Healthy cooking oils: A not-so-simple quiz
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- olive oil
- canola oil
- corn oil
- soybean oil
- safflower oil
- sunflower oil
- sesame oil
- peanut oil
- rice bran oil
- coconut oil
- palm oil
- butter
- ghee / clarified butter
- pork lard
If you pick olive oil, you are only partially right. It depends on the type of olive oil and it depends also on what type of cooking you do. Good quality extra virgin olive oil is one of the healthy cooking oils for salads as well as low to moderate heat cooking, like sauteeing. It is not for high-heat deep frying.
If you pick canola oil, you are dead wrong. It is an artificially created oil from the seed of a genetically modified plant. It is unnatural and has been found to cause several health problems. It is far from being one of the healthy cooking oils.
You are also off the mark if you pick corn oil, soybean oil, safflower oil and other polyunsaturated fats. Yes, these are the oils widely recommended by nutritionists, dieticians, doctors and other health experts. But, sorry to say, they, too, are off the mark. They don't understand what are healthy cooking oils.
Sunflower oil is a special case - because the composition of sunflower oil varies greatly. We will look at this more closely later in another article.
Sesame, peanut and rice bran oils are about in the same class as olive oil. They are relatively healthy cooking oils with the added advantage that they can tolerate high heat cooking. On the other hand, they may not have as many beneficial nutrients as extra virgin olive oil.
And if you really want to do some serious high heat cooking, like deep frying, your best bets are actually the saturated fats, including coconut and palm oils, butter, ghee and lard. Aren't these harmful to health? That's what most health experts say. Yet the people of Okinawa, who are known for their longevity and good health, cook predominantly with pork lard. One of their favourite daily dishes is stewed pork leg, laden with lard!
Puzzled? The key is 'cooking'
The key to understanding healthy cooking oils lies in one word - COOKING. It's a different matter if you use oils in raw salads, or swallow them by the spoonful or in pill form as health supplements. When you use oil for cooking, the most important thing to consider is what happens to the oil when it gets heated?
Briefly, these are the answers:
- Oils that are high in polyunsaturated fats - eg corn, soybean, safflower and sunflower (some types) oils - turn rancid easily when heated (and also when exposed to air and light). Turning rancid means the oil becomes very harmful to health.
- Oils that are high in monounsaturated fats - eg olive, sesame, peanut, rice bran and some types of sunflower oil - are more stable and can tolerate quite high heat during cooking. Among oils in this group, olive oil is not as stable as the rest and should not be used for high heat cooking.
- Oils that are high in saturated fats - coconut and palm oil, as well as various types of animal fat - are very stable and most suitable for high heat cooking, such as deep frying. They also keep well and do not spoil easily with long storage.
Sadly, this issue of oils turning rancid is not considered by most nutritionists and doctors when they recommend polyunsaturated oils as healthy cooking oils. They simply base their recommendations on the mistaken belief that polyunsaturated oils prevent heart disease while saturated fats cause heart disease.
This belief ifself is a mistaken belief and we shall look more closely at it in another article. But even if we accept that polyunsaturated fats are beneficial to health, whatever benefits they bring are negated once the oil turns rancid.
And this is the most troubling part - most polyunsaturated oils have already turned rancid during the manufacturing process, because high heat is used to extract the oils from seeds. So even if you don't use the oil for cooking, what you get from the bottle is already rancid, damaged, harmful oil.
Incidentally, rancid oil is smelly. The Chinese term for rancidity translates to "smelly oil". However, you do not get the rancid smell because the oil has been deodorized and processed in various other ways.
The only way to ensure good quality, non-rancid vegetable oils is to buy cold-pressed oils that have been extracted without the use of high heat and chemical solvents. Make sure you buy from reliable suppliers who take care to prevent the oil from being exposed to heat, light and air during storage and shipping.
After all this, do not use the oil for high-heat cooking - not for Chinese-style stir fries with a wok over a huge fire, and certainly not for deep frying. And always look out - sniff out - for a possible rancid smell.
Further reading
The subject of healthy cooking oils is a big and complex subject that cannot be covered in just one article like this. Please also read the following articles:
- Why polyunsaturated fats are not healthy but harmful?
- Why saturated fats are truly healthy cooking oils?
- Do saturated fats really cause heart disease?
- The value of monounsaturated fats.
In addition, there are links the left of this page to discussions about some of the more common types of cooking oils, includingboth the unhealthy and healthy cooking oils.
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