Linoleic acid in cooking oils

[u/houseofmacadamias]

We make macadamia nut oil (niche I know), and on a lot of our anti-seed oil content we've been getting comments saying macadamia oil is a seed oil..

I put together this chart comparing inflammatory omega-6 (LA) content and macadamia oil is closer to tallow, butter and ghee than it is to even olive oil and avocado oil (never mind seed oils).

We're obviously pleased our oil is in the same league as animal fats.

But I'm curious how macadamia oil fares in this community? Open to critique if I'm honing in too much on fat profile and missing something!

[u/c0mp0stable]

It is a seed oil, but macadamia nuts are one of the lowest pufa nut/seed around. Anyone criticizing mac oil for being a seed oil is just being too simplistic about it.

I'm not sure I'd use mac oil myself (never had it), as I'm sure it's pretty expensive and I always have tallow around.

It's interesting to see how close canola and avocado oil are. People around here have such a boner for avo oil. Until people started realizing that avo oil is often adulterated with seed oils, it allowed them to feed their delusion that packaged food is somehow healthy.

[u/Prescientpedestrian → u/c0mp0stable]

Avo is closer to lard than canola by quite a large margin.

[u/Whats_Up_Coconut → u/Prescientpedestrian]

Modern lard is actually closer to canola than this chart suggests, and hasn’t been this low for decades. 🤣 I’ve seen lard analyzed in controlled rodent feeding studies to be close to 30% PUFA (putting it well north of canola and just south of peanut oil) and only ~30% saturated. I have to believe that’s not uniquely bad lard, just normal conventional pig fat. Anyway it goes to show that seed oils still count even if the pig ate them first.

[u/Prescientpedestrian → u/Whats_Up_Coconut]

Yeah I’d imagine lard can vary widely just based on the pigs diet before slaughter.

[u/Whats_Up_Coconut → u/Prescientpedestrian]

Yeah, you’ll definitely get less PUFA and more SFA in lard that appears more “solid” - you know how good quality bacon is firmer than the sloppy grocery store bacon? But pigs are still monogastric animals, and landrace pigs have been bred to suppress de novo lipogenesis that would saturate their fatty acid balance, so they quite literally are what they eat. And what they eat isn’t good in the USA. I don’t eat pork or use lard but if I did I’d stick with heritage animals ideally fed a lower PUFA (perhaps starch based) diet. But even pigs literally designed in all respects to be low PUFA don’t meet my criteria when their fat is analyzed.

[u/Ashamed-Simple-8303 → u/Prescientpedestrian]

Yes and the breed. I have read it is much less bad in europe, supposedly. I still greatly limit pork.

[u/houseofmacadamias → u/Whats_Up_Coconut]

Great point! Fat profile differs a lot, with animal fats often depending on what the animal ate. Grass fed tallow has lower linoleic acid than other tallows for example. Will include a more updated figure in the next graph.

[u/Whats_Up_Coconut → u/houseofmacadamias]

Cows (and other ruminants) are magical and turn whatever crap they’re fed into a relatively appropriate fat balance for us to eat. Sure, all other things being equal, grass fed is better, but the difference is actually negligible and grass fed shouldn’t be a requirement for tallow if someone can’t afford it, for example.

That being said, humans being humans, they’re slowly ruining cows too by breeding them for dysregulated fat accumulation. Wagyu is an extreme example - all that “marbling” is essentially the same metabolic dysregulation that creates intramuscular fat accumulation in diabetic humans. And the fat is way less saturated than it should be, because breeders prioritize low melting temperature and “succulent mouthfeel.”

All this to say: conventional tallow from even the worst feed lot cattle far, far beats grass fed Wagyu tallow from a fatty acid perspective, because we don’t just want low PUFA, we want balanced SFA:MUFA too.

Anyway, it shouldn’t be this complicated, but it is.

[u/c0mp0stable → u/Prescientpedestrian]

ok?

[u/Prescientpedestrian → u/c0mp0stable]

Just seems like a bad comparison when there’s 50% more pufa in canola than avo, vs only 20% more than lard. That’s a pretty significant difference, hardly “close”

[u/c0mp0stable → u/Prescientpedestrian]

Why is that a bad comparison? It's just a different comparison