Olive oil healthier for fried foods

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.