Last night I heated some extra virgin olive oil and fried chopped potatoes, onion and asparagus. After a few moments I tossed in some spinach leaves and chopped tomato, then poured over beaten eggs. A sprinkle of cheese and a light grill to brown the top and voila – yummy frittata for an easy Sunday evening meal. The big question is have I increased my risk of getting cancer by frying in olive oil?

“Exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke or going outside without sun-block is much more likely to cause cancer than burning your cooking oil,” writes fats and oils expert, Laurence Eyres, in the October/November issue of Food New Zealand – the official journal of the NZ Institute of Food Science and Technology. But what about all those cancer causing chemicals – polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons – that are formed when we burn cooking oil? It’s true that when oil is repeatedly heated to its smoking point it will begin to accumulate cancer causing substances and lose its natural antioxidants. But who uses the same oil over and over again, especially when we’ve burnt it? We usually just heat and eat.

When researchers feed ‘severely heat-abused frying fats’ (more than we would ever do at home) to some poor experimental animals there are ‘very few deleterious effects’. In fact olive oil is especially stable because it is monounsaturated. Extra virgin olive oil is even better than a lower quality olive oil because it has more natural antioxidants to soak up nasty free radicals. And good news for those of us who love New Zealand extra virgin olive oil. Compared to overseas olive oils it has more antioxidants and a higher smoking point, so you can heat it hotter before it starts to burn.

Toddlers who eat fruit as a snack rather than with meals are three times more likely to have iron deficiency. “But I thought it was healthy to give my child fruit as a snack,” commented the health professional sitting near me. “It is,” replied Dr Clare Wall, one of three child nutrition experts speaking at a seminar I attended this week. “But it’s also important for toddlers to eat fruit with a meal because it increases iron absorption from that meal.”

One in six Kiwi toddlers are iron deficient and around two-thirds don’t eat enough iron to meet the recommended daily intake. For most, it’s not bad enough to cause anaemia but it is bad enough to affect their behaviour and brain

Eighty percent of our adult brain is formed by the age of three. So just at the time when our toddlers have learnt that saying “NO” causes the big people around them to act in all sorts of funny ways, we need to make sure they somehow get enough brain nutrients into them, particularly iron, zinc and omega-3 fats.

Iron carries oxygen around the body. If a muscle is deprived of oxygen, it dies. If a toddler doesn’t get enough iron the brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. It can’t develop so well – and the damage is irreversible.

“I’ve been taking an iron supplement for three weeks and still feel tired.” This was the comment from a woman attending a series of nutrition seminars I was running. She had been discharged from hospital three weeks earlier and prescribed an iron supplement. “When do you take it?” I asked her. “With breakfast,” she replied. Breakfast consisted of muesli with low fat milk or wholegrain toast and a cup of tea. A healthy breakfast – yes. But a suitable meal to take an iron supplement – no.