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. 

Exploitable Illusions

Managed Misconceptions
By JAMES ROTHENBERG

Labeling something as a misconception assumes a burden of proof. The acceptance of the proof that something is indeed a misconception is dependent on the number of people desiring the proof. This is not always apparent.

For example, one may hold a belief that nobody has ever walked on the surface of the moon, and another may call this a misconception. To bring the non-believer around, the believer may offer detailed specifics of rocketry capability, launch and pick-up data, and surviving video of suited astronauts prancing light-footedly over a lunar landscape.

The rigid non-believer will always be able to find this type of persuasion unconvincing: rocket capabilities as too abstract, launch and pick-up as so much sophistry, and video evidence technical trickery.

This would result in a stalemate were it not for one thing. An overwhelming number believe it as fact and not just because they believe their own eyes, but because it has been thoroughly infused into habit of thought by its continued reference as being factual by respected opinion. Thus it is generally considered to be a misconception leastly because doubters were convinced but owing to the sheer weight of the opposition.

The degree of stubbornness of a misconception is proportional to the amount that it has been infused into habitual thought, which in turn is proportional to the amount it is supported by respected opinion.

Quickly examining two of our most persistent, national misconceptions will reveal the inadequacy of bare facts when set against a dominant, propaganda producing entity, in this case the US Government together with its supporting cast.

Misconception Number 1 is that we have a functioning democracy due to our form of representative government, and that the political system works equally well for all citizens. There is scant evidence for this. There is abundant evidence that the two major political parties are completely absorbed in self-perpetuation and to this extent serve the interests of a narrow sector of powerful elites and corporate structures that fund and, therefore, control them.

The citizen is encouraged to believe that the successes of giant, multi-national corporations are part of what makes America great. Even the stunning achievements of the capitalist system like outsourcing, plant shutdowns, mass layoffs, forced relocations, environmental degradation, staggering healthcare costs, decreased competition, and ever-escalating wealth and income disparities do not diminish enthusiasm for our two political parties that are wedded to this economic system.

There are some signs of backlash against the political system, popularly summed in slogan form as “Just Vote Them Out”. And then what? Leave the slogan up? Both major parties are inherently corrupt because their fate is tied not to the general public but to the narrow interests they serve.

Necessarily the powerless desire change. It is well to recognize that change is not in the best interest of the wealthy and powerful. The explanatory power of this recognition makes present day circumstances intelligible.

This speaks to something that dares not speak its name. Class warfare. It’s a third rail for political aspirants because it undermines the carefully prepared myth that we are all equals under our political system, that we are all one class. This is a great illusion, although a persistent one.

Misconception Number 2 is that our military defends the country, implying all the people in it. Equally. War is an economic question, and going to war is an economic decision by the stakeholder class. It is the greatest psychological trick ever played on great mankind to convince the masses that someone who has died for economic expansion has died for country. It is also the most cynical as the true motivation for war must be skillfully cloaked by an appeal to that which our organism will instinctively react to. Self-defense.

We defend ourselves from other people by fighting them in their countries. The count is alarming. The illogic even more so. All one has to do is picture the opposite, say Russians defending themselves by invading us, to spot the fallacy.

How did our war criminals get away with it? In attacking Iraq both US and international law was broken. This is quite straightforward. It was a violation of Articles 41 and 42 of the UN Charter, a treaty ratified by the US Senate in 1945 thereby becoming, in accordance with Article 6 of the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. Without first engaging in collective measures with other member states of the UN or gaining the prior assent of the UN Security Council, a war of aggression was waged against a sovereign nation.

This is incontrovertible. Even the criminals would have to admit as much. Where they got around things was appealing to (and expanding) UN Charter Article 51 dealing with self-defense, although there are two glaring catches.

First, Article 51 begins, “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations…”. Enough said.

The second catch is that any remaining claim of legitimate self-defense went out the window when the claims about Iraq posing an imminent threat to the United States were revealed as lies. At that point everything resets to the incontrovertible breaking of US law. The war criminals got away with it and, from the point of view of the arid and sanctimonious state, the nation’s honor was saved.

Young men and women are duped into believing that their heroics are preserving the nation’s freedom. This manipulation can be terminal. For this reason utmost care must be taken to insure that the sensibilities of a trained, patriotic public are not offended. Crass descriptions of war as dollar profit and loss must be replaced with comforting, exploitable allusions to high ideals.