You will be hearing quite a bit of information about the need to find a cure for breast cancer this month of October since it is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  I think it's important for everyone to know that National Breast Cancer Awareness Month was started by Zeneca Pharmaceutical (now AstraZeneca) in order to increase donations to "find a cure."  What this really means is giving money to pharmaceutical companies to come up with new drugs to treat breast cancer. 

Olive oil comes from olives, corn oil comes from corn and canola oil comes from ... canola?

Right... sort of. Canola oil is a genetically modified food made from a hybridized version of the rapeseed plant which is a member of the mustard or cabbage family.

Rapeseed oil is a low quality monunsaturated oil used mostly in industrial applications and in some traditional Japanese, Indian and Chinese cultures.  The problem with rapeseed oil is that it's high (30 to 60%) in a toxin called erucic acid, found to be associated with fibrous heart lesions.

In the late 1970's, when polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils were beginning to be shunned for their association with high rates of cancer and heart disease, monounsaturated fats like olive oil were being relied on more and more as the best source of healthy monounsaturated oil. However, there was not enough olive oil for world demand, not to mention that it was too expensive for producing cheap processed foods. 

Adding just 4 tablespoons of olive oil a day to a Mediterranean diet cuts the risk of invasive breast cancer by 68%

Perhaps nowhere in health has there been more confusion than the confusion caused by fat. The question of which fats are healthy and which fats are unhealthy has led to some pretty unhealthy diets, including extreme no fat diets that attempt to eliminate fat as much as possible with no attention to the differences between different fats

Recently, the confusion was placed in clear relief with the publication of dueling studies. The first exonerated saturated fat and vilified polyunsaturated fats; its opponent vilified saturated fats and championed unsaturated fats.