Canola oil- Don’t eat it
As the food industry tried to find healthy and cost-effective alternatives for saturated fats in oils, they came up with canola oil. Saturated fats were highlighted as ‘bad’ due to research indicating that saturated fats play a role in poor cardiovascular health. Many of these reports were particularly aimed at corn oil and soybean oil. Therefore food manufacturers searched and experimented and they discovered rapeseed oil. Rapeseed oil is monounsaturated oil but unfortunately the original type of rapeseed oil is very high in erucic acid, which is a fatty acid linked to heart damage, in particular fibrotic lesions of the heart. So food manufacturers refined rapeseed and canola oils until they came up with a formula in the late 1970s to genetically manipulate the rapeseed plant by seed splitting. This seed split oil produced canola oil with less erucic acid, and higher amounts of oleic acid. Although there are not the previously high levels of erucic acid in canola oil, there are still reasons for serious concern if you this oil.
Canola oil is a genetically modified product, cheap to manufacture, and it is now in most of our processed foods. It first created in the early 1970s as a natural oil, but in 1995, Monsanto created a genetically modified version of canola oil. Genetically modified canola that is modified for herbicide tolerance was approved for commercial production in Australia in 2003. GM Canola is often used in margarine, dairy blends and spreads, and ingredients in tinned foods. Canola is now our third-largest broad-acre crop and we supply 20 per cent of the world market. Over the past 15 years, Australian consumption of canola oil has increased 2.4 times. Canola oil is considered healthier than peanut oil, soybean oil and cottonseed oil – all of which have high levels of omega-6s and next to no omega-3s (an anti-inflammatory fatty acid). However canola oil still contains twice as much omega-6 (20 per cent) as omega-3 (nine per cent). Only flaxseed oil, at 57 per cent, has a large omega-3 content.
We now know that a diet where most of the fat comes from seed oils is detrimental to health. Evidence suggests that polyunsaturated fats (even without hydrogenation), and in particular the omega-6 fats, could be strongly linked to many cancers and autoimmune diseases. The Los Angeles Veterans Trial (1969) replaced animal fats with seed oils.(1) It was conducted with 846 Californian military veterans randomly assigned to two different hostel kitchens. One kitchen replaced all animal-fat products with a seed oil (corn oil) for the eight-year duration of the study. The other kitchen served a normal high-animal-fat diet. Ironically the trial set out to determine a link between animal fat and heart disease however, the unexpected occurred. The seed-oil group had a slightly lower average blood-cholesterol level, but heart disease-related events were not significantly different between the two groups. What is more interesting is that the analysis of the published trial data showed a dramatic difference in cancer deaths between the two groups, with the incidence of fatal cancers in the seed-oil group nearly double that of the normal-diet group by the end of the eight-year trial.
There are a couple of good reasons to stop using Canola oil and replace it with Coconut Oil, Olive Oil, Ghee or Organic, Pasture-Raised Butter (what our grandparents used). One reason is that partially hydrogenated vegetable oils like canola are also known for causing inflammation and hardening of arteries, contributing to the risk of coronary heart disease . Also, there is evidence that the consumption of rapeseed oil and some other types of vegetable oils shortens the life span of stroke-prone and hypertensive rats. In this study rats bred to have high blood pressure and predisposition to stroke, died sooner when fed canola oil. Furthermore, rats fed the non-canola oil-based diets lived longer than the rats fed canola oil. (2) Another study looked at the effects of canola oil on blood coagulation time or how long it takes blood to clot in stroke-prone animal subjects. It was reported that there was a “canola oil-induced shortening of blood coagulation time and increased fragility in red blood cell membranes,” which may promote the occurrence of strokes in animal subjects that are stroke-prone. (3)
Another important thing to consider is that when canola oil undergoes hydrogenation, this increases its level of trans fats. Trans fats are fats that you want to avoid as they increase LDL cholesterol and lower HDL cholesterol. If a fat is partially hydrogenated oil it means that there is some trans fat present. Trans fatty acids are detrimental byproducts of food processing are really bad for health.
We don’t need to use canola oil when there are healthier alternatives to replace it. Other oils to avoid are soy oil, corn oil and vegetable oils- rather stick to coconut and olive oil as healthy substitutes.