The Big Business of Vegetable Oils
“Food manufacturers use vegetable oils for the same reasons other manufacturers use plastic: it is easy to manipulate chemically, the public can be taught to ignore the consequences of its use, and best of all, it’s cheap.”
After reading my last article, you may be wondering just what IS the big deal with eating vegetable oils? Why is it at the very top of my “NOT FOOD” list? (linked here) I am going to explain this topic using quotes and information taken from a no-nonsense book by author Dr. Cate Shanahan, MD called Deep Nutrition that was published in 2008. I love this book and highly recommend reading it (get it here) because even though it may get a bit technical at times, Cate speaks very clearly and directly on the topics.
Remember in our last article I spoke of the rise of the “diet-heart hypothesis” (saturated fat and cholesterol supposedly cause heart disease) that was driven almost entirely by the ambitions of one man, Ancel Keys. It turns out that all of those studies he conducted in his laboratory and used as his proof were NOT studies on animal fats at all. He was feeding his subjects MARGARINE the entire time.
“All the news reports you’ve heard on the hazards of saturated fat and cholesterol are supported in large part by studies that evaluated the effects of hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is full of unnatural molecules that aren’t found in butter, steak, or any natural food.”
Ancel Keys wasn’t a doctor or a cardiologist. He didn’t have an MD. He had a PhD from his studies of salt-water eels and helped design rations for the military. He DID have a massive ego however, and really wanted the world to acknowledge him as the savior of society. And once he had food manufacturers on his side, they helped him accomplish his goal.
“Keys sold himself as the go-to expert on all manner of heart disease using bad science, covert deception, and fear.”
Does this sound familiar? When will we learn that government cannot be trusted to keep the health and you and your family a priority? Big businesses and the cash they provide is their priority.
I have somehow always had this innate distrust for as long as I can remember, along with a passion for nutritional knowledge and research. My family’s health must be MY priority. You cannot allow the government to usurp your responsibility: It is up to YOU to learn and decide what is best for your family. My husband has a saying that we repeat often to our boys: “QUESTION EVERYTHING.”
“It wasn’t long before the American Heart Association, which depends on large donations of cash from the vegetable oil industry, jumped on the bandwagon with Keys. They took his sloppy statistics and ran with it, eventually convincing most doctors that steak is a “heart attack on a plate” and that margarine made from hydrogenated vegetable oils was healthy. Within a decade, grocery store shelves were loaded with ready-to-eat foods, and Americans were buying. No longer insisting on fresh food from small farmers right in our neighborhoods, we’d been convinced that products made in distant factories were safer, healthier, and better. And they were also cheaper.”
So who were Americans NOT listening to during this time of nutritional upheaval? It’s actually the scientists who should be considered the experts in the fat field: the lipid scientists. There have been hundreds of articles published on this topic and guess where many of them place the blame for heart disease? Processed vegetable oils. But don’t plan on finding this out from your heart doctor. He’s got a flight to Italy to catch for his vacation and no time to stay caught up on the research.
“What lipid scientists have been telling us - and what the research has supported for years - cholesterol and saturated fat are not your heart’s enemy; industrial fat products, the vegetable oils, are.”
So back to our original question: What makes vegetable oils so bad for you? Simply put, vegetable seed oils are meant to be contained in the seed and are there to help in the germination process. When exposed to pressure and heat and removed from the antioxidants in the seed that protect them, they become very dangerous and extremely reactive. Toss out the clog concept for your arteries, and think of vegetable oils as uncontainable brush fires, free radical reactions that incinerate everything they touch. Processed vegetable oils literally FRY YOUR ARTERIES.
“Free radical chain reactions weaken the underlying collagen scaffolding and fuse molecules together, polymerizing the arterial walls into a kind of crunchy protein plastic. Now the artery can easily rupture and bleed. If blood ever contacts collagen directly it will clot, plugging up the artery. And that’s how you get a heart attack or a stroke. So it’s a blood clot, not fat, that shuts off the flow of blood...Your body tries to patch these badly damaged sections with matrices of protein, calcium, and cholesterol.”
The plaque that the medical establishment would terrify us with is a sign that your body is desperately trying to repair the arteries that YOU keep damaging by eating vegetable oils. And that one big plugged artery your heart doctor just charged you thousands of dollars to route around? It’s not the major problem. Your body probably already grew collaterals as a work-around. You should be more concerned about what that big plugged artery is telling you: “your entire vascular tree has been damaged, and there’s really no way to tell where you might develop a clot.”
For a very detailed explanation of how our body’s circulatory system is supposed to work, I encourage you to read Cate’s section on the Lipid Cycle. Here you will learn all about lipoproteins (you will recognize some of their names: LDL and HDL), how they are all wonderfully made and distributed in a timely fashion when you have a diet rich in natural fats. When you consume a diet containing processed vegetable oils, this lipid cycle breaks down, the tightly controlled labeling of the lipoproteins is damaged and the oxidizing fatty acids are free to wreak havoc all across your delicate circulatory system.
And it gets worse. Don’t think that processed vegetable oils only affect your arteries. They burn and react all throughout your body causing gut disease, damaging your immune function, increasing levels of genetic mutations, birth defects, even attacking your brain, especially in children and the elderly, contributing to every kind of brain-debilitating disease you can think of.
“Vegetable oil can transform ordinary fatty acids into a kind of atomic tornado, tearing through cellular structures and leaving molecular wreckage in its wake...Vegetable oil is undoubtably the most unnatural product we eat in any significant amount...More than any other ingredient, vegetable oil is what puts the “junk” in junk food.”
So now is where I give you a great big warning. Very rarely will you see on a food label the words “vegetable oil.” Instead, you will see one or more of these:
Corn oil
Canola oil
Soy oil
Sunflower oil
Cottonseed oil
Safflower oil
Rice bran oil
Grapeseed oil
The oils extracted from these seeds contain what is called (big scientific words coming) “polyunsaturated fatty acids,” or “PUFAs,” and these oils are highly corrupted during the extraction process, becoming mutated, oxidized, and heat-damaged versions NO MATTER THE SOURCE (even “organic cold-pressed”).
“One of the initial steps...involves the use of hexane, a component of gasoline. If you were to get up close and catch the stench of the initial extract, you might never imagine it could be cleaned up. Making these stinky oils palatable requires a degree in chemical engineering; it takes twenty or so additional stages to bleach and deodorize the dark, gunky muck.”
Let me be very clear: Any product that contains these nasty ingredients is NOT FOOD.
Your body was not designed nor built to incorporate and deal with the high amounts of these volatile vegetable oils that are practically omnipresent in American food today. That is why it is at the very top of my NOT FOOD list.
If you want to make a very huge leap towards health, you would be wise to go through your kitchen immediately and THROW AWAY every bar, carton, box, bag or container of material that contains any of the above listed oils. They are NOT FOOD and you should not be consuming them. And especially DO NOT feed any of them to your children.
Don’t be surprised to find them in packages from your favorite chain “health” food store. These companies care more about their bottom line than your family’s health, that’s just the way of business and these products are made much cheaper and easier using these oils. The biggest way you can show your disgust with these companies that continue to use these oils is to STOP BUYING THEM. Send them a clear message, and set your body up for a health revolution in the process.
I would be remiss if I did not close this article with Cate’s Four Pillars of the Human Diet, which is her eating plan at the end of the book and her recommendations to her patients to reverse and prevent disease. It tracks exceedingly well with my own:
MEAT ON THE BONE
FERMENTED AND SPROUTED FOODS
ORGANS AND OTHER “NASTY BITS”
FRESH, UNADULTERATED PLANT AND ANIMAL PRODUCTS
Again, I highly recommend the book if you want to get more in depth, plus she has a newer book that you may want to check out called The Fatburn Fix (get it here) and you can listen to her on several great podcasts explaining all these concepts:
Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey
Fundamental Health with Paul Saladino, MD
I hope and pray that my past two articles have convinced you to dump vegetable oils from your life. They are a sinister force that could be the root of many of your health problems and those of your family. There is truly no limit to their ability to damage every system in your body.
But just in case you still need convincing, my next article will summarize all these thoughts and bring a new one to mind...could vegetable oils also be directing your body to store fat?
Yep.