Cooking with extra virgin olive oil isn't unhealthy—just potentially wasteful

For generations, home cooks have treated extra virgin olive oil as too precious and too fragile for the heat of a pan — a belief passed down with the quiet authority of received wisdom. Science, however, has been quietly assembling a different account: that this most celebrated of oils handles everyday cooking temperatures with resilience, retaining meaningful nutritional value even after heating. The myth endures not because the evidence supports it, but because a half-truth about polyphenol loss was mistaken for the whole story.