Canola oil has been marketed as a healthy choice for cooking, widely used in many homes and most restaurants. However, the truth of the matter is that Canola oil is just about anything but healthy! Yet, the FDA has not only deemed it safe for consumption, but actually supports it being labeled “healthy.”
Canola oil was originally developed in Canada, Canadian “ola”, which means oil. Canola oil comes from a seed called rapeseed and was mostly used for industrial purposes. Rapeseed oil was the source of the chemical warfare known as mustard gas. The US banned rapeseed back in 1956 when soldiers and civilians began experiencing blistered lungs and skin. The canola plant does not occur naturally in the wild, but instead has been bred by BIG agriculture. In other words, it is a genetically modified plant, or GMO. Since Canola oil is cheap to manufacture and mass produce, it was modified to remove the lethal eruric acid. It took the food industry over a decade of genetic engineering to obtain the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) nod from the FDA. Initially the rapeseed name was changed to LEAR (low eruric acid rapeseed), and then to Canola Oil. Continue reading “Is Canola Oil really good for you?”
