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Canola Oil

Canola Oil

Aid Overall Health

Canola oil is a vegetable oil used mainly for cooking and baking. The benefits and risks of canola oil are widely debated, with one side saying it is a tasty, heart healthy oil and the other saying that it is a dangerous poison.

Whether canola oil is safe is difficult to determine as experts cannot even agree on what it is made from, let alone whether it has toxins in it or how much. The United States Food and Drug Administration does consider canola oil generally safe, but the debate continues.

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Summary

Canola oil has several uses and is frequently found in food and other products. WebMD states that canola oil has a light flavor, smooth texture and a multitude of uses. Canola oil is an ingredient in sauces, dressings and marinades. It is used for cooking, grilling and frying at high tempe... more

Canola oil has several uses and is frequently found in food and other products. WebMD states that canola oil has a light flavor, smooth texture and a multitude of uses.

Canola oil is an ingredient in sauces, dressings and marinades. It is used for cooking, grilling and frying at high temperatures. People also use it to coat nonstick pans when baking.

Yet canola oil is not only found in the kitchen. Farmers use it to repel insects. Canola oil, along with many other oils, are used to make soaps, fuels and lubricants.

What canola oil is used for is perhaps the one thing people agree on. Where it comes from, what it contains and if it should be used at all are subjects of controversy.

Origin

Go Ask Alice, an online educational service provided by Columbia University, states that canola oil was originally made in the late 1960s and 1970s in Canada. The Canadians created canola oil through combining black mustard, leaf mustard, and turnip rapeseed using conventional methods, not genetic modification as is sometimes suspected.

The problem then lies mainly in the connection to rapeseed, which is known to contain large amounts of a toxic long–chain fatty acid known as erurcic acid. Go Ask Alice states that high concentrations of erucic acid causes adverse health effects, but that canola oil contains very little of this fatty acid.

Much of the debate about canola oil's safety comes down to how much erucic acid it contains and how much is actually harmful to people. What is interesting though is that WebMD states that canola is frequently confused with rapeseed and that canola oil actually comes from the canola plant, not rapeseed.

The Mayo Clinic agrees, stating that the canola plant was made by crossbreeding from the rapeseed plant.

Erucic Acid Content

Proponents of canola oil say that it is low in erucic acid, either because it is from the rapeseed-derived canola plant or a low-erucic hybrid version of the rapeseed plant. Go Ask Alice states that canola oil is only 1 percent eruric acid.

However, how much eruric acid is safe is not known. There are claims that toxins in canola oil may cause a range of problems, from blindness to respiratory distress. Eruric acid is associated with fibrotic heart lesions as well. Even the Mayo Clinic warns that large amounts of eruric acid is sometimes toxic to humans.

These concerns may not be well-founded. Rapeseed oil processed from the rapeseed plant, which has not been crossbred to decrease eruric acid levels, has been used in India, Japan and China for thousands of years, according to the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Canola Oil Break Down

During crossbreeding efforts to lower eruric acid, manufactures of canola oil were able to replace the fatty acid with another fatty acid called oleic acid, according to Snopes.com.

When canola oil is broken down, it is shown to contain 57 percent oleic acid, 23 percent omega-6 fatty acid, between 10 and 15 percent omega-3 fatty acid and 5 percent saturated fat.

Omega-3 and omega-6 are both polyunsaturated fats and oleic acid is an unsaturated fat, all of which are considered healthier than saturated fat, according to the Mayo Clinic. The clinic states that because canola oil is very low in saturated fat and high in monounsaturated fat it is one of the safer and healthier choices of cooking oils.

Heart Health

The FDA approved a health label in October 2006 that allows manufactures to state that canola oil is beneficial for heart health. Labels may say that there is limited evidence indicating that consuming 19 grams of canola oil per day can decrease the risk of heart disease. Nineteen grams is around 1.5 tablespoons of oil.

However, this potential benefit is only possible if people switch out other fats for canola oil so that they lower their overall saturated fat intake and do not increase calorie consumption.

Monounsaturated fats, like oleic acid, are healthier than polyunsaturated fats and saturated fats.

Monunsaturated fat is a kind of fat in oils and foods known to be beneficial for cholesterol levels. It may also help with blood glucose regulation and insulin levels, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Polyunsaturated fat is found almost exclusively in plant-based foods. Polyunsaturated fats may also improve cholesterol. According to the Mayo Clinic, polyunsaturated fats can reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

Omega-3 polyunsaturated fats are particularly beneficial for the heart. Omega-3 is in canola oil and other oils, though also in some fish. Eating a diet rich in omega-3 could have a protective effect against high blood pressure and irregular heart beats.

Mustard Gas

In addition to the fear of eruric acid toxicity, there are reports that canola oil contains the extremely dangerous agent mustard gas. Unlike the possible harm of eruric acid, the mustard gas connection is completely false. According to the Weston A. Price Foundation, mustard gas is a chemical warfare agent that causes blindness, nervous disorders and mad cow disease, among other concerns that anti-canola people also attribute to consuming canola oil.

Although rapeseed is a member of the mustard family, it is not used to make mustard gas. Go Ask Alice explains that mustard gas does not come from a mustard plant, but instead gets its name mustard gas because it smells somewhat like mustard.

Studies

Despite the limited evidence reported by the FDA that canola oil may be good for the heart, studies show the opposite, according to the Weston A. Price Foundation.

A proponent of canola oil, Professor Robert L. Wolke, wrote to the "Washington Post" to dispute unfounded claims that canola allergies can cause a range of symptoms from blurred vision to tremors. He furthermore added that he could not find any long-term studies that canola oil is harmful to humans.

Although many people may take that as evidence of canola oils safety, the Weston A. Price Foundation states that the reason Wolfe could not find any long-term human studies is that since the FDA classified canola oil as generally safe no long-term studies have been performed with humans.

There have been many animal studies though. The foundation reports that studies dating back to 1978 show several negative effects from canola oil that refute claims of canola oil being beneficial for the cardiovascular system.

Studies found that canola oil fed to animals was linked to fibrotic lesions of the heart, vitamin E deficiencies, reduced life-span in rats bred to be prone to strokes and unhealthy changes in blood platelets.

 

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Sources

  • http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/canola-oil
  • http://customers.hbci.com/~wenonah/new/canola.htm
  • http://goaskalice.columbia.edu/canola-oil-dangerous-or-another-urban-legend
  • http://www.westonaprice.org/know-your-fats/the-great-con-ola
  • http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/id/QAA400093
  • http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/canola-oil/AN01281
  • http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/canola.asp
  • http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/fat/NU00262
  • http://www.epa.gov/oppbppd1/biopesticides/ingredients/factsheets/factsheet_011332.htm
  • http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=5

Other

  • Side Effects
  • Other Names
  • Uses
None Known When Taken Properly
Low Erucic Acid Rapeseed (LEAR) oil
Heart Disease Prevention