Canola oil - fact or fiction?

[Crayz9000]

Recently, my parents got an E-mail from a subscription service stating that canola oil, when heated, has a higher percentage of polyunsaturated fats (as compared to olive oil) that will become transfatty acids. Well, duh; this is the case with any oil.

However, they now refuse to have anything with canola oil in it, which has pissed me off to no extent - they don't want me eating most of the food that I prefer (I'm not a fast food junkie nor a health food nut).

Now I have read the hoax E-mail concerning certain elements of rapeseed oil (the plant known as canola was, indeed, selectively bred to remove those elements). That led me to wonder if this new thing about canola oil is merely an offshoot of the old hoax. I mean, transfatty acids only become an issue if you heat the oil past a certain temperature; what's the harm of using it in a salad dressing?

Any opinions on this? Better yet, has anyone seen actual scientific reports on this - even though the newsletter claimed that recent tests in Europe proved that canola oil was harmful, they didn't show actual results, which makes the entire newsletter suspect.