Olive oil healthier for fried foods

London, Oct 23 : Love fried food? Try olive oil as it withstands the heat of the fryer or pan better than several other seed oils to yield healthier food. The researchers deep- and pan-fried raw potato pieces in four different refined oils - olive, corn, soybean and sunflower - and reused the oil 10 times. They found that olive oil was the most stable oil for deep-frying at 320 and 374 degrees Fahrenheit, while sunflower oil degraded the fastest when pan-fried at 356 degrees Fahrenheit. "For frying foods, olive oil maintains quality and nutrition better than seed oils," said lead researcher Mohamed Bouaziz. Different oils have a range of physical, chemical and nutritional properties that can degrade when heated. Some of these changes can lead to the formation of new compounds that are potentially toxic. By-products of heating oil can also lower the nutritional value of the food being fried. The study was reported in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.