Prairie farmers are elated that canola can now be advertised in the United States as a heart-healthy oil.
“It’s awesome,” said Brian Tischler, a Mannville, Alta., farmer and president of the Canadian Canola Growers Association. “This is big.”
Tisdale, Sask., farmer Jim Caughlin shared the sentiment.
“It’s great. We’ve known for a long time that we have a healthy product. This helps bring that (knowledge) to the public,” said Caughlin.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Oct. 6 gave makers of canola products the right to use labels with a health claim about the oil’s ability to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease due to its unsaturated fat content.
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Canola growers have long been faced with the annoying situation of producing the most healthy mass-market oil in the world, but generally being paid for it as if it was interchangeable with unhealthy oils like palm or less healthy ones like soybean oil.
Often a modest premium has been attached to canola, but its value closely follows that of soybean oil. For years doctors and dietitians have suggested people eat fewer saturated fats, but while canola has the lowest saturated fat content of any major vegetable oil, it did not become a high value, premium product like olive oil.
For farmers that’s been dispiriting.
“Growing canola has been a declining value proposition for the last 15 years and that’s hard to understand when you’ve got a better product than other edible oil products in the world,” said Caughlin, who is chair of the Saskatchewan Canola Development Commission.
The successful bid for a qualified health claim from the FDA was headed by the U.S. Canola Association and supported by the Canola Council of Canada, which gets much of its funding from prairie canola grower groups.
Prairie farmers can’t count on the subsidies received by American and European farmers, so market development like this is necessary.
“Until the health message is strong, the public will respond only to price,” said Caughlin.
That health message can now be put on packages and in ads.
Tischler thinks a health claim on a package will have more impact than the years of messages from doctors and dietitians. Certainly it will make the public less skeptical when it sees the canola industry promoting its product.
“You can tell people it’s good for you, but if you don’t have that claim (on the package), it’s just words,” said Tischler. “When you get that claim from the FDA, confirming everything we’ve been saying, it just makes that whole job so much easier.”
