Setting the record straight on cooking oil myths

• Are you cooking with the right oil?

COMMENT

Nearly every time I lecture on extra virgin olive oil, people ask me whether it is safe to cook with. I don't know who invented the misconception that extra virgin olive oil becomes toxic when heated, but I'd love to dispel it once and for all.

I have been travelling the country with Nutrition Australia and sharing research on the health benefits of extra virgin olive oil and a plant-based Mediterranean diet. This has been my research area of interest for more than 20 years. I successfully prescribe this diet to patients and lecture on food as medicine to nutrition and dietetics students.

New research conducted in an oil specialist laboratory shows that extra virgin olive oil is the safest and most stable oil to cook with. It also showed that smoke point (the temperature at which an oil starts to produce smoke) does not tell you how suitable an oil is to cook with and actually correlates very poorly with how likely an oil is to break down and form harmful compounds when heated.

These findings have been anecdotal for some time but now the research is official. This is welcome news and adds to many studies that show extra virgin olive oil can also make cooked food healthier by adding natural antioxidants.

People in Mediterranean countries have been cooking with extra virgin olive oil for thousands of years. Heavily processed oil varieties like canola, rice bran and grapeseed were not around a century ago. Neither was refined olive oil for that matter, which is different to extra virgin.

Refining oil involves high heat, high pressure and, quite often, chemicals to make these oils suitable for human consumption. As a result, refined olive oil has the same type of fat as extra virgin but none of the antioxidants that are vital to extra virgin's health and cooking benefits.

Of course, eating is not just about health benefits. It is also about enjoyment, and research shows that cooking in extra virgin olive oil can make vegetables taste better. Indeed, my patients report that they enjoy (and will eat more) vegetables if they are cooked in extra virgin olive oil. Sadly, many people in Western countries don't enjoy vegetables, perhaps because they are used to eating them only boiled or steamed.

The extra virgin olive oil smoke-point myth needs to be busted so that we can all go back to enjoying traditional foods that are not only healthy for us, but delicious, too.

Dr Mary Flynn is an associate professor of medicine and research dietitian at Brown University, Rhode Island, US. Cobram Estate olive oil helped fund the study Evaluation of Chemical and Physical Changes in Different Commercial Oils During Heating.