Myth: Don't buy oil made by the "leaching method", its extraction process requires the use of chemical solvents, and it is easy to produce various harmful chemicals.
Truth: "Leaching oil" refers to the process of extracting oils and fats from vegetable oils. Many people are worried that the leaching oil will be soaked with chemical reagents, and there will be chemical residues. In fact, the "vegetable oil extraction solvent" used in the leaching method is a food-grade special solvent specially produced by the state for vegetable oil extraction, and the solvent does not have any chemical reaction with the oil in the whole production process, and will be completely removed in the subsequent refining process.
At present, there are two main technologies for extracting oils from vegetable oils: pressing and leaching. Oil pressing is a method of extracting oil from oil by mechanical pressing, and it is also the most traditional method, and many soil oil is pressed; Leaching oil is the process of using chemical solvents to dissolve the oil components in the oil and then separate it from the solid, also known as leaching and extraction. It is the same principle as soaking sugars in beets with water and extracting the active ingredients of traditional Chinese medicine with alcohol.
The oil yield of the pressing method is lower, the efficiency of the leaching method to extract oil will be much higher, which can reduce waste, and the scale of the leaching oil can be very large, which is also impossible to do in the pressing process. Therefore, the leaching process has gradually become the mainstream practice of oil processing plants.
Therefore, whether it is the pressing method or the leaching method, as long as the finished edible vegetable oil is produced in accordance with national standards and meets national food safety standards and product quality standards, it is safe.
*: From the January 2024 edition of Science's Myth List.