CRIMINAL: Whole Foods and the Hole in the Truth

Whole Foods' style is standard corporate drivel.  Think Cargill.  Think Monsanto. Think Union Carbide. Think DOW Chemical. Think Coca-Cola. Whole Foods is knee-deep in Big Agra politics and human poisoning. Their landing page reminds me of that corporate chemical company in Michael Clayton, U-North. 

Generally when a phrase, sentence or word is not personal but pontificating, like this one penned by Rachael Gruver, "Canola oil has been the subject of much misinformation over the years, and we'd like to set the record straight" it's clear that she is trying to manage and massage opinion rather than providing her audience or Whole Foods' custsomers with specific answers.  Instead, she's a bagman for the corporate foods company.  

Rachael Gruver

I have no doubt that Rachael Gruver and folks like her would love to set the record straight, by which she means to silence any opposition to the use of and quel controversy over canola oil. She would love it if her opinion, in so far as she is an authoritative representative for Whole Foods, be the final, definitive word on the safety of Canola oil.  If the health benefits of Canola oil are so blatantly obvious, then why does she need to go to such trouble to defend Canola oil?  How often do we hear or read any writer on nutrition setting the record straight on olive oil?  So in their attempts to clear the murky waters surrounding Canola Oil, which they are not--it's already a proven toxic that destroys heart tissue--Whole Foods doubles its efforts to muddy the waters.  Whole Foods does this to get people to eat their prepared and higly toxic foods.  Health be damned!!  Are the profit margins so high on the prepared foods that Whole Foods insists upon a corporate policy of poisoning you to eat their junk just to make a few extra nickels?    
       At their website, Whole Foods claims that adverse health affects from Canola oil are a myth.

Myth: Canola oil is associated with health problems like… mad cow disease?

We’ve heard from customers who’ve read that canola oil is associated with everything from mad cow disease to glaucoma, but the fact is, none of the purported side effects associated with eating canola oil that we’ve heard about from customers have ever been reported in medical journals. 

That is the first accusation I've heard made to mad cow disease.  I've heard that Canola Oil destroys heart tissue.  Destroying heart tissue, I would say, is a little more serious than mad cow disease.  Perhaps a larger myth that needs to be dispelled is that Canola Oil is good for you.  It's not: the junk is poison.  It's just that it is so profitable.  It's worse than even I had thought.  Writing at the Weston A. Price Foundation, Sally Fallon and Mary J. Enig explain that

Canola oil is "widely recognized as the healthiest salad and cooking oil available to consumers."  It was developed through hybridization of rape seed.  Rape seed oil is toxic because it contains significant amounts of poisonous substance called erucic acid.  Canola oil contains trace amounts of erucic acid and its unique fatty acid profile, rich in oleic acid and low in saturated fats, makes it particularly beneficial for the prevention of heart disease.  It also contains significant amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, also know to have health benefits."  

This is what the food industry says about canola oil.  

Oh, about the erucic acid, read this: 

Unfortunately, about two-thirds of the mono-unsaturated fatty acids in rapeseed oil are erucic acid, a 22-carbon monounsaturated fatty acid that had been associated with Keshan's disease, characterized by fibrotic lesions of the heart.  

And yet Ms. Gruver would have you and me, well, us, believe that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Canola Oil.  I am just glad that she is our advocate on healthy eating and life-sustaining food choices.  Thank you, Ms. Gruver!

Corporate food manufacturers go to great effort to hide from you the risks of their food.  I once wrote a bacon company to ask if they used corn in their feed for their hogs.  And I got a reply, which in and of itself surprised me, that stated "If I told you I'd have to kill you."  Aren't these folks just crazy with the jokes?  But the Fallon and Enig article initially anyway says that Canola oil contains mustard gas.

Canola oil is a poisonous substance, an industrial oil that does not belong in the body.  It contains "the infamous chemical warfare agent mustard gas," hemagglutinins and toxic cyanide-containing glycocides; it causes mad cow disease (there it is), blindness, nervous disorders, clumping of blood cells and depression of the immune system.  This is what detractor say about canola oil.  

They don't identify the detractors.  

How is the consumer to sort out the conflicting claims about canola oil? Is Canola Oil a dream come true or deadly poison? And why has canola captured so large a share of the oils used in processed foods?  Certainly Whole Foods puts Canola Oil in almost every prepared dish.  And when they tell you it is not in the dish, they're lying.  

Recently I ordered a take-home serving of a kale salad from Whole Foods' Deli section.  I asked the Deli clerk, "What kind of oil does the salad have?"  

His answer was, "Olive oil."  And it does contain olive oil, extra virgin olive oil.  Olive oil is the number one oil in the dish, but it also contains Canola Oil, but the Deli chef deliberately omitted this fact.  He lied.  They don't care if you get sick.  In the usual corporate not-accountable game, you will be blamed; that or some other item you consumed as long as it wasn't anything that you bought at Whole Foods.  

You can see the ingredients above, but I'll write them out here too:
Ingredietns: Tomator, Lacinato Dino Kale, Lemon Juice, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Dried Cranberries (Cranberry, Apple Juice Concentrate, Sunflower oil), Non-GMO Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil, Pine Nutys, Sea Salt, Black Pepper. 042115  So the Whole Foods Deli clerk lied to me when he restricted his answer to Olive oil only.  And the Non-GMO Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil is a registered trademark.  Note how the description uses capital letters the way you do with proper nouns.  Compare it to "Sunflower oil."  Why isn't the "o" in Sunflower oil capitalized? 

I mean you don't have to search too far for too long to find out how bad Canola oil is.  The challenging part is to find decisive and definitive articles that report and prove that Canola oil destroys heart muscle, instead of ambiguous phrases like "A monosaturated oil, rapeseed oil has high levels of erucic acid.  Erucic acid is a fatty acid that is associated with heart damage, specicifically Heshan's Disease, a disease that manifests itself with fibrotic lesions of the heart."  I mean how convincing can one be when using phrases like "associated with heart damage"?    

All the top ranked articles on a Google search shout to the heavens how bad Canola oil is and yet Whole Foods hires a blogger to defend the oil and its uses in its prepared foods. Huh.  So just in the course of, say, forty-five minutes I've been able to find horrific destruction caused by Canola oil that Ms. Gruver seemed to overlook as professional blogger at corporate Whole Foods.  So lets review the harm that I found:

1)  Contains a known poison of mustard gas.
2)  Contains erucic acid that has been associated with Keshan's disease, a selenium deficiency and characterized by fibrotic lesions of the heart. Huh.  How 'bout that: fibrotic lesions in heart muscle.  Did Ms. Gruver miss these perchance?  Why, O, why, Ms. Gruver would you over look this destruction of heart muscle caused by your precious Canola Oil?
3)  Mad-cow Disease.
4)  Glaucoma. 

Then this from Organic Lifestyle Magazine:
DAMAGED CAUSED BY CANOLA OIL
1.  Canola oil depletes Vitamin E. 
2.  Canola oil increases the rigidity of cell membranes, which can trigger degenerative diseases.  
3.  Becaused of Canola Oil's high sulfur content, it goes rancid easily, which can exacerbate allergies and compound problems for people with bronchial or asthmatic issues. 
4.  Human studies reveal Canola Oil causes an increase of lung cancers. 
5.  Canola Oil can shorten lifespan of animals and lower platelet count.
6.  Daily Canola consumption can raise your triglycerides over 40%.
7.  Canola Oil molds quickly and also inhibits enzyme function.  
8.  It opens the door for free radicals, undermining natural antioxidants, and can be linked to increased incidence of many diseases.
9.  Canola Oil leaves no foul taste when it's spoiled, so it's hard to tell if you're eating rancid erucic acid.
10.  Then there's always the perennial threat of consuming a rancid oil.

In your body oxidized means damage to your cells and tissues, especially to the areas rich in fat like your brain.  You know what happens when an apple is exposed to air?  Oxideation is the process that turns it brown and makes it go bad.  If you eat vegetable oils that are already oxidized from heat and light in processing, you are exposing your own healthy tissues to a volatile substance which will damage them . . . .  Oxidation, or rancidity, is not a major contributor to most degenerative diseases, it also causes inflammation.  Excess inflammation in the body can cause anything from arthritis to more serious diseases such as Parkinson's, bipolar moodes, schizophrenia, and obsessive compulsie disorders.  (source)

Aren't these conditions and diseases lovely?  How did Ms. Gluver overlook these terrible conditions and diseases?

The history and context for Canola Oil's rise to prominence in the health food sector is compelling.

Canola oil began to appear in the recipes cutting edge health books, such as those by Andrew Weil and Barry Sears.  The technique was to extol the virtues of the Mediterranean diet and olive oil in the text, and then call for "olive oil or canola oil" in the recipes.  One informant in the publishing industry told us that since the mid-1990s, major publishers would not accept cookbooks unless they included canola in the recipes.  

In 1997, Harper Collins engaged Dr. Artemis Simopoulos to write a cookbook featureing the heatlth benefits of omega-3 fatty acids.  Dr. Simopoulos was a pediatrician who had served for nine years as chair of the Nutritional Coordinating Committee of the National Institutes of Health before becoming president of the Center for Genetics, Nutrition and Health.  She had published several papers on omega-3 gatty acids, calling attention to their disappearance from the food supply due to the industrialization of agriculture.  Her most famous paper, published in 1992 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, compared omega-3 levels in supermarket eggs from hens raised on corn with eggs from hens allowed to roam and eat a more varied diet.  The more natural eggs contained twenty times more omega-3 than supermarket eggs.  

Did you read that?  Twenty times more omega-3 than supermarket eggs!!!  That, my friends, is what has happened to our food supply.  It has officially been denuded.  But we're feeding millions more.  Aren't we lucky?

But perhaps myself along with other researches are overstating the hazards.  Maybe the hazards haven't been proven.  But then how do you explain the sickness, the mild nauasea, the bloating?  

DANGERS OVERSTATED?

Reports on the dangers of rapeseed oil are rampant on the internet, mostly stemming from an article titled "Blindness, Mad Cow Disease and Canola Oil," by John Thomas, which appeared in Perceptions Magazine, March/April 1996.  Some of the claims are ludicrous.  Although rapeseed is a member of the brassica or mustard family, it is not the source of mustard gas used in chemical warfare.  

Glycosides or glycosinolates (compounds that produce sugards on hydrolysis) are found in most members of the brassica family, including broccoli, kale, cabbage and mustard greens.  They contain sulfur (Not arsenic), which is what gives mustard and cruciferous vegetables their pungetn flavor.  These compounds are goitrogenic and must be neutralized by cooking or fermentation.  As rapeseed meal was high in glycosides, it could not be used in large amounts for animal feeding. However, plant breeders have been able to breed out the glycosides as well as the erucic acid from canola oil.  The result is a low-glycoside meal that can be used as an animal feed.  In fact, canola meal for animal feed is an important Canadian export.

Hemaggulutinins, substances that promote blood clotting and depress growth, are found in the protein portion of the seed, although taces may show up in the oil.  And canola oil was not the cause of the mad cow epidemic in Britain, although feeding of canola oil may make cattle more susceptible to certain diseases.  

Like all fats and oils, rapeseed oil has industrial uses.  It can be used as an insecticide, a lubricant, a fuel and in soap, synthetic rubber and ink.  Like flax oil and walnut oil, it can be used to make varnish.  Traditional fats like coconut oil, olive oil, and tallow also have industrial uses, but that does not make them dangerous for human consumption. 

We have had reports of allergies to canola, and internet articles describe a variety of symptoms--tremors, shaking, palsy, lack of coordination, slurred speech, memory problems, blurred , vision, problems with urination, numbness and tingling in the extremities, and heart arrhythmias--that cleared up on discontinuance of canola.  None of this has been reported in the medical journals, however.  Writing for the Washington Post, Professor Robert L. Wolke chastises the publishers of these reports as spreading "hysterical urban legends about bizarre diseases."  The industry actually profits from such wild claism, because they are wrong and easily dismissed.

Nevertheless, consumers do have reason to be cautious about the establishment's favorite oil, now showing up in an increasing number of products.  

It is everywhere.  It's in all of the packaged mixed nut combinations at Trader Joe's, Sprouts, and, of course, Whole Foods.  Further, Wolke's criticism of "the publishers of these reports spreading hysterical urban legends about bizarre diseases" is itself bogus.  First, syndromes and symptoms like "tremors, shaking, palsy, lack of coordination, slurred speech, memory problems, blurred , vision, problems with urination, numbness and tingling in the extremities, and heart arrhythmias" are not from bizarre--far from it.  Second, and to call these publishers and their symptoms as hysterical should be a huge, red communist flag alerting you to the professional dismissal or the profession dis.  He's pulling credentials and hoping that his statements stick.  The fact that the very conditions mentioned improve once the oil is discontinued, does that not give any reader a hint as to what is causing the sysmptojms that he so easily and readily dismissed out of hand and tagging them as bizarre and the publishers as hysterical?  It's just so dishonest.  And I am surprised that Farrell and Enig are signing off on this guy's criticism.  That's disappointing.  

And then there are the testimonials.  

H. Sim writes:
I am one of the people who was rushed to an emergency room with symptoms of a stroke or overdose. I had consumed Atlantic salmon cooked in canola oil with salt & pepper. I was slurring and my blood pressure dropped; I passed out after vomiting. The emergency doctor wanted to order an MRI, but I was certain I wasn’t having a stroke, as there was no pain or confusion associated. Thankfully, my husband could understand me through my slurring (no one else could). We skipped the MRI, and blood tests confirmed for the doctor what I already knew: I hadn’t overdosed nor consumed a drug that would cause this. My husband was able to convince the doctor to give me treatment for food allergy (Benadryl, IV steroids, and epinephrine). Within several minutes I was feeling better and the slurring went away. I followed up with an allergist who tested for everything I’d consumed except canola oil (they don’t have allergy tests for canola, so of course it can’t be written in medical journals) and I tested with no allergies. However, each time I’ve been inadvertently exposed to canola oil, it’s happened again, only now I can feel the symptoms come on and take Benadryl before I become seriously ill. I must admit, it’s incredibly frustrating to read about this reaction being “a myth” since it’s not in medical journals. I dare say there are many illnesses not yet written about in medical journals. Assuming the illness to be a myth because it isn’t in a journal is probably the chief reason it isn’t in a journal.

David Seal writes:

My problem with Canola oil is that even small quantities causes low level nausea, night-time stomach upset, excess gas, and chronic diarrhea. Elimination of this oil from my diet (nearly impossible to do completely, it’s in almost every processed food now), has cleared these symptoms for over a year now. My body either finds it no more digestible than mineral oil, or the hidden toxins rife in the product from nature or processing simply disagree with my biochemistry. Either way, if I inadvertent consume some of this Canola Oil, the symptoms rapidly return and last for days. I really wish the food manufactures would come out with lines of products similar to the “gluten free” labels: like “Canola Free” or “No Rapeseed Oil Used”. Restaurants will not tell you, they will just say they use “vegetable oil.”

This oil is deadly.  Stay away from it.  I won't ask you to stay away from Whole Foods.  That is your decision.  Plus, there are things there that people benefit from I am sure.  Plus I don't telling people to ban things.