Seed Oils: 5 reasons to question their use

5 reasons why you might want to avoid seed oils

If you're more of a visual learner, this 28 mins YouTube video by What I've Learned is an interesting watch: The $100 Billion Dollar Ingredient making your Food Toxic

If you want a list of the scientific references that demonstrate cause for concern relating to seed oils, see here. Credit to Tucker Goodrich

What are seed oils?

• Rapseed/Canola
• Sunflower
• Corn
• Cottonseed
• Soy
• Safflower
• Grapeseed
• Rice bran

1/ High Omega 6?content

Omega-6 is an essential fatty acid in the human diet, but only required in very small amounts. Historically, human consumption of linoleic acid (the omega-6 found in seed oils) has only been around 1-3%, but modern seed oil consumption has pushed this up to 7-10%, which is evolutionarily unprecedented.?

Our bodies simply haven’t had the time to adapt as they have done with, say, dairy, which was only introduced 10,000 years ago with the advent of farming. Indeed, the inflammation caused by this level of consumption has been linked to weight issues, diabetes, heart disease and even vision issues. Tucker Goodrich, an American seed oil specialist, has pointed out that linoleic acid is now the biggest cause of blindness in the US through causation of age-related macular degeneration.

2/ Chronic disease burden

The levels of chronic disease in our society has sky-rocketed in the past century, in line with the advent of seed oil consumption. Whilst this is only correlational, there are a number of randomised controlled trials (considered the gold standard) discussed below which show a strong relationship between seed oils and disease.

3/ Increased risk of death

The Sydney Heart Diet Study showed that people consuming more vegetable oil had a 62% higher rate of death during the seven-year observation period compared to a control group eating less vegetable oil (olive oil & butter). Jeff Nobbs, an American food researcher, has shown that this is a bigger risk factor than heavy drinking, moderate smoking and physical inactivity! He even calculated that the risk of each tablespoon of vegetable oil is equal to smoking 2 cigarettes a day.

4/ Increase in Heart disease

In another study, the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, participants who increased their consumption of corn oil and margarine had 86% more heart attacks. Interestingly, these findings were buried at the time of the study because they didn’t fit with the established narrative at the time that saturated fat caused heart disease. They had to be salvaged from a basement and re-evaluated by medical investigator Chris Ramsden almost half a century later.

5/ Weight gain mechanism

There has been a great deal of concern around a compound called 4-HNE (a breakdown product of seed oils) which is a colourless oil found throughout animal tissues after an increase in the lipid peroxidation chain reaction. This has been shown to be obesogenic.

Consumption of seed/vegetable oils is also associated with weight gain in animal studies. Worse still, this weight gain increases if the oil is heated (and more so if repeatedly heated). Incredibly, the group who consumed the repeatedly heated oils actually consumed slightly less calories, yet still suffered more weight gain.?

Interestingly, the bulk of established studies on vegetable oils, sometimes used to justify their consumption, are performed in their fresh, uncooked state, despite vegetable oils being widely used as cooking oil. Given the evidence above, it’s not hard to see why some in the industry would want to avoid studying vegetable oil in its cooked state. Yikes! ??

As a side note, the Croissant Diet n=1 experiment has always fascinated me in that it demonstrated significant excess fat loss via a high stearic acid diet and low in PUFA (polyunsaturated fatty acids).