More on Canola Poison

I know that everyone out there has seen propaganda about how healthy Canola oil is.  It has the perfect ratio of saturated to unsaturated fats, and even has polyunsaturated fats in a great combination so as to lead everyone to believe that this stuff is the ideal product for the entire world.  Well, it is a great product for Monsanto, but for human consumption, not so good.  Let’s go back to the origins of canola and see where this stuff came from.  Rape is a plant that is in the Brassica family, which includes plants like broccoli, cabbage, and mustard.  Mustard is a pretty potent little plant on its own, and has a few interesting characteristics; however the poisonous gas from World War One, mustard gas, was not from mustard, but actually from Rape.  Rape is fast growing, and has the ability to produce more seed and therefore more seed oil per acre than any other plant around.  That is a good thing.  The oil has been used for industrial purposes for decades and it is cheap.  The problem is that it contains a toxic alkaloid called erucic acid.  Normal rape oil from native rape plants contains about 9% erucic acid by weight.  It is a neuro toxin, it is systemic, meaning it is absorbed through the skin, mouth, lungs, digestive tract.  Anywhere it touches the human body, it is absorbed. 

Back in the early 70’, some rape farmer thought that he could make more money if he could grow a whole lot of rape and if the oil could be consumed by humans.  A mighty impressive concept, and one that those with the time, money, and equipment decided to work on.  If you look at the Canadian Oil Council website it states that Canola as of today, was created by traditional breeding techniques to selectively remove the harmful erucic acid.  You might need to expand your definition of tradition if you believe that load of Canadian Crapola.  Canola was created through a pioneer genetic methodology that could only be produced in a laboratory.  If you read the Rape book, (Yes, there is an actual book written by the guys that did it) Canola scientists actually took the unprecedented move of using gas chromatography to identify the genes that controlled erucic levels in the rapeseed, and then they split seeds mechanically to germinate a half seed.  It wasn’t like they planted two plants and cross-pollinated the species over time. They developed a new procedure known as seed-splitting to accomplish the genetic determinism and the scientists who invented Canola were one of the first to use the technology.  The plants they used represented an international patchwork of trial and error for combining of parts.  That might seem a bit like the task of assembling Frankenstein, as opposed to gardening in the backyard.  The techniques indeed quite obviously paved the way for the total genetic engineering techniques that form the basics of Genetic Engineering today.  In fact, Monsanto’s GE crops were built on the back of the Canola plant, by the very scientists who created the Canola out of nothing but gas chromatography, split seeds and erucic content.

However, all the canola oil that is consumed still contains 2% of an extremely toxic substance.  This acid has been shown over and over again in numerous long term feeding studies that the cumulative effects of adding canola to their diet results in horrific degenerative problems.  That part of the story isn't going to go away just because the Canola industry is about 50 billion dollars worldwide. The facts are, money makes laws protecting consumers somewhat transparent.  And butt loads of money make those protection laws invisible. And we are talking about BUTT LOADS of money here, 50 billion dollars a year is the current worldwide harvest of this stuff.  I'm not saying that farmers should stop growing the stuff, I mean Canola biodiesel fuel is cheap, let's use it for that.  We keep hearing about the fossil fuel crisis, this is a great thing to help alleviate that problem.

One of the things that people have said to me is that it isn't even remotely the same thing when researchers feed rats a diet containing 20% Canola and then after two years they dissect the rats and find that their brains are like Swiss cheese and their bodies are littered with tumors and degenerative problems.  WE DON'T EAT THAT MUCH CANOLA they tell me.  So the same thing won't happen to humans.   Hmmmm, I never know how to respond to that argument.  The standard scientific procedure for testing long term exposure to any chemical is feed high doses of it to short lived mammals and that will simulate a lifetime of a human consuming normal amounts.  Is it valid?  It is a standard used worldwide.  If someone does not want to believe the findings of NUMEROUS studies that have done this very thing, then there isn't a lot that anyone can do to change their mind.  There are a lot of those people in the world.  They drink diet soda sweetened with Aspartame, eat their white bread containing potassium bromate, get a flu shot every fall, enjoy the wonderful benefits of low cost milk, beef, chicken and love to eat all those wonderful fresh strawberries loaded with arsenic and bromate insecticides and then can't understand why they get cancer, have heart disease, weight problems and can't remember where they left their car keys last night. 

So what are the alternatives?  Well, domestic peanut oil is a great substitute.  Don't get the stuff from China, that has been explained here before.  Then come the other great oils that are better for you health wise because they really are high in polyunsaturates and monounsaturates (Canola claims this, but it is a  lie, the tests are on unprocessed oil, not the stuff that they sell that has bee heat treated to get rid of the horrible smell it has) and they are fantastic for you.  Extra virgin olive oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, and the best is coconut oil.  All are more expensive than Canola, but they won't rot your gut or destroy your brain.