Let's first understand "Why are cooking oils are required to be consumed at all in first place"? Cooking Oils provide essential fatty acids and are fortified with fat soluble Vitamins like Vitamin A, D, E and K.
Non consumption of cooking oils can lead to our body being deficient in these vitamins, which are known to provide us protection against cancer, improve bone health, essential for night vision and help in blood clotting.
Moreover, fats act as reserves of energy and form a layer around our organs to protect them from jerks and injuries.
Imagine if there was no fat, how the smallest prick from a needle would potentially puncture your intestines! Cooking Oils provide us both Unsaturated and Saturated Fats.
Unsaturated fats comprise of Polyunsaturated Fats (PUFA) and Monounsaturated Fats (MUFA).
Let's not get too technical but in brief, MUFA and PUFA are what you should look at when purchasing an oil to analyse which oil is good.
To determine which cooking oil is healthy for our consumption, following parameters are critical: Smoking Point of Oil: The oil that is used for frying should have a high smoking point.
Once the oil has reached its smoking point it breaks down and becomes denatured or rancid and hence not good for health.
Cooking oil that can be used for frying are Sunflower, Soyabean, Mustard, Rice Bran, Canola and Peanut oil.
However, Soyabean and Sunflower oils can be preferred option as these are comparatively higher in PUFA, especially Omega 6.
Cooking Oils rich in PUFA (which include Omega 3 and Omega 6) are good for heart health and help in increasing HDL, the good cholesterol.
This brings us to the next critical parameter.
Oil Composition- Another important parameter while choosing cooking oil is the ratio of MUFA, PUFA and saturated fats.
We should choose oil which has minimum saturated fat and maximum MUFA and PUFA.
Oils which have high composition of MUFA are Mustard, Olive, Safflower, Peanut and Rice Bran while the ones which have higher composition of PUFA are Soyabean, Sunflower, Flaxseed, Corn and Cottonseed Oil.
Since both MUFA and PUFA are critical for our body, it is advised to rotate between these two categories of oils on regular basis..
Everybody's fashionable favourite these days is Olive Oil so here is a brief comment on it.
Extra-virgin olive oil is derived by "cold pressing" of olives.
This extracts the oil while preserving the health and nutritive qualities of olives unlike most cooking oils wherein while refining through chemicals destroys some of their natural nutritive value.
Olive oil is rich in oleic acid which has been associated, in clinical studies, with lowering rates of heart disease, atherosclerosis, diabetes, colon cancer and asthma.
But olive oil is not a heat stable oil and is best used cold (for salad dressings) or under moderate heat and thus just does not suit our Indian frying cooking style.
So, use it on bread instead of butter for your breakfast but don't fry cutlets in it.
If there is high Saturated Fat content in any oil, it's avoidable to buy that oil, especially for people with cholesterol imbalance or sedentary lifestyle.
Saturated Fats come primarily from Ghee, butter (including bakery products like biscuits, patties etc), full cream milk and products derived from it (most of the mithais) and some oils like Palm, Coconut and Cottonseed oil.
While ALL oils have some saturated facts, the ones highlighted here has maximum ratio of saturated fats.
Saturated fats can lead to increase in cholesterol in the body and are hence harmful.
You've heard that a million times.
But hey, do you know cholesterol is an integral part of our cell structure and bile juices and so has some importance in our body? Hence an occasional desi ghee parantha is OK as long as your cholesterol profile is healthy.
In summary, the above reiterates our point that we should keep changing our cooking oil regularly to get a good composition of MUFA and PUFA while avoiding saturated fats.
Also remember, it is avoidable to reuse same oil for frying over and over again as once at smoking point, it gets denatured.
So, think global but eat local.
Rotate oils and don't take Olive Oil as panacea for all your oil related problems, Choose wisely what you eat and don't just adopt the latest fad as the miracle mantra to health.
While we have listed out many oils above as good in PUFA, hardly any has good constitution of Omega 3 in it.