Dhru Purohit Show - Big Idea: Why Are Seed Oils So Pervasive and The Case For and Against Them

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Ollie, and Manukora Honey. Vegetable oils are a hot topic in the wellness world. Some consider them a heart-healthy alternative to saturated fats, while others argue they may be far more harmful to our overall health than once believed. But where did they come from, and how did they become so widely used?  Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Jeff Nobbs to discuss the history of seed oils and how they’ve become ubiquitous in restaurants and ultra-processed foods. He also describes the research limitations and selective reporting that have heavily influenced their recommendation and use. Jeff Nobbs is the cofounder and CEO of Zero Acre Farms, a company replacing harmful vegetable oils with healthier, more sustainable options made through fermentation. With over 15 years of experience in health and nutrition, Jeff has launched several start-ups focused on better ingredients and food access, including the restaurant chain Kitava and the nonprofit HelpKitchen. He’s also served as COO of Perfect Keto and GM at Ebates (now Rakuten). In this episode, Dhru and Jeff dive into: The history of seed oils and how they became so pervasive (04:01) Why trans fats were banned from commercial production (17:26) Observational research and the case for seed oils (21:40) Randomized controlled trials and the case against seed oils (28:21) Biomarkers in people who consume seed oils and observational data on trans fats (33:04) The Minnesota Coronary Experiment (40:32) McDonald’s transition to seed oils (43:15) Final thoughts (44:36) Also mentioned: Full episode with Jeff Nobbs This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Ollie, and Manukora Honey. Support your energy, bones, and resilience with The Women’s Three: Iron, Calcium, and Vitamin D3—formulated by experts, made for women. Head to livemomentous.com and use code DHRU for 35% off your first subscription. Want to give your dog the best in clean eating? Take the online quiz and introduce Ollie to your pet. Right now, Ollie is offering 60% off your first box of meals when you subscribe today! Just head to Ollie.com, use the code DHRU, and you’ll get 60% off your first box of meals in your subscription. Upgrade to the creamiest honey, packed with antioxidants and prebiotics. Just go to manukora.com/dhru to get $25 off the Starter Kit and boost your energy, immunity, and digestive health today! Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Prode here. Starting now, and I guess as of last week, too, we are now doing what we're calling a big idea Monday, where we feature key moments, aha moments from podcast episodes that are succinct, that'll leave you walking away with another level or distinction about a particular topic or idea. And today's episode is all about the topic of seed oils, probably one of the most hotly debated topics in health, but it's actually quite simple. We'll get to the simplicity in a little bit. But let's start off with this. The fact is that vegetable oils and seed oils are ubiquitous in our standard American diet.

You can see them on every ingredient list you pick up on your average grocery store, specifically with ultra-processed foods. And they are used in almost every restaurant around the country. I'm talking about oils like canola oils, soybean oil, cotton seed oils, sunflower oils, sunflower oils, and so on. Now, there's still a lot of debate in the nutrition world. I've had a lot of people argue on each side of the debate as to whether or not seed oils are actually a problem for a health. And if they are to what degree? Some argue that it's the ultra-process foods.

That's an issue. It's not the seed oils alone because a lot of us are not really having a ton of seed oils by themselves. And the pro-seed oil camp, which they're not necessarily pro-seed oil all the time. They're more anti-a-lot-lot-saturated fat inside of the diet. they feel that a lot of studies show, these are mostly observational studies, that people who have an abundance of seed oils in their diet are generally healthier when you are factoring in that they're not eating a lot of saturated fats like butter and ghee and lard and tallow. What we do know for sure, though, is that the more ultra-processed foods one has in their

diet, the more seed oils are typically consumed. And that can lead to a whole downstream of effects, including excess calories, people who a lot of ultra-processed food, spontaneously end up eating about 500 calories more a day, and potentially other aspects that isn't exactly clear. Is it the seed oils that are causing it? Or is it just the fact that you're eating a lot of low-quality ultra-process foods? It's probably the ultra-process foods. So amongst this debate, a big question that I was asking myself, and I know a lot of you

have asked this question before, is how the heck did seed oils become so widely used in the first place? They haven't always been used throughout history. They're kind of new. How did we get to this place? where some seed oils may not be as good for you as other seed oils, potentially, and how did every restaurant and every ultra-processed food end up using these oils? Well, in today's big idea moment, we have Jeff Knops,

the co-founder of a pretty cool company called Zero Acre Farm. They're trying to make an alternative to the ubiquitous seed oils that are out there. And Jeff comes on the podcast today, and he talks about the history of seed oils. And he also talks about the history of trans fats. One of the most deadly fats that's out there that we know causes heart disease and how a guy named Fred Cumao fought hard for decades to end up getting these fats banned, largely banned in our food system. And in addition to the story that Jeff tells about Fred Cumero, we also discuss some of the arguments for and against seed oils. And before we get into it, honestly, I think it's really simple. My general view on a lot of this is replace seed oils.

You can with olive oil. A lot more restaurants that are out there are using olive oil and are advertising that. Sweet Greens, parakeet in Los Angeles, True Food Kitchen, one of my favorite restaurant chains that's out there. Try to stay away from a lot of added, saturated fat in your diet. That's my own personal opinion. I think a lot of people would benefit from that. And a lot of the rest of it is individuality, your own lipids, your goals, what your level of

comfortability is. So keep that in mind as we listen into this fascinating discussion with Jeff Knobbs. Why do restaurants use seed oils? Why do companies make seed oils? And why are there doctors, researchers? If you literally Google, are seed oils toxic, as we did here on our screen, you scroll down, one of the first articles that's there is the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. And it's basically the title says, scientists debunks claim of seed oil's health risk, right?

So let's break those down section by section. Let's start off with how we got into this situation where we're using seed oils in the first place. Give us a little bit of that history. Yeah. So history lesson here. Seed oils first started being consumed in large quantities in 1911 with the introduction of Crisco. So working backwards from there, they were first used in general for manufacturing. They were used to lubricate machinery.

And that came about from not enough whale blubber. We were originally using whale blubber for a lot of industrial applications. We overhunted whales didn't have enough blubber. So we switched to using cottonseed oil and other vegetable oils. But they were acutely toxic. They had all sorts of downstream health effects. They would make men infertile permanently, for example, of too much cotton seed oil was consumed.

Unfortunately, a lot of beef tallow at the time was cut with cotton seed oil because it was cheaper. And so there were all sorts of issues that stemmed from that. But they discovered a way to acutely detoxify cotton seed oil and then partially hydrogenate it. And that created a sort of semi-solid white shortening substance that was branded as Crisco, crystallized cotton seed oil, and was called vegetable shortening. It was from cotton. So people are more associated cotton with dresses and blouses and napkins than with vegetables. You know, this is an oil or shortening from like kale and asparagus and broccoli.

But vegetable shortening had a good ring to it. And it was kind of before the days of all the FDA labeling requirements. So it's sort of just stuck. And now every oil that's chemically extracted or pressed from a crop is called vegetable oil. But that was 1911, introduction of Crisco. pretty soon it was in millions of American households. As we started to do more factory farming and raise more cattle and chickens that ate a lot of corn and soy, there was now a plethora of those seed crops in this country.

And so we started chemically extracting oil from corn and soy as well. And that slowly started to replace cotton seed oil as the most prevalent oil that was used in the U.S. In 1955, I believe, President Eisenhower had a heart attack. And at that time, in the first half of the 20th century, heart disease was very rare, almost unheard of. And a lot of, you know, cardiology was not even a practice in the early 1900s. Many doctors had never even heard of heart disease. I think it wasn't until 1930 that heart disease was an actual option as cause of death. for folks, again, this is the number one cause of death in the world we're talking about.

And 100 years ago, many doctors had never even heard of it and didn't see patients who suffered from it. But that quickly changed. And more and more Americans were suffering from heart attacks. And when the president, President Eisenhower did in 1955, it really put this topic of heart disease in the national spotlight. And everyone began to follow the president's story to see how he would recover and what would happen next.

And at the time, even. though there was no clinical evidence or no human interventional study whatsoever done on the idea that vegetable oils could help with heart disease, they found that folks who did have heart attacks and died when they would do autopsies, they'd find cholesterol and arterial walls. And that cholesterol was thought to then be the cause of heart disease. If there's a ton of cholesterol and heart attack patients, and it's this like foamy cholesterol, LDL, they didn't know at the time it was LDL in particular, but LDL particles that are oxidized that are hoovered up by these macrophages that get all big and foamy and then, you know, clog,

clog arteries. Simple ideas stick. And the idea that you throw some butter or beef tallow down a cold drain pipe and it and it will clog your drain pipe, that image stuck with our arteries, where if you eat saturated fat, it's going to clog your arteries, even though, you know, you put any saturated fat at 98 degrees and it just, it melts. melts into a liquid. But at the time, the thought was if we can eat something that lowers our cholesterol levels, that's got to be good for heart disease. And it was found that eating more vegetable oils did in fact lower cholesterol levels. So back to President Eisenhower. He was put on a low saturated fat, high vegetable oil diet. He continued to get worse. So he and his doctors

decided he needed to take it to the next level. And he went on a high corn oil diet. Um, Unfortunately, the president ended up dying of heart disease, I think five to 10 years later. His doctor would later say something along the lines of, if there's one thing I learned from this whole experience, I wish we could just go back to when no one had ever heard of corn oil. Is that documented? Like, is that, that's like a known thing? Yeah.

I think the doctor, Dudley White, I think. So this was at his end of life, like kind of like in his final days or after Eisenhower had passed away, the doctor had mentioned this? The supplement space is full of trends. But real performance, that starts with the fundamentals. As someone who's always believed in doing the basics with excellence, it's a lot about what we talk about on this podcast and what I write about in my newsletter,

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That's OLLI-E.com slash D-H-R-U and enter the code D-H-R-U to get 60% off your first box today. Yeah, I think it was, I can't remember if it was after Eisenhower passed away or if it was at the end of his career when he sort of did a memo on his, you know, decades of being a doctor. And he was largely influenced by a gentleman named Ansel Keys, who plays a large role in this whole story and was extremely influential. Sometimes history is defined, not by a bunch of really great data, but by just one person who's extremely convincing. And that was Ansel Keys. Anyways, at this point, a lot of money had been put into organizations, interests were aligned. Procter & Gamble around this time donated a bunch of money to the American Heart Association, which was a very little known organization. you know, not nearly as influential as it is today.

But Procter and Gamble sort of turned that organization into something that they could, you know, maybe influence. And so all of this was in motion. Again, there were no human studies. The human studies that the proponents of vegetable oils did put together ended up not working out the way they expected. One was the Minnesota coronary experiment. This was Ansel Keys and I forget the name of the other researcher designed this experiment.

And when it was published only one of those folks ended up putting their name on the paper and some of the data was actually just hidden. And it wasn't until the last 10 years when fellow named Christopher Ramsden, who's a researcher for the National Institutes of Health, NIH, very esteemed researcher, dug up these old dusty records from the basement of the lead researcher from decades ago and really, republished all of this data and showed that what they were hiding, what they didn't want to publish, was that, yes, vegetable oils did, in fact, lower cholesterol levels. And if you're just looking at biomarkers, that's a huge win.

The issue, and this happened with both the Minnesota Corner Experiment and the Sydney Diet Heart Study, which was another study that Ramston published, lower cholesterol levels, but increased risk of death, increased heart attacks. in one of those studies in Sydney Diet Heart, the increased risk of death was 62 percent. So a 1.62 hazard ratio. That's up there with physical inactivity, heavy drinking, heavy smoking in terms of risk of death. Anyways, I'll fast forward now to the 1990s. You know, there's still a big push for vegetable oils because there's been so much momentum.

And most vegetable oils, many vegetable oils are being partially hydrogenated into trans fats at this time. In the 1990s, there was a big push to move away from animal fats. And so, again, primarily because of one individual who put a bunch of his money into full-page New York Times ads and things like that, trying to get animal fats out of deep friars, he was ultimately successful and pressured these companies to remove the beef tallow and the lard and to replace them with vegetable oils. Is he was talking about? This wasn't keys. This was, I'm blanking out on his name, but one individual who basically made it his life mission for this. A wealthy philanthropist?

Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And he was successful and between 1990 and 1993, McDonald's, Wendy's and Burger King all took the animal fats out of their friars and replaced them with partially hydrogenate oils or trans fats. That ended up being way worse for people's health. It's thought to have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. Trans fats in particular.

Trans fats in particular. Artificial trans fats in particular. Yep. And then ultimately trans fats were banned. The reason they were banned, and this will be the wrap-up of this story, a gentleman named Fred Kumero, who in his 90s had been researching trans fat for decades, he put out a citizen petition to the FDA for them to finally ban trans fats because the science had been showing how bad they were for many, many years. And the FDA just ignored him. So he sued the FDA. And in response, the FDA, finally in 2015, ban trans fats.

And by 2018, they were required to be out of all foods beyond 0.5%. Even though they've had the data for a really long time, I know a tiny bit of that sort of history, it really took somebody suing the FDA for them to say, okay, we're actually going to do this and ban it. But even still, I think there's some controversy because I recently got my whole. Boston heart full panel done by my cardiologist, Dr. Michael Twyman, who's been on this podcast before. And even somebody like me who, you know, doesn't cook with any sort of things that have trans fats at home. And yes, we'll occasionally eat out and other things like that, generally at healthier restaurants. A lot of restaurants here in L.A. that actually, you know, promote themselves as not using vegetable oils and using higher quality oils, but you can't control that everywhere, right?

You can just do your best. Even I had a tiny amount of trans fats. And as most people do, they have trans fats that still are showing up when they do blood work. So there's some hidden rules there where you can still, I think, get a certain amount of trans fats through, even though they've pressured the companies to largely remove it. Is that your understanding? Yeah. On nutrition labels, you're allowed to list trans fats as zero grams. If it's under 0.5 grams per serving. So, food companies can play with the serving sizes to ensure that there are fewer than, than 0.5 grams per serving. And often also when you heat the oil, it produces trans fats. So that, you know, the fresh soybean oil or canola oil may have been lower in trans fats,

but then once it's heated or deep fried, and there are numerous studies on this, it does produce trans fats. So I just want to pause there because regardless of what people feel about the topic of vegetable oils. Maybe one side feels that people who are talking about the concerns around vegetable oils, those individuals are fearmongering, that there's so many other things to focus on like getting dietary fiber in people's diets, this, that, not that they have to be mutually exclusive, we're going to chat about that later on, but there's one side that feels people are fearmongering by telling people to avoid vegetable oils or their deeper concern, again, we'll chat about this later, is, well, what are they replacing it with?

And are those oils actually healthier? Again, we'll chat about this. Everybody stay tuned. So there's one side that feels that way to kind of simplify their feeling. And then the other side feels all the things that you've talked about in the beginning of the episode of all the other data around seed oils and why we should be so cautious. But put those two things aside. And I just want to pause for one second and say, trans fats.

a fat that we know that is associated with increased death and increased cardiovascular disease, well-established, like everybody agrees this now, even the industry agrees this, there's still a way for that to get in our foods that's legal inside of the U.S. So everybody can just pause for a second and just take that in, right? So just take that in for a second,

that me, you, all of us, even anybody that's trying to be healthy, you're still consuming some amount of trans fats, obviously can't go crazy, still got to live your life. But the most dangerous oil that we know, the most dangerous fat that we know, if that's still allowed in our system, obviously that's going to, you know, trigger your spidey senses a little bit. And the only meaningful way that we're consuming trans fats now is through vegetable oils. And they don't have to be partially hydrogenated. Simply the process of cooking high omega-6 vegetable oils produces trans fats.

And that individual, Fred Cumerow, he passed away a couple years ago, I think, at the age of 102. And he was doing research in his lab up until the last couple of years. Incredible individual. Yeah. He would have been a great podcast guest. Has anybody ever made a documentary about him? Not that I know of. I feel like.

I'm only in written form, but. I feel like that would be a person to really make a good documentary about. Yeah. That would be really cool. You know, history doesn't exactly repeat itself, right, that old quote, but it will rhyme. And so we need to look at the way that it's rhymed over time, even some of the things that have happened during the pandemic, just to have a healthy sense of skepticism when people say the science is settled on any side of things. But nonetheless, we'll put that to the side for a second. And I have one final point on Fred Kumiro, which was in one of his final pieces of literature, you know, really urging people to not consume trans fats, he essentially said,

there were two causes of of CBD of cardiovascular disease or heart disease. One, the consumption of artificial trans fats, not to be confused with natural trans fats, which are found in things like ghee and dairy fats, but artificial trans fats from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and two, oxidized polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils from frying in high polyunsaturated fat vegetable oils. So the person who finally got trans fats banned, he was trying to get two things band. One was trans fats. Two was seed oils or high omega-6 vegetable oils. He was successful in one. He didn't live to see the day that the other would happen, but hopefully it does at some point.

Can we Google this guy? I just want to see what he looks like. For those that don't have access to the video, obviously we're streaming this on YouTube. Aw. He looks like my wife would say Jugi. You know, he looks like a total Juji, which doesn't mean like a sweet, older guy or sweet, cute person. And oh, man, you just want to give him a hug. He looks like he might be from Texas. He's got a little bit of that sort of southern tie thing going on. Yeah, that's a good look. Or maybe from the south somewhere, which obviously if he was successful in this whole trans fats banning process, he had to have some cahonas.

So he probably was from Texas. This is great. All right. Any documentary filmmakers out there, this is your next subject. Somebody should make a story about him. Great call. So you gave us the history of vegetable oils. how they start off in industry, their toxic nature, how they were through a heavily sort of process,

process, a lot of the most toxic things were removed enough to make them short term, in your opinion, you know, quote unquote, safe to eat, meaning people were not immediately becoming, you know, the example that you gave of men and low sperm count and becoming sterile. I had not heard about that. I'd love to look that up to now they can be used and also industry likes it because it's cheap. We haven't said that as well, right? It's cheap to use. Yep.

It's cheap to make. And this is why also restaurants use these oils in addition of the fact that entire generation, multiple generations now of America and now increasing around the world, when I go and visit India, there's signs everywhere about why big brands are. are telling people, do the healthy heart decision, switch to vegetable oil. Right? So all around the world, everyone is in this narrative, right? And well-meaning in many cases of people thinking that they're doing a better job for their heart. And obviously, you're contesting that. So that's kind of the summary of that.

What about the doctors that are out there that are saying very actively, like, you know, the head of Tufts Medical School? right, different plant forward vegan podcast host and even, you know, people that are more like in the middle. Why are they looking at the data and coming up to a different interpretation? So what do they feel about the topic of vegetable oils and why are they defending them as being generally safe for people to consume and not inflammatory to the body? I'm also not a psychologist. and so I can't say exactly what's motivating them.

Everyone has their biases. You know, we're only human. We know that for sure. Two different people can look at the exact same study and walk away with two completely different conclusions. And less so their motivations, because I don't want to get in their head, but what are they seeing that they're evidently,

and everybody's on a spectrum, right? We'll go through some of the opinions. Some people feel that, hey, I'm not defending vegetable oils. I just am worried about what people are going to replace. them with. We're going to get to that in a second, right? That's one of the arguments that's out there. Other people say that actually, when you look at these big studies, people who have higher levels of vegetable oil in their diet actually have better outcomes, right? So what are they seeing there when they say things like that? There's something powerful about starting your day with one of nature's

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That's a good thing, Manuka Honey, travel honey sticks, a wooden spoon, and a guidebook. To get this offer, just head over to Mani. Manukora.com slash Drew to grab yours. That's Manukora, M-A-U-K-R-A-com slash D-H-R-U. So start your day with intention and let nature do the rest. Yeah. So they're looking at observational studies. And observational studies sound, the results sound really powerful because you can say things like we followed 437,000 people over 20 years and we found this result. I mean, that sounds really trustworthy. The issue is correlation is not causation and observational studies are not randomized controlled trials. So the ideal study would be you take one group of people, ideally it's thousands,

but hundreds would be certainly better than nothing. And you have them do one intervention, say they eat more vegetable oils. And then you have group B and they do a different intervention. and let's say they eat fewer vegetable oils, and everything else is equal, that's a randomized controlled trial. Then you can be very confident in the results at the end of that trial. What is the effect of that one variable that we changed?

With observational studies, what is typically done is individuals in a study, probably at the beginning of the study, are given a food frequency questionnaire where your listeners can Google food frequency questionnaire issues. The list is long. You're essentially relying on someone to fill out a form of what they eat and then assume that's not what they eat for the next year, five year, 10 year, depending on the study.

They're not very reliable. But, okay, I get it. It's better than nothing. And then you follow these people around for years or decades and you try to draw causation from what is by definition not causation. So you may look at this group of hundreds of thousands of people and say the group of people eating more vegetable oils, have fewer heart attacks. And for the average person hearing that, they may hear, if I eat fewer vegetable oils, I have a lower risk of heart attack.

But there is no way you can say that. They may try to control for different factors. So, for example, they could say, let's just compare the non-smokers to the non-smokers. The non-smokers who eat a lot of vegetable oils compared to the non-smokers who eat very few vegetable oils. or those who exercise a lot, let's compare those who exercise a lot and eat a lot of vegetable oils to those who exercise a lot and eat a few vegetable oils. But to try to pick apart life into a few variables that you control for, I believe as a fool's errand,

there is so much we do. And we have no idea. I mean, just the nature of this discussion, there's clearly a lot of controversy around this. There's controversy around almost everything. And so to try to just define a handful of things that. we know are, you know, risk factors for something and control those out, that does not give us causation. So that's the first issue is relying on observational studies to try to infer anything causation. And healthy user bias plays a key role in this in that, you know, I just went over

the kind of history of vegetable oils. It's been almost 100 years now that, you know, I guess like 60 years now that the American Heart Association, you know, Time magazine, mainstream media has been saying vegetable oils are good. Vegetable oils are good. So people that listen to health advice, eat more vegetable oils. These are probably also the people that, you know, do more yoga and go on runs and eat more fruits and vegetables and do all the other health advice that they hear about. And there are studies showing, for example, the opposite side of that, which is people who eat more saturated fat, also drink more alcohol, also exercise. less also, you know, participate in other less healthy activities.

And so that's healthy user bias, unhealthy user bias. It's impossible to pull that out of observational studies completely. And then the second point is, I believe, an overreliance on biomarkers. So biomarkers are not health outcomes like death or heart attack or cancer. Biomarkers are things that we think are linked to those outcomes. And so biomarkers could be something like LDL cholesterol levels. And again, looking back at the history, much of this vegetable oil rhetoric was formed when we hadn't even differentiated between types of polyunsaturated fats like omega-6 and omega-3 or types of cholesterol like LDL and HDL. And we just looked at biomarkers like cholesterol levels.

And even today, many studies are guilty of this of assuming that if a biomarker is associated with an outcome, then we can do another study that associates some lifestyle intervention like consuming seed oils. with that biomarker and try to infer that eating the seed oils is therefore causative of that health outcome. So just to make sure, I got that. So if a study, again, observational, right, got a few questions about that, but if a study's big observational study, we followed 400,000 people, you know, I'm not sure what that data set was, whether it was Framingham or this or the nurse's study, but we followed all these people over a period of time.

We saw from these food questionnaires what they ate. Here's our extrapolation of that data. One of those components being people who eat seed oils, right, that they had lower cholesterol, lower LDL, and then we're just assuming that lower LDL means less risk for cardiovascular disease. Is that what you mean that we're taking one biomarker and then immediately saying that that automatically means less cardiovascular disease? Yep, exactly.

versus straight up somebody dying from that thing. In a randomized controlled trial. Right. Now, let me ask you, this gentleman again, what was his name, the sweet old uncle? Fred Cumerow. Fred Cumao, who died at 102. What was the data set that he showed that got them to ban trans fats? Was it observational data?

Like, what was the data that he got? Because I want to make sure, yes, observational data, as many of my guests have talked about, before, there's challenges with it. And of course, there's been probably a lot of things that have come that we, you know, have today that is health advice that is given to the public that's made them healthier that's probably largely based on observational data. So in this example of trans fats, do you know what data was presented that came out in litigation that led to the banning of trans fats? It was relatively short, his petition, actually. It had shown some data that he came up with in his lab in his own experiments. It had also referenced data from others. There was, I mean,

going back to the 70s, there was data on this. In the 90s, it became very prolific. But it also wasn't without its controversy. There's a book called The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teishol's, which documents a lot of this. There were folks who were hired to follow around trans fat opponents at conferences and just grill them with questions to make them look silly and make them, you know, look not very credible because they were hired but bit by industry to not get trans fats banned. But, but, but Fred's, Fred's petition was pretty short and sweet. It wasn't any, I don't think it was any particular, you know, type of observational study or trial. But it was built on other data sets that were there. And is my guess just because I'm not in this world, I'm not a

researcher, you know, you've looked into this space for a while, you've been passionate about it, wouldn't you assume that some of that data that had led to the banning of trans fats was maybe probably observational data or was it all sort of clinical data was it randomized control trials do you know anything of the above it was a plethora of different studies which included all of those that you just mentioned okay got it so why can't the same thing happen with seed oils well partially is the same data set there because one of the things that I saw and maybe Tesla we could tweet this who's the head of Tufts medical school again? Darius. Darius, Mazafarian.

Yeah, Mazafarian. If you look them up on Twitter and you look up seed oils, one of the things that he's done is he says, you know, everybody's talking about seed oils being inflammatory. In fact, they've been showed to become the anti-inflammatory. So what data said is he talking about? He's tweeted about ongoingly, and you probably know what I'm talking about, right?

But there do seem to be individuals that are saying there are actually, and I didn't come prepared with any studies or links. Have you seen people talk about non-observational data showing that seed oils are safe or even maybe anti-inflammatory? Have you seen some of those comments? Yeah, and sometimes they will be randomized controlled trials that measure biomarkers. So that leaves us right off with, you know,

back to what we were talking about. Yeah, that's not an outcome. They may last two to four weeks. I watched your podcast with Simon Hill and the study that he mentioned, I've also seen him post on Instagram about this topic as a, you know, very, very plant forward individual who I think is fine with seed oils. Yeah, just to clarify for him, because I've asked him a few times, he's like, I'm not pro seed oil.

I'm concerned with what people are going to replace it with, which we can have that whole discussion. I think it's a great point. And also, generally, he's four people cutting back on seed oils, if that means also sort of restricting their calories from processed foods, if that's going to mean that they're going to eat healthier foods, he just doesn't think that they're as bad as everybody talks about it, right? Just to kind of clarify from what I understood his position being.

Yeah, and I came away with the same position from that conversation. And in one of the primary studies there that, you know, I've seen a lot of folks cite in terms of looking at the impact of seed oils on inflammation to try and show that they're not inflammatory are randomized controlled trials that last a couple of weeks. And in a couple of weeks, you're not giving, you're not giving your body a chance to incorporate all those new healthy fats into all of your cells. Again, linoleic acid, the primary fat in seed oils, has a 680-day half-life. That means it takes six years for 95% of the linoleic acid to leave your body. What the heck is going to happen in two weeks in terms of incorporating, you know, those new healthy

fats into all of your cells. So if you're just looking at inflammatory markers a couple weeks later, you know, one, what markers are you looking at? And do we, do we have the audacity to think we can capture every possible marker in the human body that may be associated with something like inflammation? And two, are you capturing all of the relevant data if you're only looking at it for two to four weeks as opposed to several years, which is, of course, harder to do? you know, one randomized controlled trial in humans that lasted something like four months was in migraine sufferers. Migraines are an inflammatory neuro condition.

And in this randomized controlled trial, what was interesting was, so one group consumed significantly reduced levels of, so there was a control group, a group that had a high omega-3 fat diet and a group that had a high omega-3 low-Ommas. omega-6 diet, and the group that just increased omega-3 consumption had a reduction in migraine pain, the group that increased omega-3 and decreased omega-6 had a significantly reduced. I think it was twice as effective as the high-omega-3 group in reducing migraine pain, days of migraine pain in a month. This was a more recent study.

Yeah, this was like in the last year or two. Okay, amazing. If we find it, I would love to link to in the show notes. Also on this, you know, we talked about what does a perfect study look like, right? Like one group of people stays away from seed oils over a period of time and another group of people is fed healthier fats. Did you ever listen to that Malcolm Gladwell series? Yeah, how McDonald's broke my heart.

How McDonald's broke my heart. Tesla, can you just bring that up? And one of the experiments that you talked about in there, and I don't remember who was behind it, but from what I understand, and you could probably fill in the blanks, there was a researcher who basically ran what would today be considered maybe an unethical study, but at that time, it was allowed to kind of happen. And it was done with prison inmates, right? Are you familiar with this study?

Yeah. Can you break it down to the audience? Yeah, that was the Minnesota coronary experiment. Okay, just talk about that. What was that, you know, if you know anything about who ran it, and what were some of the findings that were found from it? So the Minnesota coronary experiment was done many decades ago, 60s or 70s, And it was done very intentionally to prove that vegetable oils prevent heart attacks and prevent heart disease.

And it was successful in lowering cholesterol. It was not successful in preventing heart attacks. And in fact, especially for those older individuals in this study. Prison mates who literally could not decide what to eat. They were being served food. They had to eat it. Right? One group was eating vegetable oils and another group was not eating vegetable oils.

So it was perfectly controlled because their food was controlled because they were in prison. Yeah, ethically questionable today at the time made for a really great randomized controlled trial. They were sort of stuck eating whatever diet was given to them. And yeah, exactly like you said, you know, one group may have been eating butter, another group may have been eating margarine made with vegetable oils. One group, maybe their eggs were cooked in butter. Another group their eggs were cooked in, you know, corn oil or whatever. And so there was definitely a dietary difference in omega-6 consumption. and vegetable oil consumption.

And yeah, the group eating more vegetable oils, surprisingly, had had higher rates of heart attack. And this was not what the researchers expected. The whole point of the research was to show that vegetable oils were healthy. So most of the data ended up in the lead researcher's basement until after he died. And then Christopher Ramsden, this name keeps coming up, he was the lead researcher from the the NIH who wanted to get to the bottom of what really happened in this study. So he contacted that the Minnesota Coroner Experiment lead researcher's son and was able to get into his father's basement, dust off and find those old dusty tapes.

So it wasn't like he had it on a thumb drive, right? This is from many decades ago. So it was tapes of data and was able to pull together an updated analysis of the data based on these tapes. And what that data shows us is why they were so hesitant to publish this data because it shows that the more vegetable oils you eat, the higher your risk of heart disease. Yeah, it was, it's a great listen to. And if you if you Google it, the basement days, Malcolm Gladwell, revisionist history, probably a lot of people have heard it. It's a great

series. History of McDonald's, them switching from, you know, beef tallow to fry their French fries in and then switching to peanut oil, how the founder at the time of the CEO, I think the founder got super on this whole track of trying to convince everybody to do it. He also took out full-page ads in the New York Times and things like that. And the unfortunate part was, and I've seen criticisms on both sides of this research, but at least in the way that Malcolm Gladwell tells it, that the researcher died feeling that he really had failed. They had done something seriously wrong in his research,

that something was fundamentally off, and that his family felt that he always kind of felt bad about the whole situation because it didn't prove what they thought was going to be the obvious answer about vegetable oils and that the findings led them to believe that they legitimately effed up and how now the son feeling like through the reanalysis of it how much his dad would have felt like well the work was not in vain right and at least being part of the evidence space that could at least counter some of the claims that were being made about, you know, where are vegetable oils always being shown as being healthy? So very fascinating.

The debate around vegetable oils is still ongoing in the wellness community. Some out there tout seed oils and vegetable oils as a heart-healthy swap for saturated fats. Others argue they pose a more significant risk to our health than previously believed. For me personally, I don't do well with seed oils and I don't need blood work to tell me. I actually notice for myself when I regularly eat at restaurants that I know cooking seed oils, I even have exposure to fried foods, which typically are fried in rice bran oil at some of the healthier restaurants I'm going to occasionally canola oil that are out there. I immediately get an inflamed throat. I've known this since I was a kid. I just didn't actually know what was causing it. And through a lot of AB testing, I figured out

for me that it's been seed oils and deep fried foods. So now I avoid fried foods completely. I do my best to minimize my exposure to seed oils. One meal here there is not going to kill me. But add it up over a period of time, I definitely don't feel good. So for me, it's pretty easy. And the other component is, again, most people are getting their exposure to seed oils through ultra-processed foods. And I'm just not eating a lot of ultra-process foods in my diet.

So I'm not worried about that aspect. Generally speaking, I do well with olive oil. And because I listen to a lot of different people when it comes to the aspect of heart health, I've made up my mind. And I don't want to live from my age right now, 43, till hopefully 100 plus with a high LDL and APOB. I do think that that increases our risk of heart disease, even if we are metabolically healthy,

and I am metabolically healthy. So I'm not willing to roll that dice. I don't do a lot of added butter and ghee, but I'm not worried about having some a little bit here and there. So I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Jeff Nobs, and I hope that it's provided some context as to how seed oils became so pervasive in the food system around us. And what the experts on both sides are saying about the impact of seed oils and vegetable oils

on our health. If you'd like to learn more, I've done a number of podcasts on this topic of seed oils. If you want to hear my full-length conversation with Jeff and expand on this big idea moment, you can find that interview in the description below. As always, if you think you know somebody who might enjoy this conversation, share this episode with them. I'm sure they'll appreciate it. Until next time, Drew Proitt, signing off.