As Canada’s canola harvest draws to a close, the combines rolling across the Prairies symbolize more than another agricultural season ending. They represent a national success story — one that has quietly powered Canada’s food economy for half a century. Yet while farmers collect a golden crop, a storm of misinformation continues to swirl around one of its key products: canola oil.
Once heralded as a made-in-Canada innovation that helped transform global diets, canola oil has recently become the scapegoat of a new nutritional panic. Critics lump it with other so-called “seed oils,” portraying it as inflammatory, toxic, and responsible for a host of modern health ailments. Some U.S. advocacy movements, including “Make America Healthy Again,” have gone so far as to label it a dietary threat and to call for warning labels on foods containing it.
From an economic and scientific perspective, these claims collapse under scrutiny. Canola oil is one of the most studied and well-characterized edible oils in the world. The evidence, built over decades of clinical research, shows consistent health benefits — particularly when canola replaces saturated fats in the diet.
A 2020 systematic review published inNutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseasesconcluded that canola oil consumption significantly lowers total and LDL cholesterol compared with saturated-fat-heavy diets. Two years later, a feeding trial inThe Journal of Nutritiondemonstrated that both conventional and high-oleic canola oils reduced total cholesterol, LDL, and apoB within six weeks — effects on par with olive oil, long considered the gold standard for heart health.
Additional research has reinforced these findings. An eight-week randomized trial among women with type 2 diabetes, published in Nutrition & Metabolism (2019), showed that substituting sunflower oil with canola reduced C-reactive protein, a key marker of inflammation. More recently, a 2025 meta-analysis in Nutrition Journal found that canola consumption led to modest but statistically meaningful reductions in body weight and body mass index compared with other oils.
Even population-level data point in the same direction. A 2025 report from Johns Hopkins University revealed that higher blood concentrations of linoleic acid — the dominant omega-6 fatty acid in canola — were associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. The very compound accused of being harmful may, in fact, play a protective role.
The backlash against canola oil is therefore rooted not in evidence, but in speculation. Much of it rests on the claim that heating seed oils generates toxic oxidation products. However, most of those assertions originate from laboratory or animal studies conducted under extreme conditions that bear little resemblance to everyday cooking practices. In normal culinary use, canola oil’s stability and safety are well documented. The American Heart Association and numerous health authorities continue to recommend replacing saturated fats with unsaturated ones such as canola to reduce cardiovascular risk.
The more pressing concern is the broader impact of such misinformation. When consumers are persuaded that canola oil is “toxic,” they often revert to butter, lard, or tropical oils high in saturated fat — choices that undo decades of progress in public health. This is not an advance in nutrition literacy; it is a retreat into nostalgia disguised as science.
From an economic standpoint, the stakes are significant. The canola sector contributes over $40 billion annually to Canada’s GDP and supports more than 200,000 jobs, many of them in rural communities. Canada supplies about one-fifth of the world’s canola, and the crop stands as a rare example of a homegrown agricultural innovation that became a global staple. Undermining consumer confidence in this product risks not only distorting public health messaging but also damaging a cornerstone of the national agri-food economy.
This episode also highlights a broader flaw in contemporary food discourse. Complex issues such as diet quality, affordability, and sustainability are too often reduced to simplistic narratives about good and evil foods. Vilifying one ingredient allows activists and pundits to appear decisive without engaging the more difficult realities of nutrition, access, and behaviour.
Canola oil is not flawless. Like any cooking oil, it can degrade under poor storage or extreme heat, and not every processed food containing it is healthy. But when used appropriately — as part of a diet emphasizing fruits, vegetables, grains, and lean proteins — its benefits are well supported.
— Sylvain Charlebois is director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, co-host of The Food Professor Podcast and visiting scholar at McGill University.
