Is canola oil a seed oil?

The name is a trademark, not a plant

There is no canola plant. 'Canola' was coined for rapeseed varieties bred below a threshold of erucic acid and glucosinolates — the compounds that made traditional rapeseed oil unsuitable for food use. In the EU the same oil is usually sold as rapeseed oil, which is why an imported label can look unfamiliar.

Olive Detective resolves canola, rapeseed and low-erucic rapeseed oil to a single entry, so a product does not slip past because it was labelled for another market.

The number that does not fit the reputation

Applied strictly by omega-6 content, an avoid-list built on the linoleic-acid argument would rank canola below several oils that are widely treated as acceptable. It is not, and that gap is worth naming rather than smoothing over: for most people the objection to canola is about industrial extraction and heavy refining, not the fatty-acid profile.

What the processing objection actually says

Commercial canola oil is typically hexane-extracted, degummed, bleached and deodorised, and heating during deodorisation can generate small quantities of trans fats. Cold-pressed canola exists and skips most of that, but it is a small share of the market and rarely what is in a fryer or a packaged food.

Whether that processing matters to health is genuinely contested, and the studies most often cited on both sides are not strong enough to close the question. What is not contested is that the two products — cold-pressed and RBD — are different, and the label usually tells you which one you have.