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Comment by curun1r | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t the issue with vegetable oils the omega-6 fatty acids? IIRC, our diets are supposed to be somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio since omega-6 is inflammatory and omega-3 is anti-inflammatory. If you over-consume either, you’ll be unhealthy. So vegetable oils aren’t completely bad, but when over-consumed without the corresponding omega-3 consumption, you get inflammation and a lot of the modern maladies.

And it’s not all vegetable oils that contain omega-6, so using olive oil, coconut oil and a few others should be fine and healthier than cooking with animal fats.

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I guess I mean seed oils rather than vegetable oils. I'm happy eating olive oil.

By seed oil do you mean grapeseed oil?

Canola oil, soybean oil, corn oil, etc.

Yeah, I think it’s really per-oil that you have to worry...not sure a broad classification is going to help much. Better to just memorize the whitelist of oils that you want to limit yourself to.

Safflower, Sunflower, Corn, Soybean, Cottonseed and Peanut are all particularly bad. Canola (rapeseed) is about 2:1, so it’s not too bad if you need to use cheap stuff. Then there’s a bunch that have hardly any at all, so those should be fine...coconut and olive are my favorites to cook with since they withstand high temperatures better, but I’m also starting to love avocado oil in a lot of dishes, particularly ones where the oil doesn’t get cooked. And, of course, flaxseed oil has the opposite imbalance, so it should be a staple in everyone’s pantry to help us correct for oils used in restaurants and other food we don’t cook ourselves.

And it probably should be said that palm oil is killing us for a completely separate reason, so even though it’s relatively healthy to ingest, it’s a good one to stay away from.

Do you mind sharing more info on the palm oil thing?

I believe OP is referring to the mass deforestation caused by harvesting palm leaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_and_environmental_impac...

When you take flights over Southeast Asia, it’s quite a sad sight. It’s just endless palm plantations in what used to be pristine rainforest habitats. You can understand the perspectives of these third world countries because palm oil can bring in a lot of money to places that tend to be very poor, but from an environmental standpoint, palm plantations are a disaster. They’re destroying some of our most valuable carbon sinks to produce the stuff.

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