The Right Cooking Oil

Source :moneylife :Tanushree Kar

The well-known nutritionist, Anjali Mukherjee has emphasised the use of healthy fats
The well-known nutritionist, Anjali Mukherjee has emphasised the use of healthy fats in her book Healing with Food where she says that since all oils and fats are made up of fatty acids, it is the individual fatty acids that make all the difference to our health.


 Since the average Indian palate is fond of deep-fried foods, it is essential to know the pros and cons of cooking oils and fats to reduce the damage to one’s health.

Cooking oil is defined as purified fat of plant or animal origin, which is liquid at room temperature. Some of the varieties of edible oils are palm oil, olive oil, soybean oil, sunflower, peanut, sesame, mustard and rice bran oil. 


The term ‘vegetable oil’ is, however, used for a blend of a variety of oils based on palm, corn, soybean or sunflower. 


Fats are an essential nutrient in human diet, but an unbalanced diet is not healthy. Nutritionists recommend that less than 10% of a day’s intake of calories should come from saturated fats. Since any oil is rich in calories, one should use them rather sparingly. Cooking oil poses a peculiar problem of its own. 


Though the hydrogenation of cooking oil makes it more stable, a side effect is that it also creates trans fats, which are unhealthy. 

During cooking, even healthy unsaturated fat, like that present in olive oil, sometimes gets converted to trans fat. Unlike other fats, trans fat is neither required nor beneficial for health. Eating trans fats increases the risk of coronary heart disease. 


Trans fat from partially hydrogenated oil is generally considered more of a health risk than those occurring naturally. Trans fats occur naturally in small quantities in meat and dairy products. There are two types of oil available in food stores -- refined and unrefined. Refined oil is usually bland and extremely light in colour and considered safe for deep frying. Unrefined oils are processed by cold- pressed and expeller-pressed methods.


 Unrefined oils may have a strong flavour, but they definitely have a higher nutritional value. Unrefined oil should preferably be used for sautéing and not for deep frying.

When buying oil, it is necessary to read the labels carefully to see the expiry date. Oils and fats are susceptible to rancidity because as oils and fats age, they get oxidised. Rancid oils are not only bad in taste but are also unhealthy and toxic. 


So what is the proper way to store oil? Three conditions accelerate the oxidation of fats: exposure to heat, oxygen and light. Oils should be stored in cool conditions and sealed so that they are not exposed to air. 


Once opened, some oils, like olive oil, should be stored in the refrigerator. How long oil can be prevented from turning rancid depends on the storage conditions. Sunflower is an excellent all-purpose oil. It remains fresh for a longer time because of its high resistance to rancidity.

Olive oil is a monounsaturated oil extracted from ripe olives. The colour of the oil ranges from light amber to green and sometimes it is extremely strong in flavour. Olive oil is graded according to its degree of acidity and the process used to extract it. 

Olive oil which is labelled ‘virgin’ is cold-pressed, a process using no heat or chemicals and containing low levels of acidity. Olive oil labelled ‘pure’ uses heat or chemicals to process olive residue from subsequent pressings. 


Cold-pressed olive oil is superior to the refined variety. Oil from the first pressing is called virgin olive oil and is the most flavourful. ‘Pure’ olive oil or that which is labelled just ‘olive oil’ may be a combination of cold- pressed and refined and is suitable for cooking. -