Olive Oil: Healthy

Motor Oil: Unhealthy

Fwiw, I’m pretty convinced that the anti-seed oil crowd is approximately as grounded in science as the anti-vaccine crowd - that is to say, not at all.

1. Extra virgin olive oil for anything where the taste is a good thing
2. Any oil with high monounsaturates and zero saturates (the rest being polyunsaturates). This may be a seed oil.

Extra virgin olive oil (and it has to be extra virgin) is known and scientifically proven to be very good for you.

Seed oils are today highly controversial - I avoided them for many years - but current science research suggests that they are perfectly safe, and indeed good for lowering cholesterol.

Here’s a real scientist, working and published in exactly this area, talking about this exact question: https://youtu.be/VRlleOTBq7k?si=trB8t5xRjOJml5ug

Well, there’s a FLAVOR ranking and a HEALTH ranking. :)

Tops for both are avocado oil and extra virgin olive oil.

My general preference is Lucini Olive Oil, they have Italian and Argentinian variants depending on how much you want to spend, and it’s readily available pretty much everywhere.

https://www.delish.com/kitchen-tools/cookware-reviews/g46931475/best-olive-oil-brands-ranked/

They are all quite unhealthy and claims about magical compounds within this or that refined oil are largely nonsense. That said, plant-based oils are generally much less bad for you than butter and lard, and increasing unsaturated fat proportion is a good idea.

Oil in general is overused as an ingredient when savory flavors can be achieved with mushrooms, msg, nutritional yeast, tomato, and more. However it is certainly useful as a tool for heat transfer in cooking but can be used in much lower quantities for that purpose than you might expect.

I generally use avocado oil for any very high heat cooking surface like a wok, olive oil or avocado oil for other general high heat cooking surface, and nice flavorful olive oil or spiced olive oil for oil as an ingredient.