Oils and spreads

Olive oil or canola oil?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 15, 20266 sources

Keep both. Use extra virgin olive oil for most cooking, frying included, and canola for baking and dishes where you don’t want any taste. They’re both pouring fats that lower LDL when they take butter’s place, and the gap between them is small next to the gap between either one and butter.

Online, the two get cast as opposites. Olive oil is the Mediterranean hero, and canola is a “seed oil” some people call toxic. Older advice went the other way and preferred canola for its plant omega-3. Both oils have real strengths, and they’re good at different jobs.

What we’d do: buy a bottle of extra virgin olive oil for the stove and the salad, and a bottle of canola for the oven and the jobs where olive oil’s taste gets in the way.

A tablespoon of each

Canola has less saturated fat than almost any other cooking oil, and more than ten times the plant omega-3 of olive oil. Olive oil is mostly one fat, the monounsaturated oleic acid, and that, with its natural antioxidants, is what kept it steady under heat in the lab test below. Either one in place of a daily tablespoon of butter takes about 5.4 to 6.2 g of saturated fat off your day.

Which one holds up to heat?

Olive oil, in the one lab test that compared them. Researchers heated ten supermarket oils, once for 6 hours in a deep fryer at 356 °F (180 °C) and once in a pan from room temperature up to 464 °F (240 °C), and measured the polar compounds, the breakdown products that build up in hot oil.

Canola smoked much later, at 492 °F against extra virgin olive oil’s 404 °F. But averaged over the two tests, extra virgin olive oil made the fewest polar compounds of the ten oils, 8.5%, and canola the most, 22.4%. In the pan test canola reached 27.5%, above the limits many countries set for frying oil, the authors note. Their conclusion was that smoke point doesn’t predict how an oil does when heated.

The test has limits. It was one lab, owned by an olive oil company, with one set of bottles and no food cooked. It measured the oils, not anyone’s health.

Which one is better for your heart?

Both. In 221,054 US adults followed for up to 33 years, more of either went with fewer deaths. Each extra 5 g a day, about a teaspoon, went with 15% lower risk for canola and 8% for olive oil. That’s an observational study, so it can’t show the oils caused the difference. Swapping saturated fat for either one lowers LDL, and cholesterol.guide works out how much for your number.

The US guidelines have named both. The 2020 to 2025 edition listed canola and olive among the oils to cook with in place of butter, shortening and coconut or palm oil. The 2026 edition says to put oils with essential fatty acids first, “such as olive oil”.

Use each for its job

• Frying, roasting and sautéing: extra virgin olive oil.
• Baking: canola, for the neutral taste.
• Salad dressing: either. Olive oil brings flavor, canola brings more omega-3.
• Deep frying: olive oil held up best in the lab, and whichever you use, don’t fry in the same oil night after night.

Oils in the kitchen has the whole heat test, is canola oil bad for you? answers the seed oil worry, and the oil compare below puts any two of 13 fats side by side.

Your line 22.2 g

11.2Coconut oil7.9Ghee7.2Butter6.4Beef tallow5.0Lard2.3Peanut oil1.9Sesame oil1.8Olive oil1.7Corn oil1.6Avocado oil1.4Sunflower oil1.0Canola oil0.8Safflower oil

FirstOlive oilCanola oilAvocado oilCorn oilSunflower oilSafflower oil, high oleicPeanut oilSesame oilButterGheeLardBeef tallowCoconut oilSecondOlive oilCanola oilAvocado oilCorn oilSunflower oilSafflower oil, high oleicPeanut oilSesame oilButterGheeLardBeef tallowCoconut oil

How you'll use it

AnyFryingSautéing or roastingBakingDressing

Coconut oil

11.2 g saturated a tablespoon

50% of your 22.2 g line

Mono

0.9 g

Poly

0.2 g

Saturated share

83%

Smoked at 376 °F (191 °C) in one 2018 lab test of supermarket bottles.

The most saturated cooking fat, about 83%. Use it for flavor, not as your everyday oil.

Olive oil

1.8 g saturated a tablespoon

8% of your 22.2 g line

Mono

9.9 g

Poly

1.1 g

Saturated share

13%

Smoked at 404 °F (207 °C) in one 2018 lab test of supermarket bottles (extra virgin 404 °F, olive 406 °F, virgin 348 °F).

Everyday cooking, roasting and dressing. In the test, extra virgin olive oil made the fewest breakdown compounds averaged over both heating runs, with coconut oil close behind.

The heat test

300°350°400°450°500°Deep fryingCoconut oil376 °FOlive oil404 °F

Deep frying usually tops out at 356 °F (180 °C). Averaged over both heating runs, extra virgin olive oil made the fewest breakdown compounds of the ten bottles, with coconut oil close behind, and canola the most. Smoke point didn't predict that. The lab was an olive oil company's (de Alzaa 2018), and the test bottles were Australian.

These are the US guideline's lines. The Gyroscope app personalizes yours.