Thanks everyone for your posts.

I guess there is a miss conseption out in the big wide world that olive oil is good for cooking in as I have been doing it for year. Will be stopping now and just using it for salads.

Fiona

JANIE ROLLINSON wrote:Re Olive oil there is quite a lot of contradictory "evidence" about its suitability for cooking. I have searched for more information and can find nothing from a totally independent scientific source.

If you are interested you could read the article at 

http://www.oliveoilsource.com/page/heating-olive-oil

which, given the URL, is possibly biased but appears to be sound.

When you think about it Olive oil has been used for cooking for centuries in the Mediterranean region.

As a vegetarian I am not going to use lard or animal fats to cook with but feel that Olive oil is the best choice for me. I used to use Canola as well but have stopped using that even before reading David's latest book.

I suggest that you read David's book "Toxic Oils" and check the links on his home page www.howmuchsugar.com, especially those to "toxic oils". Basically any seed oil is bad for you because of the large amounts of polyunsaturated oils. These have two valences (chemical bonds) which are available for oxidation  . . . to trans fats, which are very bad for you. Like any "poison" the degree to which it is harmful depends largely on the quantity you ingest.

There are two more or less essential PUOs, Omega-3 and Omega-6. The latter is made from cheap seed oils such as canola, and is used in great quantities in "healthy" foods to replace "bad"(?) saturated fats as well as in frying fast foods. Omeg-3 is a powerful antioxidant. We should be consuming these in a ratio of about 2:1 (O3:O6). in fact the ratio in the Australian  diet is more like 15:1(O6:O3) . . . . .  roughly 30 times what it should be. We are advised to take Omega-3 supplements to redress the imbalance. The best source is "concentrated Omega-3 oil", variously called flax-seed or linseed oil (same thing). And it must be of  "virgin" or "organic" form.Tablets and capsules are useless.

JohnN