Health expert Tim Spector has warned people eating it without heating is the way to make the most of the health benefits
Health expert Tim Spector has warned that cooking with olive oil might not provide all the health benefits you think it does if you’re heating it up.
The King’s College London professor, and author of ‘Food for Life: Your Guide to the New Science of Eating Well’ highlighted there are claims suggesting that when heated, the olive oil’s benefits are lessened, leading to concerns about its safety when used in cooking.
Discussing this on the latest ZOE podcast, which he founded, alongside Elizabeth Berger, founder of Frantoi.org, he explains: “There’s this idea that there’s a smoke point that you’ve got to with olive oil that made it dangerous or bad for your health or gave you cancer. A lot of this stuff is probably propagated by the competition.
“It turns out that at normal levels of cooking, you don’t really get above about 180°C – so that’s not really a problem. Now you do lose some of the polyphenols. By heating it under regular cooking, you’ve lost about 40 per cent of the polyphenols. If you cook with it, you’re not getting the same benefits as you would if you’re having on a salad.”
Tim Spector has previously stated that for a healthy gut, people should incorporate polyphenols into their diet. It comes as research indicates these compounds nourish beneficial gut bacteria and hinder the proliferation of harmful bacteria.
On the podcast, Elizabeth added: “Exactly, therefore if you’ve got a very high-quality olive oil, you may prefer to keep that as a raw ingredient. But the benefit as well, whilst the polyphenols might be dropping down when you heat them, they will improve the nutritional content of the other ingredients that you’re cooking.”
This means that if you’re cooking vegetables with olive oil, you’ll likely find that the vegetables have become more beneficial for your health. She added: “So for example, you’ve roasted some carrots with extra-virgin olive oil. It will improve the nutritional content of the carrot, not just decrease the level from the olive oil. There is an upside. So there’s no question you should be using it to cook with.”
