[vfc1]

It has to do with the processing, olive oil is a food extract. Olives are awesome, olive oil is not, it's not a health food unlike popular belief.

It's not a whole food, most of the nutrients and the whole fiber has been taken out by the processing.

Olive oil only contains modest amounts of some vitamins, that can be easily obtained elsewhere.

Otherwise, it's almost 100% liquid fat with little micro-nutrient content.

You mean fish oil? I think here people are talking about plant oils. Fish oil is not a health food either, AFIK it's no longer recommended by the American Heart Association https://www.cardiovascularbusiness.com/topics/practice-manag...

For a pollutant free source of Omega 3, there is algae oil at very small amounts, or most people bodies just make their own Omega 3, just like any other animal.

How do herbivores get their Omega 3? Through diet, ground flax seeds is a great way to help your body produce Omega 3.

[_carl_jung]

I'm not sure that the above can be summarised as "oils are not good for us". If the oil was removed from olives, the resulting olives would not be healthier.

If the fish oil was removed from fish, the resulting fish would not be healthier.

I'm not sure how this became a debate about vegetarianism either.

[vfc1]

Eating the oil in its natural form, together with the whole olive, is not the same as eating the oil separately.

The effect that has in your digestive system is not the same. Another example is eating fructose extract instead of a whole fruit.

Eating the whole fruit does not spike your blood sugar, unlike eating the equivalent amount of fructose. Also, it does not satiate as much.

Compare the satiety of eating 10 olives to eating a tablespoon of olive oil or two.

It's this reductionistic approach to nutrition where we try to extract these single nutrients that is harmful, because our body has evolved to eat whole foods and not food extracts.

We humans have evolved to eat the whole foods, not highly processed food extracts.

There are thousands of compounds in whole foods that interact with each other and our bodies in a million different ways, and that we are only beginning to comprehend.

[cr1895]

>We humans have evolved to eat the whole foods, not highly processed food extracts

You picked olives, so...what exactly is great about eating a raw, unprocessed olive?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...

[vfc1]

Eating whole foods is not about eating raw, that is different.

I don't think the argument to eating raw makes much sense either, as we are the only animal on the planet that has evolved to eat cooked food and that has been the case for maybe a couple of millions of years, at least much longer than the human species (which goes back to aprox. 200k years).

The olives that we eat as appetizers are cured or sun-dried, because the raw olive tastes horribly indeed.

So there is some treatment of the food to make it edible, or some cooking involved.

But this is very different than extracting an oil and discarding the rest of the food, together with all of its fiber and most of its nutritional content.

It's like taking a fruit and only eating its sugar, one is healthy and the other is not.

[_carl_jung]

This was a fascinating read, thanks.

[_carl_jung]

That's true. I agree with this in general. From your initial statement I thought you were including those oils even in the context of their natural occurrence.