PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico – The Canadian canola industry owes a debt of gratitude to the people of Crete, Greece.
A 1960s study of men in seven countries uncovered a strange phenomenon in Cretan men – hardly any of them died from heart attacks.
“There was something that the men were doing different in Crete that was protecting them,” said Curtis Ellison, director of the Institute of Lifestyle and Health at Boston University School of Medicine.
Researchers explored a number of possible explanations before stumbling onto the unlikely answer. Cretan men ate a lot more fat than their counterparts, which made them healthier.
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In particular they ate vast quantities of edible oils in the form of snails and purslane, a wild green plant used in salads. Both foods are rich in alpha-linolenic acid or ALA, an omega 3 fatty acid that is also found in canola.
Ellison is using the results of the 1960s study and the omega 3 research that followed it to promote the idea of a Mediterranean diet. The “most important” aspect of the diet calls for using canola and canola-based margarine as a substitute for butter and vegetable oils high in linoleic acids.
He told delegates attending the Canola Council of Canada annual meeting in Puerto Vallarta that as opposed to the recent high protein, low carbohydrate fad, the Mediterranean diet has an extensive history, dating back to the time of Homer.
“This diet happens to have a little past,” Ellison said.
It also has solid science to back it up.
The Seven Countries Study followed test subjects over 25 years and discovered that men in places like the United States and Finland were up to six times more likely to die of a heart attack than men in Crete, whose ALA levels were three times higher.
French professor Serge Renaud was the first to put the Mediterranean diet to the test, encouraging a group of French volunteers to eat more bread, vegetables, fruit and fish, while consuming less beef, lamb and pork. They were also told to replace butter and cream with canola-based margarine.
The risk of heart problems or death among subjects on Renaud’s diet was 75 percent lower than those in a control group on a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. The study was halted before completion because a monitoring board found that the control group had “unacceptably higher” rates of death caused by coronary heart disease.
Numerous follow-up studies confirmed that increasing consumption of omega 3 fatty acids lowers the risk of dying from heart failure.
Fish oil is another good source of omega 3 fatty acids, but Ellison said a lot of people don’t like eating fish. The only way they will eat it is if it is fried, which negates the omega 3 content.
He is promoting a diet that encourages eating red meat a few times per month, poultry and fish a few times a week and olive or canola oil daily, along with cheese, fruit, vegetables, legumes and grain.
His institute road tested the diet on people recovering from heart surgery in Boston and on African-Americans with heart disease in South Carolina. It met with favourable reviews.
Theresa Nicklas, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine’s Children’s Nutrition Research Centre, also ex-tolled the health benefits of canola, calling it “naturally superior” to its competition.
It contains the lowest level of saturated fat of any oil, has a high level of monounsaturated fatty acid and is a rich source of vitamin E and essential fatty acids.
“The potential health benefits have not been adequately communicated or marketed to the American public,” Nicklas said.
She is particularly impressed with the industry’s new low linolenic, high oleic canola that does not require hydrogenation.
