We found a great article over at Truth in Olive Oil it outlines where you can add a bit of extra olive oil in to your diet to get some extra health benefits and also talks about how it’s definitely safe to cook with olive oil! Some of the key points are:
- High quality extra virgin olive oil can be heated to 420°F before it reaches smoke-point
- Cooking with olive oil below the smoke-point does not destroy most of its health benefits, or make it less healthy – under normal cooking conditions, most of the therapeutic minor components are retained
- Heating olive oil does not produce trans fats – Trans fats are created in an industrial process that adds hydrogens to the liquid oil (partial hydrogenation), making it semi-solid
- Milder extra virgin olive oil is excellent in baking, especially since heating seems to decrease the bitter taste in some olive oils
- Some studies have subjected olive oil to high temperatures (180°C/356°F) for long periods of time (from 90 minutes to over 20 hours). These conditions do tend to decrease the content of some phytonutrients, yet even under such extreme conditions, some phytonutrients remain
You can read the full article by Dr. Mary Flynn by clicking here.