Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
All olive oils start out with a good balance of fats that lower bad cholesterol, but when you cook them really hot, that balance gets ruined — especially in oils that started with less of the good fats.
Quantitative
Cooking olive oil at a lower heat doesn’t change its inflammatory potential much, but cooking it really hot makes it more likely to promote inflammation in the body.
Some olive oils have a better balance of two types of fats (omega-6 and omega-3) than others — Picual, Manzanilla, Cornicabra, and Sensation are in the healthy range, but Arbequina and its blends are way off.
All olive oils have a lot of one type of antioxidant called alpha-tocopherol — but the amount varies: Cornicabra has the most, Manzanilla has the least.
Some olive oils — like Picual and Cornicabra — hold up better when heated than others, like Arbequina and Manzanilla, because they lose fewer healthy compounds and form less gunk when cooked.
Descriptive
Heating olive oil really hot makes it get gunkier — about 4.5 times more than at a lower heat — but even at the highest temperature, it doesn’t get gunky enough to be considered unsafe by food safety standards.
When you cook olive oil at very high heat, the good unsaturated fats break down faster than the saturated ones — especially in oils that started with more unsaturated fats, making them less healthy for cooking.
When olive oil gets super hot, it starts forming gummy, big molecules called dimers — and the amount depends on the type of olive oil: blends with more Arbequina make way more than those with more Picual.
When you heat certain types of olive oil really hot, the healthy antioxidant called alpha-tocopherol disappears completely in some kinds, but not as much in others — Picual and Cornicabra oils hold up better.
Avocado oil doesn’t break down much faster than olive oil when used for frying — they both last about the same number of uses before going bad.
Both oils can be reused many times before they break down enough to be considered unsafe by health standards.
When you fry with these oils over and over, they react with heat and moisture and start breaking down into chemicals that signal the oil is going bad.
Avocado oil breaks down faster than olive oil when reused for frying — it hits the safety limit for bad compounds after 10 uses, while olive oil lasts 13 uses.
When you fry potatoes over and over using avocado or olive oil, the oil gets more acidic, more oxidized, and loses some of its natural antioxidants.
Support from friends, the hormone oxytocin, and even diet might help protect the body from the long-term harm of childhood trauma, while stress hormones like cortisol might make it worse.
Mechanistic
The rise in this chemical after childhood trauma might not mean more cell damage—it might mean the body is stuck in a low-level inflammatory state.
Women with a history of childhood trauma have higher levels of a natural antioxidant called bilirubin, which might be their body’s way of fighting back against long-term stress.
Correlational
Women who had bad childhoods tend to have shorter protective caps on the ends of their immune cell DNA, which may mean their cells are aging faster.
Women who had tough childhoods have immune cells that produce more reactive oxygen molecules, even though those molecules aren’t causing more DNA damage.
Even after accounting for things like smoking, weight, and illness, women with worse childhoods still have higher levels of this inflammation-related chemical in their blood.
Even if a new mom had a rough childhood, her white blood cells don’t show more signs of broken DNA than other moms, based on two sensitive lab tests.
Having a tough childhood doesn’t seem to leave a detectable mark on DNA or RNA damage in the blood of new moms, even when accounting for other health factors.
A specific form of a stress-related chemical (free 8-isoprostane) goes up in women with bad childhoods, but the total amount doesn’t—meaning it’s likely tied to body inflammation, not just general cell damage.
Even if someone had a rough childhood, their blood doesn't show more signs of DNA damage from oxidative stress after having a baby, based on multiple tests.