4 ms·

I predict that olive oil will soon go through the transition that orange juice did. When I was a kid, people viewed orange juice as healthy. Now we see it as un

by spodek 7y ago

I predict that olive oil will soon go through the transition that orange juice did. When I was a kid, people viewed orange juice as healthy. Now we see it as unhealthy -- just the sugar. Maybe some vitamin C, but not many people get scurvy. Whatever health benefits it has are overwhelmed by the otherwise empty calories. People want to believe more olive oil will make their diet into a healthy Mediterranean one, but it's basically just fat -- whatever health benefits it has are overwhelmed by the otherwise empty calories. They both benefited from effective marketing, not making people healthy.

lucideer 7y ago
You might be on to something, except that your comment is likening fat to sugar. These two things are not similar in terms of their effect on dietary health. You may well be right about olive oil, but the inclusion of that near-conflation makes your argument seem not very compelling.
sureaboutthis 7y ago
Maybe some Vitamin C?! Orange juice is 71% vitamin C! And there is NO added sugar except maybe in the cartons you must be buying at your grocery store. Olive oil is basically "just fat"?! You make me think that you think the fat in olive oil is no different than the fat in pork or beef. With those thoughts in mind, most of what you eat is just a little of this and just a little of that and "basically just fat" but it's too early in the morning for me to give you an education.
- brownbat 7y ago
  The benefits of Vitamin C have been wildly overstated, thanks mainly to Linus Pauling, whose theories on its therapeutic and preventative effects have been consistently debunked in large studies, with some studies even associating high doses of Vitamin C with increases in some types of cancer in mice: https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.html https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.h...
- sho 7y ago
  > Orange juice is 71% vitamin C > it's too early in the morning for me to give you an education One of those statements was correct. You are off by more than 3 orders of magnitude - an impressive feat.
  - fasterdom 7y ago
    It's even more impressive when you see that his account is named 'sureaboutthis"
    - dang 7y ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but should have some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- gdfasfklshg4 7y ago
  Fruit sugar is still sugar.
- seszett 7y ago
  > Maybe some Vitamin C?! Orange juice is 71% vitamin C! Not it's not 71% vitamin C, it's about 0.05% vitamin C. 125 ml of orange juice provides about 71% of the daily vitamin C needs (60 mg), which is probably what you meant but very different from what you actually said.
  - sureaboutthis 7y ago
    Yes, it's what I meant but it will be lost on so many people.
    - sho 7y ago
      Maybe you need to be a little less "sureaboutthis"
    - windexh8er 7y ago
      But even what you meant is wrong. When you remove the juice from the fiber (orange, apple, mango, etc) it becomes a sugary drink [0]. Added sugar doesn't mean anything, sugar is sugar is sugar [1]. By removing the fiber the overload of sugar the liver has to deal with is no different than drinking soda. While fruit juice may have a few minor benefits here and there research is stating that it's not healthy outside of small quantity. Parents give their kids (at least in the US) way too much juice [2] and it's become a learned habit as kids grow up to drink juice because they've been told it's healthy. What they weren't taught was healthy rationing. [0] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/fruit-juice-is-just-as-bad-as-soda https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/fruit-juice-is-just-as-... [1] https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/the-growing-concern-of-overconsumption.html https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/the-growing-concern-of-overcon... [2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/childrens-health/expert-answers/fruit-juice/faq-20058024 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/childrens-healt...
- dasd99 7y ago
  > And there is NO added sugar This is NO good argument - even without added sugar, orange juice is on par with coke (about 10 gram sugar/100 ml).
  - sureaboutthis 7y ago
    I will put people who say this in the same category. Anyone who thinks added sugar is the same as fruit sugar...well...
    - DanBC 7y ago
      Fruit juice contains high amounts of sugar. There's not much difference between the sugars in fruit juice and the sugars in cola. Fruit juice is not a healthy drink. This myth causes harm. Parents give their children fruit juice because they think it's healthy, and this causes toot decay. https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/childrens-health/are-squash-and-pure-fruit-juice-better-for-children-than-fizzy-drinks/ https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/childrens-health/... > Like fizzy drinks, fruit juice and squash can be high in sugar, which can cause tooth decay. Because sugary drinks can be high in energy (calories), having these drinks too often can also lead to weight gain and obesity. https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/water-drinks-nutrition/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/water-drinks-nutrition... > Unsweetened 100% fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies can only ever count as a maximum of 1 portion of your recommended 5 daily portions of fruit and vegetables. > For example, if you have 2 glasses of fruit juice and a smoothie in 1 day, that still only counts as 1 portion. > That's because fruit juice and smoothies don't contain the fibre found in whole fruits and vegetables. Have other types of fruit and vegetables for the other 4 (or more) portions. > Fruit juice and smoothies also contains sugar that can damage teeth. It's best to drink them with a meal because this can help protect your teeth.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Coke uses high fructose corn syrup in the US. The sugar in orange juice is largely fructose. The name is the same because it’s the same thing.
    - sho 7y ago
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > it's too early in the morning for me to give you an education This is rude.
- rskar 7y ago
  Fruit juices should be seen as a form of processed sugar - even if the processing is not as substantial as making table sugar. Whole fruit - such as a whole orange or grape or apple - is a much better and nutritional choice. https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/17/health/fruit-juice-sugary-drink-early-death-study/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/17/health/fruit-juice-sugary-dri... https://www.diabetes.co.uk/food/juice-and-diabetes.html https://www.diabetes.co.uk/food/juice-and-diabetes.html https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5001 https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5001
  - DataWorker 7y ago
    Doesn’t the Bmj article say oranges increase the risk of type 2 and that fruits are all different. Blueberries are good, oranges and strawberries not so much. Still better than juice but that’s to be expected.
- dang 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19532058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19532058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17434335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17434335
yakubin 7y ago
I have a great love for both of these delicacies! :) Note: I don't drink orange juice bought from a shop, I make it myself from the oranges I buy. And I don't really care about their health effects. I just love the taste.
pfortuny 7y ago
Well, more olive oil with less butter seems a healthier option.
matwood 7y ago
> I predict that olive oil will soon go through the transition that orange juice did. I guess it's possible, but juice was at one point considered a healthy alternative to eating fruits. Olive oil is considered a healthier/tastier alternative to other fats (not that fat is necessarily unhealthy).
fsloth 7y ago
Generally unsaturated fats are considered more healthy than saturated fats. So if you get n calories it's 'better' to get them from non-saturated fats than saturated fats. Humans need fat in their diet. Humans don't need sugar as in fructose from fruits. Ergo, olive oil is healthier than sugar or butter. But the same argument can be said for most non-saturated fats. Olive oil is not some miracle food that will cure you from all earthly ills but then again, nothing really is. Empty calories are not healthy but that's a bit of a strawman if I may say so - people can overeat anything that has enough calories.
objektif 7y ago
Just to tell you olive oil is not an American fad like orange juice. People in southern Europe, ME and northern Africa have been using it for a long long time.
iosonofuturista 7y ago
You are 30 years late. In the 80's processed sunflower seed oil, was seen as the healthy (and cheaper of course) alternative to olive oil, and benefited from massive marketing campaigns. Can't really remember the supposed claims, but involved the usual transfatty acid, saturated / insaturated fat mumbo jumbo. Fast forward to today, and the sunflower oil is the devil incarnate while olive oil is the hero again. The same happend with vegetable butter vs animal butter. I wish i could backup with a source, but I'm really not finding any, and even if I did, most likely would be in Portuguese, so not very useful.
riffraff 7y ago
Are you talking of industrial orange juice? I've never heard squeezed oranges to be considered unhealthy.
- joshuaheard 7y ago
  I read the sugar content is too high in orange juice. It was recommended to eat the whole fruit instead so there is less sugar and more fiber.
- jnwatson 7y ago
  Pretty much all sweet fruit juice is not healthy* because of the sugar content. The evidence is piling up that sugar is responsible for a great deal of health issues in the modern world.
- athenot 7y ago
  If you take a fresh orange, squeeze it and drink/eat ALL of the result, then that's fairly healthy. You're balancing out the fructose with lots of fiber which are supposed to help slow the absorption of that sugar. Also by consuming it right away, the other nutrients don't have time to oxidate. Orange juice as sold in stores has a lot less pulp (even the "high pulp" has less than what you'd get from an orange. It is also pasteurized, and the taste is harmonized by adding various types of extracts of oranges—though since those extracts came from oranges, they are allowed to call the result 100% orange juice, which I find rather misleading.
kiliantics 7y ago
There are already lots of people that believe olive oil is unhealthy. People who subscribe to a "whole foods" diet believe all forms of refined foods, including oils, can have negative effects on health, and there is quite a lot of research which supports these claims: http://www.plantplate.com/Guide/Detail?GuideID=1009 http://www.plantplate.com/Guide/Detail?GuideID=1009 The problem with fructose, its effects on the liver, and the mitigation of these effects from eating the whole fruit with its fibre and other nutrients, is now very well established scientifically. I would not be surprised if we reach a similar level of understanding about refined oils.
sbuk 7y ago
> but it's basically just fat -- whatever health benefits it has are overwhelmed by the otherwise empty calories. What a very ill-informed comment. Fats like olive oil are extremely good for you, especially those high in polyphenols. It can help significantly with coronary heart disease and lower cholesterol levels - the calories are far from empty.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
Fats are not "empty calories." They are essential to brain development. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20329590 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20329590 Current research suggests that the right fats are important to maintaining brain health. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170621103123.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170621103123.h... Fat also appears to play a role in immune function. I can't readily find a source to cite which nice and neatly says "The right fat is critical to immune function." In fact, googling that brings up a bunch of articles that say, basically, "Too much dietary fat harms your immune function." But a tldr of my understanding: Bone marrow is fatty and that is where a lot of our immune cells are produced.

by spodek 7y ago

lucideer 7y ago

You might be on to something, except that your comment is likening fat to sugar. These two things are not similar in terms of their effect on dietary health. You may well be right about olive oil, but the inclusion of that near-conflation makes your argument seem not very compelling.

sureaboutthis 7y ago

Maybe some Vitamin C?! Orange juice is 71% vitamin C! And there is NO added sugar except maybe in the cartons you must be buying at your grocery store. Olive oil is basically "just fat"?! You make me think that you think the fat in olive oil is no different than the fat in pork or beef. With those thoughts in mind, most of what you eat is just a little of this and just a little of that and "basically just fat" but it's too early in the morning for me to give you an education.

brownbat 7y ago
The benefits of Vitamin C have been wildly overstated, thanks mainly to Linus Pauling, whose theories on its therapeutic and preventative effects have been consistently debunked in large studies, with some studies even associating high doses of Vitamin C with increases in some types of cancer in mice: https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.html https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.h...
sho 7y ago
> Orange juice is 71% vitamin C > it's too early in the morning for me to give you an education One of those statements was correct. You are off by more than 3 orders of magnitude - an impressive feat.
- fasterdom 7y ago
  It's even more impressive when you see that his account is named 'sureaboutthis"
  - dang 7y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but should have some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
gdfasfklshg4 7y ago
Fruit sugar is still sugar.
seszett 7y ago
> Maybe some Vitamin C?! Orange juice is 71% vitamin C! Not it's not 71% vitamin C, it's about 0.05% vitamin C. 125 ml of orange juice provides about 71% of the daily vitamin C needs (60 mg), which is probably what you meant but very different from what you actually said.
- sureaboutthis 7y ago
  Yes, it's what I meant but it will be lost on so many people.
  - sho 7y ago
    Maybe you need to be a little less "sureaboutthis"
  - windexh8er 7y ago
    But even what you meant is wrong. When you remove the juice from the fiber (orange, apple, mango, etc) it becomes a sugary drink [0]. Added sugar doesn't mean anything, sugar is sugar is sugar [1]. By removing the fiber the overload of sugar the liver has to deal with is no different than drinking soda. While fruit juice may have a few minor benefits here and there research is stating that it's not healthy outside of small quantity. Parents give their kids (at least in the US) way too much juice [2] and it's become a learned habit as kids grow up to drink juice because they've been told it's healthy. What they weren't taught was healthy rationing. [0] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/fruit-juice-is-just-as-bad-as-soda https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/fruit-juice-is-just-as-... [1] https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/the-growing-concern-of-overconsumption.html https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/the-growing-concern-of-overcon... [2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/childrens-health/expert-answers/fruit-juice/faq-20058024 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/childrens-healt...
dasd99 7y ago
> And there is NO added sugar This is NO good argument - even without added sugar, orange juice is on par with coke (about 10 gram sugar/100 ml).
- sureaboutthis 7y ago
  I will put people who say this in the same category. Anyone who thinks added sugar is the same as fruit sugar...well...
  - DanBC 7y ago
    Fruit juice contains high amounts of sugar. There's not much difference between the sugars in fruit juice and the sugars in cola. Fruit juice is not a healthy drink. This myth causes harm. Parents give their children fruit juice because they think it's healthy, and this causes toot decay. https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/childrens-health/are-squash-and-pure-fruit-juice-better-for-children-than-fizzy-drinks/ https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/childrens-health/... > Like fizzy drinks, fruit juice and squash can be high in sugar, which can cause tooth decay. Because sugary drinks can be high in energy (calories), having these drinks too often can also lead to weight gain and obesity. https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/water-drinks-nutrition/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/water-drinks-nutrition... > Unsweetened 100% fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies can only ever count as a maximum of 1 portion of your recommended 5 daily portions of fruit and vegetables. > For example, if you have 2 glasses of fruit juice and a smoothie in 1 day, that still only counts as 1 portion. > That's because fruit juice and smoothies don't contain the fibre found in whole fruits and vegetables. Have other types of fruit and vegetables for the other 4 (or more) portions. > Fruit juice and smoothies also contains sugar that can damage teeth. It's best to drink them with a meal because this can help protect your teeth.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Coke uses high fructose corn syrup in the US. The sugar in orange juice is largely fructose. The name is the same because it’s the same thing.
  - sho 7y ago
chrisseaton 7y ago
> it's too early in the morning for me to give you an education This is rude.
rskar 7y ago
Fruit juices should be seen as a form of processed sugar - even if the processing is not as substantial as making table sugar. Whole fruit - such as a whole orange or grape or apple - is a much better and nutritional choice. https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/17/health/fruit-juice-sugary-drink-early-death-study/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/17/health/fruit-juice-sugary-dri... https://www.diabetes.co.uk/food/juice-and-diabetes.html https://www.diabetes.co.uk/food/juice-and-diabetes.html https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5001 https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5001
- DataWorker 7y ago
  Doesn’t the Bmj article say oranges increase the risk of type 2 and that fruits are all different. Blueberries are good, oranges and strawberries not so much. Still better than juice but that’s to be expected.
dang 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19532058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19532058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17434335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17434335

yakubin 7y ago

I have a great love for both of these delicacies! :) Note: I don't drink orange juice bought from a shop, I make it myself from the oranges I buy. And I don't really care about their health effects. I just love the taste.

pfortuny 7y ago

Well, more olive oil with less butter seems a healthier option.

matwood 7y ago

> I predict that olive oil will soon go through the transition that orange juice did. I guess it's possible, but juice was at one point considered a healthy alternative to eating fruits. Olive oil is considered a healthier/tastier alternative to other fats (not that fat is necessarily unhealthy).

fsloth 7y ago

Generally unsaturated fats are considered more healthy than saturated fats. So if you get n calories it's 'better' to get them from non-saturated fats than saturated fats. Humans need fat in their diet. Humans don't need sugar as in fructose from fruits. Ergo, olive oil is healthier than sugar or butter. But the same argument can be said for most non-saturated fats. Olive oil is not some miracle food that will cure you from all earthly ills but then again, nothing really is. Empty calories are not healthy but that's a bit of a strawman if I may say so - people can overeat anything that has enough calories.

objektif 7y ago

Just to tell you olive oil is not an American fad like orange juice. People in southern Europe, ME and northern Africa have been using it for a long long time.

iosonofuturista 7y ago

You are 30 years late. In the 80's processed sunflower seed oil, was seen as the healthy (and cheaper of course) alternative to olive oil, and benefited from massive marketing campaigns. Can't really remember the supposed claims, but involved the usual transfatty acid, saturated / insaturated fat mumbo jumbo. Fast forward to today, and the sunflower oil is the devil incarnate while olive oil is the hero again. The same happend with vegetable butter vs animal butter. I wish i could backup with a source, but I'm really not finding any, and even if I did, most likely would be in Portuguese, so not very useful.

riffraff 7y ago

Are you talking of industrial orange juice? I've never heard squeezed oranges to be considered unhealthy.

joshuaheard 7y ago
I read the sugar content is too high in orange juice. It was recommended to eat the whole fruit instead so there is less sugar and more fiber.
jnwatson 7y ago
Pretty much all sweet fruit juice is not healthy* because of the sugar content. The evidence is piling up that sugar is responsible for a great deal of health issues in the modern world.
athenot 7y ago
If you take a fresh orange, squeeze it and drink/eat ALL of the result, then that's fairly healthy. You're balancing out the fructose with lots of fiber which are supposed to help slow the absorption of that sugar. Also by consuming it right away, the other nutrients don't have time to oxidate. Orange juice as sold in stores has a lot less pulp (even the "high pulp" has less than what you'd get from an orange. It is also pasteurized, and the taste is harmonized by adding various types of extracts of oranges—though since those extracts came from oranges, they are allowed to call the result 100% orange juice, which I find rather misleading.

kiliantics 7y ago

There are already lots of people that believe olive oil is unhealthy. People who subscribe to a "whole foods" diet believe all forms of refined foods, including oils, can have negative effects on health, and there is quite a lot of research which supports these claims: http://www.plantplate.com/Guide/Detail?GuideID=1009 http://www.plantplate.com/Guide/Detail?GuideID=1009 The problem with fructose, its effects on the liver, and the mitigation of these effects from eating the whole fruit with its fibre and other nutrients, is now very well established scientifically. I would not be surprised if we reach a similar level of understanding about refined oils.

sbuk 7y ago

> but it's basically just fat -- whatever health benefits it has are overwhelmed by the otherwise empty calories. What a very ill-informed comment. Fats like olive oil are extremely good for you, especially those high in polyphenols. It can help significantly with coronary heart disease and lower cholesterol levels - the calories are far from empty.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

Fats are not "empty calories." They are essential to brain development. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20329590 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20329590 Current research suggests that the right fats are important to maintaining brain health. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170621103123.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170621103123.h... Fat also appears to play a role in immune function. I can't readily find a source to cite which nice and neatly says "The right fat is critical to immune function." In fact, googling that brings up a bunch of articles that say, basically, "Too much dietary fat harms your immune function." But a tldr of my understanding: Bone marrow is fatty and that is where a lot of our immune cells are produced.