Vegetable Oil – The Kitchen Chameleon That’s Lost Its Edge
Walk into any grocery store and you’ll find those massive jugs of “vegetable oil” sitting on shelves with bargain price tags that seem too good to be true. Here’s the thing – they usually are. What most people call vegetable oil is typically a blend of soybean, canola, corn, or safflower oils that have been chemically processed to within an inch of their lives.
The process strips the seeds of their nutrients through bleaching, refining and heating, leaving you with what essentially amounts to flavorless fat. The real concern should be overeating ultra-processed foods, which may contain harmful ingredients such as high-fructose corn syrup, added sugar and sodium. Seed oils aren’t the problem in those foods – it’s hard to cast the blame on the seed oils when these foods contain so many other things.
The bigger issue isn’t that vegetable oil will poison you – despite what you might read on social media – but rather that it brings absolutely nothing to your cooking game. Repeatedly heating unsaturated fats to high temperatures, such as in restaurant deep-fryers where oil is infrequently changed, is a health concern. However, cooking with seed oils at home isn’t an issue. Your taste buds deserve better than this bland, processed option that adds zero character to your meals.
Canola Oil – The Controversial Compromise
Canola oil may be healthier than other oil types, but studies suggest that it also has risks. This yellow liquid has become one of the most divisive ingredients in modern kitchens, sparking heated debates among health experts and home cooks alike. Health Secretary RFK Jr. has said vegetable oils, like canola and soybean, are “poisoning Americans.” But many researchers say the evidence isn’t there.
The truth is somewhere in the middle of all this controversy. Canola oil does contain very low levels of trans-fat, as do all oils that have been deodorized. Deodorization is the final step in refining ALL vegetable oils. While omega-6 fats are essential to health and perform important functions in your body, modern diets tend to be extremely high in omega-6s and low in omega-3s from whole foods, causing an imbalance that leads to increased inflammation. The typical Western diet is estimated to be around 20:1, and this imbalance is linked to chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, and heart disease.
Canola oil is low in saturated fats and can be heated to a range of 400 to 450 degrees. It also has a more subtle flavor than some other cooking oils and contains plenty of healthy omega-3 fats. One downside is that it can start to taste or smell slightly fishy as it ages. When you’re spending money on quality ingredients, why settle for something that might turn your kitchen into a seafood market gone wrong?
Corn Oil – The Hidden Inflammatory Agent
Corn oil might seem innocent enough – after all, corn is a vegetable, right? But here’s where things get tricky. This golden oil that’s often marketed as heart-healthy actually tells a more complicated story when you dig into the science. Critics tend to focus on eight specific oils, sometimes referred to as the “hateful eight”: soybean, canola, corn, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, rice bran and grapeseed.
Seed oils are high in linoleic acid, a type of omega-6 fatty acids. Your body needs small amounts of these polyunsaturated fats, which are good for your cholesterol and help protect you from heart disease. But a small amount is the key phrase here. A diet that’s too high in omega-6s is also a diet that’s typically too low in omega-3 fatty acids. The ideal omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is 2:1 or 1:1, but for most people in the U.S., the ratio is actually a whopping 10:1 or even 20:1. This type of imbalance is thought to lead to inflammation in the body.
The processing method for corn oil involves using heat and chemicals to maximize how much oil is drawn out of these seeds, which is a cheaper and more efficient process than mechanically pressing the oil out. The result is an oil that’s incredibly processed and contributes to the inflammatory omega-6 overload that’s become so common in Western diets. Your stir-fry deserves something with more personality and less baggage.
Coconut Oil – The Overhyped Wellness Darling
If you’ve spent any time in health food stores or scrolling through wellness Instagram, you’ve probably heard coconut oil pitched as some kind of miracle fat. The reality? It’s not as healthy as you might think. Coconut oil is mostly saturated fat, which raises LDL cholesterol. That’s bad for your heart. And it has almost no vitamins and minerals. It’s best to stick with unsaturated fats like olive and canola.
Palm and coconut oil are rich in saturated fatty acids, with palm oil containing about 50 percent and coconut oil an impressive 92 percent. While the American Heart Association has linked high saturated fat intake to an increased risk of coronary heart disease and doesn’t recommend it as a primary fat source or cooking oil, the marketing machine keeps pushing this tropical oil as the next best thing.
Coconut oil has not had any large-scale research to support any health benefits and it far exceeds four grams saturated fats per tablespoon, making it higher in fat than butter. If you can’t avoid coconut oil, try to limit your intake and only use small amounts for cooking. Sure, it smells amazing and gives you those tropical vibes, but when nearly all of its fat content is saturated, you’re basically cooking with solid fat that happens to melt at room temperature.
Soybean Oil – The Ultra-Processed Impostor
Soybean oil has quietly become one of the most consumed fats in America, hiding in everything from salad dressings to potato chips. The top four vegetable oils consumed in the United States are soybean, canola, palm, and corn oil. These are referred to as refined, bleached, deodorized oils – or RBD for short – because this describes the process by which they are manufactured. That RBD label should tell you everything you need to know about how far this oil has traveled from its humble soybean origins.
The processing involves using a solvent such as hexane to extract the maximum amount of oil from the seed. Hexane is a very volatile solvent with very low toxicity, and it has been estimated that refined vegetable oils extracted with hexane contain approximately 0.8 milligrams of residual hexane per kilogram of oil. The level of ingestion of hexane from all food sources is less than 2% of the daily intake from all other sources, primarily gasoline fumes.
While the hexane levels aren’t dangerous, the bigger picture is concerning. A review of 45 studies on ultra-processed foods found that greater exposure to these types of foods is associated with a higher risk of negative outcomes, especially cardiometabolic disorders and mental health concerns. Soybean oil represents everything wrong with our modern food system – it’s cheap, highly processed, flavorless, and ubiquitous in the worst kinds of packaged foods. When you’re cooking at home, you have the power to choose something better.
