What is Sesame Oil: a Gift from Mother Nature

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Sesame is well known all over the world, either as a delicious topping of pastry in form of sesame seeds, or as a seasoning and cooking oil, especially spread in Asian cuisine. What is sesame oil else? Adding to the culinary use, sesame seed oil is also a marvelous medical and cosmetic product with a variety of benefits.

What is sesame seed oil?

According to Wikipedia, sesame seeds come in many colors, among which the most wide-spread is white. However, there are also brown, gold and even black sesame seeds. Depending on sort, the oil extracted from the seeds will vary in taste and aroma density, but will not differ much in nutrition value and beneficial features. And this is the source where dark and black sesame seed oils come from, depending purely on the seed sort and not any other influents. Sesame seed oil is usually extracted using cold-pressed method, where seeds are exposed to pressing in low-temperature conditions. This prevents sesame from losing its nutritional value and thus such oil will be more beneficial to use. However, sesame seed oil differs not only in color. One of sesame seed oil types is toasted sesame oil, extracted from the seeds that were toasted before pressing. Such oil is deeper in color and has more rich nutty taste. While sesame seed oil is used either in cooking (there are a lot of sesame oil recipes or as substitute for olive oil as an example), toasted sesame oil is usually added in soy sauce to make Asian dips.

SEE ALSO: The Comparison of Sesame Oil vs Olive Oil 

Benefits of sesame oil

Is sesame oil healthy? Natural Society introduces a number of benefits sesame oil has:

• Amazing skin product

Due to its nutrition content, sesame seed oil used for skin care keeps skin elastic and strong. Sesame also has feature to repair damaged skin, smoothing it and eliminating scars and burns

• Dental care

The use of sesame seed oil is a great way to maintain oral hygiene and even eliminate dental plaque. You can simply take small amount of oil in your mouth and swish it around, thus improving your dental health. It is called sesame oil pulling in Ayuverdic medicine.

• Reduce blood pressure

It has been proven that magnesium is able to lower blood pressure, and since sesame is full of this substance, it therefore can be used in lowering blood pressure among hypertensive diabetics and other patients.

• Boosting heart health

Among many compounds sesame oil has there is one, which is considered most beneficial for cardiovascular health. It is called sesamol and it has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Sesame seed oil also decreases the risk of atherosclerotic lesions, adding to the improvement of heart health.

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How do I choose sesame oil?

Depending on the purpose of usage, you can choose either type of oil, whether roasted or not, extracted from black or white seeds. However, few points have to be made here:

• It is recommended you choose the oil extracted by cold-press method, or cold-pressed seed oil. Such oil will have all necessary nutrients and be more valuable for consumption and usage
• Choose organic seed oil, which means the plant was not exposed to any pesticides or chemicals while growing.