Is Olive Oil Less Healthy When Used for Cooking?
Cooking doesn’t destroy much of olive oil’s healthy properties, according to registered dietitian Karen Collins in a recent guest post at CalorieLab.
I’ve been wondering about this since olive oil plays such a prominent role in the Advanced Mediterranean and Ketogenic Mediterranean Diets. I use room-temperature olive oil on my salads and vegetables, but also use it to sauté vegetables, eggs, and meat.
Olive oil is the major fat in the traditional Mediterranean diet. It has heart-healthy and perhaps anti-cancer action related to monounsaturated fat and phenolic compounds that have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.
December 29th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
I’ve never worried about, personally. Olive Oil is a staple food for the people who were the basis of the initial Mediterranean Diet study, and they aren’t using it only in its raw form; they also cook with it.
In the last two years I haven’t used anything but EVOO for all of our cooking (save a couple of times when I’ve used butter for specific recipes, but that happened all of three or maybe four times out of the entire year of 2009). If something calls for oil of any kind, I just use olive oil.
I use it to saute fish, eggs, meat, everything. One of my favorites is to take a handful of beans, drizzle them with EVOO, add some flour, basil, fresh-ground peppercorns, and some dill, then lightly fry them in a pan. I then squeeze a fresh lemon over the top and enjoy a light snack. Sometimes I’ll also grate some Parmesan over the top as well.
December 30th, 2009 at 9:15 am
Sounds delish, as Rachel Ray would exclaim. Are those green beans?
January 1st, 2010 at 10:28 am
All kinds of beans…meant to say I boil them first to soften ‘em up. I usually do a kilo @ a time, and put them in the fridge to use in salads, quick batches of refried beans, soups, and otherwise. I just take a handful, fry ‘em up, and viola…quick tasty snack. I do different kinds every couple of weeks, but I generally eat beans on a daily basis.
One of my favorite salads is lettuce, tuna fish, tomatoes, mushrooms, feta, onions, beans, and some freshly squeezed lime with a liberal splash of olive oil. Simply divine.
January 1st, 2010 at 8:49 pm
that makes me rethink things. I’d been using canola (and avoiding olive oil) for cooking because canola has the higher smoking point.
But canola is mostly PUFA, so maybe that’s entirely wrong. Maybe canola should even be refrigerated.
Even so, an essential point of EVOO is that it’s extracted without heating. So *some* things within it change when heated, even if only to 200F. Is it only taste molecules? Who knows.
Oh, and about EVOO… I remember a study about a colony of Greeks in Australia who’d kept the Med Diet but had substituted local butter for the olive oil. The health outcomes were the same.
January 2nd, 2010 at 7:02 pm
That does sound good! Thanks for the details.
January 5th, 2010 at 2:27 am
I use butter and/or grapeseed oil for cooking. I use high quality unfiltered olive oil in salad dressings, hummous. There’s something about olive oil that makes it impossible to wash off of bottles, compared to other fats. Maybe the dish soap I have is just no match for it? Don’t know, but it’s hard to clean.
I’m going to look into this study about colony of Greeks in Australia, not that I’m giving up butter any time soon anyway.
January 5th, 2010 at 9:40 am
Like you, julie, I don’t have a problem with reasonable amounts of butter.
January 7th, 2010 at 2:56 am
I have a health love of butter…I just don’t use it that often anymore, except in baking, which we rarely do in any case.
One of my favorite ways to prepare salmon is to make a garlic/lemon/dill/honey/butter glaze that I marinate the salmon in for a few hours before I grill or fry it up. There’s just something about the mixture that I can’t quite obtain when I use EVOO.
I also can’t help but use butter when I make garlic bread for use with spaghetti.
One of my favorite ways to eat toasted bread, however, is using EVOO. Toast the bread, drizzle some EVOO over it, then top it off with some fresh olive paste…ooooommyyygooood is it good
Phenomenal as a side dish with a Greek salad.