— Catherine Hardie

It doesn't matter if it's olive oil or if it's coconut oil, every oil has about 120 calories per tablespoon with not a ton of nutritional value to it. So, um, if you think about that a tablespoon in a average sized saute pan, you can easily add, you know, 240 to, you know, you could easily get to 300 calories just by adding oil to a pan before even putting any of the food into the dish. So, um, for over knives typically stays away from oils because they're very processed as well. Um, you know, you can't really see the whole ingredients in an olive oil anymore 'cause the olives have been completely pushed and just the liquid, um, is coming out of those as well. So, uh, yeah, they don't use any oils at all for those. Um, like I do kind of a hybrid of that. What I'll do is I actually use oil, avocado oils, probably the one that I go to the most, but what I'll do is I'll put some in a pan and then I'll wipe off the excess, um, oil in the pan or the paper towel, because essentially what I'm trying to do is get a non-stick pan, right? So it's what most people use oils for is to be able to get something to be non-stick. So I'll do that or I'll put the oil on the pan and then wipe it down with a paper towel. That way I still get my, um, non-stick surface. But, uh, I won't get all the calories that come along with just putting tablespoon after tablespoon of oil into the pan. Some people will say, well, I like the flavor of it. Most, um, oil flavors are going to cook off, um, during the cooking process, coconut oil probably being one of the few that, uh, doesn't, um, you know, cook off as much, but olive oil definitely does. By the done time, you're done cooking with something, you can't taste the olive oil as much. So I always tell people, if you really like the flavor of olive oil, you should add it at the end of a dish, not at the beginning.