I’m curious where this misinformation that seed oils are worse than other cooking oils started. Does anyone know who started it?
From the Paleo/keto circles about a decade ago. There was a YouTube video doing the rounds on how Canola oil is being produced, among other things.
Personally, I’m in a part of the world where sunflower oil is the main fat used in cooking, so I consume that sparingly. From what I can tell, without negative consequences so far.
I love how people use the word “conspiracy” in nutrition science. Most of this is unclear data and jumping to conclusions is rarely good as we don’t have the data to accurately determine the answers yet.
But I would guess it started with the fact that vegetable oils are shown to be more unhealthy than healthy, and seed oils are even more processed vegetable oils which would cause many to believe it is worse by comparison
Any oil that you eat in large quantities is bad for you. It’s excess calories. Seed oils like sunflower oil, canola oil, etc are calorie bombs with very little health benefits to them. The main arguments against them being that they’re being the cause of inflammation, free radicals, etc are unfounded, but we’ll never know any of this because we can’t do randomized controlled trials where we give people canola oil every day for 20 years and then give someone olive oils for twenty years and then give someone ghee for 20 years and see what the health outcomes are. I quit using seed oils when I did Keto last year and my inflammation markers all went away. Does that mean the keto and paleo zealots are correct? Or is it a mere coincidence. Who knows. I think the main point is eating tons of butter and tallow, etc instead of vegetable oil like the keto and paleo zealots say is not going to be healthier. All of this is moderation and calories in and calories out.
There does not seem to be any scientific support for the view that seed oils are unhealthy,
https://consensus.app/results/?q=Are%20seed%20oils%20healthy%3F%20
I did try Googling a combination of unhealthy + seed oil, but all I got was a lot of assertions and YouTubers making faces in supermarkets.
I’ve done a bit of research on this, but admittedly am very much an amateur. I believe the issue isn’t that they’re inherently worse to begin with, but the process of how they’re extracted is worrisome.
The same could be said about olive oil if it were heavily refined, typically only first/cold pressed EVOO is considered as the “super healthy” kind, and that’s simply because it’s as close to “raw” and “unprocessed” as you can get.
From my understanding, seed oils are typically milked for all their worth, and they’re cheap. More importantly, they’re commonly used for high heat cooking, where contrary to popular belief, they’re actually far less stable than EVOO would be.
I could link a bunch of science to it, but Cobram Estates makes a pretty good explanation of it here.
I understand Cobram would want olive oil viewed as the holy grail of oils given it’s what they sell, but it seems like sound science to a simpleton such as myself.
Edit: I realize I didn’t clarify this earlier, but the cheapness of seed oils to me stands out because their price is their appeal. I think their suitability for high heat cooking is arguable, especially commercially where the same batch of oil is used multiple times, thus making it less stable/more carcinogenic.
I think it started with the observation that seed oils are in potato chips. The issue is that I could replace the seed oils with palm oil and it wouldn’t make the chips magically healthy. They would actually become worse.