[SwellJoe]

Healthy oils actually tend to have a lot of saturated fat in them. Nuts, olive oil, coconut oil, avocados, are all quite rich in saturated fats, and actually are good for you (no scare quotes needed). The reason those oils are considered healthy is because of the types of saturated and unsaturated fats they contain.

Canola, or rapeseed, oil is somewhat less certainly good for you. And is quite low in saturated fats; which is why it became so popular. It was a low saturated fat alternative to higher saturated fat oils. That was probably a premature optimization...a variable was optimized before the full effects of diet were understood. Grapeseed might be a healthier alternatve to rapeseed oil for high heat cooking (olive oil has too low of a smoke point for any serious cooking, it's more of a finishing oil, if you care about your health). I skip it, along with corn oil and soybean oil. I don't know that it's unhealthy, but I've been seeing evidence that it might be for a few years now. The evidence that it is more healthy than other oils has all but evaporated, however, so there's no reason to choose it over cooking oils that have more recent and convincing evidence of their effect on health.

[eddiedunn]

I was of the impression that rapeseed oil was unhealthy compared to e.g. extra virgin olive oil, due to the common processing methods used to extract it (heating, chemicals[1]). Extra virgin olive oil is extracted purely by mechanical means, no heating is allowed.

Here in Sweden, however, it's easy to find and buy organic cold pressed rapeseed oil. I'm of the impression that this stuff is a lot better for you than "canola" oil.

[1]: http://wellnessmama.com/2193/why-you-should-never-eat-vegeta...

[SwellJoe]

I'm not sure, actually. My impressions on canola/rapeseed oil are quite vague. But, as I understood it, traditional rapeseed contained unhealthy acids and that canola was a modified variant to reduce those acids (thus the name: CANadian Oil Low Acid). Rapeseed, as far as I know, is always unhealthy, no matter how you process it. Canola has been made less unhealthy but is probably not as healthy as many alternatives, such as grapeseed oil (which has a fat profile somewhat similar to olive oil, but can be used in high heat cooking as it has a very high smoke point).

[DanBC]

> The evidence that it is more healthy than other oils has all but evaporated,

I'm not sure how you reach that conclusion.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23939686

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/food-matters/2013/10/25/...

[SwellJoe]

Those articles don't seem to talk about canola/rapeseed oil, at all. They seem to cover olive oil, which I stated is thought to be a health oil. Am I missing something?

Or, was my parenthetical comment about high heat cooking with olive oil confusing? I was speaking of canola/rapeseed oil when I said the evidence that it is healthy have all but evaporated. Olive oil is great, but burned oil is carcinogenic. Olive oil burns at a quite low temperature. So, cooking in grapeseed oil is probably a better bet, and adding olive oil toward the end for flavor.

[DanBC]

> I was speaking of canola/rapeseed oil when I said the evidence that it is healthy have all but evaporated.

Ah, sorry, I mis-read you.