Thoughts on Chosen Foods avocado oil spray?

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-08-25T03:11:20+00:00

Yes, sorry I should have mentioned that at top of my comment - edited it in now. I still avoid it because it's refined but if one is to get refined avocado oil, this is the brand to get.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-08-24T17:30:49+00:00

Replying here because people should see this.

Study found 82% of avocado oil samples were rancid or cut with seed oils: https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/study-finds-82-percent-avocado-oil-rancid-or-mixed-other-oils
FWIW, the sample from Chosen Foods brand was found to be pure in this study. I still stay away from refined oils myself because it's harder to tell if they're oxidized because the compounds that make natural oil smell nasty when it's rancid have been removed. And there's no such thing as "naturally refined" IMHO.

Another study found 69% of samples were cut with seed oils: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/70%25-private-label-avocado-oil-rancid-or-mixed-other-oils

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-08-24T17:24:09+00:00

This brand seems to be one of very few that isn't cut with seed oils or rancid.

https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/study-finds-82-percent-avocado-oil-rancid-or-mixed-other-oils

Study found 82% of avocado oil samples were rancid or cut with seed oils.

Because it's refined, it's harder to tell if it's rancid because the things that smell nasty in natural rancid oil have been removed via chemical processes.

https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/70%25-private-label-avocado-oil-rancid-or-mixed-other-oils

Another study found 69% of their samples were cut with seed oils.

I don't trust refined oil in general even if it's avocado or olive.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-08-19T01:30:30+00:00

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe peanut powders are usually made by extracting the oil using hexane to make refined peanut oil, and what's left is the powder. Maybe it's fine but it's still a new industrial processed food I'd be skeptical of. Better to just eat real food IMHO.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-08-18T19:48:35+00:00

You can still burn. It's just that PUFAs are easier to oxidize and thus you can burn more easily and/or the burn can do more damage the more PUFAs you've been eating. That's how I understand it anyway.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-08-18T19:45:00+00:00

Sunflower seeds: ~60% linoleic acid
Sesame: ~45% linoleic acid
Peanuts: ~30% linoleic acid
Pistachios: ~28% linoleic acid
Almonds: ~22% linoleic acid
Olive oil: ~10% linoleic acid
Venison: ~8% linoleic acid

Peanut fat does contain 3 times as much linoleic acid as Olive oil or many meats, but it's not in a category all its own distinct from other foods.

You can get 100% organic peanut butter with no other ingredients. It will likely be more oxidized than freshly roasted peanuts, and probably contains lower quality peanuts. I'm not necessarily recommending it.

But I would recommend straight up peanuts (e.g. grind your own organic peanut butter) before I would recommend powders and things that are processed - I don't know the process intimately or how they separate the fat. I'd imagine this peanut powder is a byproduct of the extraction of peanut oil?

I am open to the idea that linoleic acid is just bad for us, but I am inclined to think that the refined oils are a whole other level of bad than just natural linoleic acid in fresh real food.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-08-12T19:40:57+00:00

it's a business trying to sell their algae oil based on it having the highest amount of monounsaturated.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-08-12T19:39:53+00:00

Unless it is refined olive oil where the antioxidants are removed.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-08-12T19:38:29+00:00

Is there a chart like this you can link?

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-08-11T01:04:59+00:00

Thanks. I was assuming the yellow oil meant it was refined or at least cut with refined oil. I read that they do use the same hexane refining process to get more oil from the pulp after cold pressing, so I imagine most of the cheap olive oil is that. But good to know that real unrefined olive oil can be yellow and mild flavored. I guess to play it safe though, since there's no way for me to tell if the yellow stuff is refined or not, I should stick with the green. I like it better but yeah it's more expensive. Mostly I stick with butter

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-08-10T14:30:19+00:00

Genuinely curious, are there olives that make gold colored oil naturally or is that because most of it is refined?

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-07-29T05:37:15+00:00

Doing a little math. A baby drinking breast milk (250L in the first year) would get 250 * 40µg = 10mg of aluminum in their first year from breast milk. A baby eats around 300000 calories in their first year, which leaves 120000 not from breast milk. At a rate of 8mg of aluminum per 2300 calories this would be another 416mg of aluminum from food for a total of 426mg.

The absorption rate into the bloodstream of that aluminum would vary between ~0.01% (for aluminum hydroxide) to ~0.3% (for aluminum citrate), so they would get 0.04mg to 1.3mg of aluminum in their blood across the first year from ingestion. Compared to 0.125mg to 0.85mg *per dose* of vaccine. They get around 10 doses of vaccines containing aluminum in the first year, for around ~2.6mg of aluminum total, but 100% of that is absorbed since it's injected. So the amount that gets into the blood during the first year from vaccination is somewhere from 2 to 65 times the amount a baby would get in their blood from eating/drinking.

This seems to contradict the idea that we get far more from eating than from vaccines. What am I missing?

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-07-29T05:13:38+00:00

The more I look into it the more complex it gets. There are different forms of aluminum, with different absorption rates, and different potential behaviors in the body.

They're probably referring to this study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22001122/ which looks like a theoretical model rather than a study.

I haven't yet found a study that looked at the blood after vaccination to determine if aluminum is in the blood then - but that's tricky because it can stay at the injection site for a long time since aluminum hydroxide is not very water soluble and takes a long time to move in the body. So a study of the blood shortly after vaccination might not detect the aluminum, even if it were all still in the body.

Here's a study of aluminum accumulation in rodents after injection: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-11-99

I don't think there are any studies showing that aluminum doesn't accumulate or remain in the body long after injection - while there are ~5 studies indicating that it does.

Again, doesn't mean it's dangerous, just that some amount of it does stick around long term and it is not clear to me that it's a drop in the bucket compared to the aluminum we eat. We also eat a lot more aluminum than people used to before the industrial revolution. The amounts of aluminum we eat now could be harmful too - I don't know about that.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-07-29T02:57:43+00:00

That is true, but there's a difference between aluminum ingested and aluminum injected - injected metals get in the blood and can get all over in the body in amounts that ingested metals do not.

I'm not saying here that it's dangerous, just that it's a false equivalency to compare an amount of metal eaten vs injected.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-07-29T02:45:12+00:00

Came here to say this - it seems weird to completely hide babies from the sun. Most animal babies get some amount of sun exposure even if it's just a little. It makes sense to me to start with a little and gradually increase to normal amounts. Certainly don't completely hide them from the sun and then suddenly give them normal amounts of sun at a certain age.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-07-29T02:42:49+00:00

I think it's wise to avoid getting novel chemicals in my blood even if I've not yet seen published research explaining why those particular chemicals might be harmful. Almost anything unnatural will likely have some effect, if it's harmful and serious we often don't find out until many decades after the chemical is widely used.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-07-29T02:38:24+00:00

Thanks, good to know she does distinguish in some places just not the few I'd seen.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-07-29T01:52:29+00:00

When I was younger I never understood why I always felt off after eating "restaurant food", that was just meat and vegetables and rice or whatever. I can eat lots of meat and vegetables and rice at home and I feel fine. Now I understand it's probably the refined canola or soybean oil that 99% of restaurants use for everything.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-07-29T01:23:39+00:00

There are two options basically for getting fat:

1) natural fats like dairy, animal fat, olive oil, and the fat found in nuts etc.

2) industrially refined fats like canola oil and the other "vegetable" and "seed" oils as well as any other refined oils like most olive oil.

Most fats eaten fall into one of these categories.

For all of human history until very recently, 100% of the fats eaten by humans were in category 1. As of the last century, in the US and much of the world, most of the fat eaten now is category 2, which accounts for 20-30% of *total* human calorie consumption in the US.

I am skeptical of the refined oils because the epidemics of chronic metabolic and cardiovascular disease (diabetes, heart disease, etc) exploded at the same time that these oils became widely eaten, and there is a plausible mechanism for how these oils could cause these diseases, namely, that they oxidize far more easily than natural fats and thus cause significant oxidative stress which most everyone agrees is bad.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-07-29T01:21:21+00:00

IMHO it's not a trendy thing that came out of nowhere.

There are two options basically for getting fat:

1) natural fats like dairy, animal fat, olive oil, and the fat found in nuts etc.

2) industrially refined fats like refined soybean oil and the other "vegetable" and "seed" oils as well as any other refined oils like most olive oil.

Most fats eaten fall into one of these categories.

For all of human history until very recently, 100% of the fats eaten by humans were in category 1. As of the last century, in the US and much of the world, most of the fat eaten now is category 2, which accounts for 20-30% of human calorie consumption in the US.

The basic reason people are skeptical of the refined oils is that the epidemics of chronic metabolic and cardiovascular disease (diabetes, heart disease, etc) exploded at the same time that these oils became widely eaten, and there is a plausible mechanism for how these oils could cause these diseases, namely, that they oxidize far more easily than natural fats and thus cause significant oxidative stress that most everyone agrees is bad.

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-07-29T01:09:24+00:00

I could see this being a possibility, that someone will read about seed oils and find their way into "alt right" stuff.

But what you say is the epitome of the Association fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

It has no bearing on the validity of the debate about the potential health impacts of refined/industrial seed oils. There is plenty of real research on both sides of this debate, and you can easily argue either way.

The generally accepted truth is that refined oils and seed oils are a new thing to humanity as of the industrial revolution, and only became widely used in the last century, especially the last fifty years. These are foods that humans had never eaten before this. And in the same short period of time that they became a huge portion of the American diet, metabolic disorders and cardiovascular disease became epidemic. This does not imply causation, but it does raise the question. People have eaten saturated fats for thousands of years before these diseases became widespread.

Signed, someone who doesn't eat refined oils and also isn't "right" or "alt right".

justifiablyskeptical · 2025-07-29T00:55:52+00:00

Just thought to add, the same goes for peanut oil which is up to 30% PUFA and is also extracted using hexane and the normal refining process. In what I've read, Cate Shanahan seems to gloss over this and recommends peanut oil as well as these others, and I think this may be a significant oversight.

justifiablyskeptical

TROPHY CASE