For example:

  • When you open a fresh jar of peanut butter do you only work through one side until it is completely empty then start on the other side?

  • Or when you get those shallow tubs of hummus does it have to make it back home undisturbed? Then one of the baggers at the grocery store shoves it sideways into the bag completely ruining the symmetry.

  • udon
    10•9 months ago

    That’s not true and plant-based oils are so different from each other. Sunflower seed oil is pretty bad, but olive oil or rapeseed oils are good for you. Just don’t use too much, but that applies to all oils

    • @smooth_tea
      4•9 months ago

      Well you can find quite a few scientific studies saying exactly what I’ve said. I agree that plant based oils are not all the same though.

      Just one example:

      3918 of those who cooked with vegetable/gingili oil had ASCVD, and 249 of those who cooked with lard/other animal fat oils had ASCVD. The prevalence of ASCVD in vegetable/gingili oil users (31.68%) was higher than that in lard/other animal fat oil users (17.46%). Compared with lard/other animal fat users, the multivariate-adjusted model indicated that vegetable oil/sesame oil users were significantly associated with a higher risk of ASCVD (OR = 2.19; 95%CI, 1.90-2.53). Our study found that cooking with lard/other animal fat oil is more beneficial to cardiovascular health in older Chinese.

      https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36336120/

      • stephan
        1•9 months ago

        Very interesting, thanks for sharing that link! It seems that the analysis is reviewing oil used for cooking, not for raw consumption. I think this makes sense since certain plant seed oils shouldn’t be heated past a certain point at which they become unhealthy.

      • udon
        1•9 months ago

        Sorry, but that study is just bonkers. They use one type of oil (sesame) and sneak in the spurious generalization of “vegetable/sesame oil”, as if it were representative. It is not.

        Here you can see the range of unsaturated fat percentages in different plant oils: https://images.ctfassets.net/stnv4edzz8v3/25E1IVeShv9HOcse0Luc5p/dbe6b2165d4ca7f4a93e2f912f3bcdf6/Polyunsaturated_fats_in_plant_oils.png

        Unfortunately, neither rapeseed nor sesame are in there, but you should see how much they differ. Stay away from sunflower seed oil, at least when cooking at home. Rapeseed or olive are good. Don’t use more heat than necessary.

        • @smooth_tea
          1•9 months ago

          Where do you get the idea that they focus only on sesame oil?

          • udon
            1•9 months ago

            Well, they don’t say what they mean with “vegetable”, but it’s just put in the same group with gingili oil. I don’t know if you’re in science or otherwise familiar with statistics, but that’s a problematic indication. They don’t justify why they group them, how many of those replied with gingili etc., and they don’t provide a separate analysis. Other major flaws with the study:

            • it’s correlational, but makes a causal inference. That is basic stats, you can’t do that, even if there are no other easy ways to make causal inferences on that topic.
            • the groups vary significantly on many factors, such as total size, smoking status, gender distribution, drinking status etc. They “adjust” for that, but that’s not how “adjusting” works. You can’t just adjust for characteristics of the person and then pretend it’s all controlled for. There is a great paper on this problem, which is unfortunately quite common: doi.org/10.1037//0021-843X.110.1.40
            • @smooth_tea
              2•9 months ago

              I see your point, thanks for the insight! Did you base your reply on the abstract or the full article, because they do specify “vegetable” oil. Also, in their defence, they not only state that they only intended to show a correlation instead of a causal effect, and even add that:

              we only found the relationship between the cooking oil type and cardiovascular health in the elderly over 65 years old in China, and could not explain the reason.