Why I Stopped Avoiding Seed Oils - Ben Greenfield

In this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, eat this if you consume seed oils, the best way to combine strength and cardio, peptide stacking rules, and a whole lot more. Well, welcome to yet another episode of Ben's messed-up hair. It's out of control, but I'm just letting it do its thing. No weed eaters here. And I'm drinking super oxygenated water. I don't know how much research has actually been done on the idea of drinking oxygen. Inhale, it's called. So yes, I inhale. I did a podcast with the guy who hands makes, invents this stuff. The ingredients are water, but then the label says oxygenated water. It says lowers heart rate and increases blood oxygen saturation, 7 times more oxygen than regular water. Look, this might just be water, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that that 40 ppm of extra oxygen is somehow making its way into my cells even though I'm not in a hyperbaric chamber nor in an oxygen-starved state. Perhaps the inventor knows something about science that I don't, but it tastes like water, maybe with a little oxygen thrown in. We'll see. Okay. So, this is going to be one of those episodes where I talk to you about some of the latest research while trying to ignore the tractor doing landscaping in my backyard. Hopefully, you can't hear that as loudly as I can. And, all the shownotes are going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/504. Why not start off with something that I think is a hot topic right now in the health industry? You guessed it, Seed oils. And there was a randomized controlled trial that just dropped that might change the way that you think about seed oils. Maybe not, we'll see. So, this study involved 52 healthy adults and they were split into 2 groups for 12 weeks. One group ate about 2.5% of their calories from linoleic acid. Okay, that's the omega-6 fatty acid that is found in seed oils. Now, the other group ate about 10% linoleic acid. Now, that's more of what you'd find in the average American diet, probably most of the average Western world diet. 10% of the diet from linoleic acid, the omega-6 fatty acid found in seed oils. And the group that ate 10%, they all died. Their heads exploded. No, I'm just kidding. We'll get to what actually happened. So, the popular anti-seed oil argument goes like this. Linoleic acid gets converted to what's called arachidonic acid. And arachidonic acid drives inflammation, and therefore seed oils make you inflamed. But this study found that arachidonic acid levels didn't change between the group who had just a little bit of linoleic acid and the group that had a significant, or at least a normal amount of linoleic acid. What did change in their biomarkers was their EPA. Oh gosh, I'm going to try and pull this out of the memory banks. Eicosapentaenoic acid, I believe is how you pronounce that. So, EPA, the group eating the high linoleic acid had much lower EPA. Now, EPA is the anti-inflammatory omega-3 fatty acid that governs things like your immune response, blood clotting, also known as thrombosis, inflammatory signaling. So, linoleic acid and EPA compete for the exact same enzymes to get made. So basically, what they saw was more linoleic acid, less EPA. And it kind of makes sense mechanistically, right? They're competing with each other. So the reason that's important is EPA and arachidonic acid produce opposing mediators. These are little lipids. These mediators are called oxylipins. And arachidonic acid-derived oxylipins push things slightly towards inflammation, whereas EPA-derived oxylipins push things a little bit more towards the anti-inflammatory side. Okay. So, the long story short is that when we drop EPA by increasing our percentage of linoleic acid intake, we can tilt the ratio a little bit more towards the pro-inflammatory side. Now, this does not mean that I'm on the take your I'm allergic to seed oils card to every restaurant and ruthlessly cut all seed oils out of your diet. You probably would've found me, you would have found me about 3 years ago saying this, but I am increasingly unconvinced that we need to completely remove All seed oils. If we did, none of us would be eating, I don't know, seeds, nuts, most grains, Whole Foods cold salad bar, guilty pleasure, you name it. Instead, I think that what we should be avoiding, as I've mentioned on this podcast multiple times, are seed oils that have been repetitively heated, fried, or stored for long periods of time at high temperatures in translucent plastic bottles. Those are the type of seed oils to avoid. But more importantly, I think that this study highlights the fact that if you are going to have some seeds, have some nuts, whatever, eat at the Whole Foods salad bar every now and again, I don't know why I'm kicking that horse to death. And basically, if you have some amount of this linoleic acid in your diet, which frankly, if you're the average person, you do, and you probably have more than 2.5%, and in many cases, maybe close to the 10% of your total calorie intake that was found in this study, you should make sure that you're getting adequate omega-3 fatty acids. The thing is, if you're eating, say, like flaxseeds or chia seeds or walnuts, a lot of the ways that people who don't eat fish will recommend you get your omega-3 fatty acids, it won't fix this because high amounts of linoleic acid from seed oils will block the conversion of plant-based ALA to EPA. So, we really can't get EPA from seeds and nuts, et cetera, in an appreciable amount to allow for adequate EPA. So, you should be getting your EPA basically from fatty fish or fish oil, especially if you have seed oils in your diet. That's the most simple takeaway that I can give you, right? Include fatty fish or fish oil in your diet. I am on the slightly higher fish oil bandwagon unless I am in a scenario in which I shouldn't be taking things that would thin the blood like prior to, say, a surgery, for example. But I take 2 to 4 grams of fish oil on any days that I don't eat a portion of fatty fish. I had a bunch of trout from Seatopia. Shout-out to Seatopia, clean plastic and metal-free farmed fish. They farm it so they can control what the fish eat and get a cleaner fish. But I had Seatopia last night, so I didn't need to take fish oil yesterday. But any days I'm not having fish, I have 2 to 4 grams of the Kion Omegas. And that's like Anchovy caught off the Peruvian coast that's packaged with rosemary and vitamin E and some other good stuff. Pretty good DHA/EPA ratio. That's the one that I choose. There's other good brands out there for fish oil like Nordic Naturals. Carlson's has a good cod liver oil. Dr. Jeffrey Bland, his company Big Bold Health, they do a pretty good salmon oil. But anyways, practical takeaway here is fatty fish or fish oil regularly, especially more so if you're consuming seed oils. So, next up, we get into a look at how much strength training is actually adequate in order for you to be getting a lot of the long-term health rewards of strength training. So, this was new research and basically, they tracked more than 147,000 people for 30 years. And, what they found was that the sweet spot for strength training, brace yourself, drum roll please, is about 90 to 120 minutes per week. So, an hour and a half to 2 hours of hitting the weights or doing some form of strength training per week is where you're going to get the biggest payoff. And, this was a pretty long, pretty big study. And, that amount of strength training, 90 minutes to 2 hours, was linked to lower risks of death overall, especially from cardiovascular disease and neurological disease. And, when I was looking at this study, another one popped up that I thought was interesting. And, this was Actually, looking at what happens when you combine the strength training with aerobic exercise. For these people in this study, when you combine the strength training with an aerobic exercise protocol, you got even better benefits. But then, this other study that I saw showed that when you combine strength training with aerobic training, that is the most effective type of exercise beyond yoga, tai chi, breathwork, stretching, running, walking, cycling, whatever. Combining strength and aerobic training in a week is the best way to reduce blood pressure, which is really good to know because blood pressure is, I think, the number one silent hidden killer of people worldwide. Now, there's a subtle nuance here that you need to be aware of, and that's an idea or the idea of what's called concurrent training. Now, concurrent training is the idea of combining, just like I mentioned, strength and aerobic exercise. Most of the studies like this that you see are not combining strength and aerobic exercise in a single session, in a single workout. What they're saying is you do some strength training during the week and you do some aerobic training during the week. It does not usually mean same-session concurrent work, meaning doing, I don't know, push-ups and then bicycling and then pull-ups and then rowing and then Whatever, like squat jumps and then squatting and kind of going back and forth from cardio to strength. So, what is interesting is that if you look at the metabolic effects, and there's multiple studies backing this up, I remember going over some of them. This podcast has been going for 19 years and the first couple years of this podcast, I remember bringing up these studies. For maximizing fat loss and for getting a good metabolic effect from a workout, Combining strength and cardio in the same session actually is a good idea. This would be the same way that people who are training for a HYROX or a Spartan Race or a Spartan DEKA or an indoor fitness race or something like that would train. This is very similar to what you'd also find in, I don't know, an F45, many CrossFit classes. It's very similar to how I train. So, I did this morning, for example, I had 2 sets of deadlift, chest press, pulldown, squat, overhead press, and row. And, those were sets to maximal failure. I was using a machine called the ARX for this. Well, after each of those sets, I had 2 minutes on the AirDyne bike doing nasal breathing. Right. So, that's a perfect example of combining strength And cardio, which again, most of these studies are not doing. Most of these studies are just saying, okay, so you're doing some strength training sessions, some aerobic training in the same week. But when you combine them both into the same workout, if you're looking for maximizing fat loss and maintaining muscle at the same time and getting the biggest metabolic effect, doing concurrent training like that in a single session is pretty superior. Big reason for that is higher total calorie expenditure, Bigger, what's called excess post-exercise oxygen consumption when you stack modalities like that. And the con, like the flip side, is what's called the interference effect, the interference effect of doing cardio and strength at the same time. So basically, there is a signaling pathway called the AMPK pathway that's triggered by things like fasting and cardio. And there is another pathway called the mTOR signaling pathway that's stimulated by things like, I don't know, like high protein or calorie intake or strength training, right? I guess you might classify as mildly catabolic, one is anabolic. And when you combine cardiovascular training with strength training, you suppress mTOR signaling by activating AMPK, and you can actually reduce your ability to be able to build strength or to build muscle. That's called the interference effect. For most people, besides the bodybuilder or, I don't know, the high school football player who just wants to get totally jacked as fast as possible, The interference effect is not that big of a deal. I mean, I'm going to use myself as an example. I know I'm an N=1. I am 6'2. I weigh 195 pounds. I'm at 6% body fat. And concurrent training is the main form of training that I do. And I could probably be potentially more yoked and more jacked or whatever if I just did traditional strength training or long rest periods, more sets, et cetera. But I like doing strength and cardio at the same time. It's a very time-efficient way of training for me. I like to be a little gassed while I'm working out, and I like to have my heart rate elevated from the bike while I'm doing the chest press. It's just how I like to train. That's why I like doing Spartan races and stuff like that so much. Maybe that's not your jam, but it is pretty time-efficient also when you're going back-to-back with strength and cardio like that. But do know that there is the risk of the interference effect. So, if you really want to maximize strength and mass as much as possible, don't do that. But if you're just going for the fat loss, the metabolic effect, and squeezing as much into as short a period of time as possible, kind of like the rep schemes that I talked about in podcast episode 503 where you're doing these myoreps, one set, and then continuing to do additional sets at a lower rep range and stripping the weight off as you go in some cases so that you're just gradually exhausting that muscle over one single super long set. as a form of time-efficient training. This kind of fits in that same category. So, for more on that myoreps piece, go to— this is my sneaky way of getting you to listen to another podcast if you haven't listened to it yet. Go listen to Podcast 503, BenGreenfieldLife.com/503. And, this one's at BenGreenfieldLife.com/504. Okay. Someone wrote in, I don't know if this is their actual name, but G Dubs asked at BenGreenfieldLife.com, you can leave a question. They asked, do peptides have side effects You think okay to stack? Do peptides have side effects you think okay to stack? I don't quite understand the question, but I'm going to assume that what G-Dubs means is what peptides can you stack or are there any rules around stacking peptides? So, yes, there are rules around stacking peptides. I know peptides are another hot topic now, possibly a hotter topic than seed oils. Someone should come out with a, I don't know, a seed oil peptide and they would probably just go viral. So, I'll give you 6 quick rules for stacking your peptides. First, don't co-mix your peptides in a single syringe assuming that we are talking about injectable peptides. So, 2 peptides that are both, say, reconstituted in what's called bacteriostatic water, which is that kind of a near-neutral pH, are usually fine if you draw into a syringe right before you inject them. However, there can be some issues like BPC-157 is typically reconstituted with a little bit of acetic acid for stability and that drops the pH. And then, if you pull BPC-157 into a syringe with a peptide that falls out of solution at a low pH, you lose the efficacy of that peptide. It's just basically kind of like acid-base chemistry. So, the bigger issue I think is when people combine peptides in a bottle and then inject them later. That's the biggest no-no. If you want to be as clean as possible, don't take your 3 daily peptides that you're supposed to use and pull them all into one syringe and inject them. They are typically not meant to be combined into a solution like that because of the effects. That amount of degradation at the pH that those different peptides are at, is not going to occur right away. So, if you pull all 3 into syringe, inject them right away, say subcutaneously, it's not a huge deal. You'll lose a little bit of efficacy, but you'll save yourself quite a bit of time. And it's really not that much efficacy that you lose. I can't put an exact number on it because it really varies from peptide stack to peptide stack. But the cleanest one that would be kind of like a hard no is GHK copper peptide. That is a copper complex. Copper basically causes oxidation of any other peptides that you mix it with. And so, you need to keep GHK copper peptide in its own syringe always. If you want to play it super safe, just when you're stacking peptides, try to inject them separately. And definitely, that's the case with GHK copper peptide. The next is that the peptides act on different receptors. They have different mechanisms of action, but some of them do hit the same receptor. For example, not to get too nerdy and in the weeds here, but There are peptides that people use for the anabolic or growth hormone effect like GHRP-2, GHRP-6, ipamorelin, oral MK-677, hexarelin. These all might sound like alien names to you or Star Wars robots, but all of them agonize the same receptor. It's what's called a ghrelin receptor, and that receptor triggers growth hormone pulses. So, if You combine any of those that I listed together, you're just going to desensitize the receptor faster. All peptides will have some amount of receptor desensitization over time, which is why you never just inject the same peptide day in, day out. It's usually certain peptides for certain reasons. Like before I travel, I'll inject some thymosin alpha-1 for the immune system. If I'm injured or inflamed, I'll use some BPC-157 or TB-500. If I'm on a growth cycle and want to put on some muscle, I'll use something like tesamorelin for Anywhere from 10 to 12 weeks, but never anything year-round. And, what you want to do basically is look at the mechanism of action of the peptide that you're using and don't use 2 peptides at the same time that are hitting the same receptor. It'd be impossible for me on this podcast to go down the whole list of what not to mix, but I'll just give you one example. All those that I listed hit the growth hormone receptors. You only need one, right? Not all of them all at once. More is not better when it comes to peptides. So, you can stack across mechanisms though. So, what that would mean is that if you look at something for growth hormones, it's called a GHRH analog, a growth hormone-releasing hormone analog. That would be like semaglutide, CJC-1295, tesamorelin, which I mentioned earlier. And then, You combine that with one of those ghrelin receptor agonists like ipamorelin, those are acting on different receptors. Those are acting on different receptors. And so, even though they kind of result in a similar mechanism of action, they're not hitting the same receptor. This would be the reason that some people would, for example, use a GHRH analog at night pre-sleep like say semaglutide or CJC-1295. And then, use something that agonizes the ghrelin receptor in the morning like ipamorelin. Those act on 2 different receptors, but the combination releases more growth hormone than either alone. And, this has actually been shown in literature that when you combine 2 different peptides act on different receptors but that are going after the same thing like a growth hormone effect, you get a better effect than if you use just one. So, you would use, for example, 1 growth hormone-releasing hormone agonist plus 1 ghrelin agonist. So, pretty simple conceptually. Most of you, I hope, are working with your physician on your peptide protocol. That's the best way to do it versus fly-by-night sold-for-research-only companies and then using Claude or GPT because doctors have access to a lot of the information that I'm sharing with you. And, are able to make those recommendations to you of some of the science. It's a little bit confusing. The next thing to know is that when you are in a certain metabolic state, some peptides don't work as well. So, let's take insulin, for example. If you have a high amount of insulin in your system, any of those things that help to boost growth hormone are not going to work quite as well, which is why you would want to inject them or use them on an empty stomach because insulin is a peptide And it will interfere with the action of something like a growth hormone. It will blunt the response to a growth hormone peptide. So, you need to consider your metabolic state when you use a peptide also. And of course, if you were to inject insulin on a completely empty stomach, then you could potentially go hypoglycemic, right? So, when you look at peptides, you also want to consider the metabolic state that you're in. I would also say the circadian state that you're in, like retatrutide, tirzepatide, a lot of these GLP agonists, They tend to lower blood sugar, but they also can cause a little bit of sympathetic nervous system stimulation, which is why many people sleep better when they inject something like a GLP in the morning rather than in the evening. And I back that up and recommend that. Reason number 5, if you're counting, that you do want to be careful when stacking peptides is that the side effects can stack. So, a growth hormone peptide, a growth hormone secretagogue can raise IGF-1. And carry a downside cluster of effects like water retention, carpal tunnel-like symptoms, higher fasting glucose, increased appetite. There's another peptide, MK-677, which I mentioned earlier. That's pretty bad when it comes to glucose regulation and hunger. And if you layer something like that, MK-677, on top of an injectable growth hormone-releasing peptide, you've basically doubled the receptor hit, which I already got over, But then, you've stacked the metabolic cost and the side effects on top. So then, you've got more water retention, more bloating, more wrist pain, higher fasting glucose, raging appetite. And so, that's another reason to understand the idea that more peptides are not better. We are not in a race to see who can inject the most peptides in a day. And while I'm throwing some caution out there, and again, I'm a huge fan of peptides, I've used them for a long time, we do need to be realistic about What we're stacking. Like the Wolverine stack, I've talked about that on my podcast since, well, for a long time, almost 10 years. I think the first time I brought that up was 2016. Well, BPC-157 has over 100 preclinical studies and people use it for muscle issues, gut issues, gut inflammation, et cetera. But as of 2026, while I'm recording this, pretty limited human clinical data. There was a 2025 safety pilot study that had 2 subjects. There was a 2025 systematic review that found 1 clinical study among the papers analyzed and a handful of case reports. There's obviously a ton of anecdotal N=1 stuff on Reddit and old bodybuilding forums and beyond, but I don't know if we can count that as research. There's no randomized placebo-controlled efficacy trial that I know of unless there's some old yet-to-be-translated-into-English Russian literature on BPC-157. The first controlled human trial on it for hamstring recovery started recruiting in 2026. So basically this year, and there's no regulatory approval trial that I know of that has been completed on BPC-157. And then a bunch of people stacked that with TB-500, right? That's a fragment of thymosin beta-4. There is some human trial history on it for things like dry eyes, wound healing, skin or dermal repair. But not for torn muscles, which is the reason that a lot of people use it. So, people talk about the Wolverine stack. I will say that it works for me. It works really well for me and it helps stuff to heal up much more quickly. I, for example, this past Sunday at a 4th of July party, I was playing football and I was having someone hold the football, kicked it, missed the kick, and immediately like this stinger right in the back of the hamstring. And, I went home, I injected with BPC-157 and TB-500 actually near the site of pain using good sterile techniques. The next day, I felt pretty good. The day after that, it was just gone. I've had that injury in the past and without the peptides, it would normally be a week of hobbling around for something like that to feel better. That's totally anecdote, right? So, if you're using this kind of stuff, don't tell your friends because science says. Tell your friends, hey, I'm a human guinea pig. I'm an experiment. I'm trying this stuff out and I feel pretty good. But plausible has value, but it doesn't mean that something's actually proven. And stacking 2 unproven compounds in the same protocol doesn't validate them. It just means you're running 2 experiments on yourself at the same time. So, just be aware of that. I want to be the voice of reason here as much as I can. That is all I got for you today. Show notes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/504 where you can leave your questions. Your comments, feedback. Thanks for tuning in. And leave this podcast a rating or review wherever you checked it out. See you next time. Do you want free access to comprehensive shownotes, my weekly roundup newsletter, cutting-edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life, and a whole lot more? Check out BenGreenfieldLife.com. It's all there, BenGreenfieldLife.com. See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like, or rate this show. 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