Cottonseed Oil: what it is and where it hides
Short answer
Cottonseed oil is a heavily refined seed oil pressed from cotton seeds — a fibre-crop by-product that must be refined to remove gossypol, a compound naturally present in the raw seed.
Also written as
On an ingredient list this oil can appear as hydrogenated cottonseed oil, vegetable oil (cottonseed). Olive Detective normalises every one of those to a single flag, so a label in another language does not slip past.
Where you run into it
- Commercial frying oil, especially in restaurants
- Packaged cookies, crackers and snack cakes
- Shortening and confectionery coatings
Why people avoid it
It draws the strongest objection of any oil on this list: it comes from a crop grown for fibre rather than food, is not edible until refined, and cotton is not held to food-crop pesticide standards in every growing region.
What people use instead
- Coconut oil or palm-free shortening alternatives
- Butter in baking
- Beef tallow for frying
How the app flags it
Scanning a barcode matches the product against Open Food Facts and reads its parsed ingredient taxonomy, so cottonseed oil is detected by canonical tag rather than by string-matching English text. If the barcode is not in the database, the camera reads the ingredients panel instead. The flag feeds the personalised “For You” score only as heavily as you ask it to — seed oils are one preference among several, not the whole verdict.
Other seed oils we detect
Keep reading
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