Why Canola Oil is Not the Healthy Oil You've Been Led to Believe

Wine, coffee, eggs and butter have been praised by some as being healthy foods and condemned by others as being bad for your health. To add to all of the controversy out there, here comes canola oil!

Could canola oil, which has been praised as a “health food” and consumed by millions, actually be dangerous to your health?

According to mainstream media, canola oil is “good for the heart”, offering viable monounsaturated fats similar to olive oil. Sadly, much of what we hear in the mainstream media and various “health” blogs has been influenced by aggressive marketing tactics of big food companies. One important consideration as a litmus test for information on health, is to see if the source of the information comes from an entity that derives a profit from the product in question. Many times, this is unfortunately a difficult fact to uncover.

The History of Canola Oil:

Wouldn’t it make sense that canola oil comes from a canola plant? There is no natural canola plant that produces canola oil.

In the late 1960s canola oil was invented in Canada. The oil is cheap to manufacture and is now a dominant ingredient in many processed foods. A derivative of the rapeseed plant, which is part of the mustard family of plants, canola oil has been hybridized to eliminate the lethal erucic acid found in rapeseed.

Olive oil was the product of choice among those who were health conscious; however, it was quite expensive to mass produce. So the food industry, needing a more affordable substitute, started selling rapeseed oil. Unfortunately, the rapeseed oil caused muscular heart lesions.

The erucic acid found in rapeseed oil is naturally poisonous to the degree that it can be used as an insecticide. Rapeseed oil is also the source of the notorious chemical warfare agent, mustard gas.

In 1964, the food industry attempted to reduce the toxicity levels of rapeseed. It took the food industry over a decade and a tremendous amount of cross breeding to get rapeseed oil to be acceptable to the US market.

The name was changed to LEAR: Low Eruric Acid Rapeseed. LEAR was not well received in the US as its association with rapeseed was too glaring.

In 1978 the food industry merged the words “Canada” and “ola” meaning oil, creating the name Canola Oil.

The Impact of Canola on the Food Industry:

Prior to the late 1970s, the food oil industry collaborated with the American Heart Association, departments of nutrition at major universities and numerous government agencies to advocate polyunsaturated oils as being heart healthy. This was in contrast to saturated fats, which were falsely accused of causing hardening of the arteries.

However, by the late 1970s/early 80s, the cooking oil industry in North America had a huge dilemma. The consumption of polyunsaturated oils, corn and soybean oils in particular, were directly connected to numerous inflammatory health complications, namely cancer and heart disease.

Subsequently, as a result of this problem, the food industry had to discontinue using large volumes of polyunsaturated oils and no longer made claims of the oils being healthy.

Furthermore, manufacturers would not resume the use of traditional “healthy” saturated fats, including; butter, lard, tallow, palm oil and coconut oil, mainly due to their narrow profit margins.

Originally canola oil was invented through basic laboratory breeding and selection techniques. In 1995, a canola was genetically engineered to contain bacterial DNA that would make it resistant to the toxic herbicide Roundup. Roundup was recently declared a probable carcinogen by the World Health Organization. The strategy behind the Roundup Ready Canola, is the be able to treat the fields with Roundup and kill the weeds and not the crop!

Around 82% of the world’s canola crops are currently genetically engineered to resist Roundup. Monsanto presently owns patents on the Roundup Ready Canola seed and farmers can be sued for having “unauthorized” canola plants in their fields.

The Effects of Canola Oil on the Body:

Even though it may be true that canola oil is high in monounsaturates, between 55 to 65%, canola oil is still anything but healthy.

The polyunsaturated component of canola is cause for major concern. The oil is extremely unstable under heat, light and pressure, which causes oxidation and releases free radicals inside the body.

Canola oil produces high levels of butadiene, benzene, acrolein, formaldehyde and other related compounds when heated, which become infused with the cooked food. All traces of omega-3 fats are essentially gone.

Canola oil also undergoes a heavy duty manufacturing process of abrasive refining, degumming, bleaching and deodorization, using high heat and questionable chemicals, before the final product is created.

A study released in 1996 by Japanese scientists, showed that a special canola oil diet killed laboratory animals.

Recommendations for Healthier Fats and Oils:

1. Extra virgin olive oil that is cold pressed is great for non-cooking purposes, such as on salads.

2. Extra virgin coconut oil is preferable for cooking and baking under a wide range of temperatures, with an abundance of healthy saturated fats in the form of medium chain triglycerides (MCT). Coconut oil contains lauric acid, a MCT which helps to support the immune system.

3. Organic grass fed butter and ghee are great sources of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) which has shown in studies to help prevent cancer, build muscle and burn fat. Both ghee and butter are very stable under high temperatures as well.

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