Seed Oil Scare: The Curious Case of Canola

Speaker 1 We're hearing a lot about seed oils.

Speaker 2 Why should people be worried about these kind of products?

Speaker 3 Seed oils are one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods. And seed oils, the reason they're in the foods is because they're heavily subsidized.

Speaker 3 They're very, very cheap, but they are associated with all kinds of very, very serious illnesses, including body-wide inflammation.

Speaker 4 That is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and we're sorry to start the episode with him because we're also sorry that he is currently the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Speaker 7 There are so many reasons we're sorry about this, but nonetheless, we started the show with his voice because he is far from alone in saying seed oils are dangerous.

Speaker 13 It's quite a common belief these days.

Speaker 15 Seed oils are some of the worst fucking things your body can consume. There's some sort of a correlation between seed oils and macular degeneration.

Speaker 15 Look, it causes inflammation and inflammation is fucking terrible for you no matter what.

Speaker 4 Yes, again, sorry, that's Joe Rogan, host of a truly shockingly popular podcast. And we of course are also hosts of a popular podcast.

Speaker 4 This is indeed Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graeber.

Speaker 16 And I'm Nicola Twilley.

Speaker 11 And we, like many of you, have been hearing this anti-seed oil propaganda for a while now.

Speaker 8 But then a listener got in touch with an intriguing question that made us want to dive a little deeper.

Speaker 19 Hi, my name is Amy McLeod. I'm from Vancouver, British Columbia, and I'm curious about canola oil.

Speaker 19 My grandfather was a farmer in Saskatchewan, and he grew canola on his farm in addition to other things.

Speaker 19 And I always use canola oil in my cooking.

Speaker 19 I feel like it's a great way to support Canadian farmers, but now with all the buzz around canola oil being really processed, I'm not sure if it's the healthiest choice.

Speaker 19 And I'm wondering sort of what the history of canola oil is and

Speaker 19 if there's something that's a better choice or if it's still fine to use.

Speaker 4 Amy, we are on the case. What is canola oil and why is it so popular in Canada?

Speaker 21 And is it and all its seed oil brethren so extremely terrible for you?

Speaker 2 What is so bad about how it's processed?

Speaker 23 We've got all the answers coming right up.

Speaker 4 This episode is sponsored in part by the Alfred P.

Speaker 4 Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics and by the Boroughs Welcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research.

Speaker 4 Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

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Speaker 27 So originally, the Romans bought rapeseed over to the UK when they invaded it, so that's sort of two or three thousand years ago.

Speaker 16 This is Duncan Farrington.

Speaker 28 He's a British farmer, and you might not have realized, but he is talking about canola.

Speaker 18 He just called it rapeseed because that's what we call it in the UK, because that's what it started out as.

Speaker 22 We're old school like that.

Speaker 4 We'll get back to where the name canola comes from. But rapeseed, that sounds unpleasant, but it's related to the plant's Latin name.

Speaker 4 Rapeseed is a brassica, like kale and broccoli and cabbage, and the oil plant comes from a subspecies called brassica napa or brassica rapa, rapa for turnip.

Speaker 4 But then rapa became rape, like the vegetable rapini, or like rapeseed.

Speaker 30 And rapeseed, or rape as it's sometimes called, just to make matters worse, it goes way back.

Speaker 18 Botanists think it may have originated in India, there's records of it being cultivated there as much as 6,000 years ago, but it's definitely been used for thousands of years everywhere from China to the Mediterranean.

Speaker 4 The Romans, as Duncan said, they grew rapeseed to press for oil, but they may not have been using it for food.

Speaker 27 They probably could have eaten it, but naturally rapeseed is more of a, has more of a bitter flavor oil.

Speaker 27 The Romans probably most likely used it for oil lamps and candles and also Roman bars to put on the body as a, you know, when the guys and girls went to the bars and a massage oil.

Speaker 28 Back home in what's now Italy, Romans had access to lots of lovely olive oil.

Speaker 9 That was their fave.

Speaker 7 But as they colonized northern Europe, where the weather is crap and olive trees don't grow, they needed a new oil source.

Speaker 33 Rapeseed did the trick.

Speaker 4 It grows really well in cold climates, and so while it was kind of bitter, probably northern Europeans did eat it occasionally if they didn't have their favorite butter or lard around.

Speaker 4 It was definitely used for animal fodder, and apparently by the 1500s, it was Europe's major source of lamp oil.

Speaker 16 Then, once the Industrial Revolution got going in Britain, this lamp oil found a new role as an engine lubricant.

Speaker 4 Steam engines were a foundational technology that powered the Industrial Revolution, and it turns out that rapeseed oil is a great lubricant for steam engines.

Speaker 4 Water and steam don't wash it off, it stays oily and luby where it's supposed to be.

Speaker 16 Once our petrochemical era really got going and steam engines were replaced by diesel engines that didn't need rapeseed lube anymore, our unfortunately named oily friend kind of fell out of favor.

Speaker 4 But then, in the 1930s, a farmer from Poland was living in Canada.

Speaker 35 And a a friend of his sent him a few seeds of rapeseed and he found it grew very well.

Speaker 35 And when the Second World War broke out there was a need for a lubricant for marine engines and the oil from rapeseed was a perfect lubricator for marine engines.

Speaker 20 This is Michael Eskin.

Speaker 10 He's a distinguished professor in the Department of Food and Human Nutritional Sciences at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, and he is a key player in the rapeseed/slash canola story, which really heated up, like Michael said, during World War II.

Speaker 4 There was a huge shortage of oil in Europe at the time.

Speaker 4 They were using anything they could get their hands on: whale blubber, cottonseed oil, anything, and they really needed lubricants for the engines that powered their ships.

Speaker 4 So, Canadian farmers quickly picked up the slack, grew a lot of rapeseed, and sent it over.

Speaker 35 Thankfully, the war ended, and there was no need first,

Speaker 35 a lubricating oil. And so the question was: someone raised in Agriculture Canada,

Speaker 35 has this oil any potential? It smelled bad and it had a bad color.

Speaker 37 It was greenish and stinky.

Speaker 8 Canada was growing a lot of it, and the engine lube market had disappeared.

Speaker 32 Meanwhile, as the Canadian government had noticed, the country was also importing 90% of all its edible oils.

Speaker 8 So a couple of plant breeders, one in Saskatoon and one in Winnipeg, got to work to see if they could make it a little more palatable.

Speaker 4 The reason the rapeseed oil was stinky and kind of bitter was because of a couple of particular components.

Speaker 35 There were two things they were interested in reducing. They were interested in changing the fatty acids, but they were also interested in reducing what we call the glucosinolates.

Speaker 16 The fatty acid in question was erucic acid.

Speaker 8 It's pretty common fatty acid in plants, but it's found at especially high levels in rapeseed.

Speaker 12 It was the erosic acid in particular that made rapeseed so great for machine lubrication, but it tastes quite bitter, which makes it harder to love as an edible oil.

Speaker 8 Plus, it had a bad rap for health reasons.

Speaker 27 There was some research done a long, long time ago showing that, and the research was done on rats, showing that high levels of uric acid in rats can actually cause heart lesions.

Speaker 27 It can cause a weakening of the heart wall.

Speaker 4 There was a bunch of research on rats showing various negative health outcomes of consuming erosic acid, so people assumed it was also toxic to humans, although that has never been shown in human studies.

Speaker 4 But in any case, the breeders wanted to take the erucic acid out.

Speaker 16 The other target for elimination was the glucosinolates.

Speaker 31 These are also found in all brassicas.

Speaker 7 They give Brussels sprouts and cabbage and mustard their pungent, slightly sulfury brassica flavor, which I like, but that was considered off-putting in a wannabe edible oil, too.

Speaker 4 Another big issue with glucosinolates was that after the seeds were pressed for oil, the leftover seed residue was was fed to animals, and they seemed to not love that brassica flavor.

Speaker 4 So for it to be useful as high-protein animal feed, which was a major goal, getting rid of glucosinolates was important.

Speaker 35 This was in 45, so a process started, but it took until the 60s till two breeders, and there are a lot of others involved in that, but two breeders. One was a fellow called Baldur Stephenson.

Speaker 6 He was in Saskatoon, and there was another scientist called Keith Downey in Winnipeg.

Speaker 34 And to this day, both provinces like to claim credit for the resulting breakthrough.

Speaker 35 So I guess it was a little competition but they were friendly and they worked together and

Speaker 35 what they did it was the old-fashioned type of plant breeders where they crossed plants and they analyzed.

Speaker 4 As Michael said, this took more than 20 years of cross-breeding and a bunch of other people got involved too.

Speaker 4 One of the things they needed to do as they were doing all this breeding, they had to come up with a name that didn't involve the word rape.

Speaker 35 We were happy to change the name. The name was going to be Canberra, but a company had already established that name, so they had to look for another name.

Speaker 17 Canbra is short for Canadian brassica.

Speaker 10 But in lieu of that, they decided to go with Canola.

Speaker 35 Canadian oil, canola.

Speaker 4 So the breeding was successful. There was almost no erucic acid or glucosinolates in the new variety.
There was a new name that didn't include rape at all.

Speaker 4 And then they had to do nutrition studies to demonstrate that this new variety of rape seed, now called canola, was what's known as grass, generally recognized as safe, meaning anyone and everyone could cook with it and make products with it and eat it.

Speaker 12 The room where they first fed canola to humans to make sure it was safe is still right there at the University of Manitoba.

Speaker 22 So, right now we're entering the room where

Speaker 22 the original studies were conducted for feeding humans, university students, the

Speaker 22 first canola oil that was available for testing.

Speaker 4 Carla Taylor is a professor in food and human nutritional sciences at the University of Manitoba, and one of the things she studies is canola oil.

Speaker 22 Students would come up for all their meals, and

Speaker 22 they were taking blood samples so that they could look at how the fatty acid composition in their plasma was changing over the time that they were on the study.

Speaker 9 Michael was part of the team back then.

Speaker 6 His colleagues were doing that nutrition research, and he was studying the basic chemistry.

Speaker 35 They looked after feeding the stuff to students and analyzing

Speaker 35 urine and feces. We always knew when they were analyzing feces

Speaker 35 because you came into the department that day and you need to put a peg on your nose. And we looked at the composition, the stability, the performance, and a whole range of activities.

Speaker 4 After all the research was done in the 70s and 80s, the Canadian government recognized canola oil as safe, then the American government did too, and farmers in both countries started to grow it.

Speaker 11 And Michael told us its success exceeded everyone's expectations.

Speaker 35 Canada has 43,000 canola farmers and they generate around $30 billion

Speaker 35 annually into the economy. So it is it is the largest, yields the largest return of any agricultural product.
And in fact, changed the agriculture landscape of Canada.

Speaker 22 It's a big deal.

Speaker 22 If you were here in the end of June, beginning of July, when canola is blooming, you would think that about half the fields are yellow.

Speaker 4 And because things need to be explicitly pointed out these days, government research that took decades is now worth billions of dollars every year in North America.

Speaker 4 But so Carla comes from a farming family, and her family owned one of the farms that happily switched over and ended up enjoying wide swaths of yellow flowers every summer.

Speaker 22 Yeah, so I grew up on a farm, and my brother still runs the family farm. And

Speaker 22 canola is one of the main crops. And actually,

Speaker 22 I can remember when I was young growing up, there weren't any yellow fields in front of the house.

Speaker 22 I know the time that there was kind of the switch that canola was suddenly this crop that became available. It could be grown here in this climate.

Speaker 22 Before it would be wheat, barley, and some oats, and now it's switched to mostly

Speaker 22 canola and wheat.

Speaker 4 The resulting oil, the final endpoint of thousands of years of growing and decades of breeding, that final product is that clear, flavorless cooking oil available basically everywhere these days.

Speaker 22 For quite a long time now, I mean, that's just the main vegetable oil that's in the grocery stores here.

Speaker 16 But in my home country, England, that innocuous, multi-purpose cooking oil is not the only kind of rapeseed oil on the shelves.

Speaker 16 In fact, these days, canola, or as we still call it, rapeseed oil, is taking extra virgin olive oil on at its own game and sometimes winning.

Speaker 38 How rapeseed got fancy after the break.

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Speaker 4 Duncan Farrington is a fourth-generation farmer in England, and he remembers when his dad started growing rapeseed for oil.

Speaker 27 We started growing it here. My father started growing it in 1984, but there were other neighbors around that were growing it.
five or so years, maybe even 10 years before that.

Speaker 18 What happened was in the 1970s, French plant breeders breeders started looking at old-fashioned rapeseed again.

Speaker 18 They'd seen what their Canadian colleagues had done, and they had good reason to be interested in an edible oil that could be grown in the milder, wetter climates of northern Europe.

Speaker 4 One of those reasons was that in the 1970s, America suffered an intense drought, and we didn't want to send our soy to Europe, even though they had been depending on it for animal feed.

Speaker 4 We put an embargo on shipping it over. Remember, the rapeseed leftovers after oil pressings are great for animals.

Speaker 23 These were uncertain times.

Speaker 18 Food imports in general were threatened by the oil crisis in the Middle East.

Speaker 42 Meanwhile, another edible oil source, the peanut, that was having a little crisis of its own, also drought-related.

Speaker 21 U.S.

Speaker 39 supermarket shelves were stripped of peanut butter.

Speaker 8 So oils were in short supply all round.

Speaker 27 The EEC, European Economic Community, got together, and one of the things they looked at doing, which was very important, was making sure Europe wouldn't starve again and Europe would have food security.

Speaker 4 And so those French breeders did what the Canadian breeders had done.

Speaker 4 They created a rapeseed plant that had low levels of erucic acid and glucosinolids, but that was better suited to European climates where you can get two harvests a year.

Speaker 4 This solved both the edible oil issue and the animal feed crisis.

Speaker 41 And just like in Canada, this new and improved version of rapeseed caught on right away.

Speaker 27 There was a high demand for it, and the prices originally were very, very high.

Speaker 27 I remember when I was a boy, farmers would call it black gold because it was worth a lot of money.

Speaker 18 This European rapeseed oil 2.0 was pretty much identical to the Canadian version, except it wasn't called canola.

Speaker 21 It wasn't fancied, to be sure.

Speaker 27 Back in the day, you'd go into the supermarkets, and there'd be an array of plastic bottles, and it was called vegetable oil.

Speaker 27 It'd often have a nice little pretty picture of a yellow flower on there, but it wasn't called rapeseed oil. It was just called vegetable oil.

Speaker 4 Duncan went off to university and studied the family business. He studied agriculture.

Speaker 27 And I thought rapeseed sounded pretty interesting, so I did a literature review on rapeseed and rapeseed oil.

Speaker 27 And while I was doing it, I just came across the fact that there's a crop that we grow in Britain.

Speaker 27 It's considered, as we've been talking about, it is a cheap commodity crop found in a supermarket in a plastic bottle, highly refined, no character. No one knows anything about it.

Speaker 27 It's got an awful name of rape.

Speaker 27 So no one cared about it.

Speaker 12 Duncan didn't think that was fair. He felt like it deserved better.

Speaker 27 I researched it at university and found out how wonderful it was and thought, why on earth are we not making something about this in Britain? And actually, one of the researchers was a chap called Dr.

Speaker 27 Kerr Walker, who was a researcher from Scotland. And I was talking to him one day, and he had done a lot of nutritional research on the effects of rapeseed oil.
And he was known globally.

Speaker 27 And I said, why don't we talk about it and make something of it in Britain? And he said, Duncan, it will never work. With the word rape, it's never going to work.

Speaker 4 We're going to get back to the nutritional research on rapeseed oil. Obviously, that's something contentious these days, but Duncan wasn't put off by the problematic name.

Speaker 4 He needed a high-value crop to help keep his family farm afloat. At the time, what they were growing, which included rapeseed for boring vegetable oil and animal feed, it wasn't enough.

Speaker 27 And if I wanted to stay on the farm, which I was absolutely, you know, I wanted to be a farmer, but if I wanted to stay on the farm, the only way I could economically do that was look at diversifying in some way or another.

Speaker 27 So I went back to my university research, a little germ of or an embryo of an idea of a business. I went and I spent 18 months actually doing a business plan.

Speaker 4 His idea was to produce a high quality, higher price rapeseed oil, like extra virgin olive oil versus the cheap industrial stuff.

Speaker 27 And eventually in 2005 we set up Britain's first cold crush business. We were the first company in the UK to grow, press and bottle rapeseed oil on farm.
And we've not looked back since.

Speaker 16 The growing part doesn't involve anything revolutionary.

Speaker 21 Duncan grows rapeseed pretty much the same way his father did.

Speaker 18 He plants it in late summer, and it takes a while to get going.

Speaker 27 So, over the winter, it lays dormant and looks like lots of very small cabbages.

Speaker 27 And then, as the weather starts warming up, and the day length lengthens from the end of February, it starts really growing. And what happens then?

Speaker 27 It turns more away from looking like a cabbage to a tall plant with lots of branches on it. And it has these tiny little pods which look like more like runner bean pods or pea pods.

Speaker 27 And inside those pods, when they are mature, are little black seeds, and inside the black seeds is a yellow kernel, and we squeeze that, and that's where the lovely, delicious yellow oil comes from.

Speaker 4 Squeezing it, that's the real difference between Duncan's oil and the industrial product. For industrial rapeseed oil manufacturing, the seeds are all first heated to 185 degrees Fahrenheit.

Speaker 4 Not quite boiling, but very hot.

Speaker 27 Because the higher the temperature, the more efficient the oil extraction. And then it's refined using often hexane solvents because it dissolves the oil.

Speaker 16 The oil is trapped in solid plant matter and hexane pulls it out.

Speaker 4 And the hexane and oil liquid mix is separated out from the solids. Then the hexane is boiled off.

Speaker 27 And then it's bleached and it's deodorized and you end up with a very bland-looking oil and a tasteless oil.

Speaker 21 There are a couple of good economic reasons to make rapeseed oil this way.

Speaker 16 One, mass-market edible oil suppliers actually want an end product that's anonymous and undistinguished.

Speaker 18 It allows them to hedge their bets.

Speaker 27 If rapeseed harvest fails one year, or the price of rapeseed is high, soya oil, sunflower oil, olive oil, other oils can be substituted.

Speaker 27 And if it's all put in a bottle and it's all a clear, tasteless product, it doesn't matter what's in it. It's called vegetable oil.

Speaker 4 But also, this industrial process is really efficient. It works so well that the seed residue only has about 1% oil left in it.

Speaker 27 Compared to ours on a cold day at 18%, and in the summer we might have 10% oil in it.

Speaker 27 So what we're doing, it is very, very inefficient compared to a great big factory doing it more in a commercial way.

Speaker 16 Duncan's oil is, like he said, cold pressed, which means all the flavours and antioxidants in the oil aren't cooked out.

Speaker 30 Again, it's like extra virgin olive oil compared to industrial olive oil.

Speaker 27 It's very simple. We call it the process of no process.
All we do, we take our seeds and we squeeze them.

Speaker 27 I started with one press, I've now got 18 of them, and they are squeezing the seeds without any added heat.

Speaker 4 Duncan showed us some of those seeds, his presses squeeze. They look like tiny round little balls of mustard seeds you might buy at the store to cook with.

Speaker 27 But mustard seeds have a brown or yellow coating, rapeseed has a black coating.

Speaker 27 And if you actually squeeze one of those seeds between your fingernails, inside there's this yellow kernel, and that is where the oil-bearing cells are.

Speaker 27 Now, if you have a mortar and pestle and you bash those seeds it takes an awful long time to get oil out of it but our little presses they're going 24 hours a day seven days a week and when it's just gently squeezing the seed the oil comes out and the oil comes out with bits of seed husk and material so then we pass it through a filter which is like a great big tea strainer and then we put it in a bottle and it is as simple as that and what we're doing we're just capturing all of the natural nutrition and character of that oil we aren't removing anything, we aren't adding anything.

Speaker 27 So, it is, it is what it is.

Speaker 4 Of course, the final product is more expensive than plain vegetable oil, but it's cheaper than extra virgin olive oil.

Speaker 32 So far, so great.

Speaker 42 But, like Duncan's scientist friend Kerr Walker, at this point in the story, I confess that I am feeling a little skepticism about whether the great British public was really going to embrace an artisanal coal-pressed rapeseed oil.

Speaker 4 This is just what Duncan found himself up against when he first launched his company more than 20 years ago.

Speaker 27 So, So when I first started, if you're really posh, you know, everyone consumed olive oil. If you weren't quite so posh, sunflower oil sounds nice.
It's nice and sunny and has a good feeling about it.

Speaker 27 And, you know, if you're a commonal garden person like myself, you probably have rapeseed oil from the local supermarket. And that was what you had.

Speaker 27 And rapeseed, or vegetable oil, as it is known, was seen as the cheap, cheerful... commodity product.

Speaker 12 What that meant is he didn't just have to make oil, he also had to change people's attitudes.

Speaker 27 Originally, my mother and myself did our first days bottling and we spilt oil everywhere and we were trying to work the machinery and then eventually we knew how to do it but I had a few bottles at the end of the day and I put them in the boot of my car and I literally drove around.

Speaker 27 I got a speeding ticket on the way because I was in a hurry. I think on that first day I drove around nine potential customers.
I came back with eight customers.

Speaker 4 Duncan didn't want to do the farmer's market route. He wanted to go to shops and have them displaying his oil alongside all their other beautiful products.

Speaker 4 One of the nine shops he visited was the local butcher.

Speaker 27 And he said, okay, and he is probably just trying to take it off me to shut me up and get me to disappear.

Speaker 27 But we did this deal and I said, look, if you buy a case off me, if it doesn't sell, give me a call in a couple of weeks' time or whenever, and I'll come and I'll give you your money back and we'll say at least we gave it a try.

Speaker 27 And Mr. Johnson was his name.
He said, that sounds like a good idea, Duncan. So we did that.
And then two weeks later, the phone rings and it's Mr. Johnson.
I thought, oh, no, here we go.

Speaker 27 And he said, Duncan, you know that oil you bought? Can I have two more cases, please?

Speaker 42 Pretty much everyone who tried Duncan's cold press rapeseed oil became a convert.

Speaker 36 Even the non-human consumers.

Speaker 27 Put it this way. When we first started the company, my wife and I, Ellie and I, we had a German pointer dog called Ollie.
We named him after the oil company, Ollie the dog.

Speaker 27 And he's the company mascot for a long time.

Speaker 27 And he absolutely loved, if he'd get the chance to go and lick up a bit of oil off the floor anywhere, he absolutely loved it and he had a very shiny coat because of it.

Speaker 4 That sounds lovely. I'd love a shiny coat myself.
And Duncan said his oil really is totally different from industrial vegetable oil, the clear canola or rapeseed oil in the see-through plastic bottle.

Speaker 27 It's as different as chalk and cheese. First of all, you can see the lovely yellow colour.
With that yellow colour, it's the carotenoids in there that give it the colour.

Speaker 27 So a refined oil, they would bleach it. So the colour goes straight away.
And when the colour goes, it takes away some of the nutrition.

Speaker 8 Having got hold of a bottle ourselves, we can confirm that it is, in fact, extremely yellow.

Speaker 6 Here we are at the inaugural canola tasting.

Speaker 49 Thank you for having me. I can't wait.

Speaker 8 Once again, I roped my long-suffering husband, Jeff, into another glamorous gastropod tasting.

Speaker 12 I toasted some bread and put out extra virgin olive oil, Duncan's cold-pressed rapeseed oil, and some regular canola oil in three little saucers.

Speaker 49 They all have liquid in them. One is what I suspect to be olive oil.
Another one is very almost clear and doesn't look particularly good. And then another one is a very deep yellow.

Speaker 49 It's a pretty unappetizing color of yellow, frankly. It looks like someone has kidney problems.

Speaker 49 Or like somebody just had a massive molten butter incident at a movie theater.

Speaker 4 My partner Tim and I did a similar tasting. We were going to compare the cold-pressed rapeseed to normal canola oil, to olive oil, and to sunflower oil from Maine, not too far from me.

Speaker 4 Unlike Jeff, I thought the color was delightful. Now I'm going to open for the first time this rapeseed oil that was delivered all the way from the UK.

Speaker 4 Okay, very pretty color. I'm going to pour it out.

Speaker 4 Just a little bit. It is the brightest yellow of the bunch.
Tim cut us some bread that he just made that day and we took it over to the four white saucers that had the oil.

Speaker 4 Tim and I started with the plain canola oil.

Speaker 22 It really has zero color.

Speaker 22 No real smell.

Speaker 22 Doesn't change the taste of the bread at all, but it changes the texture because you've got the little kind of oily mouthfeel.

Speaker 4 Oh, it's weird to just dunk in plain because it's like you get the fat, but no flavor.

Speaker 4 It's not like butter or olive oil.

Speaker 22 Not a winner.

Speaker 6 Yeah, same verdict in our household.

Speaker 49 Well, I don't know, but I'd go as far as to say that it doesn't have a taste.

Speaker 31 It has no flavor.

Speaker 8 It has

Speaker 22 fat.

Speaker 13 Like

Speaker 5 my tongue has a like a fat texture on it now.

Speaker 4 Okay for cooking, not for dunking. Unsurprisingly, all four of us totally love dunking our bread in olive oil.

Speaker 12 Honestly, I could drink good olive oil by the glass.

Speaker 22 It is pure bliss.

Speaker 4 I wanted to love my local sunflower oil, but I'm not a huge fan.

Speaker 22 They're kind of weird.

Speaker 22 It's almost a little smoky.

Speaker 22 Or...

Speaker 22 burnt tasting maybe. I don't know.

Speaker 4 It just tastes so intensely of sunflower seeds to me that even when I cook with it, I want to really like it because I like supporting local oil and it's okay with like cabbage, but it keeps a very strong flavor of sunflower.

Speaker 36 And then it was on to the main event.

Speaker 33 The bright yellow, cold-pressed rapeseed oil.

Speaker 6 Alright, I've soaked up a lot of it just to make sure.

Speaker 18 It definitely has a flavor.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 38 I want to say it's a little cabbage-y, honestly.

Speaker 12 I mean, I like cabbage, but it's savory and cabbage-y.

Speaker 28 Jeff thought it was more like a string bean thing than a cabbage vibe, but both of us liked it.

Speaker 49 And I'm just spitballing here, but like if it was on a salad, maybe I wouldn't notice that it wasn't olive oil, and it would just continue the taste of a salad because it has that kind of leafy, string bean-y, you said it was cabbage-y, but it tastes, you know, a little, it tastes like a dressing that has already been on a salad and now it's at the bottom of the bowl.

Speaker 4 At first, I think I was influenced by knowing that it's related to broccoli. I get like a little vegetal, little vegetal, like brassica thing going on.

Speaker 4 Then I just took a little sip of the oil straight. So tasting it on its own, I'd actually say it almost, it almost has a little nuttiness to it.

Speaker 4 I'm not, like even maybe more than this like cabbage-y thing. It's like a vegetal, slight nuttiness, not intense nuttiness like sesame.

Speaker 4 It's really interesting.

Speaker 17 Also, it was not nearly as bold as the olive oil, which for me made it better for cooking or dressing a salad rather than dipping, but that's part of its charm.

Speaker 27 It is, as the name says, it's yellow yellow in colour and mellow in flavor. There's no bitterness at all.

Speaker 4 And that's the origin of the name. Duncan's oil is called mellow yellow.

Speaker 4 After our tasting, Nikki used it to make roasted potatoes, which sounded delicious, and I made some cabbage with it at high heat. It was great.
I'm a fan.

Speaker 18 Rapeseed slash canola has a higher smoke point than olive oil, which basically means you can heat it to a higher temperature before it breaks down and starts to smoke.

Speaker 40 So it's good for any time you want to cook at a really hot temperature.

Speaker 27 And because it's light in flavor and not overpowering, that's that's why you can use it in a salad dressing or you can use it right through to baking cakes and it's not going to overpower the cake you bake with it.

Speaker 4 When Duncan started, as we've said, nobody was making cold-pressed rapeseed oil, but his oil got so popular so quickly, Michelin starred chef started using it too.

Speaker 4 Anyway, he basically invented a new food sector in the UK.

Speaker 27 I think within the first five years, there were probably, I don't know, say 50 growers around the country starting doing their own brands.

Speaker 6 So, what we have established here is that rapeseed oil can taste great.

Speaker 41 But, and I hate to mention it, isn't it supposed to be killing us?

Speaker 4 That's coming up after the break.

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Speaker 1 They are the hateful eight. Canola, soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, ref brand, and cottonseed oils.

Speaker 4 Megan Kelly used to be on Fox News, and now she hosts her own serious radio show called The Megan Kelly Show.

Speaker 4 And she was speaking with someone named Casey Means, who calls herself a functional medicine/slash holistic medicine doctor. She is a doctor.

Speaker 13 Which does not make her advice any more scientifically sound, unfortunately.

Speaker 17 Casey told Megan that if you eat canola, you're basically eating engine lubricant, which if you've been listening, you'll know is really stretching the truth.

Speaker 42 Rapeseed oil was indeed a lubricant, and then its entire fatty acid composition was transformed through breeding.

Speaker 28 But that's not the only criticism of canola out there.

Speaker 27 The funniest one I heard was, or read, was that rapeseed is related to mustard, and mustard was used in the Second World War as mustard gas, so it kills you. So you shouldn't eat rapeseed oil.

Speaker 27 Well, excuse me, people are quite happy to put mustard on their hot dog, and yet they thought that it's the same thing as mustard gas. So there is a lot of nonsense out there.

Speaker 36 In case you're worried, mustard gas the weapon is a human-made chemical.

Speaker 30 It's not chemically related to mustard or other brassicas.

Speaker 42 It just got its name because it smells a little sulfury at room temperature and turns yellow-brown when it's mixed with other chemicals to form a weapon.

Speaker 4 Casey didn't mention mustard gas, but she did also go hard on the industrial process for turning canola seeds into oil.

Speaker 4 I think if you really want to lose your lunch, you should Google a video of how canola oil is made.

Speaker 1 The listening audience, it looks like they put that through a car engine. That's really what it reminded me of.
Shh. Putting it through a car engine and feeding.

Speaker 7 Duncan described this process to us earlier.

Speaker 8 It's the standard process for all industrial oils, including non-extra virgin olive oil.

Speaker 42 And like most industrial food production processes, it does look a little...

Speaker 18 well, industrial.

Speaker 30 It's not what we like to picture when we're thinking about how our food gets made, but welcome to reality, folks.

Speaker 4 Also, the hexane residues in edible oil processing don't seem to be a health issue.

Speaker 4 Look, we don't love the sound of hexane, which is a petroleum product, and we haven't studied the impact of its entire life cycle. But it's been used to extract oil since the 1930s.

Speaker 4 It's been extensively researched. High exposures do cause health effects, but there's a vanishingly small amount of hexane left after the processing is done.

Speaker 4 And so you get more exposure to hexane from the fumes when you fuel up your car than by eating industrial canola oil.

Speaker 8 Still, thanks to all the social media misinformation out there, a lot of people are now cutting out canola along with its fellow seed oils.

Speaker 55 Sweet Green just announced they are removing seed oils from their cooking oil and phasing it out from their salad dressings. This is amazing, guys.

Speaker 8 And some are even replacing it with good old-fashioned beef tallow.

Speaker 56 Steak and Shake says all locations will be quote RFK'd as they swap vegetable oil for a healthier beef callow to cook their iconic shoestring fries.

Speaker 4 Bad news for vegetarians who like their fries or people who care about industrial animal agriculture and its welfare and environmental implications.

Speaker 4 But also Carla says that beef tallow isn't so great for us.

Speaker 22 There is plenty of evidence out there to say that a high saturated fat diet is not beneficial, certainly not beneficial in terms of cardiovascular disease and perhaps certain types of cancers.

Speaker 10 So beef tallow definitely has issues.

Speaker 20 Meanwhile, the hexane and mustard gas and engine oil issues with canola are not really real.

Speaker 42 But for critics of canola, these are all side issues.

Speaker 11 The real problem with canola is is that it supposedly causes inflammation.

Speaker 4 Inflammation is blamed for just about every health problem these days, but the science of it is definitely more nuanced.

Speaker 4 Inflammation can be bad, but also a little inflammation can sometimes help you heal. That's part of why this immune system response exists.

Speaker 10 The problem with canola, again, according to the critics, is to do with the particular fatty acids it contains.

Speaker 22 So canola oil is known for its high monounsaturated fatty acid content?

Speaker 4 The term monounsaturated has to do with its structure. Monounsaturated fatty acids are the kinds of fatty acids you find a lot of in vegetable oils like olive oils.

Speaker 4 Our bodies can make monounsaturated fatty acids, but it's also important that we get them from food.

Speaker 42 Saturated fatty acids are fats like in meat, cheese, coconut oil, and palm oil, and science has shown pretty clearly that these aren't as great in large amounts for most of us for our overall health.

Speaker 2 Canola oil has very little saturated fat.

Speaker 4 And then there's what's known as polyunsaturated fatty acids. These are the omega fats.
Omega-3 and omega-6 are the main ones. We did a whole episode on these types of fatty acids called omega-123.

Speaker 29 You should check it out. Guess what?

Speaker 8 Canola oil has those too.

Speaker 22 It also has a fairly good level of omega-3 as ALA, alpha-linolenic acid.

Speaker 22 And the other polyunsaturated fatty acid there besides the ALA is primarily what we abbreviate as LA or linoleic acid, which is an omega-6 fatty acid.

Speaker 22 If we get those in our diet, then we can convert them to all these other fatty acids that we need in our body.

Speaker 4 Omega-3 and omega-6 are called essential fatty acids because our bodies need them and we can't make them ourselves. We have to get them in food.

Speaker 32 So, great, canola has both of these essential polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Speaker 16 But then the argument goes the linoleic acid, the LA, which is the omega-6,

Speaker 38 in in our bodies that becomes something called arachidonic acid.

Speaker 54 Another omega-6 fatty acid, which can be turned into

Speaker 54 pro-inflammatory metabolites.

Speaker 4 Maddie Markland is a nutrition scientist at Johns Hopkins, and he and a team of researchers around the world tried to figure out whether eating linoleic acid was connected to arachidonic acid and to bad health outcomes.

Speaker 4 And as we discussed in our recent episode about nutrition science, it's hard to get good information on what people eat, so they found a way to measure it that was much more scientific.

Speaker 54 Instead of asking people what they are eating, can we take a blood sample and measure the fatty acid concentration in the blood?

Speaker 11 Matty and his colleagues analyzed the data from more than 30 different studies involving more than 70,000 people from different countries.

Speaker 40 Some of them were short-term studies, some ran for more than 30 years.

Speaker 54 And during that follow-up time, we are looking at how many people are developing cardiovascular disease. We also looked at cardiovascular mortality as an outcome.

Speaker 54 And what we found was that those with the highest levels of linoleic acid in their blood had the lowest risk of developing cardiovascular diseases.

Speaker 33 So that's good, right?

Speaker 11 Lower risk of cardiovascular disease sounds like a win to me.

Speaker 4 But what about this idea that linoleic acid or omega-6 turns into arachidonic acid and that's where the problem lies?

Speaker 4 Well, Maddie told us that, first of all, arachidonic acid turns into different chemicals in the body. Some cause inflammation and some actually are anti-inflammatory.

Speaker 4 But even more importantly, it seems as though inside our bodies, linoleic acid doesn't turn into much arachidonic acid at all.

Speaker 54 Studies using stable isotopes, so they can actually look at the specific molecules, they have found that there is very limited conversion of linoleic acid to arachidonic acid in the human body.

Speaker 16 So, that whole mechanism that's supposed to be behind the omega-6s in canola and other seed oils causing inflammation, it turns out that's not what's actually going on.

Speaker 16 In fact, Matty told us the evidence suggests that linoleic acid, the supposedly bad stuff in canola oil, it not only doesn't increase inflammation, it also seems to have some real health benefits and not just for lowering the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Speaker 54 We also found that linoleic acid was strongly associated with lower risk of

Speaker 54 type 2 diabetes. So, linoleic acid, we know, can also improve glucose metabolism.
And there are other data suggesting that linoleic acid reduces inflammation, it can also reduce blood pressure.

Speaker 4 But another thing that seed oil haters claim is that it's the ratio that we have way too much omega-6 compared to omega-3 in our diets today, and that's what's making us sick.

Speaker 4 Maddie checked for that too.

Speaker 54 Yeah, we did, so we did statistically adjust for omega-3 fatty acid levels, and we also did kind of stratified analysis where we look specifically in those with low omega-3 and those with high omega-3 acid levels.

Speaker 54 And we didn't see any difference in this association between linoleic acid and cardiovascular disease.

Speaker 54 So our study and other studies does not really suggest that the ratio itself should be changed by reducing omega-6 fatty acids.

Speaker 54 It's more probably that you should increase omega-3 fatty acids to improve improve the ratio.

Speaker 16 In other words, cutting out seed oils is not going to help boost your omega-3 levels.

Speaker 30 For that, you have to eat more omega-3s.

Speaker 11 And outside of oily fish, which are delicious, but which most Americans consume very little of, and outside of tofu and chia seeds and flaxseeds, which are also pretty underrepresented in the standard Western diet, canola is actually a bit of an omega-3 superstar.

Speaker 22 It is at a level that is a little bit higher than soybean oil, definitely much higher than the omega-3 found in

Speaker 22 something like corn oil or the traditional sunflower, safflower oils, and so forth.

Speaker 22 And also compared to olive oil, canola oil has a much higher level of omega-3.

Speaker 4 Daryush Mazafarian is director of the Tufts University Food is Medicine Institute. He was on our nutrition science episode, and he's one of the co-authors of Maddie's study.

Speaker 4 He says, basically, there's no reason to avoid canola or any other seed oil.

Speaker 57 This is, you know, one of the great internet myths that's out there that seed oils are harmful.

Speaker 57 And canola oil has been studied in well over 100 randomized control trials and overwhelmingly been shown to improve every risk factor that has been looked at and never been shown to be pro-inflammatory, which is kind of the theory.

Speaker 57 We have all the science. Like, we don't need any more studies on canola oil.
This is one of the most well-established areas of science there is, is the health effects of plant oils.

Speaker 18 So, long story short, RFK, Joe Rogan, Megan Kelly and her guest, and a whole bunch of other online influencer types are, to put it politely, completely and utterly incorrect on this issue, as well as many others.

Speaker 4 Now, just saying that a processed junk food like cookies or chips has canola oil won't give it magical health-promoting properties, of course, and we certainly can't say that there won't ever be research linking omega-6s to increased risk of any disease.

Speaker 4 Still, Maddie and and Carla and everyone else who studies it say that canola and other seed oils are fine. The industrial ones are fine for you.

Speaker 4 But Maddie agrees with Duncan that the mellow yellow cold pressed stuff is likely even better.

Speaker 54 Perhaps with cold pressed oils you can retain more antioxidants and other things that could be destroyed during high heat treatment. So yeah, in that sense,

Speaker 54 it might be a good idea to use more cold pressed oils.

Speaker 8 Mellow yellow is not on the shelves here in the US, but you can find a little less processed canola oil in grocery stores.

Speaker 18 It's organic and expeller-pressed rather than being the more heavily refined stuff.

Speaker 13 But it is not at all the same as Duncan's cold press.

Speaker 32 Carla says she knows of a small company in Canada that tried to do the same thing as Duncan, but it didn't really catch on.

Speaker 22 I think the biggest roadblock right now is the consumer perception because here in North America, we've, you know, kind of grown up around our vegetable oil is nice, clear, light-colored.

Speaker 22 And yeah, maybe it just wasn't the right timing to take off to say, here's an alternative for

Speaker 12 what

Speaker 22 we can do with something that's grown here.

Speaker 13 That point about canola being local, that's also important.

Speaker 33 Matty is originally from Sweden, and he said that for northern countries like Sweden, or England, or Canada, where olive oil is not grown, canola/slash rapeseed has even more value as part of a healthy diet.

Speaker 54 So, in Sweden and in Scandinavia, we have worked on developing a healthy Nordic diet since we might not always have the foods that are typical for the Mediterranean diet, like fresh fruits. So,

Speaker 54 you should look into the healthy Nordic diet. And one component is to consume more canola oil instead of other fats.

Speaker 4 Carla says she doesn't just study canola oil, she eats it too.

Speaker 22 I mean, yeah, I do research on it,

Speaker 22 I use it myself.

Speaker 22 I do have some olive oil for some particular uses, but my everyday go-to happens to be canola oil.

Speaker 5 Carla's talking about regular canola.

Speaker 6 But if you're lucky enough to get your hands on some of Duncan's mellow yellow, he has some tips for peak enjoyment.

Speaker 27 Do whatever you want to do. There's no particular rules on this.
If your thing is stir-fries, you know, use it as a stir-fry oil.

Speaker 27 If you like roast potatoes and you're very traditional on a Sunday, especially in Britain, do your roast potatoes in mellow yellow.

Speaker 27 It is a high-temperature oil, and you get the most lovely, crispy potatoes. They've got this lovely golden color because the colour of the oil on there, and they're fantastic.

Speaker 4 Thanks this episode to Duncan Farrington, Michael Eskin, Carla Taylor, Maddie Markland, and Darios Mazafarian, and of course to listener Amy McLeod, who sent us down this rabbit hole.

Speaker 4 We have links to their research companies and rapeseed oil on our website, gastropod.com.

Speaker 5 Thanks also to our superstar producer, Claudia Guib.

Speaker 32 We wanted to leave you this episode with a special treat.

Speaker 12 Turns out Michael Eskin is not just a distinguished professor, he's also a rapper.

Speaker 35 Without lipids, we can't survive. They help the cells in our bodies stay alive.
They control what enters and what leaves.

Speaker 58 By the way, the past for lipids in the membranes interweaves. Allipose tissue comes from lipids we eat.

Speaker 35 It covers our bodies and regulates heat. Without lipids,

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