Canola promoters think their oil will be a winner if a federal task force’s recommendations on trans fatty acids are implemented by Parliament.
That’s because the report released last week not only targets trans fats, but also saturated fats.
“We’ve got the solution. We can get rid of the trans and keep the saturates low,” said Dave Hickling of the Canola Council of Canada.
“For the past few years we have been working on products that are a solution.”
Officials from Health Canada and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada co-ordinated the task force. It recommends a two percent limit for trans fats in oil products like margarine and a five percent maximum in processed foods.
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It also lays out suggested rules for companies wishing to use the term “trans fat free.”
Most important for the canola industry, Hickling said, is the task force’s repeated concern that eliminating trans fats not lead to an increase in saturated fat content.
Trans fats are almost universally accepted by scientists as being a significant cause of heart disease. But saturated fats are also a major cause of heart disease.
One of canola’s sharpest marketing edges for decades has been the fact that it has by far the lowest saturated fat content of any vegetable oil.
But the recent widespread concern with trans fats has worried some canola promoters that consumers might forget about canola’s positive low-saturated fat nature and focus only on trans fats.
The problem is that food manufacturers replace trans fats by using palm oil instead of partially hydrogenated canola and soybean oils.
Palm oil is high in saturated fat, but is much more heat stable than traditional canola and soybean oils, which traditionally have been hydrogenated to make them stable. However, hydrogenation increases trans fat levels.
Since trans fat labelling requirements came into force in the United States, some food processors raised their use of palm oil and increased the saturated fat content of their products.
But good news for canola recently came when the Wendy’s burger chain decided to go with a corn-soybean blend as a replacement for its partially hydrogenated soybean oil rather than move to a palm oil blend.
Willie Loh of Cargill said the move showed that leading food providers are willing to shun trans fats and keep to low-saturated fat products.
The Canadian task force allows some increase in saturated fats, but recommends keeping them low. It appears to want to avoid increasing overall saturated fat intake as an unintended consequence.
“They are aware of it,” Hickling said. “They do know you can create one problem by solving another.”
