Canola oil

Excellent post, David C...... Thank you for this!  Very enlightening on a confusing subject to many I'm sure.

As a substitute for flax oil, is there some sort of recommendation for getting an 'ample' equivalent of the omega 3s from direct flax-seed inclusion in the diet?  We have plenty of locally produced oil-seed flax, much of the large scale production destined for linseed oil, but plenty for dietary use as well.  

More questions likely to follow.....much thanks!

David, a remarkable post. I hate to ask, and please do not take this as a challenge, but would you be willing to give us some indication of your background/qualifications? I hope you will understand that it may help people navigate these perilous waters.

Respectfully,
-Doug

As a substitute for flax oil, is there some sort of recommendation for getting an 'ample' equivalent of the omega 3s from direct flax-seed inclusion in the diet?  

To grind seeds for my daily cereal I found some like oats, millet, lentils were too dusty others like flax, sunflower, pumpkin, chia were too oily and gummed up in the process.  So I gradually accumulated scoops of the right proportions about 2/3 to 1 of oily seed to dusty.  I usually have six seeds in a batch mixed
with water in a stainless steel bowl that fits inside the cooking kettle to make a double boiler to simmer for 2 to 4 hours.  That is my daily bread; seems to work well to get digestible but not degraded amounts of essentials.

We use olive oil  and butter for everything except deep frying where we use sunflower oil. We grow and press our own olive oil and have enough for our community of around 12 people with a bit over to sell.
We also make our own butter. When we get to much cream from our cow we make gee.

Thanks so much for your extensive post, I have learned some new facts!

I do buy cold-pressed local rapeseed oil from time to time (e.g. to make muffins), I also buy cold-pressed sunflower oil (just checked in the pantry: one local, one organic from France, both a bit expensive) and sometimes flax oil.

But I use virgin olive oil most. OK, it is not local but it was imported in Central Europe in former times as well. I also use butter, never margarine.

I have even convinced husband that butter is not that bad (he comes from a family of doctors that thought butter, fat, eggs, cream etc. were the devil's and bought all the "light"/substituted stuff - both his parents died of cancer. No idea if there is a correlation but probably yes).
He will still cut off the fatty edge from bacon but now that I bought some seasoned lard (in Bavaria we have both pig and goose lard as a spread for bread) he even eats that.
My grandparents grew up on this diet and lived well into their nineties/over hundred years.

It is sure hard to get the balance between health, sustainability and ethics! Youngest daughter is strictly vegetarian and I although I consider myself flexitarian I have a hard time sometimes getting a balanced meal on the table that all would eat, that is both sustainable, balanced and affordable!

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:David, a remarkable post. I hate to ask, and please do not take this as a challenge, but would you be willing to give us some indication of your background/qualifications? I hope you will understand that it may help people navigate these perilous waters.

Very diplomatic, Doug - but why on earth should a 'challenge' be a problem?  I've made several statements which are clearly not from mainstream thought (or assumptions, anyway) and so can be termed properly as 'eccentric'.  That doesn't make me wrong, but it certainly needs, like any statement or practice, to be challenged.

I'm a retired secondary teacher, specialty geography, and in the UK that's ages 11-18.  I've also run many courses for teachers.  I got interested in good health through watching many of my close family die through heart disease, and this was clearly mostly because of poor diet.  So I've spent the last three decades working to be sure of good health despite challenging work and home environments, leading to examining and trying diet plans, nutritional practices and medical research.  And gradually, I was able to question and check both the accepted wisdom of nutrition and health and the 'eccentric' ideas that weren't obviously loony.

Result?  I wrote a book!  A diet plan and the rationale behind it, giving users a flexible way to adapt any dietary practice to become healthy, and be a basis for a lifetime habit of health and good eating.  I called it "The Bad Health Diet", and it's been trialled again and again as I honed it to 'perfection'.  The book is currently about 300 pages, with the philosophy (there's a turn-off!), the outline plan, the detailed plan, culinary suggestions and some recipes.  It's easy to follow, but you have to engage - and few people want to.

So it's failed, so far.  Three reasons why I won't publish to the world: it asks people to change; it needs them to think; and I'm not a well-enough known name to attract people.  I've tried to simplify it, but the dieticians tell me that it mustn't miss out the key principles.  I've tried to split it into sections for different mindsets, but that gets too complicated.  And it doesn't use a 'hook' to attract, just a reality that - so the doctors and dieticians say - is one that folks don't want to face.  Yet it's easy to follow - I use it (which is why I wrote it!) and everyone who's tried it likes it.  Then most of them sort-of fade away into bad diet anyway.  Hey!  Try telling a smoker doctor to quit, or a vastly overweight doctor to slim!

Because of my deep research, then, and the fact that what I say has the oral agreement of every expert I've debated with, I reckon I'm worth challenging.  Want to know my sources?  Just ask - and then follow up and make up your own mind once you read the evidence on each point yesterday that I knew would be a challenge to both mainstream and oddball ideas.  If you're open minded enough, I think you'll accept the evidence, and come to agree with me.

My husband is a retired chef, and I was a baker. We often use very high heat - though he does it more than I. The smoke point is an issue for us, not in a health issue, so much as a 'fill the house with smoke' (and possible fire) issue. The old joke about knowing dinner is done, when the smoke alarm goes off thing? Our joke is that's when we know the pan is (finally) hot enough to start cooking.

John Weiland wrote:As a substitute for flax oil, is there some sort of recommendation for getting an 'ample' equivalent of the omega 3s from direct flax-seed inclusion in the diet?  We have plenty of locally produced oil-seed flax, much of the large scale production destined for linseed oil, but plenty for dietary use as well.

Thanks, John.

As I said, flax isn't the only good source of plant-based omega-3, but it's (fairly) cheap compared with the alternatives.  And yes, eating the seed works fine, as long as you remember two key points:

#1: Flax is one of those seeds designed to be eaten by a bird, pass through the gut undamaged, then be deposited somewhere advantageous to the flax plant, together with a dollop of fertilizer!  That also applies if you eat it!  So to use the omega-3, you have to take steps to break the seed's protection from being digested.  The two common ways available in-store are cracking and grinding; if you buy the seed whole (in this form, it's good for at least a year in your storage cupboard), you'll need to process it yourself before use.  You can buy milled flaxseed and cracked flaxseed in a health store, but in vacuum-sealed packs - heed the use-by date on these.  Beware, though, that you should store the unsealed packet chilled or frozen, and eat it up quickly.  For the nutritional value, it's fine to eat rancid flaxseed, just as it is with the oil, but the taste's not pleasant!  That's why the big commercial companies don't handle flax, and why the growing of it almost died out in the West a century ago, because farmers couldn't sell their crop.  You may have seen both brown and golden flax seed (nutritionally identical) used in biscuits and bread or as a topping, with a hint that it's healthy.  No.  Unless the seed's broken, it's just pretty-looking roughage.

#2: The flaxseed coating has another property - it gets sticky when it's wetted, because the outer coating swells and jellies in water.  So if you eat the seed in cereals or a smoothie, make sure it's surrounded with plenty of liquid to dilute the gel.  I often add flaxseed when I make bread, but I've now fully migrated to using it milled - with extra water in the bread to allow for that absorption.  Hans Quistorff, does that help you?

Chia seed is easier to handle than flax.  While problem 2 above applies equally, the seed will digest fully, when eaten unbroken.  So you can substitute it in the same proportions if it's available near you.  Modern Chia has come along amazingly well in the last two decades.  It's a Mexican native and was a staple food of the Aztecs with - in Udo Erasmus' table - about a third oil in the seed, 30% Omega-3 to flax's 60%, and triple the omega-6.  Flax is a quarter protein with few carbs, chia is a half carbs but has little protein.  But Udo's info is old, and I know modern chia has much more omega-3.  

I've just been trawling the net for more recent data and found this article from a team at Poznań University in Poland.  In Table 2 it gives a snapshot of modern breeds of chia, which are now grown worldwide in suitable climates.  "Chia seeds - the current state of knowledge 2019"  This table shows two analyses of both modern-breed chia and flax oils; they have similar omega-3, but the flax has double the MUFAs and much less omega-6.  Udo Erasmus, by the way, really IS the guru of food oils.  He's now retired (but find him on Facebook); he recently told me that the 1993 second edition of his seminal book is still current in the science.  https://www.amazon.ca/Fats-that-Heal-Kill/dp/0920470386/  Though of course, the omega controversy is still running, and still almost ignored by mainstream medicine, despite the research base for the work (in several doctoral papers) being validated by the late 1970s and it being addressed regularly by nutritionists.  Udo's thought is that there's a LOT of money tied up in megacorp food oils....

Anita Martin wrote:I use virgin olive oil most. OK, it is not local but it was imported in Central Europe in former times as well. I also use butter, never margarine. I have even convinced husband that butter is not that bad (he comes from a family of doctors that thought butter, fat, eggs, cream etc. were the devil's and bought all the "light"/substituted stuff - both his parents died of cancer. No idea if there is a correlation but probably yes).
He will still cut off the fatty edge from bacon but now that I bought some seasoned lard (in Bavaria we have both pig and goose lard as a spread for bread) he even eats that.

Thank you, Anita.  

I did extensive work on margarines from the 1990s and watched the trans-fats quietly disappear from the supermarket shelves during the noughties.  I think the mega oil companies maybe got frightened of possible litigation over trans-fats, just as happened to tobacco companies.  But there was an irony in what your husband was saying: the evidence that saturated fats had a strong link to cardio-vascular disease was solid at the time, but it wasn't causal, according to a lot of recent research.  And in the end, this work shows that margarines with trans-fats turned out to be worse for health than butter.  

Modern margarines (or 'spreads', as they're now called) are healthier than butter, by the current science, as long as they're monounsaturate-rich rather than omega-6 rich.  Because the studies have been finding that a diet majoring in the omega-6 rich seed oils is strongly associated with poor health, it's worth keeping away from any products that use such oils in their main fat source, except in small amounts.  This is an interpretation referencing the 'omega-balance' debate.  Soya oil or sunflower oil margarines, for example, are omega-6 rich.  'Olive Oil Spreads', by the way, are mostly rapeseed oil, with less of the headline olive oil - but that's fine!  Rapeseed oil is what to look for.  Here's a blog post I made a while ago about it; it's mostly still current.  "The Margarine Myth"  

One new thing that's come along in the early Millennium is a sunflower oil that's low in omega-6 and higher in omega-9 polyunsaturates.  Confusingly, it's marketed as 'low in saturates' as a nod to health; one brand name is 'SunSeed'.  That brand apart, the only ways you can know this modified sunflower seed is by that claim, and by the analysis showing low polyunsaturates.  It might be GM, it might not - I've never been able to track down inside data on it.  Most of it appears to be US-grown, and it's popular in potato chips ('crisps', here in the UK).  This old article has some extra info, and for the non-Brits, 'Walkers' is a crisp brand, respected for great taste, bought out by Frito-Lay for their recipe and now owned by Pepsico.  theguardian.com/society/2006/apr/25/health.lifeandhealth

I think that, for you, olive oil counts as local.  Why?  Because now, you're only a short rail tunnel journey from where it's grown and pressed.  In former times, maybe that was another world, but now - a 2-hour ride via either Austria or Switzerland?  Shorter than trucking from the Baltic, anyway.

You're right about the old folks in central Europe feeding well on animal fats.  Providing they were active and ate a balanced diet with natural foods and plenty of vegetables, they statistically lived long eating all that fat, and this has been reflected in the huge health-and-heart study in Central Europe.  Beware, though, that you don't translate that inappropriately to modern times and pretend that many 'treats' daily of fat- and sugar-rich snacks are OK along with the pork fat.  Way back then, this was called 'gluttony' ('Völlerei'?)  And everybody knew how gluttons ended up!  The hardworking but not starving peasants tended to be healthy; their 'betters' died young from overindulgence - or so the folk wisdom goes!

Very good discussion here.  Thanks for the flax tips and extra info on chia.  As a quick seasonal aside, this is the first holiday baking spree in which I'm making use of an egg replacer in cakes and cookies that consists of about 1/3 cup of chickpea flour, a tablespoon of 'chia protein powder' (just crushed chia seed??), and about 1/2 or more of Himalyan black salt, the latter of which provides the sulfury 'eggy' taste and bouquet.  (Cake and cookie recipes using this will always have some source of oil/fat, so it's kind of a matter of getting one nutrient sourced from one item and others sourced from the complementing ingredients.) So maybe I've been getting more omega-3 from there than I think, although it is a crushed product not being stored in any careful way.

My wife keeps a lot of flax seed around to feed to various domestic animals on the property.  The seed is ground to powder on the day it is used....and she's tried it herself, but has a hard time with the turpentine flavor.  I've seen it often promoted as an egg replacer but have always worried about the same flavor/smell issue with it.  So I admit that I've not really tried it that much, even though it would satisfy the "buy local" inclination better than chia would.  But thanks to Hans Q as well with regard to preparing it in more palatable ways.  The mucilage on the seed of flax is something we know well.... is the mucilage in chia carbohydrate-derived or protein based?

It's funny how these different disciplines wax and wane in the scientific eye.  When in school, it was still 'hot' to do DNA-based research because that's where all of the focus was for everything from crop improvement to medical advances, some of which has come to pass.  But I recall at the time a fellow student in our group wanting to do 'lipid research' and we all just laughed at how boring the discipline was ...... just a bunch of fats collecting in our cell membranes and doing little to nothing.   Clearly that's an oversimplification, but what they know now about the crucial, active role of lipids in cell metabolism is changing our views rapidly.  

Edited to add for Anita M.:  As an American, had that first shocking experience in Austria one time sitting down to dinner at a restaurant.>>Before-dinner toasted bread was served with solid bacon fat mixed with chives!  In retrospect it was quite tasty....and quite fitting for the high alpine location we were travelling through.

But thanks to Hans Q as well with regard to preparing it in more palatable ways.  The mucilage on the seed of flax is something we know well.... is the mucilage in chia carbohydrate-derived or protein based?

 
Not sure but it is classified as fiber, soluble fiber though it does not dissolve in water it absorbs the water. The point for this thread, which is about oils is, it makes baked goods moist without adding additional oil to the recipe. So in using them use a lot more water. My recipe uses as much water as the rest of the ingredients.

Hans Quistorff wrote:

As a substitute for flax oil, is there some sort of recommendation for getting an 'ample' equivalent of the omega 3s from direct flax-seed inclusion in the diet?  

To grind seeds for my daily cereal I found some like oats, millet, lentils were too dusty others like flax, sunflower, pumpkin, chia were too oily and gummed up in the process.  So I gradually accumulated scoops of the right proportions about 2/3 to 1 of oily seed to dusty.  I usually have six seeds in a batch mixed
with water in a stainless steel bowl that fits inside the cooking kettle to make a double boiler to simmer for 2 to 4 hours.  That is my daily bread; seems to work well to get digestible but not degraded amounts of essentials.

Friends of mine used to make a similar cereal, but instead of grinding dry then boiling, they would pour hot water over the grains at night, then in the morning put the soaked grains along with whole flaxseeds and some others in a blender.  Served with fresh fruit.

David Croucher wrote:
You're right about the old folks in central Europe feeding well on animal fats.  Providing they were active and ate a balanced diet with natural foods and plenty of vegetables, they statistically lived long eating all that fat.  Beware, though, that you don't translate that to modern times and pretend that daily 'treats' of fat and sugar are OK along with the pork fat.  Way back then, this was called 'gluttony'.  And everybody knew how gluttons ended up!  The peasants tended to be healthy; their 'betters' died young from overindulgence.  Fact!

Sure, you always have to look at lifestyle and genetics. My family did not consist of peasants (only if you look centuries back) but they were quite active and always cooked from scratch. From my maternal side we tend to have (very) high cholesterol levels with a very good overall health and longevity.
Husband on the other hand has Italian/Spanish heritage with a history of cardiovascular illnesses (and cancer), a tendency to put on weight easily, and I have to remind him that he is not working as a lumberjack but has a desk job! So of course you have to take that into consideration.

John Weiland wrote:
Edited to add for Anita M.:  As an American, had that first shocking experience in Austria one time sitting down to dinner at a restaurant.>>Before-dinner toasted bread was served with solid bacon fat mixed with chives!  In retrospect it was quite tasty....and quite fitting for the high alpine location we were travelling through.

Well, you had a delicious Schmalzbrot! I guess that the average German-Austrian-Polish-Czech ingests far less Schmalz than the average US-American bacon (when I wrote bacon in my previous post I meant ham, the thing you put on your bread like prosciutto). If you look at the numbers (don't have them at my fingertips, not sure if it was Michael Pollan, Saffran Foer or another source) the amount is huge.

You might have had either pork or goose schmalz or a mixture. IIRC the goose schmalz has a good balance of saturated and mono-insaturated fats and together with offals makes up for the lack of more heat-loving seed oils/olive oil and sea fish.

I can only eat Schmalz in winter. In summer I can be a happy vegetarian but when the cold comes I like more fat and meat. Organic schmalz is difficult to source so we rarely have it around. Pork Schmalz was ubiquitous in former times, for baking and frying. Deep frying was always done in pork Schmalz or Butterschmalz (the German type of ghee) - there is a wide range of pastry known as Schmalzgebäck (similar to doughnuts) -  but I can't tolerate it, it gives me tummy ache.

If I fry something these days it is with an oil for frying (I guess it is mostly sunflower but the label fell off so I can't check) or olive oil. I grew up partly in Spain and my mum used olive oil quite early. In Spain olive oil is used for frying - love Spanish style Fries!

Today I am baking bread with ground linseed (I looked at the package: although organic, it is of Non-EU origin. Have to see next time if I can source a more local product)

ETA: I have also read that the way cattle or pigs are raised and fed has an influence on their nutrients for humans. So I guess that a pig with a happy life and balanced diet will give you better fats than one from industrialized feedlots.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:I had a look at sunflower oil, generic brand, and the cost was not much less than olive oil.  Pass.  Help me out: is sunflower oil better?  Lighter, more flavourful, more responsible?  BTW, the basic stats on the label were the same as canola.  I also noticed a fancy version of canola oil, touted as "first pressed" (but not cold pressed).  I raised my skeptical eyebrow: better quality? or a ploy by the marketing hamsters?

Hi, Doug.

You're right to be suspicious.  Let's face it, marketing is all about the hype and what the advertising scriptwriters think they can get away with without being sued or jailed! (Fines?  They just ask themselves and their lawyers which route helps the bottom line.  Fines are often simply another entry on the 'costs' side.)

The reality is that olive oil, being mostly monounsaturated, is definitely healthier than sunflower oil - the tradition about Mediterranean diets and olive oil has a lot of truth behind it.  In human development, seed oils were a rare food; collecting natural seeds to eat was a reluctant and frustrating task, only undertaken when nothing easier was available.  Seeds are typically rich in omega-6 fatty acids, and could be a problem because - for good health - human bodies need the vegetable omega-6 and omega-3 in roughly equal but small amounts because we can't make these basic fatty acids in our own bodies.  This genetic failure is trivial, and so not counter-selective, as long as our diet was balanced and included plenty of hunted meat or fish.

Sunflower oil, peanut oil, soya oil and corn oil are now big agri-business and pushed hard as a cheap fat source.  The modern Western diet is heavily dependent on copious omega-6.  In consequence, most folks are nutritionally deficient in omega-3.  Governments, nutritionists and doctors - you'll have noticed - are alarmed enough by this to keep pleading with us to eat oily fish every week; that makes back some, but not all, of the deficiency.

Rapeseed oil is another matter.  It's mostly monounsaturated and the polyunsaturates are balanced between omega-3 and omega-6.  This is unique among the common oils, and makes it the healthiest.  If your bottle labels' analysis showed the same proportions of oil types (saturates, monounsaturates, polyunsaturates) in sunflower and Canola, this is already a lie - and breaks the law.  The issues of processing and GMO are what began this thread, but that's true for all the other common oils too.  So, given similar prices, and remembering that the processed oils are all almost flavourless, I reckon rapeseed (whether Canola-branded or not - in North America it will be!) is the healthiest of all, followed by olive, then all the alternatives.  

By choice, though, pay more and get cold-pressed (virgin/extra-virgin).  Rapeseed is still the healthiest, closely followed by olive.  Avoid all others except nut oils (not peanut, which is a legume not a nut).  And depending where you live, any of the cold-pressed oils might be best value.

You asked about 'first-press Canola'.  That OUGHT to mean it's pressed-only, with no chemical extraction, so it should be superior whether that includes hot pressing, pre-cooking, etc or not.  The jargon follows the conventions for olive oil in the Latin Mediterranean , where 'first press from perfect fruits' is conventionally 'extra virgin' and the second, stronger pressing, maybe including damaged olives, was considered still 'virgin' but less tasty.  That terminology in that region is protected by law.  But, of course, someone might be lying to you about that first pressing or - more likely - what happens next.  

I'd be inclined to go for it, but maybe you could inquire from the maker?  I buy cold-pressed flax oil from the maker (the farm itself in Southern England, where they've been growing flax on the farm for over a century), and I wanted to know whether their bulk oil, sold for animal feed, was as good as that in bottles at three times the price.  

So I phoned, and got the farmer's daughter who was that day's receptionist.  She had to think.  "Well," she said, "the bottled oil is filtered twice more, so it's clearer."  What did I learn?  That their flax oil for horses is superior to the human, not worse.  The very best, single-estate olive oil is marketed as 'unfiltered; right from the press.  I'll take that!  So I buy my flax oil in gallons, and freeze it till I need it (the stuff's so healthy, it goes rancid fast when its warm or exposed to the air.)  I need about one can a year.  It's pretty cheap - 5 litres is £28 delivered - about C$50 for you.  That's a quarter of the price in bottle from health stores (who MUST store it refrigerated or frozen, or you walk away and find a more savvy store).  Cheapest cooking oils are about £1.30 a litre (slightly less in big cans), which makes the healthiest oil of all - flax - a little over four times the price.  And my cold-pressed rapeseed oil is less than three times the cost of cheap oil from my favourite discount supermarket.

As other folks here have said, though, once the oil is natural (ie, cold pressed), flavour starts to matter; they actually HAVE a flavour!  Olive oil comes in countless flavours (apart from 'mild', which usually means 'processed-to-take-out-the-flavour'!)  This is where many people go for nut oils; I still like the rapeseed best for flavour and it's still healthier than them all.

PS: ignore brands in food oil marketing, except maybe to avoid them (guess who pays their advertising bill?).  There's nothing to give superiority, except the addition of nasty chemicals, like 'Crisp-'n-Dry' with its chemical anti-foaming/detergent agents. and the chemical antioxidants that most of them have.  Anything organic that "Keeps Forever!!!" is suspicious....

John Weiland wrote:'chia protein powder' (just crushed chia seed??)

My wife keeps a lot of flax seed around to feed to various domestic animals on the property.  The seed is ground to powder on the day it is used....and she's tried it herself, but has a hard time with the turpentine flavor.  I've seen it often promoted as an egg replacer but have always worried about the same flavor/smell issue with it.  So I admit that I've not really tried it that much, even though it would satisfy the "buy local" inclination better than chia would.  But thanks to Hans Q as well with regard to preparing it in more palatable ways.  

The mucilage on the seed of flax is something we know well.... is the mucilage in chia carbohydrate-derived or protein based?

Three good questions, John that I can hazard answers to.

All oil and fat sources have a waste product, once the fat or oil is extracted.  Some are super-tasty, like what we in the UK call 'Pork Scratchings'.  Some are fit only for animal fodder or just fertilizer/soil conditioner.  But I reckon your 'chia protein powder' is the residue from chia oil extraction.  Should be good.  Remember the analyses, though: flax residue is protein-rich (so a great cattle cake), chia residue will be carbohydrate-rich.  But it still ought to be about a quarter protein and include some oil, too.

That 'cricket bat flavour' or 'drying paint flavour' from rancid flax oil is caused by the polymerization of the oil with oxygen into a varnish.  Flax oil is, after all, the original varnish ingredient in paint!  The fix is to keep it cold and out of the air.  If your farm flax seed is rancid, it's VERY old, or it's been stored in hot conditions - say, a silo in the hot sun.  Flax seed, properly stored, is good for at least 5 years, as I know from losing some for several years in our dry cellar - it tasted great.  Animals hate the rancid taste as much as we do, but it's still healthy to eat; it will cause you to do a 'rainbow yawn' (as the Aussies say) before it loses enough magic omega-3s to matter.

"Mucilages are water-soluble polysaccharides" (one of the articles below) rather than either proteins or carbohydrates  Look up polysaccharides if you want to know more.  In both flax and chia, it seems to have health benefits, but I suspect that if your diet is balanced, they won't be any special value.  Just as people extol the 'vitamin-C richness of, say, goji berries, forgetting that a good diet with vegetables and fruit will already be giving you far more than your body can use and all the surplus is constantly being excreted.

Chia seed mucilage: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/fo/c8fo00173a#!divAbstract

Flax seed mucilage: https://flaxcouncil.ca/abstract/health-effects-of-flaxseed-mucilage-lignans/

Anita Martin wrote:I have also read that the way cattle or pigs are raised and fed has an influence on their nutrients for humans. So I guess that a pig with a happy life and balanced diet will give you better fats than one from industrialized feedlots.

A good time to address this one again, Anna - and thank you for what you've said!

One of the points about animal fats that Udo Erasmus (a vegan as well as an oils specialist) raises is the huge effect diet and lifestyle have on cheap meat and dairy provision.  And similarly for fish and bird's eggs, and even some plants.  Essentially, animals living a natural lifestyle in climates with a winter, prepare for that winter by storing omega-3.  

So humans eating wild meat and fish, the milk and eggs from wild animals and a lot of fresh leaves from wild plants will be well-nourished indeed, as they get plentiful omega-3 without having to source it elsewhere.  But that was before farming.  Just as ancient hunter-gatherers have been found to be fit and well-nourished in general (analysis of bodies found frozen in glaciers, and skeletal analysis), early farming communities relying on mono-cultivation of grains have typically had severe deficiency diseases.  (I'm simplifying this to keep away from the effects of disaster, climate change, etc.)  

Bringing this up to modern times, factory farming of animals and the products of giant agri-corporations have induced dietary deficiency in most of us today.   When the animals are raised in concentrated lots, there's almost no omega-3 in the meat or milk.  Udo quotes wild cattle having far less fat anyway than domestic cattle (as you'd expect) and 8% omega-3s in that fat as opposed to 1.6%; with pigs it's similar.  Wild meat is, of course, vastly more expensive than farmed.  Grass-fed cattle and especially living-in-the-fields cattle are in between.

And with animals, you get, essentially, what you pay for.  Cheap meat, cheap bread and fast foods all take their toll on our bodies because the vital nutritional balances are upset.  The fix is, unfortunately, to pay more, or to find work-arounds like dietary supplementation.  

Anyone want to continue that theme?  It's fruitful, and brings in a lot that's been said on this thread.

I apologize its not about canola oil precisely but its about canola's range of seed oils.

I found this vid not so long ago about oils[1]. It feels very convincing. Also there are other trustworthy vids[2][3] saying that its not even omega3 vs omega6 but more like unsaturated vs saturated. Unsat oils love to oxidize and then they cause all sorts of inflammation in our bodies. Consuming them for decades keeps your body in an inflamed emergency state which probably caused all the cardio vascular epidemic in the last 100 years. What startled me and why I started digging into oils is that I realized that flax seed oil I use to finish my wooden projects polymerized into a plastic like film when it had enough contact with oxygen. So It got me thinking we have a lot of oxygen in our bodies and we consume all sorts of oils... I suddenly imagined tiny sticky bits of oil clogging up arteries. Don't know if its really the case but it turned out that unsaturated oils may cause problems and its better to avoid them at all. I stopped using even the olive one.

[1]  
[2]  
[3]  
[4]