Agreed. It's bizarre, but I also know a large proportion of the population get their nutritional information nowadays from tenuously referenced YouTube/Facebook/TikTok videos by unqualified authors, so perhaps not surprising. They are in my eyes no different than the Atkins and Peter D'Adamo's of the 90's. The exact conclusions of this study were:
From the results of the studies included in this review, we conclude that (1) the myth that frying foods is generally associated with a higher risk of CVD is not supported by the available evidence; (2) extra-virgin olive oil significantly reduces the risk of CVD clinical events and weight gain, based on the results of a large randomised trial that included as part of the intervention the recommendation to use large amounts of extravirgin olive oil for culinary purposes, also for frying foods; however, the whole Mediterranean dietary pattern plays a more significant role rather than the supplemental extra-virgin olive oil alone; and (3) high consumption of fried foods is probably related to a higher risk of weight gain and hypertension. However, many factors such as the type of oil used and the frying technique (deep-frying or panfrying), frying duration and temperature, and use of new or reused oils for frying have to be taken into account.
Are you referring to the push to replace partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (which would likely mean they’d end up using non-hydrogenated vegetable oils), or do you mean something else?
It was over health not vegetarianism. McDonalds adopted a little bit of the cholesterol war and a little bit of styrofoam reduction in that time period and that's about it.
It definitely wasn't due to vegetarians as to try to keep the flavor they started adding beef flavoring to the fries, which AFAIK they refused to remove once vegetarians--who had thought they might be the intended audience of the vegetable oil--noticed and complained.
I see where I got confused — I misread the tense: I thought they were talking about a present/recent push to change the oil used in the fries, not the one from the 1980s (which resulted in replacing the beef tallow around 1990 or so).
Does this study actually say anything to that effect? It seems to imply that olive oil is beneficial or at least not harmful.
I've heard that animal fats are better than that now-banned partially hydrogenated crap, and a lot of people lost a lot of trust in modern nutrition science because of it, which I suspect is a lot of how the idea that animal fats are healthy got popular, but that doesn't prove they are better than regular vegetable oils.
I'll stick with the sensible bro science which says to avoid seed oils, this is a mere survey and if you scroll to the bottom and look at the sources they're all over the place.
