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Study finds 82 percent of avocado oil rancid or mixed with other oils:
Consumer demand is rising for all things avocado, including oil made from the fruit. Avocado oil is a great source of vitamins, minerals and the type of fats associated with reducing the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. But according to new research from food science experts at the University of California, Davis, the vast majority of avocado oil sold in the U.S. is of poor quality, mislabeled or adulterated with other oils.
In the country's first extensive study of commercial avocado oil quality and purity, UC Davis researchers report that at least 82 percent of test samples were either stale before expiration date or mixed with other oils. In three cases, bottles labeled as "pure" or "extra virgin" avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil, an oil commonly used in processed foods that's much less expensive to produce.
Journal Reference:
Hilary S. Green, Selina C. Wang. First report on quality and purity evaluations of avocado oil sold in the US [open], Food Control (DOI: 10.1016/j.foodcont.2020.107328)
Why put avocado oil in the bottle when you can use soybean oil instead and pocket the extra profit?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Booga1 on Wednesday June 17 2020, @01:27PM (23 children)
There's a lot of fraud going around in the world of oils. There were some stories a while back about the same sort of problem with olive oils. They were being mislabeled as "extra virgin" when it wasn't, or mixed with other oils. Furthermore, low quality oil sometimes had similar issues as what we're seeing now with avocado oil where they start with rancid olives. [pri.org]
Sesame oil is another one where you have to watch out. Always check the ingredients on the label because a fair portion of them are cut with soybean oil. At least with sesame oil they tend to have proper labeling in the US and it's not that hard to find if you're paying attention.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @01:58PM
Rancid fish oil is unlikely to be as beneficial as fresh fish oil.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday June 17 2020, @04:35PM (16 children)
>Always check the ingredients on the label because a fair portion of them are cut with soybean oil
Are you sure that helps? I seem to recall hearing that with olive oil in the US, something like 80% of oils were severely cut with much cheaper oils, and many contained no olive oil at all, while the ingredient list claimed 100% pure olive oil. Obvious fraud, but who's going to assemble a class-action lawsuit over a bottle of cooking oil?
(Score: 4, Informative) by MostCynical on Wednesday June 17 2020, @09:02PM (6 children)
if only you had some sort of effective regulation [foodregulation.gov.au] that could stop mis-labelling and prosecute fraud,
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @10:54PM (5 children)
That's assuming it's caught. In some cases the only issue with the product is that it's not from the region it claims to be from and in others it's a completely different product, but there's 350 tons of olive oil entering the US every year, which is an extremely large amount to try and monitor. Yes, you can conduct randomized sampling, but if the product was mislabeled by region rather than the actual characteristics of the product, that can be virtually impossible to identify as fake.
Ultimately, shy of taste testing it and demanding a refund from the retailer if it doesn't taste right, there isn't much that can be done. But, being willing to pay the proper cost of the product and then demanding that the quality match the price should help. Or, you can always try to buy from sources that are listed as less prestigious / not subject to mafia control and hope the market corrects.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Thursday June 18 2020, @02:14AM (3 children)
That can't be right....
You must be off by several orders of magnitude.
350,000 tons, or 350,000,000 tons or something, perhaps, but I guarantee it is way more than 350 tons imported every year!
That doesn't even make sense. I use at least 15-20L per year, just myself! What's the average density?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday June 18 2020, @03:10AM (1 child)
Well there's your problem, it's meant for cooking, not as a hair care product.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday June 18 2020, @11:31AM
Romans use to use it at their famous baths for getting clean, presumably because still needed to be invented.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 18 2020, @11:32PM
Oil is less dense than water but not significantly less, about 900g per litre or so. For back of the envelope calculations just go with the usual "1 cubic metre is 1 tonne"; one pallet will be about 1 tonne and one tanker truck will hold about 50 tonnes.
Anyway the correct import figure for the United States seems to be ~350,000 tonnes/year.
This website has year over year import totals for olive oil [internationaloliveoil.org] (see section 3) which annoyingly doesn't seem to say what unit any of the numbers in their tables are but it does appear to be tonnes: I was able to find elsewhere that the US imported about $1.5 billion in olive oil in 2018 [trendeconomy.com] and the bulk commodity price of olive oil seems to be on the order of $5000/tonne, which seems to put 350,000 tonnes in the right ballpark.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday June 18 2020, @03:07AM
The gummint does bugger-all (Australian technical term for "very little") testing, but then consumer organisations like CHOICE [choice.com.au] pick up the slack, they regularly run tests of products showing how much, or little, they comply with the regs. One recurring one has been sunscreen, for which most stuff rated SPF50 and above isn't, so they've been re-running tests for awhile on those. Eventually if they show up bad enough problems there'll often be a law change to enforce quality requirements.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Wednesday June 17 2020, @09:34PM (4 children)
> >Always check the ingredients on the label because a fair portion of them are cut with soybean oil
>Are you sure that helps? I seem to recall hearing that with olive oil in the US, something like 80% of oils were severely cut with much cheaper oils, and many contained no olive oil at all, while the ingredient list claimed 100% pure olive oil. Obvious fraud, but who's going to assemble a class-action lawsuit over a bottle of cooking oil?
--
Well, sesame oil isn't typically used as a cooking oil the same way olive oil is, and certainly not in the same quantities or number of recipes that use it. I did a quick scan of a recipe site and found olive oil in six times more recipes and the quantity of olive oil needed was often 3-12 times more than ones with sesame oil.
Around here I mostly see bottles labeled sesame oil which could be any blend, or pure sesame oil(or 100% pure) which only has sesame oil as an ingredient. It is usually sold in small bottles and used as a flavoring. Sesame oil has a strong flavor and toasted sesame oil has an extremely strong flavor. People may not actually want pure sesame oil which leads to an actual market for the blends. It's less something to be hiding and more about your personal taste. Of course there's always a chance some brands are doing the same thing with it, but it seems to me that there's a willingness on the consumer's part to buy the blends. Pure sesame oil doesn't command a huge price premium(partly because the bottles are so small), so there's less probably incentive to hide that.
Of course, any oil can go rancid over time so I would imagine some things in how sesame oil is handled and produced could still lead to low quality oil or oil that goes bad faster than expected. I guess we'll never know for sure unless there's another study like the ones done for olive and avocado oils.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday June 18 2020, @03:12AM (2 children)
Except sunflower oil, apparently. I've used that stuff five years past its expiry date without any hint of rancidness.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 18 2020, @03:50AM (1 child)
Going rancid is more about exposure to air. Put it in a well sealed container with no air space and it will last a very long time. If you still had some five years past expiry, I would suspect that you were not opening the bottle very often.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday June 18 2020, @04:08AM
Ah, true, dark cool cupboard, very little use since I was mostly using the olive oil next to it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by hendrikboom on Thursday June 18 2020, @11:34AM
Dark sesame oil is *wonderful* for adding flavour to things. Even uncooked things like salads.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday June 18 2020, @01:47AM (1 child)
With olive oil it's not hard to identify the quality from the taste. And that's not oil-snobbery, I used to just use whatever stuff the supermarket had in stock until a friend of mine gave me a bottle of oil his Italian wife's family made, each bottle individually numbered and dated. I've never tasted olive oil that good, it had a kind of freshly-cut grass taste. Since I can't get any more I make do with the best equivalent determined by trial and error, which oddly enough is one of the cheapest budget brands in the supermarket while the more exotic Italian ones just taste of generic "oil" vs. "fresh olives".
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday June 18 2020, @03:17AM
Just checked the label, it's from Tunisia:
I assume we get the real deal here rather than the adulterated "Italian" or "Spanish" oils made from a mix of cheap Tunisian oil and a few Italian olives thrown in to justify the name [washingtonpost.com].
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 18 2020, @04:55AM (1 child)
Annoyingly as long as the olive oil used in the bottle is 100% pure then that's a legal label. It says nothing about everything else in the bottle, just the olive oil. It's completely misleading and that's why so many companies use it. Awhile back there was a lawsuit about 100% fruit juice and the ruling was that since 100% of the tiny amount of juice in the drink came from fruit, the statement was factually correct and thus legal.
You read it as "100% of the juice comes from fruit", not that "the drink is 100% juice". So "100% pure olive oil" would mean "100% of the olive oil came from pure olives." Personally I don't know how you get impure olives, perhaps cross-breed them with grapes?
Never trust advertising. And apparently you can't trust ingredient lists either. Best to just buy cows from the butchers and only eat that (and you'll actually end up pretty healthy).
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday June 18 2020, @11:36AM
I moderated this funny because of the cross-breeding suggestion.
(Score: 2, Funny) by fustakrakich on Wednesday June 17 2020, @07:02PM
There's a lot of fraud going around in the world of oils.
I think it falls under the subject of serpentology
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 17 2020, @07:05PM (2 children)
Reminds me of the Aloe Vera scams revealed a while back.
As for olive oil made with refined rancid stuff plus a little flavoring... seems like that should get a classification that allows it to be sold with proper labeling, and that maybe it shouldn't be too much less valuable than "extra Virgin" for most people's purposes - not unlike maple syrup blends made with 90% cane sugar.
Apparently, there's a market opportunity for "boutique" Greek olive oils in the U.S. - some people (who know, and care) are willing to pay quite a premium for actual traceable olive oils coming from known growers / refiners.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday June 18 2020, @11:39AM (1 child)
I've often wondered what maple sugar would taste like without the sweetness. Presumably the distinctiveness of the flavour comes from something other than the sugar itself.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 18 2020, @04:07PM
Early attempts at "low cost" maple syrup substitutes, IMO, focused too much on rock bottom prices (corn syrup based) and probably also on consumer focus group feedback like "can't you make it thicker? It always runs off onto the plate..."
I wouldn't mind paying cane-syrup prices for something that's indistinguishable from maple syrup - just made with other flavor source stock that doesn't cost $100 per gallon to supply at retail.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 18 2020, @01:33AM
There was a study that showed that the honey sold in all the major US supermarkets except for Trader Joe's was fake / blended with sugar syrup.
Since Trader Joe's bypasses a lot of the middle-men (each step is an opportunity for adulteration), and since this direct buying worked to make it so only they were selling real honey, I've been hoping the same applies to olive oil from Trader Joe's, and only buy oil from Trader Joe's.