JJ Virgin argues that obesity and metabolic disease stem from a cumulative toxic load: seed oils, artificial sweeteners, plastics, ultra-processed foods, and environmental stressors like EMFs and chronic stress. These toxins disrupt the gut microbiome, lower metabolism, and trigger insulin resistance, but their effects unfold over decades and vary person to person, making them hard to study.
I think that we will start to really get the issue with seed oils. That right now there's two things that are huge fights right now: seed oils and artificial sweeteners. There's one school of thought that goes, "Oh no, they're fine, people can lose weight on them." It's like, well, this isn't about weight loss. This is about whether you're healthy or not and what the long-term ramifications of these things are. And you wonder with something like an artificial sweetener which we know can disrupt your gut microbiome. Is it what will happen in a couple weeks of using it, or is it the toxic soup of something like artificial sweeteners combined with seed oils combined with plastics that create this history book of your body that years later you go, oh my gosh, and we're n of 1, so who knows what's generationally being passed down. So you can never really look at it, and I think this is the challenge with a lot of these toxins. You can't ever look at the toxin in isolation for a month and say this was a problem. It's really the combinational toxicology over decades that you would look at, but who's gonna ever study that? Who would pay to study that? No one, right? And every single n of 1 is different here. So I think we'll look back at things like, and it just makes sense, why would we use an artificial sweetener? Sweetener. And how could that possibly be a good idea? Why would we use an oil that in the pure processing of the oil creates toxic byproducts that then have to be stored in your body? And why isn't anyone questioning— like, we're looking at all of this obesity and everyone tries to pull out one thing, but what if a big source of the obesity actually is all of these toxic byproducts being stored in your fat and lowering down, cooling down your metabolism a bit, a little bit, and creating insulin resistance, which we know that toxins create insulin resistance. So I think we're going to start to see some major problems, but we'll never connect the dots. It's different when you have a single cause like cigarettes and you can just go, there it is, it's cigarettes, right? But you have ultra-processed food, you have artificial sweeteners and colorings in there. You've got highly refined carbs, and then you've got damaged seed oils. You've got a trifecta of doom that you're not going to be able to pull apart to figure out which one really caused the problem. It's all of them combined with stress, lighting, EMFs. And then we sound like crazies, and that's the funniest part of it. It's like, okay, you start talking about the fact that we've got like lighting that we never would have evolved with. And then we've got EMFs, we've got all these things, and we sound like crazy people with this, you know, whereas like it's just actually pretty obvious.
