Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I’ve been shopping at Whole Foods (a health-oriented grocery chain with many stores across the U.S.) for a good ten years now. We’ve had them in the DC area since I came here 13 years ago. It is definitely more expensive to buy things there, but my perhaps naïve assumption was always that the things I bought were hopefully a little healthier - without the preservatives, chemicals, high-fructose corn syrup, aspartame, trans fats, and other junk that’s rife in products at mainstream supermarkets. At the very least, their hot food bars supplied me with many lunches and breakfasts throughout the years at pretty reasonable prices and offering what I thought were great and healthy options.

Perhaps it was the naïve assumption that most products in Whole Foods were healthy that made me a bit lax about looking at ingredients lists, or perhaps it was just that Whole Foods did not have ingredients listed for most of their prepared foods until recently. In any case, I’ve been reading these labels recently and have come to the conclusion that just about everything that Whole Foods makes (there prepared foods you buy for heating up at home as well as their hot-bar items) has canola oil in it! It is already very difficult to find packaged products containing an oil other than canola or a similar vegetable oil in them, but seemingly this is also the case for many non-packaged items as well.

Now, many of you may be saying “so what, isn’t it the saturated fat that’s bad, not the unsaturated stuff”? Well, not exactly. Check out Gary Taubes’ “Good Calories Bad Calories” and you will see a great outline about how this myth came to be. Even the traditionalists have disembarked from the pure “eat more unsaturated fat” to just “eat more MONO-unsaturated fat.” Monounsaturated fat (MUFA) is the type of fat that olive oil is primarily made up of and presumably the healthfulness of the Mediterranean diet is based on this. A diet high in polyunsaturated fats (PUFA’s) has been linked, albeit tenuously, to increased risk of cancer. It’s true that Canola oil does have a decent amount of MUFA (60%), but it also has a lot of PUFA (almost 40%).

There are other potential health concerns specific to Canola. Apparently processing of the oil involves a “deodorization” process which converts omega-3 fatty acids into harmful trans-fatty acids.

Of course not everyone will believe that Canola oil is unhealthful. There’s certainly no incontrovertible truth and intelligent people can still disagree about whether canola oil increases risk factors or decreases them. Still, because this oil is a bit controversial, especially among what is probably one of Whole Foods’ target audiences, my thought is it would behoove them to use an oil that is less controversial.

Olive oil is seen almost universally as, if not a perfect oil, at least one that is acceptably low in potential health risks. The advocates of the Mediterranean diet of course contend that the MUFA’s in it are exceedingly healthy, as are its low levels of saturated fatty acids (SFA’s). Those on the other side of the spectrum who believe that SFA’s are healthy while PUFA’s are not, view olive oil at worst as a neutral oil, since it’s mostly MUFA with just a tiny percentage of PUFA.

Likewise, butter is a great option for many items that require fat, especially baked goods. When I’ve looked at the ingredients of baked goods at my local Whole Foods they invariably list canola and not butter, although very occasionally I will see something that doesn’t have it – for example a pound cake I picked up last night. Of course, butter is relatively high in SFA and so for the traditionalists who still believe in the diet-heart hypothesis (that SFA’s increase cholesterol levels and that increased cholesterol levels increase coronary heart disease risk factors) despite lots of evidence that refutes this theory, it isn’t acceptable. Similarly the tropical oils that used to be used a great deal in baking had their reputations tarnished (I believe wrongly) because of the whole saturated fat scare of the 80’s and 90’s. Only in the last 10 or so years are we starting to see reports about how some of the fatty acids in these oils can actually be heart-protective.

Even if we just concentrate on olive oil as the least controversial alternative, it is a lot more expensive than canola, and there’s the rub. If it wasn’t for this factor, we might be seeing a lot more olive oil in Whole Foods’ prepared foods. As it is Whole Foods charges a premium for their food, and using olive oil would probably make their food that much more expensive. At this point, though, I don’t even have the option of buying most of their prepared foods because I don’t care to consume canola oil. So Whole Foods is losing sales because they’ve made it too hard for me to buy lunch there, given the small number of options that don’t contain added canola.

Sadly, few people care enough about this stuff to be aware that there’s anything controversial about canola, and others simply won’t believe that there’s enough evidence to implicate it in health issues. I contend, though, that the people who pay a premium at Whole Foods for presumably healthy food are probably more aware of the controversy and more likely to use that as a factor when making buying decisions. Still, I think this issue needs a lot more exposure. Optimally, I should be preparing all the food I eat myself, of course, but being a busy parent this isn’t always possible, and I would like to not be so constrained in my choices when going to a store that is supposed to be carrying products that are healthful…