Animal cooking oil is not unhealthy or that unpleasant to consume

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

1. Animal cooking oil's enjoyability shouldn't be -25.

People can easily consume concentrated animal fats. Examples of that are butter -- worldwide, cured pork fat -- eastern Europe, whale blubber -- Inuits. The same cannot be said about plant fats. I've yet to encounter a culture or nationality which has a history of consuming significant amounts of concentrated plant based fats. Avocados cause oral allergy syndrome, nuts filled with lots of fats are still nuts which are toxic when consumed in large quantities daily. Drinking vegetable oils? Yeah, sure, there's castor oil, though it is being consumed not when you are hungry but when you need a laxative. Oh and actually a lot of vegetable oils are laxatives. So there's a difference between consuming, say, 7000 kCal of vegetable fats and the same amount in animal ones. While the latter will make you sleepy and extremely lazy (if it's not a cold mutton fat), former will cause quite a quick dash to the lavatory if you can even bear eating through all of that amount which is doubtful.

2. Real life animal cooking oils are not as unhealthy as vegetable ones.

Throughout the last century some food industry giants tried their absolute best to destroy the market of animal fats which are used for cooking. They did an extremely agressive marketing, they paid for for a flawed research papers from which they took the worst statistics about animal fats and pushed it onto media. You can google the history of American Heart Association, early years of which were spent on anti-animal-fat propaganda just so P&G can sell more of their loathsome Crisco margarine filled to the brim with trans fats that raise cholesterol and increase heart disease risk. The body of research on that topic is huge and it constantly grows bigger. There are two reasons why I hesitate as to should I dump on you all that info from all the papers which affirm my take on that problem or not. a) It's not a popular science article. b) Compiling research results into a single easily digestable document in no small task, so I want to see if anyone is really interested in reading it. If you are, please say so in the comments. I promise that if there are at least 5 people who think they are capable of reading through it, I'll edit this issue to contain all of the necessary data.

Describe the solution you'd like

Change animal cooking oil enjoyability from -25 to -15. Change animal cooking oil health modificator from -2 to 0.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Living my life and not editing a single issue for 2.5 hours.

[actual-nh]

I'd prefer to see the papers (as long as they're freely available, just giving links will be fine; no problem re comprehension, I teach Human Anatomy & Physiology). There's a massive amount of research indicating that saturated animal fats are not a good idea to consume (albeit rather more on a long-term basis than health is used for in CDDA), for instance; ditto for the bits of burned stuff that are likely floating around in that animal fat. Olive oil is frequently consumed uncooked (in salad dressings?), and there are quite a lot of nuts that are by no means toxic (and the oil extraction process would leave behind all such toxins that I'm aware of). I'll have to check on rancidity speed and whether that's properly being taken into account - there's a reason health codes specify removal of animal fats used for cooking on a frequent basis.

In terms of enjoyment, this is likely highly variable from person to person - the smell of bacon fat has made me nauseated since I was a child, even through the time in which I was pretty close to being a carnivore. EDIT: I also note that we aren't talking about butter, cured pork fat, or blubber - we're talking about oil like you'd get as a leftover from cooking meat, AFAIK. If you'd like to put in a recipe for purifying it to something without, for instance, as strong a smell, that may well be a bit better.

[ZhilkinSerg]

While food fun should vary for different characters, please do not ever ever confuse butter and fat cut from meat pieces (the latter is gross for most people).

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

@ZhilkinSerg En, I still remember seing Bear Grylls trying to consume raw camel fat (berber delicacy) on camera and failing miserably. Still, I'd prefer that to drinking half a gallon of soybean oil.

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

Alright, back to the business. Since we've got an actual expert to refute or confirm my claims, I'll start with this and that.

[actual-nh]

(There are also at least two MD-variety experts around, @Venera3 and @I-am-Erk.) The two papers are definitely interesting in terms of long-term health (although the first may not be very representative of the mostly-American survivor population, and I suspect the omega-6 (inflammation-promoting) linoleic acid to be the culprit in the second's results). I am not sure about their applicability to the short-term, very approximate/unrealistic health stat in CDDA.

More data is really needed about what we're talking about. Let's look at the sources of these two items in CDDA:

• In initial generation, by itemgroups, cooking_oil2 (animal cooking oil) is found in equal frequency with cooking_oil (vegetable cooking oil) in canned foods, pantry liquids, and food service. I find the first two quite unlikely except when they're used for commercial food-prep locations also. In most grocery stores in the US, it would be difficult to locate bottled animal cooking oil; I don't know about commercial food-prep use. The other locations with cooking_oil do not have cooking_oil2. The vegetable oil is likely a mixture of different types (corn, soybean, canola, and others - olive oil should really be split out!); I'm not sure about the animal cooking oil.
• Recipe for vegetable cooking oil: There are a great variety of sources for vegetable oil: "plant_sac", cotton seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, canola seeds, grape seeds, and "weed" seeds. The first is in-game only, being a drop from fungaloids, but is apparently edible on its own without problems. Pumpkin, sunflower, grape, and marijuana seeds are not problematic to consume on their own, and at least the first two are considered appetizing (not sure about the second two). One can argue both ways on canola seeds and their oil, although I note that some apparently find the flavor of unpurified canola oil (as would be produced by the recipe) pleasant. Cotton seeds are another matter; they have a toxin, gossypol, which this recipe would not eliminate.
• Recipe for animal cooking oil: This is produced using rendered - and therefore much cleaner than if simply cut off of meat - fats, including tallow; these are themselves noted as being edible, but with a -1 Health effect and a -18 morale effect.

My conclusions from the above (I will be interested in further papers from @MomoiroShinobinomono or others, of course, such as on applicable nuts):

• Further information is needed on exactly what animal cooking oils are being found, and possibly some corrections on their frequency relative to vegetable cooking oils.
• The spawned vegetable cooking oils are likely rather a mixture in reality, varying from unappetizing ones to the possibility of olive oils that lovers of such probably would prefer drinking to consuming any other oil.
• The recipe-source vegetable oils are, with one exception, likely to be at least as OK as recipe-source animal cooking oils. Cotton seed oil should really be split off into a separate recipe (for non-edible vegetable oils).
• The recipe-source animal oils are likely to be about equivalent to the stats of the sources - currently a -1 Health effect, probably from digestive tract side effects, and a -18 morale effect.

So, yes, the recipe-source animal oils should not be quite as large a Health and Morale penalty (and may be lower if the sources are considered less problematic)- but, if cotton seed oil is removed, the same is probably true of most of the recipe-source vegetable oils, with some uncertainty re canola. The spawned oils are uncertain in regard to the animal cooking oils, and likely to actually be a mixture of problematic and non-problematic for the vegetable cooking oils.

[I-am-Erk]

I'll make it way easier

There are very specific diets that are high in fat and seem to be metabolically stable. However, other things being equal, if you're mostly eating a "western diet", excessive fat consumption is bad for you. While our survivors are eating much weirder stuff, they are still by and large adapted to a western diet, and we should use it as the starting point for health measurements (abstract as they are) and to some degree enjoyment measurements. It is not normally considered enjoyable to drink cookoff grease and under normal circumstances is excessively unhealthy.

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

Seing how in-game animal cooking oil is stored only in liquid holding containers, and judging by the fact that it is accessible through the Consume drink pop-up window I determine that in-game animal cooking oil is a liquid that stays liquid at room temperature. C:DDA's setting is New England which average monthly temperature rarely goes up to even 30°C Which eliminates it being ghee(~32.4C°C melting point), beef tallow(42-45°C melting point) and lard(35–45°C melting point), values for which I found here. Bacon grease doesn't really behave like a liquid at room temperature (~24.4°C) but I can give it a pass in terms of it being a possible candidate for being the "animal cooking oil" at summer. Video evidence. In regards to a schmalts I couldn't find any data on its melting point but on many pictures of it on the internet it appears to be solid. Suet has a melting point of between 45 °C and 50 °C, thanks wikipedia. Now I'm really confused. What in the world is that mysterious in-game liquid with 6,35 kCal/ml nutritional value?

[Zireael07]

Tallow and lard are separate items in game, so this is further proof that they are NOT the animal oil.

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

The closest types of animal oils to match the in-game properties and have a history of being used for human consumption I found are fish oils in general and liver fish oils in particular, none of which are used to cook food in, only to be used as a supplements. Unless someone can provide us with an information about a real world animal fat which stays liquid at room temperature and is commonly used for cooking, my original proposition might as well go to hell as trying to adjust and balance the values of a vague thing that doesn't exist in real world in accordance to real world properties seems pointless. Thus I propose to delete the Animal cooking oil and, if necessary, to replace it with real world animal fats that are yet to be represented in game.

[Zireael07]

Deleting it might be the way to go - google turned up literally nothing except extremely vague 'animal oils aren't as bad as you think' type sites, which usually advocate mixing plant and animal oils, without specifying what the latter is supposed to be. The list of cooking oils on Wikipedia only has tallow and lard, everything else is plant-derived.

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

Yeah well there are whale oils, bone oils, mink oil, crocodile oil, shrimp oil, crab oil, emu oil, axungia, bear grease, skunk oil and shark liver oil. The list of these obscure animal fats goes on and on. Thing is, they aren't used for cooking but rather as a moisturizers, supplements, lubricants and in a traditional medicine. Going further, even if they were used for heat treatment of food they still are quite a rare commodities which you shouldn't be able to find in a kitchen of an average American.

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

Data from this and this papers shows that:

The included long-term trials suggested that reducing dietary saturated fat reduced the risk of combined cardiovascular events by 17% (risk ratio (RR) 0.83; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.70 to 0.98, 12 trials, 53,758 participants of whom 8% had a cardiovascular event, I² = 67%, GRADE moderate-quality evidence)

But

We found little or no effect of reducing saturated fat on all-cause mortality (RR 0.96; 95% CI 0.90 to 1.03; 11 trials, 55,858 participants) or cardiovascular mortality (RR 0.95; 95% CI 0.80 to 1.12, 10 trials, 53,421 participants)

There was little or no effect on cancer mortality, cancer diagnoses, diabetes diagnosis, HDL cholesterol, serum triglycerides or blood pressure, and small reductions in weight, serum total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and BMI.

Which my tired brain translates into human language as "lowering saturated fat intake might save you from couple of CVDs in your life but you are still going to die at the same age". Am I correct in that assessment?

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

In regards to the nuts adressed by @actual-nh earlier, yeah, long-term consumption in moderate amounts appear to be good for us. My original claim that

nuts filled with lots of fats are still nuts which are toxic when consumed in large quantities daily

was both bold and unfounded. I couldn't find any solid data in regards to that, sorry. The only take against excessive nuts consumption I still have comes from anecdotal evidence and popular science articles with little to no references. That take being nuts containing a lot of fiber and tannins which on excess consumption might lead to a short-term digestive problems. That is not an appealing characteristic of a food type people might want to eat a lot daily. Though, seing as certaing aspects of human hygiene are never going to be implemented in game I suppose it is not important.

[actual-nh]

We found little or no effect of reducing saturated fat on all-cause mortality (RR 0.96; 95% CI 0.90 to 1.03; 11 trials, 55,858 participants) or cardiovascular mortality (RR 0.95; 95% CI 0.80 to 1.12, 10 trials, 53,421 participants)

Which my tired brain translates into human language as "lowering saturated fat intake might save you from couple of CVDs in your life but you are still going to die at the same age". Am I correct in that assessment?

Pretty close, but more "we can't detect a change in lifespan, possibly because it isn't there, possibly because the data is too noisy" - 0.9 to 1.03 is not a very tight range, plus the very wide range for detected cardiovascular mortality effects when there were less cardiovascular "events". There are too many other things affecting mortality in humans (as opposed to controlled environments with genetically-identical - inbred - lab animals).

That take being nuts containing a lot of fiber and tannins which on excess consumption might lead to a short-term digestive problems. That is not an appealing characteristic of a food type people might want to eat a lot daily. Though, seing as certaing aspects of human hygiene are never going to be implemented in game I suppose it is not important.

I am not aware of any of the nuts currently in the recipe containing noticeable amounts of tannins, although I'm likewise tired and haven't really checked. Soluble fiber should not be present in the oil extract; insoluble fiber may require some filtration to remove. (Fiber might eventually be taken into account in some ways, such as disruptions to the gut's ability to absorb some nutrients if too high or too low (including absorption of water if it could IRL cause diarrhea).)

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

I don't know about dietary fiber being implemented in that way. They're too closely related to bowel movements. On the other hand I'll heartly welcome antinutrients being added in the future to counter current unrealistic 100% digestibility of food and vitamins. We already have an avatar traits which will go hand in hand with such concept. Oh and that actually makes me happy to think that maybe there'll be other uses for fermented food in game besides it having a long shell life.

[I-am-Erk]

I would assume animal cooking oil is mostly fish oil and/or grease from several not-normally-food-animals, for example carnivores produce fats that are liquid or nearly liquid at room temperature.

I'd be fine with removing the current recipe and replacing it with a recipe for fish oil.

[natsirt721]

If the animal cooking oil item is removed, is it worthwhile to replace it in recipes with lard, seeing as how that is probably the closest analogous item? I would increase the portion count from the recipe and reduce the item size - a 55g chunk is way more than you need for simple frying tasks.

[I-am-Erk]

Really actually, we should have a cooking_fat requirements list, so that you can treat oil, lard, tallow, butter, etc as equivalent in most recipes.

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

I like the idea of adding fish oil as a replacement. All the more reasons to search for a || pro fishing rod! I'll research the manufacturing methods and their applicability in game tomorrow, thanks. From what I can find right now it seems like:

1. Unfiltered fish oil isn't recommended for human consumption. (will prob need some kind of cloth in recipe)

2. a) It can be made by a fairly inexperienced man w/o the use of heavy/complex machinery, though the fish oil that is made with primitive tech is obviously going to be of an inferior quality. ('ll keep in mind when calculating preliminary nutr. values) b) I believe that the recipe for it shouldn't be autolearned. Does anyone know a suitable book it could be jammed into?

[natsirt721]

I wouldn't straight-up replace animal oil with fish oil - I'm not the most experienced chef but I can't really think of any cases where I have seen or used cooking-grade fish oil. I certainly don't know that it is regularly available in a grocery store - I would probably look in the Asian foods isle first? If you're looking to create cooking fats from fish, I would think that having fish butchery return fat chunks and granularizing lard from the fat recipe would be simpler, especially if you add the cooking_fat requirement list. You probably want to see how much fat a typical freshwater fish has though, in my experience most small game fish don't have a whole lot of subcutaneous fat, and you might have to ruin the meat in order to get enough be be meaningful.

Also, fish oil (at least, my Omega-3 supplements) have a very strong fishy taste - I would expect that this would diminish the enjoyability of certain recipes that use it. Cooking eggs or frying meats may be ok, but I probably wouldn't use it to make a cake. I might include the BAD_TASTE flag to represent this.

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

Yeah we shouldn't be able to make a cake with it.

From what I've found:

1. Adding upon what I mentioned above, avatars shouldn't be able to make a fish oil that both tastes ok and is as healthy as it could be as it would require a complex multy-step purification process with an added reintroduction of vitamins at latest stages of manufacturing. Farewell neutral enjoyability of a makeshift fish oil. Though there could also be an uncraftable purified fish oil with -5 enjoyability and a positive health value. The best spawning locations of which are probably going to be pharmacies and convenience stores.
2. The process of making a makeshift fish oil will probably involve adding shredded raw fish mass into an air-tight barrel which consists of a hand press and a couple of separation layers to filter out waste products. Seing how our avatars are capable of constructing a small hand press I see no problems with them being able to make a primitive bigger ones. In regards to the separation layers I suppose they could be made out of medical gauze and rags.

My vision of a recipe for such an apparatus so far looks like this:

Volume: 150 L Weight: 182.41 kg Bash: 8 Cut: 0 To-hit bonus: -5 Materials: Wood, Steel, Cotton

Tools Required: 1 tool with wood sawing quality of 2 1 tool with hammering quality of 3 1 tool with drilling quality of 1 Components required: 1x wooden barrel 1x big hand press 8x plank 8x scrap metal 8x nail 10x medical gauze 5x rag 1x water faucet 10x duct tape

An alternative could be just using a makeshift essential oil extractor but its recipe doesn't list any filtering materials.

Of course we'll need to make a recipe for shredded fish. As it is not a filleting I don't think that it should require a tools with fine cutting quality. Such a product could also be possibly fed to cattle. I'll post nutritional values of both oil variants and a possible recipe for a big hand press later.

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

Ok I think I found the best candidate for a

Big hand press

Volume: 40 L Weight: 105 kg Materials: Wood, Iron

Primary skill: fabrication 4

Tools Required: 1 tool with wood sawing quality of 2 1 tool with wood chiseling quality of 2 1 tool with hammering quality of 3 1 tool with drilling quality of 2 1 tool with cutting quality of 1

Proficiencies required: Basic carpentry Carving

Time to complete: 70 hours

Batch time savings: none

Activity level: moderate exercise

Components required: 1x heavy wooden beam 2x log 2x plank 1x wooden frame ~10x nail

[MomoiroShinobinomono]

Feel free to convert the values listed below into imperial units

From what I've gathered it seems that an oil made from cod's liver has a density of ~970 g/L and an energy of ~900kcal/100g. Which gives us "8730 kcal/L" / 4 = 2182,5kcal/0,25L. This is a single in-game small plastic bottle, which holds 16 oil charges, so each fish oil charge is going to have a caloric value of 136,40625, rounded up to 136 calories per charge. 970 g/L divided by 4 gives us 242,5g/250ml. Which, divided by 16 charges, gives us 15,15625 g of fish oil per charge. Rounded, the weight of a single charge is going to be 15g, the same as one charge of a vegetable cooking oil which currently has 127 calories per charge. What. Someone must've rounded each iteration of their veg. oil calculations earlier, lol, what a way to find out. Whatever.

For the sake of simplicity and simply because I'd've to dig for a really obscure physical values of them both (& I highly doubt there's even any data on a makeshith fish oil), in the future I'll just assume that makeshift fish oil and an industrially produced vitamin-rich one are both of the same density and a caloric value.

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[Zireael07]

fix'd by #57225?

[I-am-Erk]

Only the health part, but I think it's fair to call this conversation stale given that no movement happened in months and parts are now resolved.