There's a television advertisement in Australia. It's an old one and it goes like this the guy's talking about motor oils and he's saying oils ain't oils and essentially. 

What he's saying is the more refined an oil is the better it is for your car well it's the exact opposite for the human body. The more refined it is but less good. It is for the human body and definitely the planet and the less refined, so the more natural it is the better it is for you so using that logic. 

Obviously, the oils that are intact in whole unprocessed foods are the best oils for your body given though that we are in an oil society and we eat lots of oils. 

How do you find good oil in the supermarket?

There's so much confusion around it and I get asked this question a lot about how do you find a good oil, how do you know what a good oil is and why is it that these oils that you see on the supermarket shelf and these clear glass bottles are so bad for you so what. I'm going to share with you today is the nature's principle return to food and sweet freedom take on oils.

How to get them?

So the first thing I love to share with people is some information that I learned from you two Erasmus's book fats that harm fats that kill or fats that heal which was written in 1993. So fats that heal fats that kill really important and I found out that most oils are actually made this way. 

So they are first they're cooked the seeds or nuts or whatever they're using is cooked and then they're formed into a cake then it goes through a process of solvent extraction where heptane and hexane which is gasoline is used to extract the oil from the cedar. Then that cake that they make and then it goes to a deep gumming stage where water and phosphoric acid and you know remove the fossil lipids. 

So these are the nourishing parts of the oils that are actually removed with phosphoric acid which is really toxic and can burn a hole in your hand. If you touch it then it goes to the refining stage where the oils mixed with sodium hydroxide okay. This is not good this is caustic soda it's the active ingredient in Drano, and it's mixed with sodium carbonate. 

Then it goes to a bleaching stage where filtered acid-treated activated clays are used to remove any colors and aromas and then a deodorizing stage again using heat that will destroy more and more nutrients every time. They heat oil the nutrients are destroyed and then a final preservation stage where they use a whole host of synthetic antioxidants of which you need a science degree and librarians vocabulary to learn how to pronounce or a scientist's vocabulary to learn how to pronounce things like butylated hydroxy to lean mutilated hydroxy a small propyl gallate terroristic winning own boo. 

How to make soap from oils?

They look when announced, sorry messed it up I'm citric acid and methicillin. This is just in the process of it and if anyone knows about making soap from oils what they did in the olden days and they made soap from oils as they would actually be able to process it to the point where they could make soap. 

So these oils are processed so much they have to add a de for to it because they don't want your oil foaming up on you crazy huh so basically you're ending up with oil it is the white sugar version of you know cane you're ending up with that oil and what that does is it enables the oil to say stay on the shelf-stable for much longer than say a natural cold press or expel their expressed oil. 

So when you're buying oils and you want to find a good one the first thing to do is to know that air and light oxidize oil so you want to find the oil that's kept in a dark bottle or you know something that excludes air and light so if you pain lots for good oil and it's in a glass bottle it usually means that the people who are actually producing it don't really understand how oils are kept now. 

If you understand in certain cultures where they had olive oil how it was actually made years ago was simply a matter of taking the oils and crushing them and then what they learn through you know sophistication and learning how to press the oils is that the pulp that was leftover after grinding it in the stone. 

It could actually yield more than the first kind of pressing of it. The free-flowing oil which in Italian is called prima Lucio. It's like the Rolls-Royce of olive oil and if you've ever tasted freshly pressed olives from olives that are really well taken care of it. 

It is like this amazing revelatory experience in your palate. It's absolutely delicious. I'm just remembering the first time I had it was very exciting. I'd seen oils like this on the tables and restaurants for years and I dip my toilet and I was like I don't get it like what's this thing with oil on the table. 

And then, I was invited as a guest to the Turley vineyards, there had a private dinner and I just got an invite stroke of luck and they had just pressed olives from five of their heirloom trees that had been left to go almost go wild for like decades and they took five that olives from five trees and they pressed it and they ended up with I think something like five liters of oil and they put some on the table and I was kind of like oh yeah that's great you have your own olive oil. 

It's really impressive and I dip my bread into it and I taste it and it was just like the heavens parted in a palette sense and a culinary sense it literally wasn't a moment. 

Why people dip their bread in oil?

It was so delicious and it was awakening it you know I just felt wonderful and tasted wonderful and I thought this is why people dip their bread in it. We've just been using crappy oils so it wasn't that exciting. But when you get a great oil it is something beautiful so for shopping for olive oils. 

There are many ways to look out for it it's rare I have to tell you it's rare to find a really good quality oil that is organic so you want organic so because when you spray chemicals onto the olives you can't just take the chemicals off and with fat residues, you definitely can't extract the chemicals once it's being pressed so organically. 

You want cold-pressing but nowadays they use centrifugal expellers that basically take the pulp and whizzed it around and then the oil actually comes out of it. So technically it's not the first cold pressing but you definitely want the first I'll press because of what they did when they found out that they could get oil out of the pulp at different times. When they started to put it in between mats that basically just created a little bit of pressure on the oil not too much, so it didn't create any friction into nature. 

What was the second cold pressing of olives?

The oil you had your first cold-pressed olive oil that's why it was so great, then discovered it. If they took heavier mattes porous mats and they put it the pulp in between it in layers the actual weight of the mats would create a little bit of friction and it would release more oils from the pulp and that was the second cold pressing of olives and then what they discovered it. 

If they took heat to that leftover pulp they could extract more oil from the olives then it was no longer first cold-pressed or second oppressed it was now virgin or extra-virgin meaning the lucidity was less than 1%. But it was no longer cold pressing because they'd ben as the heat and then they discovered as I discussed they went through all these great stages of using equipment science you know technology to extract more and more oil from the pulp and have less and fewer nutrients left in the oil. 

So when you're wanting it to get a good oil now there are places where you can go they just sell oils and you can get it in a dark bottle excludes the air you want something that has lots of flavor and aroma and you can see one of the things. I'm a big fan of is finding bottles where you can actually see the sediment at the bottle because you know it hasn't gone through elaborate filtration and processing, you also want to watch out for some of the olive oils we'll have in a bottle and it'll be a bright green and people think oh I'm getting a good olive oil because there's lots of color in it sometimes what they'll do.

When they're selling oil cheaply and wanting to make you think that you're getting a good oil is they will actually crush the leaves into the actual oil to give it that color and there are just so many kinds of fiddly things that actually happen in the olive oil industry. You want to try and find someone who's reputable and then once you get your oil and you trust it and you know it tastes good and it meets all the criteria. You don't want to cook it at high heat okay. This is able to withstand high heat cooking without kind of decomposing and breaking down because there's no goodness in it where is this oil is super fragile and sensitive and if you start to cook at high heat it can actually become toxic. 

So I use my olive oil for raw purposes. I don't normally cook with it anymore and if I am gonna cook I tend to use something like coconut oil and you know more things that aren't actually gonna get upset by the high heat. So once you get your beautiful oils remember they are best for raw things so your salads drizzle over things. 

They're going to have beautiful flavor aroma compounds they're going to look great in your food at a silkiness to it. And the other thing that happens with plant-based fats is they're so easily assimilated and digested by the body and they help you assimilate. The fat-soluble nutrients in the vegetables that you're putting them on so they not only look good taste and feel good they make your body good.