Compared with cold-pressed virgin olive oil in glass bottles, the plastic jugs of vegetable oil offer a real bang for your buck, which may be why they can be found in almost every kitchen. But how often can you use vegetable oil to fry, sauté, or deep-fry your meal without causing health issues?
An Issue of Carcinogenic Toxins
The raw materials of commercially available vegetable oils, such as soybean oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, rapeseed (canola) oil, and grapeseed oil, aren’t as high in oil content as olives, so it isn’t possible to simply press out the oil—it has to be extracted through a much more complex process.The method involves soaking the raw materials in an “organic solvent” such as hexane to extract the oil. Then the materials are heated and the solvent is removed through evaporation. Often, this process also includes degumming, deacidification, decolorization, and deodorization. In other words, by the time you get your bottle of vegetable oil, those initial raw ingredients have been intensively processed.
