Fake Avocado Oil: What It Means for Your GLP-1 Diet

Fake avocado oil is everywhere. Here’s what the new UC Davis study means for your GLP-1 diet and what to cook with instead.

If you’ve been building your GLP-1 diet around whole foods and clean fats, this new UC Davis study is worth paying attention to. Researchers found that most products labeled “avocado oil,” including chips, mayo, and salad dressings, are actually cut with cheaper seed oils, even when the label says 100% pure. That matters a lot if you’re already working to avoid seed oils on a GLP-1 diet, since the whole point of reaching for avocado oil is to steer clear of the inflammatory oils hiding in most processed food.

I’ve talked before about how food giants get away with mislabeling, from hidden sugars in “healthy” snacks to the ingredient swaps that never make it onto the front of the package. Fake avocado oil is just the latest example. 

Fake Avocado Oil Video Transcript

Hey, what’s up? It’s Lizard Bites. I’m here to talk about the fake avocado oil news and what it means for your GLP-1 diet.

Recently, the University of California, Davis did a study, released in July 2026. They tested 54 products labeled as “made with avocado oil.” 48 of the 54 turned out to be fake.

That says a lot about our food system here in the United States. Not only are they ripping you off, they’re poisoning you too. How American is that?

A Quick Update on the Kitchen Situation

This week I want to bring you this update from my family’s bank, Commerce, here in the state of Missouri. We’ve got some outstanding service issues due to the kitchen situation I’ve explained before in past videos, and why we’re doing video content instead of food content. A water leak and our insurance screwed us over.

The bank has always told me things like, “Oh yeah, you’re preapproved for this,” or “You need an auto loan, want to do some home equity, whatever, you’re approved, here are all these great numbers.” But every time we’ve actually needed these people, they’ve shot us down.

So late this week, again, having to scramble last minute, out of rage we switched our account somewhere else to find someone willing to give us fair terms and help us get the money to start fixing this kitchen. We’re stuck in between a rock and a hard place, and that’s where things stand.

What the Fake Avocado Oil Study Means for a GLP-1 Diet

As far as this news about fake avocado oil and what it means for your GLP-1 diet, it helps to understand some of the science behind why my approach, and the approach of a lot of other people, says we have to get away from seed oils.

Some of this gets treated as conspiratorial. You’ll always have people who say, “Well, the science says it’s safe. It’s been evaluated and recognized as food.” You can dig into how that evaluation actually worked on several of these oils. Back after World War II, there was an excess of industrial byproduct. Someone had the idea that it needed to become food, and that it could be hydrogenated to make it shelf stable.

At the time, the science said, “Oh yeah, this is great.” Then we ended up with an obesity epidemic and heart disease for the next 50 years, and everyone wonders where it came from.

Recent investigation into what’s really going on has identified that what all of these seed oils have in common is linoleic acid, which has the potential to be responsible for an inflammatory response in the body.

Why Inflammation Makes Weight Loss Harder

If you have a lot of inflammation in your body, a lot of your normal processes get interrupted and thrown into haywire. In my own experience, that’s always made it more difficult to lose weight.

Think about it psychologically. Sustaining weight loss is already a difficult proposition. It takes discipline to reject your body’s natural signals telling you that you’re hungry. Then you add the compounded effect of psychology, since a lot of people are comfort eaters, and it gets even harder to overcome.

If you’re serious about your health and your weight, and you know that something causes inflammation in the body while natural alternatives don’t, you have to ask yourself why we’re even using it. Realistically, it only benefits the consumer packaged goods and food industry supply chain. It doesn’t do any good for us.

So we had to look into natural alternatives that already existed. Going back to them, we find that they taste better and are better for the body. They may not be shelf stable for three months on a shelf, but they work for your body, your weight loss, and your health.

Moving Away From Avocado Oil

Some of the things I’ve recently taken up to get away from avocado oil: I was genuinely invested in avocado oil. I thought it was significant and was helping a lot. If a lot of these products are fake, then we can do even better by getting away from them entirely.

Beef Tallow

Beef tallow is one option. I know this is a politically charged topic to bring up, with RFK and Make America Healthy Again turning these things into a political divide. At the end of the day, what matters is our health, more than whether we’re aligning with one side or the other. Chances are both sides are owned by the same people anyway, so what does it even matter? What matters is doing what makes us healthy.

Beef tallow is something I’ve really switched to. The same company that makes a lot of the chips that turned out to be fake, Boulder, actually came out with a line of beef tallow chips available at Costco. I picked some up and tasted them, and you have to ask yourself why you were ever eating the other stuff.

It makes you think about all the name brand potato chips out there. After a while, those start to taste chemically, plasticky, and barely like potato. The ones made with beef tallow give you everything you think about when you remember why McDonald’s fries taste good. It’s that beef essence flavoring they add, or think about Steak ‘n Shake fries. That’s what gives these potato chips that same quality.

I know we’re not supposed to be eating a lot of potato chips on a diet anyway, but in moderation, in small servings, I’ve had them as a snack here and there. I’m not the person I was 100 pounds ago, when I could destroy a whole bag of chips. Now it takes me more than a week before I even open a bag.

They also make an olive oil version of the chips. I haven’t tried those yet. Maybe I should, though I’ve moved away from olive oil chips enough that I don’t need to start a new habit just to tell you guys about it.

Olive Oil and Ghee

Olive oil in general does not contain linoleic acid, and it also has many understood beneficial compounds for your health. You can also make clarified butter, or ghee, for your cooking. All of these are perfectly acceptable substitutions for avocado oil, given the current uncertainty around what’s really going on with it.

Final Thoughts

They’re probably never going to do anything about the fake avocado oil problem either. It’s a sad state of affairs. You just have to figure out what you’re going to do for yourself to eat the best diet you can and work toward your goals.

Hopefully this information helped. Stay tuned for the next update, whenever I’ve got something important to rant about, at least until I get my kitchen fixed.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you in the next one.