Cooking oil
Cooking oil is plant, animal, or synthetic fat used in frying, baking, and other types of cooking. It is also used in food preparation and flavouring not involving heat, such as salad dressings and bread dips, and in this sense might be more accurately termed edible oil.
Cooking oil is typically a liquid at room temperature, although some oils that contain saturated fat, such as coconut oil, palm oil and palm kernel oil are solid.
There are a wide variety of cooking oils from plant sources such as olive oil, palm oil, soybean oil, canola oil (rapeseed oil), corn oil, peanut oil and other vegetable oils, as well as animal-based oils like butter and lard.
Oil can be flavoured with aromatic foodstuffs such as herbs, chillies or garlic.
Health and nutrition
The appropriate amount of fat as a component of daily food consumption is established as a guideline by regulatory agencies such as the FDA which recommends that 10% or fewer of calories consumed daily should be from saturated fat and 20-35% of total daily calories come from polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats.