From: "Steve Harris" <sbharris@ix.netcom.com> Newsgroups: misc.kids.health,sci.med Subject: Re: Canola oil Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 21:17:15 -0700 Tsu Dho Nimh wrote in message ... >"john" <whale@whaleto.freeserve.co.uk> wrote: > >>Research submitted by Chas > >http://urbanlegends.about.com/science/urbanlegends/library/blcanola.htm >http://urbanlegends.about.com/science/urbanlegends/library/blcanola2.htm >http://urbanlegends.about.com/science/urbanlegends/library/blcanola3.htm > >http://www.canola.ab.ca/ > >Seem to nicely debunk this "research". > > >>My sister spilled Canola oil on a piece of fabric, after 5 pre-treatings >>and harsh washings, the oil spot still showed. She stopped using Canola >>oil ,wondering what it did to our insides if it could not be removed >>from cloth easily. COMMENT Probably the same thing as it does to the cloth. Luckily for you, your insides slough their lining every couple of days, and the molecules which are permanently bonded to them by free radical chemistry go with. It's better than Spray 'n Wash and no doubt it has a lot to do with keeping us mammals alive so long, while we eat polyunsaturates and gulp air the whole time. Yes, linolenic acid in rapeseed, linseed, and canola has a lot to do with its interesting chemistry. Paint thinners for oil based paints are mostly linseed, and these oils are called "drying oils" because their free radical chemistry is what makes the paints "dry." This is not a process of losing water, as with latexes. Rather, the hardening is an oxygen-driven free-radical cascade chain-reaction vinyl polymerization. It goes faster in the omega 3's oils because they have a double bond out there near the periphery of the molecule, hanging out there in the breeze, so to speak, where any other molecule with an unpaired electron can latch onto the pi cloud. And then off you go. These things go rancid. They polymerize to gunk. They give off toxic stuff that yellows photographs in the vicinity, for months. They heat up enough to cause spontaneous combustion! However, it's hard to prove that any of this does much to your body, with the possible exception of your gut epithelium, which may be stimulated to form polyps and cancers a little more often under free radical attack. In the rest of you, if you eat enough vitamin E, you stop this cascade before it does much. It's hard to even measure it without some very careful chemistry, and in animals which have been shorted in several key defense systems. Megadosing mammals with vitamin E does not make them live any longer, nor does giving them fewer polyunsaturates. Nor does giving them MORE polyunsaturates kill them faster, all other things being roughly in good shape. Not too many answers there. >>Ask for it at your nursery. Rape is an oil that is used as a lubricant, >>fuel, soap and synthetic rubber base and as a illuminate for color pages >>in magazines. It is an industrial oil. It is not a food. > > Odd, it was used as a food by the Vikings, along with flax-seed >oil and hemp-seed oils, both of which are also used for >industrial purposes. I've heard it on good authority that the Vikings were big on rape -). In Europe, colza oil has been used for a long time without too many problems. If rapeseed oil is cardiotoxic, it's not due to the same properties that make it go rancid, but rather due to the erucic acid, as has been noted. But even that influence is hard to find epidemiologically. SBH |