Dietitians Debunk Myths about Seed Oils

Mar 24, 2026

Self-proclaimed experts are using social media platforms to call canola oil unhealthy, toxic or inflammatory. Negative exaggerations often increase views, and more views mean more revenue for social media voices. It can be hard to fight against these claims, yet Abbey Sharp is up for the challenge. Sharp, a registered dietitian (RD) and founder of Abbey’s Kitchen, is one of Canada’s most trusted voices in food and nutrition.

Hello Canola website (hellocanola.ca) interviews Sharp in a Q&A article called “Debunking inflammatory myths about canola oil”. Here is a sampling from the full article:

Hello Canola: Is there any truth to the statement “canola oil causes inflammation?”

Sharp: The short answer is “no”, but this one certainly requires some explanation.

Canola oil contains both omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. Omega-6 fats are found in all vegetable and seed oils from crops like canola, corn and soybeans, and they have been demonized to a degree because they contain pro- inflammatory molecules called eicosanoids.

However, an overwhelming body of highquality evidence suggests that consuming omega-6 fats does not have a significant effect on inflammation in the body. In the research, we actually see the opposite, where omega-6 fats either have a neutral effect on inflammation or are anti-inflammatory.

Hello Canola: Can canola oil be a healthy choice if it contains omega-6 fats?

Click here to see more...

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids