In this conversational excerpt, the speaker outlines the eight seed oils they consider harmful—corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower, rice bran, and grapeseed—and explains why they belong on a “bad‑oil” list. The discussion emphasizes that chemically these oils are very similar, with crude oil from the seeds being inherently toxic. Sunflower oil is noted as the least harmful among the group because of its historical cultivation for oil, which results in a slightly better crude profile. The speaker stresses that the quality of the final oil depends heavily on harvest and storage conditions, which are rarely disclosed, leading to batch‑to‑batch variability. Extraction involves extreme temperatures (400‑600 °F), high pressures, and sometimes solvents like hexane, producing a crude oil that is “inedible and toxic.” Consequently, continuous testing by oil scientists in factories is essential to monitor and mitigate the toxicity of each batch.
Chapters
You and I have stack rank lists of bad oils and you talk about the hateful eight oils. What are the hateful eight oils? So the hateful eight are the ones that we want to avoid. And they are. I'll just list them off first. Corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower, rice bran and grapeseed. Now you brought it up. So do you have different oils on your bat oil list? Because I'm curious how they got there. I want to know first, what is the worst oil of this hateful A? Oh, well, you know, they're all very similar chemically, so but the, the, the best one is a little bit easier to answer. Actually, the best of the worst is possibly sunflower because of the fact that it had been cultivated and used a little bit for oil in certain areas. And that makes a big difference to the crude oil and how extensively damaged it gets during the refining process. So sunflower oil is probably one of the better ones, but the rest of them, their chemical makeup is very similar and the crude oil is roughly easily toxic. So, so part of how I answered the question is what is the crude oil look like? And then where does it go from there? Because it only goes down from, from the crude oil. And I've spoken to a couple of people inside the industry and they, they say that in terms of the quality between, you know, the, between all of them, all the hateful eight, really what matters in their minds is the harvest is harvesting factors and how well they were kept before they were extracted, which is information that we just don't have. Nobody keeps, no one will tell, but otherwise. So that's why the testing, that's why it's so important that they have oil scientists constantly in the factory, because every batch can be different and every batch will have different challenges and different solutions to clean up the crude oil. And the crude oil is very nasty because in order to get oil from these seeds, which were never bred to be oil seeds, with the slight exception of sunflower, they have to be pummeled with 400 to 600 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures and insane pressures and then sometimes even solvents like hexane. And it's just a total mess. What the liquid is that is the crude oil, and it is inedible and it is toxic.
