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I don't have evidence for this but my gut tells me that people are not getting fat off of olive oil, and in fact if they used more it would tend to offset a lar

• meowzero 6y ago
  Olive oil is a fat. There is 120 calories for 1 tablespoon. Sure it’s healthy fat, but it still has a lot of calories. Butter actually has less calories per tablespoon than olive oil.
  • giantDinosaur 6y ago
    Nobody disputes olive oil's caloric content. It does seem like a stretch though to imply it has anything to do with the obesity crisis in the western world. Olive oil is not a recent introduction to our diets. Perhaps people are using much, much more - but that seems somewhat implausible, it doesn't actually taste that good by itself and I'd like to see something showing that the amount use to sauté the average unit of food has increased significantly in the past few decades. Either way, having tried/trying to gain weight I can confirm that olive oil is not particularly useful in that respect, it's easy to get ~80 calories with it but difficult to go beyond that. In a lot of cases you will not consume all the oil you used for frying or whatever anyway - so it is also misleading to imply that the volume used in cooking equals calories ingested, and unless you're cooking for yourself only, the amount needed to sauté e.g. onions is basically constant for 1-5 people, so you'd likely be consuming only a fraction.