Health care don’t: Canola oil!

Cooking. Whether we love it or not, it’s something everyone has to do sooner or later. Microwave meals just aren’t the answer to good eating or good health! And whether you are a chef or just getting by when it comes to food preparation, frying something up in a pan is done by almost everybody.

There are all kinds of cooking oils out there from vegetable oil, to coconut oil, to olive oil to palm oil. But the one we want to bring to your attention is canola oil – and how and why canola oil can be a bad choice when you are looking to fry up that next dish.

What is canola?
Canola oil is developed through the hybridization of rapeseed. (Sadly, that’s not a typo. This is a Latin term for turnip rutabaga, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and mustard.) Canola gets its name from “oil from Canada” which sounds much better than the alte
ative. It was developed through natural breeding at the University of Manitoba, in Canada, during the 1970s.

Canola oil goes through a refining process that requires heat and a number of chemicals to purify the color and to remove some unappealing odors from the oil. Despite some of these unpleasant-sounding steps to refine canola oil, the oil and subsequently canola oil frying has spread around the world. Now the oil is produced in various countries everywhere from the European Union to Kazakhstan.

While it’s been commonly accepted as OK for consumption, there are questions surrounding the health value of this oil when comes to cooking with it.

Is canola oil bad?
The short answer is canola oil is not particularly good for you. The trouble with canola oil is that it’s delicate oil. That mean it’s a type of oil that does not have a long shelf life. Keeping it and cooking with it over a long period of time could mean that you are cooking with an oil that is actually decomposing – not the most appetizing thing to think about when you are preparing your favorite fish in a pan.

This decomposition is usually caused by oxidization. It’s the same process that will turn a nice red apple brown and breaks down many organic substances. So the trouble is if you cook with something that is going through an oxidization process, you are exposing your body and organs to higher levels of oxidization than they would otherwise experience. This exposure could lead to inflammation, and excess exposure could also possibly increase the rate of degenerative diseases.

Read more at http://www.belmarrahealth.com/health-risks-of-canola-oil/