Role of vegetable oils and fats in a healthy diet

Vegetable oils and fats provide essential nutrients for our bodies. Indeed, to maintain our bodies and organs, we need to ingest essential fatty acids via foods, as we cannot produce them ourselves. This is for example the case of omega 3 or omega 6 fatty acids which can be found in rapeseed oil, camelina oil, sunflower oil or linseed oil among others.

They are also a key vector for vitamin absorption. Several vitamins are fat soluble and need fats for our bodies to be able to absorb them. This is the case for vitamin A (good vision), vitamin D (bone health), vitamin K (blood coagulation), or vitamin E (antioxidant). 

Some vegetable oils and fats, due to their fatty acid profile, help maintain or reduce blood cholesterol levels. Cholesterol is a fat-like substance that our body needs. However, some types of cholesterol (HDL) are “good” for health, whereas other types (LDL) are “bad” for health. Vegetable oils and fats do not contain cholesterol. As recognised by EFSA, replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats in the diet has been shown to lower/reduce blood cholesterol. High cholesterol is a risk factor in the development of coronary heart disease.(EU Health claim, Regulation 1226/2014).

All vegetable oils and fats consist of lipids and thus provide the same amount of energy, i.e. 90 kcal per soup spoon (10 g). Vegetable oils and fats have different nutritional properties which depend on the nature of the fatty acids they contain. The various fatty acids play different roles in the body and thus the types of fatty acids in the oils and fats have important implications from both a nutritional and health perspective.

According to EFSA (2010), the fatty acid composition of the diet is an important determinant of cardiovascular risk since it affects the blood lipid profile, and in particular blood cholesterol. Replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats in the diet has been shown to lower/reduce blood cholesterol. High cholesterol is a risk factor in the development of coronary heart disease. As highlighted by WHO, unsaturated fats (found in fish, avocado and nuts, and in sunflower, soybean, canola and olive oils) are preferable to saturated fats (found in fatty meat, butter, palm and coconut oil, cream, cheese, ghee and lard) (...) Fat intake, especially saturated fat, can be reduced by: (...) replacing butter, lard and ghee with oils rich in polyunsaturated fats, such as soybean, canola (rapeseed), corn, safflower and sunflower oils.

Overall, WHO recommends limiting total fat intake to 30% of total energy intake or less for adults. Fat consumed should be primarily unsaturated fatty acids, with no more than 10% of total energy intake coming from saturated fatty acids and no more than 1% of total energy intake coming from trans-fatty acids (WHO, 2023).  As such, WHO recommends that adults and children reduce saturated fatty acid intake to 10% of total energy intake and replacing saturated fatty acids in the diet with polyunsaturated fatty acids (strong recommendations, WHO 2023).

In most European countries, the intake of TFA has for a long time been below the WHO recommended maximum consumption level. This is due to a series of voluntary measures of self-regulation taken by industry in the first instance, followed by EU legislation. The EU legislation (Regulation (EC) No 1925/2006) sets a maximum limit of 2% industrial trans fatty acids on a fat basis in ‘end products’. Based on this achievement, a similar approach as in the EU legislation is recommended, also in other non-EU countries with TFA intakes above recommended levels. 

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