![]() ![]() Olive oil-especially extra-virgin olive oil-has plentiful health benefits and has been used for purposes ranging from culinary, medicinal, religious, skin care, soap-making, and even as a fuel source since its origination in modern-day Turkey about 6,000 years ago. Unlike most other vegetable oils-except for avocado oil-olive oil is extracted from the fruit of the plant (the olive) and not the seed. Olive oil is made from pressed olives and has more varietals than canola oil, including extra-virgin, virgin, light, and refined or pure olive oil. While “cold-pressed” canola oil does exist-which would only use mechanical pressing and no heat or chemicals-it is hard to find and often very expensive. The high heat and chemical processes involved with making canola oil are thought to oxidize the fat, turning it from a nutritious oil to a not-so-healthy one. This oil is considered a polyunsaturated fat (PUFA), which is a generally healthy fat but can become unhealthy or inflammatory when it becomes rancid or oxidized. Refining and deodorizing: All of these steps lead to unpleasant tastes and aromas, so the last step is to refine the oil with various methods, including steam distillation, phosphoric acid, or clay filtration.Īs you can see, this is not a very simple process, involving high heat, chemical solvent extraction, and lots of refining.Desolventizing: As hexane is not suitable for consumption, they must strip the hexane from the canola by heating it a third time with steam temperatures reaching 239 degrees Fahrenheit.Chemical extraction: Using a chemical called hexane, this process attempts to extract the remaining oil from the seed flakes.Pressing: Screw presses or expellers remove 50-60% of the oil from the flaked seeds.Steam-heated cooking: The flaked seeds are cooked using steam heaters, reaching temperatures of up to 221 degrees Fahrenheit for 15-20 minutes.Cleaning, conditioning, and flaking the seeds: The seeds of the rapeseed plant are separated and cleaned to remove dirt, then conditioned with a pre-heating process to about 95 degrees Fahrenheit and “flaked” by roller mills, which ruptures the seeds’ cell walls.Let’s take a closer look at what the RBD process entails.Ĭanola oil is made through several steps, including: How Is Canola Oil Made?Ĭanola oil, along with the other top three most-consumed vegetable oils-soybean, corn, and palm oil-are sometimes referred to as “RBD oils,” which stands for “refined, bleached, and deodorized.” However, canola oil is not without controversy-while many nutrition guidelines still recommend canola oil as one of the healthiest fats, more recent research suggests that this oil is inflammatory and may be detrimental to health. In fact, the name “canola” comes from its Canadian origins, with “canola” being a contraction of “Canadian” and “ola,” meaning oil.Ĭanola oil has a mild and neutral flavor with broad culinary uses, qualities that lent themselves to the oil’s quick rise in popularity over the past few decades. What Is Canola Oil?Ĭanola oil is made from the rapeseed plant, but the oil didn’t originate until the 1970s when plant scientists in Canada first extracted it from a special breed of low-toxin rapeseed. In this article, take a deep dive into what canola oil and olive oil are, how they’re made, and the nutritional and culinary pros and cons of each oil (spoiler alert: olive oil is the winner!). ![]() ![]() It becomes even more confusing when canola oil enters the mix, as this oil has been the center of nutrition controversy for the past decade. With the abundance of different cooking oils lining shelves in the grocery store, it can be difficult to ascertain the healthiest types. ![]()
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