Hello and welcome to Zoe Shorts, the Bite Size podcast where we discuss one topic around

science and nutrition. I'm Jonathan Wolf and as usual I'm joined by Dr Sarah Berry and

today's subject is cooking oils. Some flour, to soy bean, to olive and coconut oil, there

are loads of oils out there but it's tricky to know which ones are best to cook with,

plus more and more people are searching, cooking oil, bad on Google. So wait Sarah, are

you saying cooking oils are bad for us? It's a bit more complicated than that Jonathan.

Okay, I'm intrigued, let's get into it. Let's imagine a typical home kitchen you might

picture some vegetables roasting in the oven or maybe a stir-fry sizzling in a hot pan.

Sounds yummy. So what oils would they typically be using to make this feast?

So chances are it's going to be a vegetable oil and the most common vegetable oil is

rape seed oil, as it's called in the UK or canola oil as it's called in the US. Otherwise

it's often a blend of vegetable oil such as sunflower, soy bean and other oils.

And we did some research with a friend of Sarah who is a world expert on this and there are

a lot of other popular oils. So there's sunflower oil, there's olive oil, coconut, peanut, sesame

and in case you're wondering, apparently the French fries at McDonald's are cooked in a blend

of rape seed and sunflower oil at ratios to make the oil as stable as possible and hopefully

Sarah you'll explain that a bit more in a minute. I will but that ratio is top secret so I can't

bulge that information. What I can divulge is that all the fats and oils that we cook with and

that we consume are made up of a mixture of saturated and unsaturated fats and different oils have

different proportions of these types of fats. For example, most vegetable oils such as rape seed,

which is also like I said called canola oil and sunflower oil have a lot of these really healthy

unsaturated fats. Whilst tropical oils such as palm oil and coconut oil tend to have an equal

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