In short, why I use sunflower or olive oil instead.

@Background Pony
 
While I’m usually all for canola oil hate, I feel that’s going a bit too far. I think “death oil” will suffice.

@CocoaNut  
Why not both?  
“rape-and-murder oil”

@Turnways_Flip
 
Would you feel better if it was labelled more accurately as “death oil”?

@Turnways_Flip
 
Sorry but that one of the best rape jokes i heard.
 
I mean the vegetable not the crime.

Look, as a chef I wouldn’t use canola oil if it was labeled as rape oil. It’s not a matter of being offended, it’s just that that’s a conversation I don’t want to have with dinner guests.
 
“Oh, this is delicious, what’s in it?”  
“Rape.”

@Darpie
 
I have the studies if you’d like proof.

@Darpie  

@Background Pony  
!profile.ultimate-guitar.com/profile_mojo_data/7/1/4/5/714589/pics/_c727936_image_0.jpg!

@Background Pony
 
Why, hello there, Mary Enig. Fancy seeing you here.

@CocoaNut  
Indeed - animal fats are generally the healthiest option, especially if those animals have been fed natural diets.  
For vegetarians butter is a good substitute, as is coconut oil.

Canola oil isn’t even healthy. Use grass fed tallow.

@Packer dash 52  
|| hence my comment ||

@KirbyfanNeox  
their isn’t one  
you were the joke all along

…WHERE’S THE FsqueeING JOKE?!

@Background Pony  
It’s accurate in some ways, but has a lot of landmines in it that may trip up a lay reader. Short of saying who exactly I am, you’re free to believe me or not, but I’ve done plenty of original work in this field, and the articles I’ve written on the subject are peer-reviewed and published in major scientific and medical journals, not Huffington Post.
 
A few examples:
 
-Cholesterol’s not as bad as people used to be told: true  
-Cholesterol doesn’t come from food anyway: true  
-Cholesterol’s not the cause of heart disease:  
partially false; there’s no THE cause. But it definitely contributes.  
-You actually need some cholesterol: true  
HDL cholesterol is good: partially true. HDL vs. LDL is a very simplified way to characterize lipoproteins, and an indirect indicator of something good (cholesterol leaving the vessel wall). There’s good HDL, bad HDL, neutral HDL, good LDL, bad LDL, neutral LDL, good VLDL, bad VLDL, RLPs (probably all bad), and chylomicrons and chylomicron remnants (which the article doesn’t even mention; chylos are good/bad/neutral, and remnants are probably all seriously bad.) But HDL cholesterol is a VERY INDIRECT indicator of something good. HDL cholesterol can be up because cholesterol is being efficiently removed from the vessels as fast as it’s being deposited, or because the disposal system in the liver is overwhelmed - and that’s VERY bad.  
-LDL cholesterol is bad: true, but how bad varies by your genetics.  
-Triglycerides are bad: true, but very complex. And unlike cholesterol, triglycerides vary all day long. You’d need to spend 24 hours in a hospital, eating specifically defined meals calibrated to your blood volume, with a blood sample taken every hour, to really know what your triglyceride level is. (And even then you can alter it depending on what you eat outside the hospital.) Studies that take one fasting blood sample in the morning (nearly all studies) don’t mean much in terms of tryglycerides; all they’ll tell you is your overnight levels are or aren’t bad.  
Lp(a) is bad: True. But like HDL vs. LDL, it’s a simplified way to classify lipoproteins (much less simplified, but still simplified). Lp(a) particles as a group do seem particularly dangerous.  
-Total cholesterol is not a great indicator of heart disease risk. True, but only because LDL is better. They’re not independent measurements; most of what is reported as total cholesterol is LDL. Though not great, it is, however, a good indicator.  
-AHA is probably recommending cholesterol levels that are too low. Probably true. The studies aren’t entirely in yet, though, so it’s just his opinion, not in any remote way a medical fact.  
~~“I have seen a number of people with total cholesterol levels over 250 who actually were at low heart disease risk due to their HDL levels.” False. Anecdotes do not make a controlled study. Moreover, you can’t tell what someone’s “risk” is by looking at them. He doesn’t know what their “risk” is. This is a tautology. “I estimate their risk to be low because they have something that I estimate to cause low risk.”  
-Dr. Rosedale’s first quote: True. (Except it leaves out chylomicron remnant cholesterol. Not his fault; hardly anyone studies chylomicron remnants because you have to feed patients carefully controlled meals and monitor them hourly, using a test that costs about $500 a patient in reagent costs alone, and takes about 16 hours of technician time to run.)  
~~“In other words, there is no life on Earth that can live without cholesterol.” Basically true, but not 100%. Deep-sea organisms use other sterols instead, because cholesterol solidifies at benthic pressures. Those organisms melt if brought up to the surface. Pretty gross, really. But not relevant to human physiology.  
-An arterial plaque is a “scar.” No, it’s an abscess. A scar is healed-over fibrous tissue. A plaque is a mass of pus (dead white blood cells), that generally were poisoned by trying to eat crystalized cholesterol deposits. It’s not healed-over at all.
 
Etc.

@Background Pony  
Dammit man, i said words even Rainbow Dash could understand! That article has words like ‘consequences’ in it - there’s no way she’d understand that!
 
(PS: i kid. I didn’t notice the link earlier.)

@Background Pony  
Ask Spike.
 
Spike: “Eat olive oil and wild-caught Alaskan salmon. Don’t eat bacon for every meal. And butter and margarine are both probably bad for you (but not terrible).”

@Background Pony  
I think the article linked further up is both easier to understand and more accurate than Ferrotter’s version.

@Ferrotter  
You… uh… wanna rephrase that maybe? using smaller words? The kind even Rainbow Dash could understand?

@Background Pony  
It’s better than most lay articles on the subject, but not great. It has a lot of horseapples strewn among its many gems.

@Background Pony  
Only large amounts of arachidonic acid, omega-6 unsaturated fatty acids, and other polyunsaturated fatty acids that have oxidized are harmful. Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids other than arachidonic acid, and omega-9 monounsaturated fatty acids are healthy. Saturated fatty acids are unequivocally and directly harmful to the cells of the blood vessels if consumed in excess. Interestingly, despite the fear and hype over them, trans-fatty acids have never actually been proven harmful in a direct study. They probably are, but it’s all based on speculation and surrogate indicators.
 
“Cholesterol” is too complex to explain here fully, but basically having too much of it is directly harmful. However, it doesn’t come mostly from food; your body makes most of its own cholesterol. Cholesterol isn’t dissolved in the bloodstream, but travels inside several different kinds of microscopic particles called lipoproteins, which are organized around protein cores called apolipoproteins. The thing is, we don’t have a good way to measure what matters, because what really matters is how much is going into the vessel wall vs. how much is coming out of the vessel wall, not how much is in the blood. Total cholesterol can’t tell us which way it’s going (but by simple statistics it’s probably going in); LDL cholesterol can indirectly indicate how much is going in (different types and sizes of particles have different capacities to put the cholesterol in the vessel wall, so one person’s high cholesterol may or may not indicate high influx rate) but not what’s the capacity to remove it; and HDL cholesterol can tell you the lower bound of how much is being removed right this moment, but not how much needs to be removed or what the capacity is to remove more. And cholesterol can undergo various forms of chemical degradation over time if your transport rate is slow, becoming more toxic, so simply knowing the cholesterol number doesn’t mean you know the amount of damage it’s doing.
 
But tl;dr version: having naturally low-normal total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol is good for you; lowering total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol to low-normal levels is healthy for you; having naturally high HDL cholesterol is usually good for you, and raising HDL cholesterol with synthetic or natural medications or diet is probably an absolute waste of time. With HDL you probably want to alter the levels of a whole gaggle of apolipoproteins (some up; some down) and we don’t even have a way to do that. The amount of cholesterol attached to them is probably irrelevant.

@Background Pony  
Also, if anyone wants to read more about this here’s an excellent article on the topic.

!i564.photobucket.com/albums/ss87/Bids99/Boo.gif?t=1253158569!

The truth hurts.
 
#DownWithTruth