All of David Cato's Comments + Replies

It's not worth the suffering to do a lot of experimentation, I typically stick with the first oil that doesn't give me issues. In the UK I buy Il Casolare from Ocado - 1 L for £16. In the US, I go to so many different places I don't have a go to, so I stick with simple heuristics for quality like single origin / cold pressed / noted date of harvest - I typically buy the cheapest in the store that meets any of these conditions - and haven't had any issues to date. Top of mind I can only recall one national US brand California Olive Ranch, but only their single origin oils is okay, I was hopeful about their 100% California blend but it also gave me preflux.

Unfortunately the Kirkland EVOO gave me the same pre-flux feeling I'm used to. I was so hopeful!

3JenniferRM
Fascinating. I am surprised and saddened, and thinking about the behavioral implications. Do you have a "goto brand" that is "the cheapest that doesn't give you preflux"? Now I'm wondering if maybe I should try some of that.

Next time I have a chance to pick up Kirkland olive oil I'll give it a try and report back. 

I made a decision around this time of dietary changes to stop trying to cut so many corners wtih food. As a calorie dense food, even paying an "outrageous" double or triple the cost of cheap olive oil barely dents the budget on a cost per calorie basis. And speaking of budgeting, I had mental resistance to spending more on food so now I guesstimate what percent of my food budget I spend over the "cheapest equivalent alternative" part and I label as "preventative healthcare".

4JenniferRM
I look forward to your reply! (And regarding "food cost psychology" this is an area where I think Neo Stoic objectivity is helpful. Rich people can pick up a lot of hedons just from noticing how good their food is, and formerly poor people have a valuable opportunity to re-calibrate. There are large differences in diet between socio-economic classes still, and until all such differences are expressions of voluntary preference, and "dietary price sensitivity has basically evaporated", I won't consider the world to be post-scarcity. Each time I eat steak, I can't help but remember being asked in Summer Camp as a little kid, after someone ask "if my family was rich" and I didn't know, about this... like the very first "objective calibrating response" accessible to us as children was the rate of my family's steak consumption. Having grown up in some amount of poverty, I often see "newly rich people" eating as if their health is not the price of slightly more expensive food, or their health is "not worth avoiding the terrible terrible sin of throwing food in the garbage (which my aunt who lived through the Great Depression in Germany yelled at me, once, with great feeling, for doing, when I was child and had eaten less than ALL the birthday cake that had been put on my plate)". Cultural norms around food are fascinating and, in my opinion, are often rewarding to think about.)

I wish you the best and look forward to hearing how it goes.

I owe my current health good to one especially shady anti-seed oil theorist on twitter.

Tl;dr: For me, one key problem with seed oils is their likelihood of being contaminated with glyphosate, commonly known as the weedkiller Round-Up and increasingly used as a pre-harvest dessicant (also widely recognized as a microbiome disruptor).

As an n=1 case study, I don't claim that glyphosate is the cause of Western disease, only that glyphosate and other microbiome-disruptors seem more likely to be a primary causes of western disease than any other reason discussed... (read more)

This bit caught my eye:

This strong response made me fairly sure that most cheap olive oils in both the US and the UK are (probably illegally) cut with rapeseed oil.

I searched for [is olive oil cut with canola oil] and found that in the twenty teens organized crime was flooding the market with fake olive oil, but in 2022 an EU report suggested that uplabeling to "extra virgin" was the main problem they caught (still?).

Coming from the other direction, in terms of a "solid safe cheap supply"... I can find reports of Extra Virgin Olive Oil being sold by Costco... (read more)

9rai
This is shockingly similar to what I'm going through.  And the fries that fucked me up the other night are indeed fried in canola oil. I'm cautiously optimistic but I know how complicated these things can be -_-. Will report back!
2[comment deleted]

I'm posting here to hold myself publicly accountable for taking on this challenge (starting yesterday), when I generated 80 bugs (many of these are likely to be broken down into more smaller bugs, so I'm inclined to be satisfied despite not reaching the magic total of 100). In fact, posting this comment is the last bug I'm tackling today to complete today's Yoda Timer exercise to kick off my being a more active member of this community.

Truly a joy to read! Thank you.

To what extent can we identify subsets of the system corresponding to "that which is being optimized" and "that which is doing the optimization"?

The information theoretic measure of individuality attempts to answer exactly this type of question.

From this view, a set of components (the system) is decomposed into two subsets (subsystem + environment). The proposed subsystem is assigned a degree of individuality by measuring the amount of information it shares with its future state, optionally conditioned o... (read more)

2Alex Flint
Thank you for the pointer to this terminology. It seems relevant and I wasn't aware of the terminology before.