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Do you know the difference between olive oil and Extra virgin olive oil (olive juice)? Would you know how to choose among all the olive oils in the supermarket which are olive juices? And which ones come from a refinery?
Many times we have wondered if cooking fried foods is good for our health. We have heard that it is not good to heat the oil and even that frying with oil can be harmful to our health. All these affirmations have their part of reason.
To give more details on whether or not it is healthy to fry with oil, we will begin by defining what olive oil and Extra Virgin olive oil are.
Olive oil is a mixture of refined oils and virgin olive oils (if you look at the label of an olive oil, you will see that it says this). Well, what does refined oils mean? The refined oils are made from a lampante oil (oil not suitable for human consumption before processing because it has very high acidity values). Then these lamp oils go through a refinery that, through chemical products, manages to lower the acidity of the oil, thereby removing the properties of the oil. As this refined oil by itself has no flavor, color, or properties, it is mixed with virgin olive oil to give it flavor and color.
On the other hand, Virgin olive oil is simply an olive juice obtained only by mechanical procedures (you can read this on any Virgin or Extra Virgin label) and without using chemical products. Therefore, this olive juice has a good flavor and numerous beneficial properties for health.
If, in addition, this Virgin olive oil is cold-extracted and is of high quality (determined by an official tasting panel after laboratory analysis and a tasting), it becomes an Extra Virgin olive oil. As you can already imagine, this superior category olive juice preserves all the properties of the oil and therefore provides numerous health benefits due to its antioxidants, phenols, Vitamin E, unsaturated fats, etc.
When using olive oil for frying (remember that it is a mixture of refined oils plus Virgin oils) we are reheating an oil that has already been heated, it has even gone through high-temperature processes together with chemical processes. So, when reheating an oil to high temperatures, what we are doing is breaking down the essential molecules of the oil and the unsaturated fats become saturated.
Something similar happens with a Virgin olive oil, since these oils, although they are olive juices processed without chemical products, are processed at temperatures higher than 28ºC and therefore, parts of the oil molecules are already degraded.
On the other hand, all this does not happen with an Extra Virgin olive oil and the reason is very simple. An Extra Virgin oil is cold-extracted olive juice, therefore, the antioxidants and vitamins E of the oil are intact when we buy the oil.
Therefore, if we consume this olive juice raw, our body will directly receive the antioxidants and vitamins from the oil (Extra virgin olive oil is an important source of vitamin E). When frying Extra Virgin olive oil, part of the fat becomes saturated, although since the oil has not been previously heated and contains high amounts of natural antioxidants, it maintains part of the properties that are transferred to food.
In addition, we have just said that an Extra Virgin is a virgin olive oil of a higher category due to its tasting, so it has a good fruitiness. So, what advantages do we get from cooking with Extra Virgin olive oil? Extra virgin olive oil will enrich each dish that we cook with the fruitiness that the oil possesses.
As described above, it is best to consume raw Extra virgin olive oil since our body will directly obtain natural antioxidants and vitamin E, although cooking with Extra virgin olive oil gives us an improvement in flavor to our dishes and also , part of the properties of the oil are transferred to the cooked food.
