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Avocado oil is having a moment. Consumers are often paying extra for it and products made with it because they think avocado oil is healthier than other oils. A new study looked into how much avocado oil is really in packaged foods that have it on the label, NPR's Maria Godoy reports.
MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: Browse the aisles of the grocery store and you'll find chips, salad dressings and mayonnaise all boasting that they're made with avocado oil. But when Selina Wang noticed this trend, she was puzzled.
SELINA WANG: I didn't think we have this much avocado oil to go around. So I became curious about the purity of them.
GODOY: Wang is a food science professor at UC Davis and an expert on cooking oils. To find out if these products really contained what they said, she and her colleagues bought a slew of them and extracted their oil. While these foods listed avocado oil as the only oil used, chemical analysis revealed a different story.
WANG: Out of the 54 avocado oil products, 89% were inconsistent with authentic avocado oil.
GODOY: In other words, they showed signs of being adulterated with other, cheaper oils like soybean oil. One sample appeared to have basically no avocado oil in it. For comparison's sake, the researchers also tested 20 different packaged foods made with olive oil and only one appeared to show signs of adulteration.
WANG: So this is largely an avocado oil product problem.
GODOY: Wang says the findings, which appear in the journal Applied Food Research, were disappointing but not surprising. Her previous research has found that the vast majority of commercially bottled avocado oils were either no longer fresh, or they were adulterated with other oils. Wang says that's disheartening because avocado oil products are often significantly more expensive than those made with olive oil and other vegetable oils.
WANG: If you're buying avocado oil products, it's very likely that you're not getting what you're paying for.
GODOY: Sarah Berry is a professor of nutrition at King's College London. She notes that in recent years, avocado oil has grown in popularity because it's seen as a healthier alternative to seed oils. She says, while avocado oil is indeed a healthy choice...
SARAH BERRY: Where I struggle is the health halo that it's been given.
GODOY: She says that while there's plenty of research showing the health benefits of eating whole avocados, there's really not a lot of direct evidence on avocado oil. On the other hand?
BERRY: We have decades of data showing that extra virgin olive oil is healthy. We have decades of data showing that most seed oils are healthy, whether it's canola oil, sunflower seed oil or soybean oil.
GODOY: Given all that, Berry says it's hard for her to justify paying a markup for products made with avocado oil. One big reason for that premium price is that avocados are expensive to begin with. And they don't yield a whole lot of oil, says Wayne Adams. He's CEO of the Adams Group, which refines avocado oil in the U.S. and sells it under the brand name Marianne's. Meanwhile, he says, seed oils are so much cheaper.
WAYNE ADAMS: You just find people that look at the economic difference, and they just see the incentive to adulterate.
GODOY: He'd like to see more regulatory action on the issue of adulterated oil in the industry. Ultimately, he says, that would help his business not get undercut by cheaters and help consumers, too.
Maria Godoy, NPR News.
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