Lewis Howes talks with a guest about whether seed oils are actually harmful. They cover the limited evidence that they're toxic, potential benefits when replacing saturated fats, and why labeling cheap oils as dangerous could hurt people who can't afford alternatives.
Are seed oils bad or good for us?
So, yeah, seed oils are super misunderstood right now. I think they're quite villainized as like this reason for our health issues. The thing about them is they don't have really a lot of redeeming qualities in terms of like nutrients within them outside of their fatty acid profile. But they're just a polyunsaturated fatty acid. There is not good data that they're harmful to our health.
Really.
And in fact, the research actually shows that they're potentially beneficial when replacing saturated fats with pol unsaturated fats, particularly with people who are at risk of cardiometabolic disease. They're cheap and they are flavorless, pretty flavorless compared to like an olive oil. And so these food corporations use them and they put them in their foods. And so we're over consuming seed oils in this country. We eat lots of them, lots of polyunsaturated fatty acids. And we don't really pair that with omega 3s, which come from like fish and algae and those types of things. And so I, when that happens, when you're over consuming anything, it can be problematic. And so I think that truth exists and people kind of extrapolate that to mean they're super inflammatory and they're causing all every issue under the sun. And we just don't have that data to suggest that. My issue with it is if we're saying that's toxic, a lot of people, that's an accessible oil. Like if you look at Costco, for example, the price of the vegetable oil compared to an olive oil or an avocado oil, especially an avocado oil, it's accessible. And so if it's not actually toxic, and we're telling people it's toxic, it can actually cause real harm, not just in people's stress levels, but also in people's accessibility. And so I think that's the issue. We should be honest about the fact that they're in lots of low nutrient, ultra processed foods that we absolutely should be minimizing in our diet.
So correlation, not causation.
Yeah. And even when we look at good studies that are done, when we look at people who are consuming them, we do not see that they're harmful to health.
Really.
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