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Researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of the Basque Coun­try in Spain stud­ied olive, sun­flower and flaxseed oils for their alde­hyde con­tent after heat­ing the oils to 190℃. The con­clu­sion once again debunked the myth that fry­ing with olive oil is unsafe.
See more: Dis­pelling the Myths of Fry­ing with Olive Oil

It is a wide-spread belief that fry­ing food in veg­etable oil can be unhealthy because of the toxic chem­i­cals (called alde­hy­des) pro­duced in the process. Alde­hy­des are organic com­pounds con­tain­ing a car­bon-oxy­gen dou­ble bond, which are formed nat­u­rally in the human body in small amounts. Con­sum­ing an excess of alde­hy­des is thought to con­tribute to the symp­toms of dis­eases like dia­betes.

The results showed that the polyun­sat­u­rated (sun­flower and flaxseed) oils pro­duced higher amounts of alde­hy­des at a faster rate than monoun­sat­u­rated (olive) oil. The olive oil cre­ated fewer alde­hy­des and also at a later stage of the heat­ing process. The rea­son for this is thought to be because polyun­sat­u­rated oils con­tain more regions for chem­i­cal reac­tion com­pared to monoun­sat­u­rated oil. Com­par­ing the results, it is safe to say that olive oil is actu­ally the best option for fry­ing.

Exper­i­ments con­ducted for the BBC show Trust Me I’m a Doc­tor con­firmed this by sug­gest­ing that heat­ing monoun­sat­u­rated fats like olive oil, but­ter, and goose fat pro­duce lower lev­els of alde­hy­des than heat­ing polyun­sat­u­rated fats and oils.

How­ever, it is impor­tant to note that we know lit­tle about what a too high dose of alde­hy­des in humans con­sti­tutes. Thus far, con­clu­sions have only been drawn from ani­mal stud­ies, and there is a lack of data from human stud­ies that can be drawn upon to sup­port the­o­ries.

Experts argue that the poten­tial risk also depends on the qual­ity and fresh­ness of the oil, and how much it is heated. It can only be said that fry­ing foods in shal­low amounts of olive oil for short peri­ods is unlikely to lead to expo­sure to alde­hy­des that is in far greater amounts than what the body would nor­mally pro­duce and it does not pose a greater risk than fry­ing with other oils. It has also been sug­gested that olive oil’s high antiox­i­dant con­tent may even reduce the amount of pos­si­bly harm­ful chem­i­cals pro­duced dur­ing heat­ing.

Any oil that is heated beyond its smoke point will con­tain harm­ful chem­i­cals. How­ever, this type of heat­ing (or burn­ing) will also sig­nif­i­cantly affect the taste and smell of the oil. Fry­ing foods usu­ally does not get the oil to that point.

Fry­ing foods, in gen­eral, is known to be the least healthy method of prepa­ra­tion, how­ever using olive oil may be safer than using other veg­etable oils.

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