Answers
Straight answers, with the evidence attached
One question per page, answered in the first paragraph. Where the science is contested we say so and give both positions, because a scanner that overstates its case is not worth trusting.
What are seed oils?Seed oils are cooking oils extracted from plant seeds — canola, soybean, sunflower, safflower, corn, cottonseed, grapeseed and rice bran — and refined through solvent extraction, bleaching and deodorising. They are high in omega-6 linoleic acid. Generic 'vegetable oil' on a label is almost always a blend of these. Palm oil comes from fruit, not seed, and is a separate category.Are seed oils bad for you?The evidence is contested. Critics argue that refined seed oils supply far more omega-6 linoleic acid than humans historically ate and that high-heat refining produces oxidation products. Major nutrition bodies, including the American Heart Association, hold that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated oils lowers cardiovascular risk. No consensus exists, and Olive Detective does not claim one.How do you check if a product has seed oils?Scan the barcode with a food scanner app, which reads the parsed ingredient list and flags every seed oil by name in about a second. Reading the label manually works too, but you have to know all the aliases — rapeseed, colza, LEAR oil and generic 'vegetable oil' are all canola or a blend of seed oils.What is the best app to scan food for seed oils?A seed-oil scanner app should do four things: match a barcode against a database of at least two million products, detect every seed-oil alias including foreign-language labels, read the ingredients panel by camera when the barcode is missing, and show you how its score was calculated rather than returning an unexplained number.What is a good alternative to Yuka?Yuka scores food on nutrition (60%), additives (30%) and organic status (10%), and scans cosmetics too. The main alternatives are Olive Detective, which adds seed-oil detection, pet-food scanning and personalised scoring, and the free Open Food Facts app, which shows raw ingredient data without a proprietary score.How is a food health score calculated?Olive Detective's 0–100 score is deterministic: nutrition quality per 100g carries the most weight, then additive load, then NOVA processing level, with a small organic bonus. Whole natural foods are not penalised for the salt or fat they inherently contain. The same product always returns the same score, and every deduction is shown with its reason.Which cosmetic ingredients should you avoid in pregnancy?The ingredients most commonly avoided during pregnancy are retinoids (retinol, tretinoin, retinyl palmitate), hydroquinone, formaldehyde-releasing preservatives, phthalates, thioglycolates in chemical straighteners, and high-dose salicylic acid peels. This is precautionary guidance based on EU CosIng and SCCS positions, not medical advice — ask your midwife or doctor about your own products.Which pet food ingredients are toxic to dogs and cats?The ingredients treated as genuinely toxic in pet food are xylitol (dangerous to dogs), onion and garlic in any allium form, propylene glycol in cat food specifically, and ethoxyquin as a preservative. Separately, by-products, added sugar, artificial dyes and BHA/BHT are quality concerns rather than toxins. Species matters: some are dangerous to cats but not dogs.How do you scan food that has no barcode?Point the camera at the ingredients panel instead of the barcode. Olive Detective reads the printed ingredient list with on-device text recognition and runs the same seed-oil, additive and allergen detection against it. Loose produce needs no scan at all — whole, unprocessed food scores well by definition — and restaurant food is covered by the seed-oil-free dining map.What is the NOVA classification?NOVA is a food classification system that sorts food by degree of processing into four groups: unprocessed or minimally processed (group 1), processed culinary ingredients (group 2), processed foods (group 3), and ultra-processed foods (group 4). It ignores nutrients entirely and asks only what was done to the food industrially.What are category-level contaminant flags?A category-level contaminant flag reports that a food category is monitored by regulators for a specific contaminant — cadmium in cocoa, methylmercury in large fish, inorganic arsenic in rice. It is anchored to FDA monitoring programmes and applies to the category, never to the individual product in your hand, which no app has tested.Which food additives should you avoid?The most-contested food additives are the artificial azo colours (tartrazine E102, sunset yellow E110, allura red E129), sodium nitrite (E250) in cured meat, BHA (E320), and the artificial sweeteners aspartame (E951) and acesulfame-K (E950). All are legally approved; the disagreement is over long-term exposure, not acute safety.Is canola oil bad for you?The evidence is contested. Controlled trials consistently show canola oil lowers LDL cholesterol compared with butter or lard, and major health bodies treat it as a heart-healthy fat. Critics object to how it is refined — hexane extraction, bleaching, deodorising — and to omega-6 intake generally. Olive Detective flags canola because many users choose to avoid it, not because a health harm is established.Is Red Dye 40 bad for you?Red Dye 40 (Allura Red AC, E129) is approved in the US and the EU, but Europe requires foods containing it to carry a warning that it 'may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children'. That label follows a 2007 UK trial linking dye mixtures to hyperactivity. The finding is about behaviour in children, not cancer, and its strength is still debated.What foods are ultra-processed?Ultra-processed foods are NOVA group 4: industrial formulations containing ingredients not found in a domestic kitchen. The categories are soft drinks, packaged snacks, confectionery, mass-produced bread, reconstituted meat products, instant noodles and soups, ready meals, sweetened breakfast cereals, flavoured yoghurts and dairy drinks, and most meat and dairy substitutes.How do you read a food label?Read the ingredient list before the nutrition panel. Ingredients are listed by weight, heaviest first, so the first three tell you what the product mostly is. Then check the serving size before any nutrition number, because per-serving figures are only comparable once you know the serving. Front-of-pack claims are marketing and are regulated separately from both.Is peanut oil a seed oil?Botanically, no. A peanut is a legume, and peanut oil is pressed from a legume rather than a seed, which is why it is absent from the canonical seed-oil list. Nutritionally the distinction is weaker than it sounds: refined peanut oil is roughly a third linoleic acid, so the omega-6 argument applies to it, just less than it does to sunflower or safflower.Is avocado oil a seed oil?No. Avocado oil is pressed from the pulp of the avocado fruit, not from its stone, which places it with olive oil rather than with canola or sunflower. It is roughly 65-70% oleic acid and about 12% linoleic acid. The live issue with avocado oil is not botany but authenticity: independent testing has repeatedly found bottles diluted with cheaper oils.Is olive oil a seed oil?No. Olive oil is pressed from the flesh of the olive fruit, not from its pit, and extra virgin olive oil is mechanically pressed with no solvent or heat refining — the opposite of how seed oils are made. It is about 73% oleic acid and 10% linoleic. One exception sits on the same shelf: olive pomace oil is solvent-extracted from the leftover pulp.Is sesame oil a seed oil?Yes, botanically. Sesame oil is pressed from the seeds of Sesamum indicum and is about 41% linoleic acid, which is higher than peanut or olive oil. It is nonetheless absent from most seed-oil avoid-lists, because it is usually sold unrefined or toasted and used by the teaspoon as a finishing oil rather than as a frying medium.Is coconut oil a seed oil?No. Coconut oil is pressed from the white flesh of the coconut, the fruit of a palm, so it is not a seed oil and it is very low in omega-6 — about 2% linoleic acid. It carries a separate and unrelated controversy: it is roughly 80-90% saturated fat, and heart associations advise limiting it while others dispute that reading.
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