Canola Oil Is a Healthy Alternative to Olive Oil?

Canola oil is refined with heat, pressure, solvents, and bleach, and comes from the seed of a plant that's younger than the Rolling Stones.

By Ari LeVaux, AlterNet
Posted on May 2, 2012

To look at many cookbooks, you'd think olive oil and canola oil were identical twins separated at birth. Countless recipes call for "extra-virgin olive oil or canola oil," as if the two were interchangeable.

This implied equivalence is odd. Extra-virgin olive oil is cold-pressed from a fruit that has been cultivated for more than 7,000 years, with no refining beyond filtration. Canola oil is refined with heat, pressure, solvents, and bleach, and comes from the seed of a plant that's younger than the Rolling Stones.

The canola plant was conceived when demand for rapeseed oil plummeted in the late 1940s, and the Canadian rapeseed industry began seeking and creating new markets for its product. Since the Industrial Revolution, rapeseed oil has been an important component of lubricants for ships and steam engines, because unlike most oils it sticks to wet metal. During World War II the U.S. built a lot of ships, and so needed lots of rapeseed oil, but couldn't get it from traditional suppliers in Europe and Asia. The Canadian rapeseed industry, which had been relatively small, exploded to fill the gap, and played an important role in the allied naval effort, becoming rich and powerful in the process.

But rapeseed oil demand waned when the war ended, and thus began an intensive program to breed a rapeseed edible to humans. The Holy Grail was a strain with dramatically lower levels of erucic acid and glucosinolates, which are the main culprits behind rapeseed oil's foul flavor, and according to some research, toxic effects.

The industry opted against calling its new product "rape oil," so in 1978 the new plant was christened canola, for "CANadian Oil Low Acid." The "Low Acid" refers to erucic acid.

Canola is processed with heat, pressure, and often solvents like hexane. Even in cold-pressed "organic" canola, the refining steps include bleaching, deodorization, and the removal of various gummy, oozy byproducts. In fact, many of these steps are similar to practices that people are worked up about over pink slime, including heated centrifugation and treatment with noxious chemicals.

The refining process can be seen in this YouTube video. The food and agriculture industries love canola because it grows well, yields more oil per acre than any other oilseed, and because there are so many ways to eat it. That bottle on your kitchen counter is only the beginning.

Canola oil is used in most processed salad dressings, often after being treated with anti-foaming agents. Canola oil is frequently hydrogenated for use in shortenings, fry oil mixes, and many processed foods. Canola oil hydrogenates much more readily than corn or soy oil -- a process that turns unsaturated fats into saturated fats and creates trans fats along the way. Canola hydrogenates so eagerly, in fact, that it happens inadvertently during the oil's steam-injection deodorization process. Because of this unintended hydrogenation, any refined canola oil is going to be partially hydrogenated. And if it's partially hydrogenated, it's going to contain trans fats. A study published in the Journal of Food Lipids shows that the trans-fat content of commercial, non-hydrogenated canola oil can be as high as 4.6 percent. Nonetheless, many formulations of canola oil are billed as having no trans or partially hydrogenated fats, because they weren't present prior to the refining process.

Another selling point for canola oil is that it can stand high heat without burning, and is thus well suited for deep-frying. Because of this, canola is often considered a preferred alternative to olive oil for very hot cooking. But the oil's large percentage of polyunsaturated fats will oxidize in high heat, turning them rancid. Meanwhile, the widely followed prohibition against frying with olive oil is misplaced. Extra-virgin olive oil has been deep-frying food in Mediterranean diets for centuries. Interestingly, the Canadian Canola Council lists the smoke point for extra virgin olive oil at 331 degrees, despite the fact that most sources pin the smoke point of good quality extra-virgin olive oil above 400 degrees, which will deep-fry anything.

One thing that's certain is that canola oil is low in saturated fat. And according to the medical community's party line, that's a good thing because saturated fats cause obesity and heart disease.

The Mayo Clinic often invokes the Mediterranean diet on its Web site, recommending "Mediterranean-style cooking" for "heart-healthy eating," and the replacement of butter with "healthy fats such as olive oil and canola oil." And thus, the long-lost fatty twins are reunited again, in your heart-healthy lasagna.

But there's nothing close to a scientific consensus about the supposed superiority of unsaturated fats with regard to obesity and heart disease. Many parts of these arguments are currently being debated.

Is the debate influenced by canola's tremendous profitability? Worldwide production is hitting record highs almost every year. And in just a few short decades of life canola oil has leapfrogged in popularity over other unsaturated oils like safflower -- which is lower in saturated fats than canola oil -- and grapeseed, which, for what it's worth, is from the Mediterranean. To what degree this surging popularity is due to the zealous pursuit of unsaturated omega-3 fats or to the marketing genius of the rape oil salesmen is a question for the cookbook authors who began recommending the oil in droves in the 1980s. One such messenger, Andrew Weil, has recently disavowed canola, calling it a "distant runner-up to olive oil." We'll see if other cookbook writers like Mark Bittman and Jamie Oliver follow suit.

Olive oil has flavor; canola is tasteless. Olive oil is intact, alive with enzymes and other biomolecules, while canola is processed, filtered and separated into a sliver of its former self. Olive oil is the ancient foundation of the Mediterranean diet; canola oil is a recent experiment, a Hail Mary effort to save an industry.

But for all of its wonderful qualities, one thing extra-virgin olive oil isn't is cheap. And canola oil, while perhaps not as mind-boggingly awesome as some would have us believe, probably isn't that bad for you -- except for those trans fats created in the deodorization process. But other than the price difference, there isn't any reason to choose canola oil over olive oil. It's a truly inferior product, despite what so many recipes imply. 

USDA's New Symbol of Dietary Guide is Propaganda for Dairy Industry

While there's some good news when it comes to fruit and vegetables, the new guidelines seem tailored to encourage maximum dairy industry profitability. 

By Ari LeVaux, AlterNet
Posted on June 13, 2011

MyPlate, the USDA's new symbol of dietary correctness, was unveiled on June 2. It replaces the agency's Eating Right Pyramid (est. 1992), which succeeded the Four Basic Food Groups (1956). Those four in turn represented a consolidation of the seven food groups the agency pushed in the 1940s, themselves pared down from 12 during the Great Depression, when many people would have been happy to find even a single food group on their plates.

The USDA's first nutrition guide was published in 1916, a year after the National Dairy Council was founded. The dairy industry has worked tirelessly with (and on) the USDA ever since -- an investment that has paid many dividends, including dairy's privileged perch as one of only four basic food groups. And despite zero scientific basis that a healthy diet requires dairy, the stuff has managed to maintain its position as a key dietary recommendation on each successive symbol du jour, through the pyramid days and on to today's MyPlate graphic.

In fact, the MyPlate paradigm is practically a repeat of the Four Food Groups, with only three discernible tweaks.

The "meat and fish" group has been generalized to "protein." This is barely even a change, and more of a semantic adjustment to reality given how many ways there are to get your fill of essential amino acids without meat.

The grain group made the transition from to MyPlate relatively unscathed, with an added piece of advice to eat more whole grains. It's worth mentioning that plenty of "Paleo diet" followers, not to mention the Atkins crowd, seem to do fine without grains as well. And if you avoid grains and sugars, it's practically impossible to get fat.

The most substantial change to the dietary recommendations is the "fruit and vegetable" category, which has been split in two. Fully half of the USDA's new plate consists of fruit and vegetables. This is an audacious goal considering how few Americans currently come close to consuming that ratio. If taken to heart by enough people, this change alone could have profound effects on public health.

By including recommendations against oversized portions, and generalizing the protein group, the USDA has managed to distance itself from the influence of special interests like the meat and fast-food industries. But it remains clearly beholden to dairy.  

This brings us to the third discernible difference from the four food groups: the MyPlate symbol includes a little circle next to the plate that looks like a glass of milk. Labeled "Dairy," it stands for three daily servings of dairy, including cheese, yogurt, milk, and other processed secretions of mammary glands, usually bovine.

In response to MyPlate's debut the dairy industry took a victory lap, with press releases from various dairy-oriented think tanks and trade groups praising the new symbol.

"USDA's new MyPlate, the simple visual metaphor of a serving of dairy products alongside a plate, says it's vital to consume three servings of low-fat and fat-free dairy foods every day," gloated Jerry Kozak, president of the National Milk Producers Federation, as he tacitly reveals how the new guidelines seem tailored to encourage maximum dairy industry profitability.

Three servings of dairy per day would be an increase for most Americans, who currently consume an average of two. Encouraging Americans to eat low-fat and nonfat milk products means even more profit, because the fat skimmed off is then processed into butter and other marketable products. The more items you can sell from a single gallon of milk, the more money you make, which is why as far as the dairy industry is concerned the MyPlate cup might as well be full of champagne: the industry has convinced USDA to recommend increased consumption of a product that's not only unnecessary, but is actually bad for most people.

Lactose intolerance, by some estimates, affects 75 percent of the world's population.

Caucasians have one of the lowest rates of intolerance, at only 12 percent. These numbers don't include the people like me, who may not get explosive diarrhea and other classic effects of lactose intolerance, but don't do well on dairy, with results including phlegm, heartburn and upset stomach. And if 75 percent or more of the world's humans can't handle dairy, it's hard to argue it being necessary for optimal human health.

Here is USDA's obsequiously dairy-centric advice to the lactose-averse: "If you avoid milk because of lactose intolerance, the most reliable way to get the health benefits of dairy products is to choose lactose-free alternatives within the Dairy Group, such as cheese, yogurt, lactose-free milk, or calcium-fortified soymilk (soy beverage), or to consume the enzyme lactase before consuming milk."

Calcium is the primary justification for the importance of dairy, but many green vegetables offer just as much calcium as milk, and in a more easily absorbed form. With the exception of soymilk, all other calcium sources, including almond milk -- which contains twice the calcium of dairy milk -- are cautioned against:

"[Non-soy, non-dairy calcium sources] may provide calcium, but may not provide the other nutrients found in dairy products."

If science and health were calling the shots, then milk products would simply be absorbed into the protein category as one of many ways to get your essential amino acids, or perhaps into a "calcium" group that would also include dark-green leafy vegetables and fortified dairy alternatives.

Much of the positive health hype about dairy is perpetuated by the National Dairy Council, which has a history of exaggerating dairy's positives and downplaying its negatives. In 2007 the Federal Trade Commission forced the NDC to retract its claim that dairy consumption encourages weight loss.

The NDC is "the nutrition research, education and communications arm of Dairy Management Inc," the Web site of which makes its intentions clear -- and improving public health isn't one of them. "DMI helps build demand for dairy on behalf of dairy producers and is dedicated to the success of the dairy industry."

Consuming dairy products is a choice that we (at least the lactose tolerant among us) have. But to spin the consumption of milk as a thrice-daily necessity is yet another scary reminder of the power that industries wield on policy.

At least with food we have the option to think for ourselves. But if USDA policy is so clearly shaped by industry, it makes you wonder about compromises the agency might make in other areas of its purview. USDA regularly makes decisions on things like pesticide regulation, forest policy and approval or disapproval of genetically modified crops. And those decisions, unlike a plate symbol, aren't so easily ignored.
 

Genes that let you live to 100?

Found: genes that let you live to 100
05-18-2010
Times Online

SCIENTISTS have discovered the “Methuselah” genes whose lucky carriers have a much improved chance of living to 100 even if they indulge in an unhealthy lifestyle.

The genes appear to protect people against the effects of smoking and bad diet and can also delay the onset of age-related illnesses such as cancer and heart disease by up to three decades.

No single gene is a guaranteed fountain of youth. Instead, the secret of longevity probably lies in having the right “suite” of genes, according to new studies of centenarians and their families. Such combinations are extremely rare — only one person in 10,000 reaches the age of 100.

The genes found so far each appear to give a little extra protection against the diseases of old age. Centenarians appear to have a high chance of having several such genes embedded in their DNA.

“Long-lived people do not have fewer disease genes or ageing genes,” said Eline Slagboom of Leiden University, who is leading a study into 3,500 Dutch nonagenarians. “Instead they have other genes that stop those disease genes from being switched on. Longevity is strongly genetic and inherited.”

Slagboom and her colleagues recently published studies showing how the physiology of people in long-lived families differs from normal people. Other studies, showing the genetic causes of those differences, are due for publication soon.

“People who live to a great age metabolise fats and glucose differently, their skin ages more slowly and they have lower prevalence of heart disease, diabetes and hypertension,” she said.

“These factors are all under strong genetic control, so we see the same features in the children of very old people.”

The so-called Methuselah genes — named after the biblical patriarch who lived to 969 — are thought to include ADIPOQ, which is found in about 10% of young people but in nearly 30% of people living past 100. The CETP gene and the ApoC3 gene are found in 10% of young people, but in about 20% of centenarians.

Some of those genes were discovered by a research group at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, led by Prof Nir Barzilai, following an analysis of the genes of over 500 centenarians and their offspring.

The studies show that tiny mutations in the make-up of particular genes can sharply increase a person’s lifespan. Nonetheless, environmental factors such as the decline in infectious diseases are an important factor in the steady rise in the number of centenarians. The human genome contains about 28,000 genes, but they are controlled by a tiny number of so-called regulator genes.

Dr Barzilai told a Royal Society conference that the discovery of such genes gave scientists clear targets for developing drugs that could prevent or delay the onset of age-related diseases, potentially lengthening people's lives and keeping them healthier for longer.

Dr David Gems, a longevity researcher at University College London, believes that treatments to slow ageing will become widespread.

“If we know which genes control longevity then we can find out what proteins they make and then target them with drugs. That makes it possible to slow down ageing. We need to reclassify it as a disease rather than as a benign, natural process,” he said.

“Much of the pain and suffering in the world are caused by ageing. If we can find a way to reduce that, then we are morally obliged to take it.”

An anti-ageing drug which might be taken by millions of people, perhaps from middle age onwards, could be the ultimate blockbuster for the pharmaceutical industry.

Michelle Mitchell of Age UK said: “Ageing is a natural part of life. The key is to ensure that we do not simply extend life but extend the years of healthy life so that people can enjoy, not endure, their later years.”

Why pharmaceuticals might be called "Weapons of Mass Prescription"

The solutions to most health problems are not in chemicals. Chemicals, in the long run, will only do more to shorten the quality of your life. Your health is a direct consequence of what you put into your body. People who eat nothing but raw foods have shown to reverse the symptoms of diabetes (in just 30 days, even), and even some forms of cancer will abate from a totally raw diet. I haven't started eating totally raw yet, but I notice when I do eat raw foods (raw nuts, veggies, milk, fruit), I feel noticeably healthier than when I eat processed crap with preservatives in it--even better than after I eat cooked veggies.

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Why pharmaceuticals might be called Weapons of Mass Prescription
Published on 03-01-2010
Mike Adams

Most people are familiar with traditional weapons of mass destruction such biological weapons, nuclear weapons and chemical weapons. The point of all such weapons of mass destruction is to inflict a large number of casualties on civilian populations as a way to cripple a nation into political or military submission.

When it comes to actually deploying weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) against civilian populations, no country has murdered more innocent civilians than the United States of America through its bombing of two Japanese cities during World War II. (This isn’t rhetoric, it’s an historical fact.)

Atomic bombs were very visible WMDs deployed in World War II as a way to force the empire of Japan to surrender to western forces. Since that time, full-scale nuclear weapons have never again been used directly on civilian targets, meaning the United States of America maintains the distinction of being the only nation in the history of human civilization to have dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations.

It begs the question: If national leaders believe dropping atomic weapons on civilian populations is justified, what other weapons might they feel justified in unleashing upon civilian populations?

Weapons of Mass Prescription

What if a nation wanted to reduce its own civilian population but do it covertly? The way to accomplish that would be to slowly poison the civilian population through exposure to toxic chemicals, heavy metals, hormone-disrupting molecules and nerve toxins.

And as any terrorist can tell you, the most covert way to accomplish that would be to inject such chemicals into the everyday products that people routinely consume: Water, food, personal care products and medicines.

Here’s another interesting fact: If you examine what’s in the water, food, products and medicines sold across North America, you’ll discover a dangerous assortment of chemicals that, taken together, could quite reasonably be considered weapons of mass destruction.

Interestingly, the fluoride dumped into public water supplies was originally an offshoot of the enrichment processing facilities for uranium to be used in nuclear weapons. These days, however, fluoride is usually just the toxic waste from fertilizer manufacturing factories or the waste from smokestack scrubbers of coal-fired power plants. Either way, it’s not good for your teeth: The entire fluoride agenda largely a convenient, low-cost way to dispose of industrial waste chemicals while calling it a public health program.

Antibacterial soaps derive their antibacterial properties from chemicals that are molecularly quite similar to the infamous Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War. And yet these products are openly marketed for use by children.

Similarly, children and adults continue to be poisoned by heavy metals like mercury thanks to the highly toxic practices of modern dentistry — an industry which astoundingly has still failed to admit to the obvious toxicity of a heavy metal its practitioners continue to install in people’s mouths as “silver fillings” (which actually contain more mercury than silver).

There are hormone-disrupting chemicals in most of the plastics used in the processed food industry — especially canned soups which are often highly toxic for a variety of other reasons. MSG and other nervous system destroyers are used throughout the food supply in soups, snack foods, salad dressings, flavorings and dips.

These are all chemical assaults of one kind or another, but the greatest assault on the minds and bodies of western consumers comes in the form of pharmaceutical chemicals. That’s why I call them ‘Weapons of Mass Prescription.’

Destroy any nation by destroying the health of its citizens

If you want to destroy any nation, simply unleash Big Pharma into its medical system. Within just two generations, its people will suffer widespread organ damage, sharp decline in cognitive function and rampant degenerative disease brought on by the side effects of everyday pharmaceuticals.

Antidepressants, for example, cause diabetes and obesity. Cancer drugs cause neurological disorders. Some arthritis drugs actually promote arthritis!

Virtually all pharmaceuticals cause nutritional deficiencies. Most of them also contribute to long-term organ damage that affects the liver, heart, brain and kidneys. Pharmaceuticals are synthetic chemicals which are inherently incompatible with human biology. Whatever “therapeutic effects” appear to be present from pharmaceuticals are really just poisoning side effects that temporarily appear to be therapeutic but are actually disruptive to human biology.

Many pharmaceuticals are, in fact, blatant poisons to begin with. Popular blood-thinning drugs, which are usually just rebranded warfarin chemicals, are molecularly identical to rat poison. (Warfarin is actually used as rat poison. It’s true. This is not an urban legend.)

Chemotherapy chemicals are extremely poisonous, and cancer patients frequently die from the toxicity of these drugs. Those who don’t die often suffer from “chemo brain” — a severe loss of cognitive function routinely experienced by victims of chemotherapy.

Poisoning the environment with chemical weapons

Meanwhile, the sheer quantity of prescription medications being used on civilian populations is resulting in the mass contamination of public water supplies with HRT drugs, painkiller drugs, cholesterol medications and other Big Pharma chemicals. (http://www.naturalnews.com/025994.html) It’s so bad now that even the fish that swim near major cities are contaminated with medications. (http://www.naturalnews.com/025933_p…)

At some point, all the chemical contamination with pharmaceuticals brings the obvious question to mind: Are Big Pharma’s drugs actually Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Is the U.S. civilian population being targeted in a cover chemical war that accomplishes the same thing as dropping bombs on Hiroshima, only more slowly and covertly?

And if so, what would be the purpose of such a chemical war on the American people?

Reshaping the human gene pool — clever!

Population control is the obvious byproduct...not only because pharmaceuticals kill so many people but also because pharmaceuticals cause widespread infertility. By dumping so many chemicals onto civilian populations, the population can be suppressed in the long term through chemically-induced infertility.

Now here’s an interesting advantage in all this: If all these mainstream consumer chemicals cause infertility, they’re only causing it among those mainstream consumers who are stupid enough to keep eating, drinking and swallowing all these synthetic chemicals in the first place. And that means this “population control” measure, if it actually does exist, is theoretically causing the greatest infertility in those who have the least intelligence. It’s potentially a way to achieve a significant shift in the gene pool of the human race by eliminating the genetic futures of those who are stupid enough to poison their own bodies (and therefore compromise their own genetic code) through mass exposure to synthetic chemicals.

As I’ve often said, there are a huge number of people in western nations right now (such as the USA, Canada, UK, etc.) who are collectively winning the Darwin Award by removing themselves from the human gene pool. And pharmaceuticals, it turns out, are the perfect WMDs to allow those who most deserve to be removed from the human gene pool to accomplish exactly that.

The future of the human race belongs solely to those who can protect the integrity of their genetic code.

And that, my friends, is not accomplished by contaminating your body with synthetic chemicals. That’s why prescription drugs may actually be Weapons of Mass Genetic Deterioration.