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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Dietary sugar—sugar that’s bound up along with fiber in its natural setting like fruits & vegetables—is a very different thing from non-dietary sugar. The former is fine; the latter is a chronic hepatotoxin that leads to metabolic disease, including lethargy, irritability, fat gain (sp. interstitial), and diabetes.
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.
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=comme...
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.