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While Donald Trump's presidency is poised to be a boon for Canadian oil, there are early signs it could be a very different story when it comes to Canada’s other major oil export.
Canada is one of the world’s largest producers of seed oils, a product likely to come directly within the sights of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to head the U.S. department of health and human services.
Kennedy has called seed oils “one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic,” and said Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by them.
Seed oils are a subset of vegetable oils obtained from the seed of a plant, such as corn oil, soybean oil and canola oil. The category notably doesn’t include olive oil or palm oil, as both are derived from fruit.
In an Oct. 28 interview on Fox News, Kennedy called seed oils “one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods.”
Although Kennedy hasn’t yet outlined what his department of health agenda might look like, one of his signature pledges has been a program to incentivize fast food restaurants to use beef tallow in their fryers instead of seed oil blends.
“I can’t wait to eat McDonalds again! Bring back tallow!” he wrote in an X post last Saturday.
Although most of the seed oils consumed in the United States come from soy, their most-imported seed oil not only comes from Canada — but was invented by it.
Canola, which stands for “Canadian oil low acid,” was developed by Canadian government researchers Baldur Rosmund Stefansson and Richard Keith Downey in the 1970s.
Up until then, rapeseed oil had been used only as an industrial lubricant similar to linseed oil. What Stefansson and Downey did was to create a food-grade variety that lacked the bad taste and high acid content of prior versions.
Fifty years later, it’s Canada’s single most profitable crop, and is one of the few sectors of the Canadian economy experiencing skyrocketing growth.
Perhaps most notably, canola is the oil used in McDonalds fryers that Kennedy wants to replace with beef tallow.
Canada produced 10.5 million tonnes of canola in 2023, a 20 per cent increase from the year before. A Statistics Canada analysis in March chalked this up to “high prices and increased exports of canola oil.”
And most of those exports are going to the United States. The Canola Council of Canada cites the U.S. as their largest single buyer, accounting for $8.6 billion of Canada’s $15.8-billion worth of canola exports in 2023.
Much of that is in the form of oil, with 2.9 million metric tonnes of canola crossing the U.S. border in 2023. Although not all of it ends up in food, that’s about nine litres of Canadian canola per American, per year.
The U.S. also brings in about $200 million per year of Canadian-made soybean oil.
Kennedy’s war on seed oils is in line with an online wellness trend dubbing seed oils as members of the so-called “hateful eight,” a group including corn oil, soybean and canola oil that is blamed for everything from obesity to headaches.
In 2022, Guy Crosby, a nutritionist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that seed oils were getting a disproportionate amount of the blame given that they’re so often included in foods stuff with other unhealthy ingredients, such as refined sugar and salt.
