Avocado oil
The oil for the pan. It works cold as well, and then it does something most oils do not.
How to use it
Cooking and frying. It also works cold, over a salad, where it pulls more out of the salad than the salad gives you on its own.
The best version
Refined for the pan, unrefined and cold pressed for cold use. Buy from a producer that says where the fruit came from: avocado oil is expensive enough to be worth cutting with something cheaper, and that has been demonstrated on oil bought in shops.
How to prepare it
In the pan, let the oil come up to heat before the food goes in. Cold, pour it over the plate just before eating rather than stirring it through.
What it does
The fat is almost entirely the fat you are asking for: 71 percent monounsaturated, 13 percent polyunsaturated, 16 percent saturated.
Fat is what carries the pigments in your vegetables into your blood, and without it most of them stay behind. In a crossover study in healthy adults, a salad was served with 150 grams of avocado or 24 grams of avocado oil, to the same effect. Alpha-carotene in the blood came out 7.2 times, beta-carotene 15.3 times and lutein 5.1 times what the same salad gave without it.
Watch out
Avocado oil is one of the oils that gets adulterated, the way olive oil does, and you cannot taste it. Researchers have had to run shop-bought bottles through nuclear magnetic resonance to see which ones had been cut with cheaper oils such as sunflower or safflower. Buy on producer and origin, not on price.