Some writers defensively said that farmers would use fuel while it was
cheap, would use less when it was not. But that was not quite the main point
in nominating quantities of petroleum based oil required to produce
quantities of seed oil. The simplest, clearest proposition surely is that it
makes no sense to use a larger quantity of a fuel oil to make a smaller
quantity of fuel oil. Is this the case? - that you have to use more than a
gallon of petroleum based fuel to make a gallon of seed oil - as my friend
Ray asserts.
My understanding of the potential corrosive effect of this kind of fuel
derives from correspondence with another, Belgian, friend who works in the
German office of a Japanese car company (no bias there, eh?). He wrote to me
some time ago as follows:
"... in some European countries
including Germany, you can buy "naturally grown" diesel fuel which means,
that
it contains a high percentage of rape seed oil. It burns quite well in the
engine and does normally no harm to the injection pump (it lubricates even
better than our low-sulphur regular diesel fuel) but the problem is that it
may
attack plastic or rubber material within the fuel delivery system. That is
why
some manufacturers recommend not to use it. For others, you can buy
conversion
kits including all sealants and gaskets and plastic parts made of special
material.
The total market share for such special fuel is still under 4% but it is
slightly increasing and propagated by "green" politicians.
If you are standing behind a car that uses this diesel fuel, you can smell
it;
it smells like somebody is making french fries next door."
Ken had written:
"As well, it is only fair to the guy who hand
bred the rapeseed (no bio-engineering here, just stoop labour), to
differentiate between rapeseed oil which is industrial stuff, and canola
oil, which was specifically bred to be wholesome for us homer saps. In
the provinces in Canada where canola its grown, it is illegal to grow
rape seed for fear of cross-pollination and contamination. It's unfair
and malicious to lump the two together, and I'm not sure what the agenda
is here. Care to explain it?
I acknowledge the clarification re rape and canola Ken, though I have not
seen the case for canola being healthier for people than rape seed - but
would be glad to know what it is. There was no malice intended in the
lumping.
I must say that I have moved in the past year or so to the view that
unsaturated oils are not desirable human food, in the way that they are
touted to be in conventional literature, and undoubtedly are among those who
seek to produce a good product. They assumed a marketed dietary role notably
after they lost ground to the petroleum oils in the paint market. They
succeed as paint thinners because they form films and membranes. They
'rancidify' - to use the term of biochemistry texts - at room or body
temperature. As they are, by definition, in their unsaturation, readily
oxidised, they are primary candidates for combination with free radicals
[active oxygen forms] arising from natural inefficiency in cellular
metabolic processes. While they are effective as antifreeze for seed in
frozen winter environments, their value to mammals running at 37c [98.6F] is
not so clear to me, given that it is at such temperatures that they are
vulnerable. We are encouraged to substitute unsaturated oils for saturated
oils, especially where there is cholesterol at high levels in the blood. The
irony is that the more unsaturated oil we consume, the more likely it is
that our capacity to convert cholesterol to steroid hormones will be
depressed - and thus, perhaps, the more likely to be higher blood levels
(though there are lots of variables there, including exercise and overall
diet). I know this sounds at odds with so much conventional wisdom. It did
so to me when I first read these arguments from endocrine physiologist Ray
Peat (see esp. nutrition papers at http://www.efn.org/~raypeat/ ) a year or
so ago - which led me into biochemistry texts which seemed to support Peat
rather than the heart industry arguments.
That's a very brief explanation of my start point. I'm not sure that I was
regarding it as an agenda, though perhaps it should be.
Dennis
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