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Study finds 82% of avocado oil rancid or mixed with other oils
- chadash 5y agoSome of the examples they found seem to not even have any avocado oil. Is there a reason trial attorneys aren't jumping at the chance for a class action suit for this?
- zwieback 5y agoProbably not. Exaggerating but I could sell "Awesome Oil" without any actual awesome in it. Using Avocado in the name apparently is no different.
- rdtwo 5y agoPerhaps though I think a jury would disagree
- zwieback 5y agoThey might and maybe that would be good. However, to get to a jury the prosecutor would have to prove that a law was broken and that there's enough evidence against the defendant. If there's no such law there will never be a case.
- chadash 5y agoIf I sell Awesome Oil and then under the name, i put in "made from 100% extra virgin avocado oil" and put avocado oil in my ingredients list but it's really soybean oil, that's different than selling Awesome Oil but putting in actual ingredients in the ingredients list. 15 USC § 1125 gives civil liability to anyone "who in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of his or her or another person's goods, services, or commercial activities". I've seen state laws that cover this as well.
- boatsie 5y agoProving actual damages. Unless the law stipulates punitive damages, it’s too hard to prove how you were “damaged” by it not being avocado oil and the dollar amount. This is why many lawsuits aren’t filed even when companies have harmed people.
- azth 5y agoFalse advertisement.
- bdcravens 5y agoLooks like the title was munged by HN's filter that strips out numbers at the beginning. (82 Percent)
- meepmorp 5y ago82%, in case anyone else was curious about the number.
- irrational 5y ago> Only two brands produced samples that were pure and nonoxidized. Those were Chosen Foods and Marianne’s Avocado Oil, both refined avocado oils made in Mexico. Among the virgin grades, CalPure produced in California was pure and fresher than the other samples in the same grade. What is the difference between "pure and nonoxidized" and "pure and fresher"?
- sp332 5y ago"Fresher" is relative. It might be a little oxidized.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoThey state explicitly that it is partially oxidized. Only two brands produced nonoxidized samples, and both of those brands were refined oil. Thus, every virgin oil was not nonoxidized.
- zerocrates 5y agoIt's saying that there were two pure and nonoxidized samples, the two Mexican refined oils. There were no "extra virgin" samples that were both pure and nonoxidized, though of the pure extra-virgin samples, the CalPure one was the least oxidized. They had 2 samples that were low oxidization but were apparently roughly 100% soybean oil.
- kahrl 5y agoNothing? They both mean: 1) The oil is actually from the plant advertised and hasn't been adulterated 2) The oil hasn't gone bad yet
- staunch 5y agoClearly the FDA and state agencies are either incompetent or corrupt here. It's surprisingly that some private organization (Consumer Reports?) hasn't come along to do this kind of testing for oils, honey, spices, etc. I'd pay more for food with certification of purity that I could really trust. It's sad that even a "Product of USA" isn't good enough in these cases.
- quantum_magpie 5y agoIn the case of honey, it's actually very simple: if it's viscous outside of summer, it's not honey. Natural honey crystalizes into (near-)solid form quite quickly.
- bagels 5y agoMaybe at a particular temperature is a better yardstick, summer and not summer are not the same everywhere.
- rorykirchner 5y agoI have pounds of honey from my parents hives that isn’t crystallized even after sitting in my cold basement when it’s sub zero out.
- quantum_magpie 5y agoHas it been treated in any way? I've been working with bees for over 20 years now, and I haven't seen honey keep the viscosity for more than a couple of weeks past harvesting, at room temperature. The duration varies based on the blossoms of course, with some such as rape going solid in 10 days while clover can last 4-6 weeks, but in the end, it always crystalizes.
- rorykirchner 5y agoHuh, not that I know of, I’ll ask. They’ve been keeping bees for several years and I’ve never seen the honey crystallized.
- maxerickson 5y agoHow does the FDA not have a standard that any oil with a plant in the name has to have the percentage of the oil that came from that plant? "We can't regulate soybean oil labeled as avocado oil because we don't have a standard for avocado oil" is literally stupid. Hopefully it isn't quite the case.
- amelius 5y agoPerhaps they simply don't have the manpower to define standards for everything.
- rhexs 5y agoAlso presumably donations and counter lobbying by various “Oil Councils” and trade groups.
- maxerickson 5y agoYeah, that's why I pointed out there could be a broad labeling standard (if the name implies a plant oil, provide the percentage...). Then they would at least be able to take action against violators.
- zokier 5y agoEU food labeling regulation has following requirement (Article 22): 1. The indication of the quantity of an ingredient or category of ingredients used in the manufacture or preparation of a food shall be required where the ingredient or category of ingredients concerned: (a) appears in the name of the food or is usually associated with that name by the consumer; (b) is emphasised on the labelling in words, pictures or graphics; or (c) is essential to characterise a food and to distinguish it from products with which it might be confused because of its name or appearance. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:02011R1169-20180101&from=EN#tocId30 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... There is also the general base requirement of not being misleading in Article 7: 1. Food information shall not be misleading, particularly: (a) as to the characteristics of the food and, in particular, as to its nature, identity, properties, composition, quantity, durability, country of origin or place of provenance, method of manufacture or production; (b) by attributing to the food effects or properties which it does not possess; (c) by suggesting that the food possesses special characteristics when in fact all similar foods possess such characteristics, in particular by specifically emphasising the presence or absence of certain ingredients and/or nutrients; (d) by suggesting, by means of the appearance, the description or pictorial representations, the presence of a particular food or an ingredient, while in reality a component naturally present or an ingredient normally used in that food has been substituted with a different component or a different ingredient. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:02011R1169-20180101&from=EN#tocId12 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
- _jal 5y ago
- yetanotherloser 5y agoOr, alternatively: rancid, fraudulent cooking oil is pretty good proof of the uselessness of the dead hand of the administrative state and given that it can and will crush you for non-harmful breaches of its own rules but can't crush harmful-to-you breaches of its own rules, and your ability to influence the growth of the rules ever decreases, maybe it's time to stop charging down the road of giving it ever more wealth and power?
- google234123 5y agoHow many more trillions a year does it need to finally be effective?
- dang 5y ago"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- _jal 5y agoApologies. Intent was humor, not fighting, but I indeed should have realized that would flop.
- anonAndOn 5y agoAs with any false labeling in the US, this seems ripe for a class action suit.
- blakesterz 5y agoI don't see the full list of brands, am I missing it somewhere?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- somesortofthing 5y agoMakes you wonder how many other common foodstuffs are wildly mislabeled and contain harmful ingredients. It's hard to imagine any US government agency having the manpower to conduct the scale of testing required to find standards violations, even if the standards themselves were perfect. I know nothing at all about the law on this topic, but would a producer of contaminated/illegal food be able to avoid responsibility for violating standards if they just shifted blame onto suppliers that are out of US court jurisdiction?
- sjcoles 5y agoWith olive oils you can prevent this by purchasing PDO or PGI olive oil. If you cook often it's worth the slight bump in price to know you are getting good oil. I love me a nice peppery Sabina olive oil.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoOlive oil is wildly adulterated with blended cheap oil. Vitamins and "supplements" are almost completely unregulated, which is one reason despite known benefits from a limited number of supplements, I've hesitated to use any. There are third party services that test some products, but I gave up on them because many of the certifications were years old and you really have no fucking idea; the company could switch to cheaper manufacturing/suppliers right after getting "certified." Vegetables have to be washed because food pickers aren't given proper bathroom facilities so they shit in the fields and have no way to wash their hands or clean themselves, so there's both soil and product contamination with feces. Could be fixed by the federal government mandating field-accessible bathrooms with hand-washing stations, which you think farmers could afford given the trillions of dollars in subsidies they get, but...nope. Most fish sold in the US is wildly mislabeled - tilapia, which is cheapest, is the most common fish substituted. Particularly annoying since it often causes gastric distress for some. Only DNA testing is reliable. Baby food contains a shocking amount of heavy metals. Packaged chicken products (and I believe eggs?) are washed in bleach, because the poultry industry has managed to gaslight us and regulators into thinking that a)salmonela is just a fact of life with chickens and b)it's the consumer's fault for not properly "handling" said food (in Europe, for example, salmonella is actively controlled, and there's a vaccine.) American cheese doesn't contain any actual cheese (though I think the FDA finally cracked down a bit on this one, so it's now called "cheese product" or something.) Chinese baby formula manufacturers figured out that melamine faked out protein tests to allow them to water down the formula. In the US, melamine and cyanuric acid were found in every formula mix, though supposedly at ~1ppm levels, but no level of either chemical is safe, and there was no reason for either to be in formula. There was huge outbreak of lead poisoning in mexican kids who were eating hard candies made from a fruit - tamarind, I think? - where growers supplying the candy company were getting paid by weight and the assholes were putting lead weights in their containers, and the lead weights were going through the fruit-crushing machines. The list goes on. Libertarians talk about how the free market will solve everything, but time after time when business is trusted or allowed to regulate itself, it doesn't. Greed almost always wins over civic duty and ethics.
- shiftpgdn 5y agoI would recommend anyone looking at this post read into the harm seed oils do to your body and gut fauna. Labeling seed oils as olive oil should be criminal.
- iszomer 5y agoOr worse, oil "recycled" from the gutter.
- RadixDLT 5y agoI just bought Primal Kitchen "pure" avocado oil. Hopefully its not the fake stuff.
- dekhn 5y agoI used to keep oils around forever, and somebody once said something about oils going bad over time. I hadn't really noticed anything, but being a foodie and a chemist, I got curious. Now I wish I had never learned that oil can go rancid. You cannot imagine what it's like to live in a world where oil is rancid but most people can't tell. I don't think there are any true negative health effects, but now that I can detect (smell and taste) rancid oil I see it everywhere. My parents and parents in law both have 5+ year old oil containers that they use maybe once a year.
- technothrasher 5y agoI'm always amazed at the amount of rancid oil people eat. Peanut Butter in particular. People will be happily munching away on it and I can smell the rancidity from a mile away. Blech, it's an awful smell.
- zwieback 5y agoMe too, nuts are terrible in general (although technically peanuts are a legume). Mine go in the freezer right away until I need them. I did an interesting experiment the other day: our admin had stashed snacks in late 2019 and I recently discovered them when we returned to the office. The little bags of hipster packaged nuts were unbelievably bad, especially walnuts. Interestingly, the expensive but major brand almonds are still good, must be higher-tech packaging.
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoDisappointing but not surprising, it's certainly long been the case that a lot of olive oil is adulterated[1] (I avoid buying imported oil here in the US, even though in theory some of it very good, just because I am hoping that California is keeping a better eye on the local stuff). 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2016/02/10/the-olive-oil-scam-if-80-is-fake-why-do-you-keep-buying-it/?sh=5b30e620639d https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2016/02/10/the...
- exhilaration 5y agoI agree 100%, I only buy California olive oil.
- jnwatson 5y agoLast year, I had a several months bout with painful GI issues. I couldn’t be far from a bathroom, and I had stomach pain when I wasn’t full. The GI doctor didn’t find anything wrong. I figured it must be something in my diet. I tried eliminating all the standard stuff. It wasn’t until I realized that I tolerated ordering out much better than cooking my own food that I isolated the problem. I had a glass bottle of evidently rancid avocado oil that I’d refill from a large plastic bottle. I use avocado oil in everything. I swapped it out and the problem was gone in a few days.
- Havoc 5y agoSo what’s the solution here? Using butter maybe? Animal product but at least that seems less vulnerable to tampering
- a0-prw 5y ago"in the US"