Olive oil has many great benefits to it - but heating it could reduce it's effect Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info Health specialist Tim Spector has suggested that olive oil, when heated, may not be as beneficial as we think.
The Kings College London professor, who wrote Food for Life: Your Guide to the New Science of Eating Well , has encountered numerous claims that heating olive oil can destroy its health benefits, even leading some to question if it becomes harmful when heated. Setting the record straight on the latest ZOE podcast - of which he is a founder - alongside Elizabeth Berger, founder of Frantoi.org , he explains: "There’s this idea that there’s a smoke point that you’ve got to with olive oil that made it dangerous or bad for your health or gave you cancer.
A lot of this stuff is probably propagated by the competition. "It turns out that at normal levels of cooking, you don’t really get above about 180°C - so that’s not really a problem. Now you do lose some of the polyphenols.
By heating it under regular cooking, you've lost about 40 percent of the polyphenols. If you cook with it, you’re not getting the same benefits as you would if you’re having on a salad." Previously, Tim Spector has recommended adding plenty of polyphenols to our diet as part of his guidelines for a healthy gut.
He explained that research suggests these compounds fee.