The Research — Field notes from the Insurgency

Aerial view of the Colombian Llanos palm plantation — context for the cooking-oil comparison

Every oil. Every metric.
The honest scorecard.

Ten cooking oils. Eighteen dimensions. Composition, smoke point, fry-life, carbon footprint, water, land use, deforestation, biodiversity, employment, and price — every number sourced. Including the metrics where palm loses. The most comprehensive cooking-oil comparison on the public internet.

Read the comparison →

53 sources · Fedepalma+Cenipalma LCA, Codex, FAO, Mekonnen·Hoekstra, UC Davis

All issues

Back catalogue.
Fully sourced.

Every issue cites the original peer-reviewed papers it draws from. Where the science is contested, we say so. Where it’s ours, we show the math.

Field Note

Movement

Nov 20269 sources7 min

The seed-oil-free movement, examined.

Sweetgreen, CAVA, Proper Hotels, dozens of independents — the SOF movement is real. The science behind it is more complicated than the discourse. An honest read from the people who make a low-PUFA oil.

STAT · Johns Hopkins · Fedepalma 2025 Read →

001

Frying

Fedepalma trial4 sources8 min

Seven oils. 300 cycles. One discard line.

A controlled Fedepalma trial ran seven commercial oils through 300 cycles at 175°C until each crossed the EU/US discard threshold. Exact failure points and what they tell procurement.

Fedepalma + U. de Caldas 2025 Read →

002

Seed Oils

Nutrition science4 sources11 min

Linoleic acid: what 60 years of trial data show.

The 1968 Minnesota Coronary Experiment was unpublished for decades. When the data was finally recovered in 2016, the story of why we replaced saturated fat with seed oils started to look very different.

Ramsden BMJ · 2013, 2016 Read →

003

HOPO

Clinical trial3 sources9 min

The HOPO cardiovascular file, on the record.

In a 160-patient Colombian randomized trial, OxG palm olein moved plasma lipids similarly to extra-virgin olive oil over three months. The result matters — and so do the caveats the same authors flagged four years later.

Lucci Food & Function 2016 Read →

004

Adulteration

UC Davis audit2 sources6 min

Avocado oil: most of the bottle is something else.

UC Davis ran two consecutive audits of U.S. retail avocado oil. Three samples were adulterated near 100% with soybean oil. Only 3 of 29 refined private-label samples met both purity and quality standards.

Green & Wang Food Control 2020/23 Read →

005

Mortality data

UK Biobankn=85,42510 min

The omega-6 / omega-3 ratio that quietly tracks mortality.

When researchers followed 85,425 UK Biobank participants and broke their plasma fatty-acid ratios into quintiles, the highest-ratio group had 26% more all-cause mortality. The signal is the ratio — not the omega-6 or omega-3 in isolation.

Zhang eLife 2024 Read →

On record

Why we publish this

The category is built on spec sheets, not soundbites.

Industrial cooking oil is a procurement-grade decision. The buyer needs to defend the choice to a CFO, a food scientist, a labelling lawyer, and a head chef — sometimes all in the same week. They deserve the actual peer-reviewed receipts, not a content-marketing thinkpiece.

So that’s what we publish. Every Issue cites the underlying study. Where the science is contested, we mark it. Where the data is ours, we show the methodology. Where our oil doesn’t win on a metric, we say so — because the procurement buyer is going to find out anyway.

It’s the same standard we hold our spec sheet to. The Research is the same brand voice in a longer form.

From research to receipt

Read the science. Then taste it.

Every Issue points back to a single product on a single supply chain. Request a sample and the lot you receive will carry a third-party COA you can verify against the data in any of these pages.

Request a sample → Download spec sheet

Every oil. Every metric.The honest scorecard.

Back catalogue.Fully sourced.