Can we have some honesty...even a teensy weensy little bit of honesty in the food business?
Here's how your "natural" oil is actually manufactured:
1. Corn kernels are dehulled, crushed with a grooved roller, and then steeped in water acidified with sulfur dioxide to separate the seed components.
2. The mash then goes through a heated screw press to expel the oil. About half the oil comes from this first step.
3. The leftover "press cake" is stripped of its remaining oil with the solvent hexane, a volatile by-product of gasoline production. Once that's done, the corn-oil-hexane solution is heated to vaporize the hexane.
4. The expelled oil and the hexane-produced oil are then combined to form the crude oil.
5. The crude oil is then filtered and degummed. Degumming is done either by steam process or by alkali process. In the steam process, the lecithin and other gums absorb the steam and become heavy enough to separate from the oil in a centrifuge. With the alkali system, a heated sodium hydroxide solution absorbs the gums, after which the oil is "washed" in hot water to remove any soap formed in the process. Yes, that's right-- soap.
6. Finally, the remaining product is "bleached" with clay. The clay absorbs color pigments, residual soap products and metal ions from the oil, after which the clay is then filtered out of the oil.
Does this sound anything like "natural" to you?
I would challenge you to try to make this natural corn oil from your own ears of corn at home...and someone has actually gone to the trouble to tell us how...How to Make Corn Oil At Home. Frankly, it doesn't sound like much fun, and if one was to actually bottle their own from this long and painstaking process, I would expect it to sell for a very high price, considering the time and effort required.
The point here is that oil from corn is just not natural, even when you factor out the inevitable GMO problem. (As of 2011, an estimated 88% of America's corn crop is genetically modified.) And it's disingenuous for Frito-Lay to say that it is. They would have us believe that because corn is natural, then by some perverse extension of that fact, anything made from corn is also natural.
Now that that's off my chest, let's talk about the problems with corn oil. Corn oil is high in polyunsaturated fatty acids that break down into free radicals when subjected to high heat. It should never be used for frying anything that you intend to eat. Research suggests that eating foods cooked with corn oil increases the risk of cancer. (It may interest you to know that most commercial french fries are fried in corn oil!)
So what, then, is a genuine natural oil? Probably the most obvious is olive oil. Oil has been made from olives for thousands of years. It's not only natural, but it's healthy--even according to the mainstream nutrition "experts." Another wonderful natural and healthy oil is coconut oil. Humans have been eating it for over 3,000 years. Both of these hold up well under high heat. Butter (my all-time favorite) is a traditional natural fat that's been around for a few thousand years as well, and you can't beat the taste. (By contrast, corn oil has been around a mere 115 years - since 1898 and the advent of industrialization.)
Natural oils don't require forty steps and complex modern machinery to produce. Companies like Frito-Lay are becoming painfully aware of the public trend toward healthy food. They are using every marketing trick in the book to make you believe that what they are selling will make you healthy or keep you healthy, and they will say whatever they can get away with, no matter how absurd.
Don't fall for the false advertising. Be wise, read labels, and question everything.
For a good tutorial on fats, see Know Your Fats
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