It’s hard to articulate how the skeptical ‘spidey sense’ works, but sometimes you notice something and you just know there’s more to it, there’s a story there. For example, I consume a lot of wellness and diet content – they are some of my particular areas of interest when it comes to skeptical writing and research.
Recently I’ve noticed that, in these wellness-adjacent spaces, there are more and more casual, passing comments that demonise seed oils. In the TikTok world of micro-trends, it’s these passing comments that indicate the macro trends. Even the choice of terminology is interesting.
I first came across the notion of cooking fats being a priority in the nutritional world several years ago, as part of an educational weight-loss programme that aims to build ‘healthy habits’ and encourage a ‘healthy relationship with food’, without the typical diet method of restricting or avoiding certain food-types. Cooking oils can be split into three categories: refined, virgin or extra virgin/cold pressed. The programme argued that extra virgin or cold-pressed oils have undergone less processing and therefore have more nutrients and fewer polyunsaturated fatty acid chains, and polyunsaturated fatty acids lead to more inflammation. But they weren’t critical of vegetable oils in particular just because of the source, only that those oils are more likely to be refined.
They backed up these opinions with a detailed explanation of fatty acid chains and nods towards ‘studies’ that they claimed supported their conclusions, but gave no specific citations. They told me that ‘vegetable oils’ was a bit of a useless label because very few vegetables actually are used to make cooking oils – mostly, vegetable oils come from seeds, grains or legumes. But this information about cooking oil choice was only a small part of a much wider programme examining habit formation and food relationships, including the idea that a sustainable diet has to incorporate the things we love instead of restricting things we consider ‘unhealthy’.
The programme explained that adding fat to the diet is important – including a portion of (ideally healthy) fat in each meal, alongside a source of protein, can help us feel more satisfied, and reduce our need to snack or eat in excess. It’s a lesson a lot of ‘intuitive eaters’ promote – instead of restricting certain food types, find ways to add to them to make a snack or meal more balanced and filling. The idea is that nothing is off limits, but if you want to eat less of a particular thing, telling yourself to stick to willpower alone isn’t sustainable, because as soon as you’re tired or grumpy your willpower drops. Instead, it’s claimed, it’s easier to stick to a healthier eating plan if you’re don’t deny yourself the things you love but find ways to make them more satisfying and filling in a balanced way.
I’m not passing comment specifically on whether these approaches are useful or not – I think diet is very personal and we have to figure out what works for us. But social media has taken concepts like these and built on them. Which is why we’ve moved from ‘avoiding extreme fat restriction can be helpful when it comes to eating healthily in a sustainable way’ to ‘animal fat is amazing’, and from ‘cooking oil choice might be relevant to how we build our diet’ to ‘seed oils are evil’.
Take for example, Troy Casey, Certified Healthnut (his description, not mine) who warns us that “seed oils are industrial oils designed to help lubricate machine equipment”, and claims:
Canola is a genetically engineered modified plant… These things are known as PUFAs – polyunsaturated fatty acids, these wreak havoc in the body and create imbalances.
These PUFAs I do believe are omega 6 and so when the vegetables are up and the omega 3s or the meats are down and so that creates imbalance in the system. It can gum up our tissues.
Troy claims it’s so important to boost our omega-3 fatty acids, which lower inflammation, because we used to hunt and gather – and, presumably, we need to get back to more of that way of life.
Meanwhile Revival Coach Bryan warns us that “these supposedly ‘heart healthy’ fats are not good for us at all” – according to Bryan, it’s because they’re polyunsaturated fats and therefore very unstable and prone to oxidising in our body, which causes increased aging. What is our alternative? According to Bryan, we need to cook with more butter, animal fats or coconut oils, because they’re saturated fats – and, according to Bryain, that means they’re stable.
Bryan tells his audience that polyunsaturated cooking oils have been promoted as healthy while saturated fats labelled as unhealthy, but we’ve been lied to ‘for decades’ – it’s actually the other way around, which is why we see declining health in the population.
Meanwhile on the TikTok account Total Health with Dr Nick, we’re told seed oils are incredibly high in omega-6, and that’s the reason they’re so inflammatory. But omega-3 fats are anti-inflammatory. Nick’s issue is that seed oils are produced using dangerous methods, with hexane and heat and pressure that denatures the oil, makes it rancid and therefore inflammatory to the body. Notice that, according to Nick, the primary cause of inflammation is the presence of omega-6… but the primary cause is also that seed oils are rancid. Such contradictions occur when we misattribute science to justify our false beliefs.
Dr Nick goes further, claiming that seed oils even hang around in the body, because cell membranes are made of fat and the fat gets into the membranes, making those cells toxic. Dr Nick tells us to use tallow from beef, lard, avocado oil, olive oil, coconut oil or ghee, which is a clarified butter, instead. Which conflicts with what we’re told by other influencers, who think olive oil is bad because it’s often cut with seed oils, while others inform us that olive oil is only fine if you’re not heating it.
These talking points are probably familiar – the idea that the very nature of processing a foodstuff is what leads it to cause harm is straight out of the ultra-processed foods play book, but there’s even more to the seed oil panic than that.
This conversation has everything. Troy ‘the certified healthnut’ tries to scare us by telling us that seed oils are industrial oils, insisting that canola oil is a GM plant and it’s used for lubricating machine equipment. Canola oil, also known as rapeseed oil, has been around for thousands of years – we know it was used as a lamp fuel in the 16th century. It is true that its use as a foodstuff came later than it’s use as a fuel source, but is that a sign that it’s unhealthy? Obviously not.
Consider turmeric, for example – the health food that many wellness influencers are evangelic about. Turmeric was used as a dye long before we realised how tasty it was as a spice, or started to use it in folk medicine. Just because something is repurposed does not make it bad or dangerous.
The rapeseed we use to make canola oil is indeed often from GM crops, but the modification is to make it resistant to pesticides, nothing more. And while it is used as a lubricant for machinery, that doesn’t mean that food-grade canola oil is unsafe to eat.
The panic over seed oils has all the trappings of conspiracism – with its unspoken “they” who have been manipulating our food and lying to us about it. We also see misinterpreted science: seed oils have proportionally more omega-6 than other cooking oil sources, but omega-6 is an essential fatty acid, our body needs it and cannot produce it. Some people claim that the body converts linolenic acid, one of the common omega-6 fatty acids, into another fatty acid called arachidonic acid, which is a building block for inflammatory molecules. But the evidence for this doesn’t stack up – it’s possible that omega-6 actually reduces inflammatory markers in the body.
Now consider that the recommended alternative sources of fats always come down to tallow or butter – this is because a lot of the influencers on the “seed oils are bad” train are also promoters of the ‘carnivore diet’… which could arguably be an evolution of the sometimes-trendy ketogenic diet.
From ‘keto’ to ‘carnivore’, from ‘vegetable fats’ to ‘seed oil’ – this shift in language isn’t inconsequential, it relates to a shift in ideological position. It is part of a shift toward alt-right talking points: traditional values, hyper-femininity for women, hyper-masculinity for men, and the idea that we should aspire to living on a homestead and eat real meat, maybe even raw meat, and cook using beef tallow.
Joe Rogan has been talking about avoiding seed oils since 2016, after learning about their supposed harms from fitness blogger Mark Sisson in January that year. By 2021, it was a regular Rogan talking point, and it was having an influence on his audience. According to an article in Rolling Stone:
Derek Beres, the co-author of the book Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, says he first started noticing whispers about seed oils being hazardous to your health when he saw Paul Saladino, aka Carnivore MD, an influencer with more than two million Instagram followers who advocates for a primarily animal-based diet, speaking about it on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Meanwhile Twitter user Carnivore Aurelius started talking about it in 2021 to over 300,000 Twitter followers linking seed oil to an increase in obesity and cardiovascular disease alongside tweets about traditional family values and the scam of feminism.
Seed oil fear has been an alt-right talking point for a while, but lately it seems like something’s changed, arguably due to the radicalisation pipeline. Whether by design or by consequence, the oil you cook your food with is a great way to radicalise people to a particular ideology. Food is something we all consume and something that has been the subject of scrutiny for decades.
As health trends drift in and out of fashion we’re often in a cycle where what we choose to eat is seen as a signifier of wealth, political viewpoints, moral stance. It even influences perception of core parts of our personality and identity, like work-ethic or selflessness: picky eating can be dismissed as selfishness, using pre-prepared foods considered laziness, choosing veganism seen as moralistic. Buying lunch during the work day can be seen as luxury or frivolity depending on who you’re talking to (or how you’re already perceived by society).
Food is something we have to think about multiple times a day, every single day. Once you’ve developed a fear about a particular foodstuff it can be very hard to break, and it can permeate into every moment of your day, from what time you wake up (got to have enough time to prepare whole foods instead of eating ultra-processed foods) to what your bedtime routine looks like (got to prepare lunch for tomorrow to save money and health on a shop bought lunch).
Centre that fear in the very fuel source you cook your food in and now you’re scrutinising and thinking about the fear-mongering position at every single meal. It’s easy to see how that can become an ideological position. Create a fear, link it to something as fundamental as eating, encourage the thought of that fear on multiple occasions during the day (even when food shopping or meal prepping for the week ahead), and you’ve snuck a position into someone’s daily life. Now they’re thinking about ‘clean’ or ‘traditional’ or ‘masculine’ dietary choices multiple times a day, every single day.
Once caught in this ideological trap, you might start evangelising to your friends about your new cooking habits and, if they question whether cooking everything in beef tallow is good idea (because society encourages us all to have and share opinions on other people’s food choices), then you might feel pushed away by the ‘mainstream’ and spend more time consuming content and gaining community from the people who share your viewpoint.
One minute it’s about making ‘healthy’ choices about food, the next it’s that eating meat is actively better for you, and then it’s that maybe climate change isn’t real – it’s just a way for vegans to force you to reduce your meat intake. Soon, you’re sneering at the ultra-processed foods in the vegan diet and processed meat replacements. And you’re thinking that maybe you should consider eating raw meats, or drinking raw milk, and really wouldn’t it be great to live the homestead life where your wife wears pretty dresses and has dinner on the table when you get home from work.
And when RFK Jr comes after your seed oils, saying the American population is being “unknowingly poisoned” by them, it’s easy to trust his understanding of the ‘science’ because you’ve known that seed oils are terrible for years… so maybe he’s right about the rise in autism and the need to control it, too?
The radicalisation pipeline is a dangerous one, but it’s not one that is always easy to see, or track. It’s easy to dismiss seed oil concerns as just a lack of scientific understanding, easy to assume that people are misguided about health. It’s even easy to laugh at the alt-right’s interest in seed oils as silly, but it seems clear to me that seed oil fears are being used as a talking point to draw people into that alt-right radicalisation pathway.
