canola oil

It has come to my attention that some segment of the population is convinced that canola oil will kill you, so today I went looking for more information. According to the Whole Foods website, this whole thing started with an article called "Blindness, Mad Cow Disease and Canola Oil" published in Perceptions magazine in 1996.

It was in that article I learned that covalent bonds will kill you, so I'm gonna go all out and name this Quote of the Year for 1996, even though this blog didn't exist yet:

Toxic substances in canola and soy oils encourage the formation of molecules with covalent bonds which are normally irreversible: They cannot be broken by the body once they have formed.

For just plain quote of the day fodder, I'll take either one of these:

• "Butter and tropical Fats are best used unhydrogenated," or
• "Rape oil is also the source of the infamous chemical-warfare agent, mustard gas, which was banned after blistering the lungs and skin of hundreds of thousands of solders and civilians during WW1. Recent French reports indicate that it was again used during the gulf."

Now my problem here is that this is a public forum, and there could well be some readers out there who are not, as we say these days, ROTFLMAO, so I may well be accused of being a misguided idiot for not recognizing the danger and blindly following the establishment. In honor of this being a place to learn stuff, I'm going to go ahead and spell out why these quotes are so hilarious, thereby rendering them not all that funny:

1. In the quote of 1996, instead of saying some poisons can't be broken down by the body, the author drags covalent bonds into it, which, since you can't have water or DNA without them, sounds like an uneducated person throwing big words around to impress other uneducated people. When I read the quote to my husband, he said, "That can't be serious. Lemme see that."
2. As to unhydrogenated butter, please go to the grocery store and ask for help finding the hydrogenated butter. If they don't have any, ask for the the dehydrated water.
3. If mustard gas was made from a plant, wouldn't you think it'd be made from mustard? Instead of a bunch of chemicals you never heard of (if you don't know what a covalent bond is)? And if canola oil was 'invented' in the 1970s, how the heck would it get into mustard gas in WWI?
4. I know there's not a fourth quote, but I just have to mention the bad, bad punctuation. Ew.
5. As long as I'm providing extra information, this whole argument has been covered less snarkily here and here.

The only arguments I will accept for not using canola oil are (1) a simple fear of erucic acid, or (2) a fear of eating selectively-bred foods, but then only from people who are highly suspicious of apples.