more food

Today we're going to start off with the quote of the day from an article about a food researcher who has found that psychology significantly affects how much people eat:

He prefers to experiment on graduate students or office workers, whom he sometimes lures with the promise of a drawing for an iPod. “It’s easy to find undergraduates to participate, but with the guys nothing makes sense because they all eat like animals,” he said.

In other food-related news, I found a 2002 article on canola oil written by PhDs who use references and good punctuation and everything, and they say that eating all canola oil all the time appears to be bad for you, and that the problem has to do with too many omega-3 fatty acids and not enough saturated fats. As you might imagine, this problem can be addressed by putting a little variety in your diet. What a shock.

However, they did say there was a real problem with canola oil, and that is that when you process it, the omega-3 fatty acids turn rancid, so they smell bad, and that the deodorization process turns a bunch of them into trans fats, which everybody knows are bad. They said a study at the University of Florida Gainesville found up to 4.6% trans fats in bottled canola oil.

So having read that, I have to revise the ending of Monday's post: I will not longer accept erucic acid as a reason to avoid canola oil. As to the trans fats, I have to do a little math here...

Ok, if 1 tablespoon of canola oil has 14 grams of fat, and 5% of that is trans fats (from the study, not the label on the bottle), then that's 0.7 grams of trans fat, and God knows no one restricts themselves to just one tablespoon, so I'll totally accept trans fats for canola avoidance.

I think I'll just stay on my rotation diet and not worry about it.