David Croucher

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.

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/

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....

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!

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....

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.

Lots of issues here, but I'll comment on some, then get to Canola!


The cholesterol thing that several have mentioned.  It's been re-evalued in the last few years, by returning to the Statin-test trials and comparing the results with long-term heath studies.  Some real anomalies have emerged; mainly in that the direct link of CVD with LDL is imaginary.  So I think that the strong emphasis today on deliberately lowering Cholesterol is mistaken.  Our bodies are hugely competent in producing cholesterol, and will make as much as we need; if we eat plenty, fine.  If we don't, our bodies' chemical factory produces it.  If we use cholesterol-lowering drugs (which, for a minority of at-risk older men, are vital), we just make more.  Depending on diet and culture, major studies across the world have found that some healthy people have high cholesterol levels and are fine, while people at severe risk of CVD death can have average cholesterol levels in some cultures.  People with very low cholesterol levels have an elevated risk of cancers and other life-threatening problems, according to large-scale recent studies - and it's been known to be caused by cholesterol-reducing drugs.  The key with CVD is not cholesterol, it's severe mental stress, usually compounded by poor diet.

Taking this into account, what do we need to be healthy?  What I've been recommending for years is to eat mostly vegetables - preferably half of all your food by weight should be vegetables.  That counters most of the issues with bad diet at one stroke, and along with staying hydrated is maybe 80% of becoming healthy.  Ten percent more is the omega-3 fats deficiency, as below.  Discuss?


Oils and Fats

Basic food chemistry to begin with;
you need a super-short Fats Course 100.5 to see the issues with Canola.  Skim through if you know this already; it may not be high school biology or organic chemistry in all countries.

All oils (liquid at room temperature) and fats (solid at room temperature) are 'triglycerides', made from attaching three fatty acid molecules to a glycerol molecule.  Fatty acids are chains of carbon-oxygen-hydrogen atom clusters, of different lengths.  When the chain is flawless, we call the fatty acid 'saturated'.  When a hydrogen atom's missing, the chain kinks at that point and the acid's called 'unsaturated'; it leaves the fatty acid more reactive - able to attach to other molecules.  Convention labels an unsaturated acid by the point where the first kink occurs - usually point 3, 6, 7 or 9 in the chain from the unattached end.  Got it so far?

Mono-unsaturated fatty acids kink once (duh!); polyunsaturated kink more than once; in practice, usually twice to five times and making them more reactive, less stable.  The first kink in the molecule from the free end is called the 'omega-point'.  So, hah! we've got to the nub of those terms we tend to throw around.  In practice, again, Omega-6 fatty acids kink twice, usually beginning at point 6; Omega-3 fatty acids kink three or more times, usually beginning at point 3.  You can look up the names of the fatty acids online, together with their kinking patterns - Wikipedia has exhaustive listings, including more detail than you really wanted to know as you get into each article!

Here's the rub of it, though.  All fats and oils (triglycerides) are rather like a handle-less fork with three prongs.  The prongs (fatty acids) are commonly any length from 4 chain units upwards to about 22, and while some are straight (saturated) others are kinked 1,2 or 3 times.  Each fork can have a mix of prongs of any kind, though in different triglycerides, certain fatty acids are commonest, and an oil or fat may have many and varied triglycerides, all mixed up together.  Our chemical factories are expert at disentangling the forks, stripping off the prongs and recombining them in a different sequence.  

How is that in practice?  Each oil and fat can be characterized (after analysis) by the ratio of the fatty acids in it.  Hard fats are mostly long-chain saturates; very light oils (lowest 'freezing' point) are mostly Omega-3 fatty acids and will stay liquid except in deep freeze.  The kinking of a fatty acid stops the forks from lying flat, so the whole oil will be less dense - which equates to a lower freezing point.  For example, at the two extremes typical beef fat is 40-40-3-2 (sat-mono-o6-o3; saturates are mostly long chain) and coconut fat 92-6-2-0 (mostly short chain saturates), while flax oil at the other extreme is 9-19-14-58.  The first two melt above blood heat and can feel greasy in the mouth; flax oil is still liquid at -20C, -10F.

One last thing - about the trans-fats people have mentioned.  When a polyunsaturated oil is 'hydrogenated' by adding the missing hydrogen atom at each kink, the unsaturated oil becomes a saturated fat - totally saturated.  That's how the original vegetable fats were made over a century ago, and the process was used to make margarine and commercial fats from whatever cheap oil was available.  The totally saturated fat was too hard to be usable alone, so the fat was blended with some oil to make it similar to animal fats like lard.  So far, so good; the saturated fatty acids made by total hydrogenation are identical to those produced naturally.  

But from the 1930s, oil factories began to stop the hydrogenation process part-way through to save time, leaving some oil incompletely saturated.  The result, thought useful at the time, was a fat of just the softness required to replace either lard or butter, ready to use once some flavouring had been added (usually, and still today, buttermilk - whey - a by-product of cheese and butter making).  Here's where the mischief came in, although no-one at the time understood it.  The partial hydrogenation produced a lot of altered fatty acids which were different to the natural ones.  All the polyunsaturated fatty acids in vegetable oils are in a 'cis' configuration, where the two or more kinks are on the same side of the chain.  But under hydrogenation, adjacent kinks can be on opposite sides, straightening the chain out again. This is called a 'trans' configuration ('trans' meaning 'across'), and the oil/fat with plenty of this will act like a saturated fat in body chemistry.  

So 'trans fats' aren't actually evil, but they aren't natural either; our bodies (say some experts) can't cope with them properly.  There are two problems: one is that the trans fatty acids have all the health drawbacks of saturated fats (but not worse).  But also, they upset our EFA-extraction.  The enzymic mechanism which reserves polyunsaturated fatty acids for body chemistry like building cell walls, is fooled into reserving trans fats - because they're still unsaturated - then discards them later because they don't work.  So you can become deficient in the vital Essential Fatty Acids your body needs for cell building and repair.  It's good that partially-hydrogenated oils are now banned - trans-fat vegetable oils are bad for you!  

Last comment: one trans-fat is harmless.  It's trans-vaccenic acid, the main fatty acid in mammal milk, including - yes - human milk as well as cow's milk!  It may even help in cholesterol control, according to some recent research.


Common oils we've mentioned - including Canola
OK, we're now here!  And I'll begin with rapeseed oil.

Rapeseed
is an ancient Eurasian crop, cousin to mustard (and interbreedable) and in the brassica group, with cabbage, sprouts and swede.  The seed oil is, in history, slightly hot (much less than mustard) and slightly bitter, partly from the erucic acid in it.  It's been used as a food oil for thousands of years in cooler climates where sunflowers and olives don't grow well.  The bitters and heat have slowly been bred out but - unlike the USA's official supposition - it's palatable and safe to eat when you get used to it.  

There WAS a 1970s scare in the US about erucic acid poisoning rats fed on it, so that rapeseed imports were banned (it wasn't grown then in the US).  However, later tests showed that (1) rats were unusually sensitive to erucic acid, and (2) rats respond badly to a forced all-oil diet anyway; they also responded badly to a sunflower oil diet.  But the deed was done, and the oil banned.  Canadian growers, under this stimulus, bred the first rape variety with a very low erucic acid content (a L-E-A-R oil) and - in a marketing coup - got this 'Canada Oil' Canola accepted for sale in the US - thus cutting out the European growers whose similar LEAR oil bore the dreaded name 'rape'.  Strangely, despite being chemically identical to Canola LEAR and non-GM, European and Asian LEAR is still banned from the US as 'unhealthy'; I guess the government labs that might clear it are 'busy'.  LEAR oil is now ubiquitous worldwide, and the HEAR varieties confined to industrial chemical use; fuels, for example.  Except in peasant economies, where the locals like their traditional rapeseed oil with a bit of a bite.

One of the issues people have raised about oils is the omega-3 content.  Well, it's great for health!  Commercial oil companies hate omega-3 because it turns rancid quickly (it's very reactive, remember), and they have discovered that super-long shelf life is a business advantage.  So omega-3 has been stripped out of commercial manufactured foods for many decades, along with natural vitamins.  Instead, artificial antioxidants have been added, and most of these are deleterious to health ("We only add a little!")  Rapeseed oil has a useful amount of omega-3, in good balance with the omega-6 - which is a health advantage compared with olive oil.  Also as with olive oil, it majors in monounsaturates, which are healthier than saturates.  And the taste?  Don't care what some people have said; MY cold-pressed rapeseed oil tastes great!  Nutty, and sort-of halfway between hazelnut oil and olive oil.

The issue of GMO (or GM as we call it in Europe) is another matter.  Whether we cautious people want it or not, GM is here to stay, and in medicine as well as plants and animals will eventually give huge benefits.  Why I've been very anti-GM (like most people in the UK) is because of the reason the pharma giants like Monsanto are doing the gene editing, more than the cross-pollination with naturally bred varieties.  It's already been mentioned here: the use of Roundup to kill weeds can be intensified if a crop can be altered to be Roundup resistant - and that's what Monsanto did with their GM rape (and also got to call it by the Canadian Government trademark name Canola).  

But if, for example, a plant was modified to produce vitamin A (it's a simple genetic switch-on with one replaced gene), this, done today easily and accurately by the CRISPR technique, would make it a real lifesaver, rather than a marketing tool for chemicals!  500 years ago, by the way, that's just what plant breeders in the Low Countries did: they bred a new carrot that was orange rather than purple or yellow, through its copious amounts of beta-carotene.  It's spread across the world, is and now a valuable source of vitamin A.  And have you seen those Canadian orange cauliflowers? ....

Rapeseed oil, then, does have ethical issues as it's sold on supermarket shelves.  But they are exactly the same as for other commercial oils.  Olga, your link to the 'Canola Oil Con' page is useful - but to me, only to show up how people can get fooled by pseudo-science.  All the nastiness of commercial oil production is there applied only to Canola, yet the same methods are used to produce ALL of the oils on your typical supermarket shelf!  Yes, sunflower, soya, peanut, safflower, grapeseed. cottonseed, and all the rest of the common cooking oils are extracted - to the last drop - by mash boiling, high-force hot presses, solvent extraction and those other methods.  And they can use seed that's a little off (or worse), because the oil's always bleached to remove odours (which can be pretty nasty!).  The resulting oil is flavourless, with no preservative vitamins (these are extracted to sell to you later as pills) or plant sterols and stanols for health.

My suggestion?  Avoid all supermarket cheap oils if you can.  Rapeseed/Canola no more or less than the others.  Go instead for 'cold pressed', often labelled, after the olive oil market, as 'extra-virgin'.  And ideally, organic too, because that label requires avoiding artificial fertilizers, weedkillers and GM.  In England, most supermarkets sell cold-pressed rapeseed oil at £4 a half litre (US $5 per 17oz), six times the cost of the cheap stuff.  The place I buy at sells it for £1.45; they clearly don't milk the 'healthy' image as the others do.

Olive oil, sunflower oil, peanut oil
The same applies as with rapeseed.  The bland cheaper oil ('mild' for olive oil) is processed the nasty way - avoid.  Buy cold-pressed only, and pay the price.

Soya oil, cottonseed oil, grapeseed oil
These are always heavily processed, because cold pressing won't work.  Avoid.

Nut oils
Great - as long as they're cold pressed, which they usually are.  But keep them just for flavouring salads, or for body rubs.  Unless you burn $20 bills for fun.


The smoke point issue
This is another common misunderstanding, in my opinion.  It's certainly true that burning-produced compounds can be unhealthy.  But the same applies to making toast, barbie smoke, searing meat and so on, as for smoking fat.  It's there for the flavour, and the carcinogenic issue is no different.  Commercial deep fryers are the place where it becomes a problem, because those tasty-smelling smoke products get to concentrate in the fat if it's not changed regularly, and you get to eat too much.  Since fire for food was invented, humans have dealt with the issue well enough - our bodies can cope with these natural by-products of burning, as long as we're not overwhelmed.

In frying then, as a couple of posters have mentioned, either use purified animal fats, palm oil or coconut fat for smoky frying, or do what the Chinese do in stir-frying - splash a spoonful of water into the pan occasionally, to keep the temperature down.  No good for those crispy fries, though!  As in deep frying, there's no problem as long as the fat has no by-products in it that will burn - use ghee rather than butter, for example.  I do fine with cold-pressed rapeseed oil and flax oil - but I don't super-hot-fry in them.  Even the most sensitive pure oil - flax oil - is good for eggs and sausage; bacon needs good timing.


Omega-3 and omega-6
This is a real issue, and Canola oil is at the heart of it.  In our modern diets, unlike millennia ago, seed oils are a major source of calories.  They are now freely available and cheap, and fast food has made them ubiquitous.  That's a problem, because now we've dumped trans fats, the oils used in commercial frying are mostly omega-6 rich. Our bodies cannot make the basic omega-6 fatty acid linoleic acid, nor the basic omega-3 fatty acid alpha-linolenic acid.  These two are called the Essential Fatty Acids because we need at least a little of each by mouth to stay healthy.  So we're adapted, unlike most mammals, to chemically extracting and reserving what we get in our food.  And we need both, in roughly equal but small amounts.  The same processing and reserving enzyme works on both, and if we have more than four times as much of one as the other, we can miss reserving enough of it.  Same as for trans-fats, which fool that process, too.  So if we eat a lot of omega-6 oils (and we do, we do!) we get super-short of omega-3, with consequent health trouble.  Typically, junk diet eaters get 50 times the 6 as the 3; most folks get 15-20 times as much.  

There is a solution, though.  Simply avoid eating those common omega-6 rich oils altogether, and select sources of omega-3 oils to eat regularly - flax oil, chia oil and also some wild-caught, far-northern oily fish a couple of times a week - eaten with the skin.  And for cooking, rapeseed and olive oil, along with animal fats if you eat those.  This ought to bring your 'Omegas' into balance.


John Weiland's oils chart is sort-of useful, but it lumps all polyunsaturates together (3 and 6 are very different for health) and puts them in the centre, not on the opposite side to saturates.  This page I googled does it better, and the website's oil descriptions are pretty good, too - though a little out of date.  https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ps/fats-oils.html

Final point: I mostly eat cold-pressed flax (linseed) oil, because it's very high in omega-3 (60%-ish), and this makes up for the omega-6 it's hard to avoid eating.  I buy it cold-pressed in gallon cans by post, direct from the farm, and store it in half-litre glass bottles in the freezer till I need it, when a bottle goes into the fridge.  It's OK there for a month or so.  I mostly use rapeseed oil for frying, and for body anointing - rub all over every morning.  Keeps my skin supple, and is what the world's farming poor do with their oil and fat in warm climates, just as people have been doing since - oh, forever!

There's all the good advice you need here!

I'd like to chip in with something that's counter to what the pros are saying: you CAN get great results for YouTube videos with a smartphone.  It needs to be able to record in the format you'll publish in, 1080P probably, and you MUST have a stabilizer and find the angle of view of the camera's principal lens ok for your results.  You also need to have a 3.5mm jack to avoid a lot of workarounds, so NOT an iPhone.

My best suggestion for this is to mount the phone in a frame that takes accessories and has dual handgrips, like the $25 Ulanzi U-Rig Pro Smartphone Video Rig (https://www.amazon.com/Smartphone-Filmmaking-Stabilizer-Videomaker-Videographer/dp/B0774MTXXG) which will mount on a cheap $15 camera tripod, or give a stable handheld platform.  You then really need a shotgun microphone with 'dead cat' for outdoors; they come under £60 if you shop around and read for favourable genuine reviews, or the cheapest Australian genuine Rode models are under $100, always with deadcat and a lead/adaptor for smartphone (4 contacts on the 3.5mm plug, rather than the 3 for other kit).  Most of the cheaper items, rather than dirt-cheap, give good enough results for this usage.

Then all the rest works in the video editor, including the dubbed sounds, your voiceovers (same mic used with your computer) and the clip edits etc.  I use the (again Australian) Videopad editor, which is simpler to use than the costly pro editors, but nearly as versatile.  Given a cheaper Andriod smartphone and this kit, you're set up for under $500.

Chris Kott mentioned an environmentally viable disposal for tyres (we Brits spell it correctly, though it may tire you North Americans to hear that!)  

A company in Wales has been running a pilot plant that will recycle the materials on a small as well as a large scale.  If it has no problems in real life, it could be the answer:
https://www.letsrecycle.com/news/latest-news/tyre-recycling-technology-successfully-tested-in-wales/