ain’t worth fixing
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/12/143154...alous-industry
Here's the NPR article about olive oil.
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