Posts Tagged ‘cholesterol’

Why Are the Oils Liquid and the Fats Solid?

Oils and fats

Oils are liquid if they melt below ambient temperatures, and fats are solid if they do not melt at ambient temperatures.  At the usual room temperatures in the United States, lamb tallow is one of the hardest fats, butter is a soft fat, chicken fat is almost liquid, lard can be a hard fat or a soft fat depending on what kind of a diet the animals ate, palm oil is a soft fat, and olive oil is a liquid. Canola, corn, cottonseed, peanut, safflower, soybean, or sunflower oils are very liquid and they have not been partially hydrogenated. Thus the natural fats range from very hard fats to very soft fats to viscous oils to liquid oils.

Whether these food lipids are called fats or oils sometimes depends on the ambient temperature where they originate. Palm Oil and Olive Oil are fruit oils, and Coconut Oil is from a fruit, which is also a seed; they are liquids at the ambient temperature where they are produced. Palm kernel oil is a seed oil that is liquid in the tropics. Some of the oils like olive oil are very solid when they are stored in the refrigerator. Some like palm oil are separated into several semi-solid forms for use in foods. Figure 1.4 shows what these fats and oils look like at different temperatures.

Figure 1.4:Melting Characteristics of Oil

The practice of calling animal fats “saturated” is not only misleading, it is just plain wrong. For example, beef fat is 54 percent unsaturated, lard is 60 percent unsaturated, and chicken fat is about 70 percent unsaturated. This makes these animal fats “less than half” saturated. Therefore, they really should be called unsaturated fats. In fact, none of the naturally occurring fats and oils is made up of only all saturated or all unsaturated fatty acids; rather they are mixtures of different amounts of various fatty acids.

SOURCE:  Know Your Fats : The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils and Cholesterol; Mary G. Enig, PhD