Why You Should Avoid Vegetable Oils

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

When they said avoid saturated fats, you were supposed to replace them with vegetable oils, right? That was the idea going back to the 1960s.

Hi, I'm Kaya Perowich, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We have unfortunately been taught to think that fats and oils are damaging for our health and lead to things like cardiovascular disease. But this is not necessarily true. When it comes to fats, the type of fat we eat matters. As a society, we've been conditioned to believe that unsaturated fats from vegetable and seed oils are best and that butter, lard, ghee, and other saturated fats are toxic. In fact, the reverse is true. Dr. Hyman discussed some of the history behind this misunderstanding with leading science journalist Nina Teicholz.

Well, this is where the food industry does come in a little bit, just to start off this story. So the vegetable oil industry was kind of born in the early 1900s, right? The first vegetable oil product was Crisco.

Oh, yeah.

Right?

So it used to be that those oils were used for the Industrial Revolution. They were used to lubricate machinery. And then they figured out how to harden them to make them, and they learned how to bleach them and make them look white. And then they thought, and it was actually Procter and Gamble that figured out how to do that. They were gonna make it into a soap. Soap is made from oil. Instead they're like, that looks an awful lot like lard. Let's try to sell it as a food. So they started to sell it as a food. Trans fat. Yeah, so it turns out that they contained, you know, that, it's what they, hardening vegetable oils is done through a process called hydrogenation and that produces trans fats. But so these trans fatty hardened oils were started to be sold to Americans in 1911. So coincidentally, heart disease starts to take off right around, maybe like 10 years later, we started seeing increases in death from heart disease. So then Procter & Gamble figures out how to just sell oil as oil. So one of the things to understand about these oils is they're processed- Procter.

& Gamble produced like shampoo.

Yeah, well they were a soap maker, so that's why they came up with this. But they were like, but Crisco was like a best selling thing. They convinced, you know, in America, so all these immigrants, and they want to become American, right? And so Procter & Gamble had this brilliant advertising campaign basically saying, you know, give up lard, those are the bygone days of your grandmother's like the spinning wheel of the olden days and have Crisco instead. And this is the newfangled thing made in shiny scientist kitchens.

So.

Proctor and Gamble figured out how to then make vegetable oils that were fluid in bottles. They kind of tinkered with the fatty acids to make them stable. And then, so here's where they, They started to influence nutrition science. In 1948, the American Heart Association, which is really just an association of cardiologists, right? Remember, heart disease is new. Tiny little association, they barely had an office. They were just like, they barely had any funds. Procter and Gamble comes in and says, we're gonna make you the designate of this radio show for a week. And it was this huge deal. Overnight, literally according to the official history of the American Heart Association, they said millions of dollars flowed into our coffers. We became overnight the powerhouse opening offices all across the country that we are today. They're still the number one largest non-for-profit in the country. Amazing. All thanks to Procter & Gamble. And pretty soon thereafter, they started to recommend that you start eating vegetable oils to prevent a heart attack.

Which was the worst idea because it turns out that trans fats, everybody agrees in this, have killed hundreds of thousands, millions of people over the decades.

Yeah, the trans fats and the hardened vegetable oils in Crisco are bad for health, clearly bad for health, but in.

The liquid form... And now they're ruled as not safe to eat. to eat by the FDA after 50 years of pressure to change that.

Right.

And finally took a lawsuit from a 97-year-old scientist who first discovered this 50 years ago to get them to change.

So vegetable oils, so it turns out that when they're in the oil form, they're also dangerous. So they don't contain trans fats, right? But in the oil form, the oils are highly unstable. That means that they oxidize easily.

Go rancid.

They go rancid. Oxidation is, remember that's why we take antioxidants because oxidation causes inflammation in your body. Yes, that's actually true.

On the inside and the outside.

Causes heart disease on the inside. Oxidized LDL is what's thought to provoke that unstable plaque that causes blockages.

Rancid cholesterol, that's the problem.

Yeah, so this is what, and in that, on all those studies, remember we talked about the Minnesota Coronary Survey where they had people, some people on vegetable oil diets in all of those studies again and again and again, the people on the vegetable oil diets died at much higher rates from cancer. This was considered a side effect of this heart healthy diet. And they actually had a series of very high level meetings at the NIH in the early 1980s to figure out what was going on with this side effect of cancer. And nobody could figure it out. And they basically just said, look, we believe that vegetable oils will help people prevent heart disease, so we're gonna ignore the cancer effect.

These were sort of invented 120 plus years ago, and we now have increased our consumption of soybean oil, for example, a thousand fold. And it's 10 of our calories, and it's in everything. It's stuff that you wouldn't imagine is in. So any processed food that you buy, it's made in a factory, probably has this oil in it or some variety of it. And I think, you know, when you look at the data, it is confusing. There's a lot of people who, who are looking at large observational processes that show that there's a risk for, you know, saturated fat and a benefit for omega-3 or omega-6 oils. And there's other data that show there's some actually randomized trials that show the opposite. When you just have people eat only the vegetable oil, they do worse.

Right. And let's just remember that latter data from trials is, is the rigorous cause and effect data.

Right.

So, yeah, I mean, so what do you recommend?

No vegetable oils.

Well, I, I was just gonna tell briefly about my visit to a vegetable oil factory to explain what a bungi factory What a brutal process it is to get oil out of a bean or a seed, right? They have to go through this process of extracting the oil. It's not even really oil when it comes out, it's this gray, rancid, disgusting fluid.

It's chemically extracted with hexane and other nasty chemicals.

Right, they have to use hexane as a solvent to extract it, and then they have, and then it's this bad smelling gray liquid. It has to be deodorized, winterized, bleached, and all this. So it goes through like 17 steps in this giant industrial plant. And then it's Crisco. So compared to, and this is what we're told to eat instead of churning butter. She's like, you just milk the cow and then you churn the butter. So I think that it speaks to our, to me, it speaks to the craziness about food that we live in, which is so divorced from our history. Like, can you really believe that something that goes through this, you know, 17-step process in a factory is what you should be eating to restore your health?

How many steps did it take from the field to your fork? You know, if there's more than one or two, it's probably not a good idea.

So the huge worry about vegetable oils, to my mind, is that when they are heated, and even if they're left out in a bottle where it's exposed to light, they will degrade.

Oxidize.

Right, they oxidize, they degrade. That means they break down into these these oxidation products. When you put them under heat, like any chemical reaction, that speeds up and it creates literally hundreds of degraded oxidation products, some of which are known toxins.

Americans are eating frightening amounts of refined vegetable oils, seed oils, and omega-6 fats, all of which contribute to inflammation and chronic diseases. Dr. Hyman recommends avoiding these oils altogether. So what should you use instead? Avocado oil and grass-fed ghee are your best bets for cooking due to their higher smoke points. Organic extra virgin olive oil and other organic extra virgin cold-pressed oils like flaxseed oil, walnut oil, and hemp seed oil are great for topping a wide variety of dishes. Organic extra virgin olive oil is also great for cooking at very low heat. Vegetable and seed oils are the types of oils used in most restaurants, especially for frying. They can even be in seemingly healthy salad dressings. When eating out, don't be afraid to ask what kinds of oils a kitchen uses and request a healthier alternative. If you enjoyed this mini episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy, please consider sharing it.

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