Is Cooking with Unsaturated Fat-Rich Oils Safe?

Claim: Unsaturated oils should not be used for cooking 0:00

Stop doing this. Stop cooking with unsaturated fats. All these, though these oils can be good for you if you eat them raw. Do not cook with an unsaturated fat like an olive oil or avocado oil. What we want to cook are saturated fats, so use your beef tallow, your lard, you're coconut oil and your butter to cooked with.

Evidence from trials on inflammatory markers 0:18

In the caption of his video, the reason he says we shouldn't cook these oil is because cooking leads to the production of inflammatory compounds. But if that's a concern, then we should see a rise in markers of inflammation when people actually use them for cooking. And here are four trials that tested a variety of different vegetable oils for anywhere from a month to two years and they did not detect any significant changes in inflammatory markers. And one of those trials involved heating safflower oil for two hours straight before eating it.

Although there is one trial that heated sunflower oil in a deep fryer for an hour, and this did lead to a temporary rise in certain markers of inflammation in people with pre-existing coronary artery disease, but did not raise inflammatory markers in healthy people.

Repeated heating tests and oil stability 0:58

But there's one study that really went above and beyond. They put sunflower and olive oil through 20 heating and cooling cycles before feeding them to participants. And the sunflower oil did lead to a temporary rise in certain inflammatory markers, but we didn't see that with olive oil. And this is possibly due to the antioxidants in olive, which is interesting since the person in this video says that we shouldn't cook with all of oil, so with the possible exceptions of deep frying or repeatedly heating and cooling these oils a ridiculous number of times, although even then it's not entirely clear if it is a concern, there really isn't much concern with using these oil for cooking.

Population study on cooking oils and mortality 1:32

And this study investigating a number of cooking oils amongst over half a million Americans suggests that replacing butter with corn, canola, or olive oil can lower the risk of mortality.