Vegetable oil
oil extracted from seeds, or less often, from other parts of fruits
Vegetable oils, or vegetable fats, are oils extracted from seeds or from other parts of edible plants. Like animal fats, vegetable fats are mixtures of triglycerides. Soybean oil, canola oil, grapeseed oil, and cocoa butter are examples of seed oils, or fats from seeds. Olive oil, palm oil, and rice bran oil are examples of fats from other parts of plants. In common usage, vegetable oil may refer exclusively to vegetable fats which are liquid at room temperature. Vegetable oils are usually edible and are generally recognized as safe (GRAS) by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). There is no evidence that seed oils are unhealthy.
Vegetable oils have been used for thousands of years (dating back to at least 6000 BC for olive oil) and were historically important for cooking, lighting, medicine, and industry. Palm oil later becoming a major global commodity during the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th and 20th centuries, scientific advances (like understanding fats and hydrogenation) led to modern products such as margarine and shortening.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Vegetable oil” is oil extracted from seeds, or less often, from other parts of fruits. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Vegetable, extracted and seeds, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4739805. The Library of Congress control number is sh94004802. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vegetable oil” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.