Earlier this year there was a MAHA convention at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington DC that included a menu choice of prime filet, lobster, or a vegetarian chickpea dish. The menu also stated, “No Seed Oil”.
The rise in popularity of seed oils coincided with a public health campaign on heart health. The term “vegetable oil” refers to a mix of any type of oil derived by seeds, but for marketing “vegetable” sounded better, but we are not talking about broccoli oil (olives and avocados are fruits). It became common knowledge that high cholesterol led to obesity and heart attacks – and so anything that lowered cholesterol was perceived as healthy. Shoppers were encouraged to switch out traditional fats like butter for cheaper “vegetable oil”.
The use of seed oils has always been controversial, even though some of the most rigorous dietary studies have been conducted to research seed oil’s benefits and risks. In the 1970’s a researcher in the Midwest was fully convinced that a low-cholesterol diet would improve health and lower heart disease for all Americans. He regularly conducted lipid tests on his children and kept the most detailed nutritional records we have to date from any dietary study in his basement.
In order to secure a closed test group, the patients in his data collection were in a closed environment “double-blind.” He used subjects in mental facilities and nursing homes to ensure they were receiving meals that looked exactly alike. Some groups received butter and normal-cholesterol foods, while the other group received margarine and low-cholesterol alternatives.
In recent years, the researcher’s son (a cardiologist) went through the basement files. After decades of data collection, there seemed to be a conclusion although it wasn’t the one that the researcher had hypothesized. Eliminating butter and bacon did lower cholesterol. However, it did not reduce the risk of heart disease. In fact, lifespans were significantly shorter in the low-cholesterol groups.
Have You Ever Seen A Canola Plant?
Seed oils can be a mix of any pressed oil from the “hateful eight” which is canola (aka rapeseed), corn, soybean, cottonseed, grapeseed, sunflower, safflower, and rice bran oil. These are highly processed and cheaper to mass produce than olive oil or animal fats. The processing often involves bleaching the oils for color and diminished odor, blending for color, and other industry shortcuts that are far from producing natural oil.
For example, “Canola” is an abbreviation for “Canada Oil Low Acid”. Canola is a GMO plant that derives from rapeseed, which is an oil that is best used as a manufacturing lubricant and cannot be consumed because of its high acidity. Canadian engineers modified the plant with low enough acid to be consumed, and now we have Canola Oil. It’s been marketed as having health benefits because of its low cholesterol, but the extent of its health risks like its link to colon cancer are still being understood.
Omega-3 and Omega-6:
A point of contention in the seed oil debate is that seed oils contain a high ratio of Omega-6 compared to Omega-3. Omega-3 supplements are popular because of their anti-inflammatory properties. However, Omega-6 is highly inflammatory and has been linked to colon cancer along with several chronic diseases. Advocates against using seed oil are citing these studies that show the extremely high Omega-6 ratio in seed oils is connected to a myriad of diseases that outweigh cholesterol concerns in natural fats.
All In All:
Those who argue that seed oils are not a problem support that cholesterol and heart health are bigger issues than chronic disease. They tend to point to processed foods, high sugar, and a generally unhealthy diet leading to chronic disease, not just the seed oil is to blame.
The seed oil debate follows a similar line of two different logics that we come across frequently. Those who are concerned about seed oil know that it’s highly processed, inflammatory, and not something humans consumed before the 1950’s. Those who think seed oils aren’t an issue prioritize cholesterol as a bigger boogeyman and feel there are a lot of bigger health issues to tackle first.
Those that don’t feel seed oils are a problem will lean towards a stance that there is a new and improved food to circumnavigate heart disease, even though more research is disproving the importance of cholesterol. Those that find seed oils to be a central issue are focusing on it as one of many synthetic chemicals the public is not aware of regularly ingesting with risks that are little understood.
