By Vincent Van Ross

Saturated fat is bad for your health. Better watch the percentage of saturated fats in your food intake and avoid saturated fat as far as possible as it is the harbinger of heart ailments. A cooking medium with high saturated fat content could be dangerous to the human body as it could result in fatty deposits in arteries, cause obesity or build up high cholesterol levels and increase triglycerides. A study conducted by POS Pilot Plant Corporation, Canada has thrown up some interesting facts about saturated fat content in different varieties of vegetable oils.

This may come as a shock to many. One of the favourite cooking mediums in South India, the coconut oil, has 89% saturated fat content which is the highest amongst all cooking mediums. Another cooking medium in India, ghee (clarified butter) is no better. It contains 68% saturated fat.

At the middle level, we have ground nut or peanut oil with 19% saturated fat which is consumed in western India and soybean oil whose fat content is 15% which has a market in central India. Then we have corn oil with 13% saturated fat and Sunflower oil with 12% fat content to which the health conscious Indians are gradually turning their choice. Mustard oil which is the main cooking medium in northern India, Bengal and specific pockets in other part of the country contains 11% saturated fat.

The healthiest oil with the lowest saturated fat content is olive oil which has 10% saturated fat in it. But, this is four to seven times more expensive compared to other edible oils used as cooking medium here.

While saturated fat is bad for health, there are some fatty acids which are good for health. These are Monounsaturated Fatty Acid (MUFA) which reduces bad cholesterol and Polyunsaturated Fatty Acid (PUFA) which provides some protection against heart diseases and heart strokes. Most vegetable oils contain some percentage of MUFA or PUFA or both.