Your FUPA problems are none of my business. I just buy the cheapest liter of OO from the Turkish market on the corner, usually it’s $5.99 or $6.99 and from Spain.
I looked up the numbers on Camellia oil (tea seed oil) I mentioned earlier. It’s a lighter, fairly neutral oil, with 485F smoke point, and generally a bit less than 10% PUFA (although, most of it is Omega 6).
-Al
Sarah, I suspect you’ve read “Eat Fat, Get Thin” by Dr. Mark Hyman? My wife and I are about 2/3 of the way thru the book, and think he makes a whole lot of sense. We are in the process of changing our diets to match most of his recommendations. If you, or others, have thoughts or experience with his ideas, I would be very interested in hearing them.
I have no experience with it but Trader Joe’s sells a plain (not EV) olive oil.
I haven’t read it, though I know of it. I used to read all the diet and nutrition books, until they started to strike me as another form of evangelical religion, preying on the desperate and naïve. “Try this amazing new approach! You’ll feel great and lose weight and be healthy and not feel hungry and never get sick again…yadda yadda.” Some are obviously better than others. Now I try really hard to stick as close to the pure science as possible, reading the studies themselves rather than the interpretations and extrapolation and diets supposedly based on them. It’s tough because, in the area of diet and nutrition, there is a real lack of studies that are objective, controlled, well designed, thorough, etc. etc. Largely due to these shortcomings, we have tons of conflicting “evidence” about various nutritional elements and how they impact your body and your health. Take any study and you can probably find another, equally valid (which is to say, problematic in many ways) which contradicts it. The books pushing these “revolutionary” new diets always manage to sound incredibly convincing, promising amazing benefits from certain foods/practices while demonizing others with scare tactics – see why I liken them to religions?
In the end, everyone who thinks about and cares about these things will make choices based on the information available to them, as well as what makes sense to them intuitively.
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
The French have an even shorter one:
“Mangez moins, bougez plus” (eat less, move more)
Yes, that’s among the best.
Ferment at least some of it.
-Al
Not too many folks here into fermented stuff.
I worry that the cheap olive oils at international markets are likely not olive oil at all, or a low percentage, considering all the scandals of the past few years. I’d certainly worry that they aren’t actually from Spain, and that, best case scenario, they may be North African oils packed in Spain. There was a time I would buy the large cans of Spanish/Greek/Italian oils and was confident enough that it was what it claimed to be, but the last couple of times I did that I felt that the oil in the can was definitely not EVOO, so am now more cautious.
Don’t know if this 100% science or not, and there are exceptions to everything. But throw it in the fridge. Olive oils will begin to solidify because of the high mufa content, and other oils with a high pufa content will not. Maybe not an indicator of quality, but should at least give an idea to whether it is olive oil or not.
Bob, thanks. I know this one actually, but there is no way to know that before you purchase the, for instance, 3L can. So I’ve stopped buying the foreign value brands at local international markets and stuck to trusted sources. For everyday I mainly use California Olive Ranch’s everyday or their bold.
Cailifornia Olive Ranch Everyday is one of the brands I frequently use. It has a harvest date on the back, which is important (many of the cheaper imports in the supermarket don’t).
AG Ferrari used to be a great source of regional Italian olive oils, plus an everyday blend, but I stopped using them when they reorganized under Chapter 11 five years ago and curtailed much of their olive oil importing business.
-Al
I don’t know what “neutral” means but this is a decent price and a higher smoke point. (edit - I now now what neutral means, doesn’t add flavor, right?)
