Martin Grootveld, a professor of bioanalytical chemistry and chemical pathology, said that his research showed “a typical meal of fish and chips”, fried in vegetable oil, contained as much as 100 to 200 times more toxic aldehydes than the safe daily limit set by the World Health Organisation.
In contrast, heating up butter, olive oil and lard in tests produced much lower levels of aldehydes.
This is, of course, one of the problems with our taking what the experts say seriously. Even more so with the experts telling us that they should make the law about what we do.
Said experts often having no clue.
I stopped listening years ago. I haven’t read the study and don’t plan to, but while I’m sure their data on aldehyde content is correct, so what? How does that comparatively stack up to cholesterol for instance?
I fry in olive oil for instance. Chippies can’t do that because the stuff is unstable at high temps and smokes up the joint something fierce. Fine for a couple of steaks, but even considering it as a possible alternative to vegetable oil is ridiculous. Why did they even bother testing it?
It’s always worth reading the label on a tin of paint. (Not the acrylic stuff. Oil paint, you need white spirit to wash the brushes). It’s the same stuff made in the same way as you fry chips. Vegetable oil heated to a high temperature.
You like frying your food in Dulux, Ltw, be my guest.
Chippies used to use beef dripping, it has a high smoke point and produces minimal aldehydes. Ignorant health fascists put a stop to that of course.
Whatever else you can say about believing the pyramids were built to store grain, there is a robust connection between that belief as generally positive social outcomes.
Even if you ignore that, believing that the pyramids were built by order of Joseph has killed precisely no one. Which is more than you can say of virtually everything the Great and Good have believed and tried to foist on the rest of us.
Different oils have different smoke points. Olive oil has a low smoke point, vegetable oils have higher points. The higher the better when cooking meats. Aldehydes are just another excuse to demonise one form of cooking over another. Aldehydes exist in many other products, from perfume to food flavourings.
TIL. Schmalz is German for dripping.
Lard, surely?
Dripping is for dipping your bread in.
Roue de Jour: Spot on. Lard is the only way to cook chips.
Guessing both…Well hoping BiG can clear this up. But dripping ok for chips. Point is I guess most English speakers like me would associate it with sweetness rather than lardiness.
Oh dear.
Lard is the rendered fat from a pig.
In British parlance, dripping is usually assumed to be that from beef.
This is just the DT trying to become the DM.
The one that had me crying over my eggs and bacon (cooked in Deisel) was the one about paying countries to take back their migrants.
What could possibly go wrong?
BiS
That’s fascinating but can you relate it somehow to our discussion on a German meaning?
I’m not aware of any paints that use olive oil as an ingredient BiS. So no, I don’t fry my food in Dulux.
Although, vegetable oils used to be very big in industry. Prior to mineral/synthetic oils becoming the cheaper and better alternative for that purpose. That doesn’t mean that food use is the equivalent of drinking your car’s engine oil.
Last time I looked, Ltw, most tins of “oil paint” were still labelled “modified vegetable oils” or even “modified sunflower oil”
Vegetable oils will naturally polymerise (molecularly crosslink) by taking up oxygen from the air. (Why they make poor lubricants) Animal & mineral oils don’t
Vegetable oils can be modified by heating to high temperature, to accelerate the process. (As does the addition of metal salts)
“Boiled oils” have been the basis of paint since…forever. Certain vegetable oils make better paints then others. Cost being one of the factors. But olive oil’s perfectly suitable for making paint & was used for it.
The problem’s that, at the temperature required, vegetable oils start to give off those toxic aldehydes. And that’s in the temperature range that frying’s done. Hence the cancer risk. It’s something you’ll find if you ever try cleaning where frying, using vegetable oil’s been done. Insoluble hard deposits that don’t respond to detergents. Look like varnish, because that’s exactly what they are. Polymerised by atmospheric oxygen after the heating process. . Best removed using caustic soda. Paint stripper. Oven cleaner. Breaks the molecular bonds (But not on aluminium!) Or regularly cleaned before they get a chance to polymerise.
The best chips are cooked in beef tallow. This is not an opinion. It is simply the case and anyone who disagrees is a knob. You can’t deep-fry in olive oil because a) it’s too expensive b) you can’t get it hot enough c) it’s too strongly flavoured. Most chippies—in the UK at least—use solid vegetable oil. It tolerates high temperatures, has a decent number of cycles in it, is neutrally-flavoured, and is relatively cheap (although still a fairly hefty cost centre for the average restaurant). Beef tallow-fried chips are one of those things that make you angry you haven’t tried before. But it’s madly expensive, the Hindus and the veggies cut up fierce, and most people’s taste is so etiolated as to make no difference. I worked in a chippie in my gap year and it was a revelation how dense the general fast food-buying public was.
But why should we take the ‘safe limit’ on aldehydes as set by the WHO as anything other than a politically-tinged random number?
I could understand if new research resulted in scientific advice which was slightly better than the previous one, e.g. “Cooking with vegetable oil is fine, but we’ve discovered a way which is even better”.
But no. Each scientific opinion is the iron word of Moses, until the next one comes along and OH MY GOD THE OLD ONE KILLS YOU and the new one becomes the iron word of Moses.
When scientific opinion believes their advice to be beyond reproach, right up until they discover it’s a load of dangerous balls and in fact the new opinion is beyond reproach, I lose a bit of confidence in scientific opinion.
What’s the government recommended daily limit for goose fat roast potatoes?
Zero, I suspect. They can’t have you actually enjoying your food.
How do they feel about electronic goose fat roast potatoes?
DocBud – “What’s the government recommended daily limit for goose fat roast potatoes?”
I expect that the government is full of people who usually think that what is not compulsory ought to be forbidden. So the only thing saving your goose fat is the fact they have not heard about it. Yet.
So let’s keep it quiet. What they don’t know can’t hurt you.
For a small consideration, I will give you the address of a restaurant in Brussels where you can have your potatoes fried in your choice of either olive oil, goose fat, beef dripping, or horse fat. In Brussels, the main/most frequented chip shop uses horse fat. Just saying…
But can you run your car on the beef tallow after the chippy has finished with it?
That’s where vegetable oil wins.
> “a typical meal of fish and chips”, fried in vegetable oil, contained as much as 100 to 200 times more toxic aldehydes than the safe daily limit set by the World Health Organisation.
So people who eat fish and chips daily ought to be dead in fairly short order, yes? Even people who eat fish and chips, ooh, once a month or so ought to be getting pretty peaky.
Either “as much as” is doing overtime in that sentence, or the WHO is more worried about aldehydes than is warranted. On the available evidence, it’s hard to decide which.