So what oil should I cook with?

Well apparently not my beloved extra-virgin olive oil. Yes olive oil is good for you, but the extra-virgin kind is best kept for your salad dressings and you should really use ordinary olive oil and that only for light frying.

As you can see from the photo there is a huge variety of oil available today - and I have to say there are a whole lot more than those shown here. And why is the drain cleaner in there? Maybe somebody was making some sort of weird joke.

I'm feeling a bit tired after a long day of trying to find the perfect b&b in France, so it probably wasn't a good idea to launch into this topic, which involves understanding a bit of science. I have been meaning to have a look at coconut oil because it seems to be everywhere - indeed coconut everything - but I think I will still save that for another day. So I thought I would stick to what to cook with. Michael Mosley did it on his Trust Me, I'm a Doctor program the other day, which is why it has come up. I didn't see it because I was out, but apparently his verdict was olive oil and rapeseed (canola) oil and also, surprisingly, butter and goose fat. My husband thought he said walnut oil too, but lots of the sites I saw said to just use this for dressings and things. I won't go into the science of it all - just google it and you will find a huge amount of stuff.

So much in fact that I got confused, because some of the sites seemed to say one thing and some another. For example, although most people seem to think sunflower, and vegetable oils are bad, a few disagreed and recommended it. Peanut oil was a similar confusion. And they all seemed not to want to commit either way on the dreaded coconut oil.

Anyway now it seems saturated fat is the thing. We all knew that polyunsaturated fat is not good (didn't we?), but we all thought that monosaturated was the way to go. Now I wonder. Maybe I should just go back to butter.

And taste just has to come into it doesn't it?

I'm confused, and as a result will probably just stick to my extra virgin olive oil, with an occasional bit of 'almost butter'.