The Hidden Dangers of Seed Oils: Why Cooking with Them Could Be as Harmful as Smoking

Featuring an Interview with Jeff Nobbs | Empowering Neurologist

One of the manifestations of type 2 diabetes is what we call non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, right? Everybody's heard about how drinking too much alcohol can kill your liver. Well, it turns out that if you consume too many seed oils, it also kills your liver.

Why should we be avoiding seed oils?

Well, it seems like they’re bad for you. That's the number one reason. So how are they bad for you is the question, right?

We’re in the middle of, to use a fashionable word, a pandemic of chronic diseases. It’s happening in every population all around the world, and it’s also happening in our animals. I’m looking over my shoulder at my dog, who I think is eating my sofa at the moment.

For instance, in getting this dog, I did a little review of dog nutrition. Dogs have a 60% obesity rate in the United States. Well, how on Earth does that happen? Along with every other animal that lives around humans and eats human foods, everything is getting obese.

Now, what's also interesting is that there are lots of populations that we know of, unfortunately getting smaller and smaller in number, who didn’t have any of the problems that we have in America. They didn’t have obesity, they didn’t have heart disease, and they often had lower rates of cancers that go along with obesity and diabetes. They didn’t have diabetes.

So what has changed over the last 100 or so years that has made us all sick?

A lot has changed. We're consuming more calories. The standard American diet has been just flooded with refined grain products. There’s an epidemic of sedentary behavior and exposure to innumerable environmental toxicants.

So how have you singled out seed oils as being a causative agent in this epidemic of metabolic disease?

Well, two things: the epidemiology. I hate using that term, but if you look at all the different populations around the world, this is the one common denominator that I’ve been able to find. For instance, I had a discussion once with a scientist on Twitter who said, “Well, it's multifactorial; it could be pollution.”

And I said, “Okay, fine. The fattest country on Earth is a small island in the South Pacific. What pollution are they experiencing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?

We can go through carbohydrates. I actually started in the low-carb community, and I still eat a low-carbohydrate diet. I think it’s Plan A for human health.

But if you’re trying to blame all these disease problems on carbohydrates, you have to explain people like the Japanese who, before the American diet was introduced, were eating 84% of their calories from carbohydrates and had low rates of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.

You have to explain the Tukisenta, another South Pacific population, who eat 94% of their calories from carbohydrates, which is just a mind-boggling number, mostly from sweet potatoes. They’re getting a fair dose of sugar there, and they have no obesity, liver disease, heart disease, or diabetes. How can that be possible?

We also have an enormous literature of research that has been done trying to explain the causative factors. For instance, if you go ask a doctor, “What’s the most effective way to treat my obesity?” he will tell you that it is to get bariatric surgery. It turns out that the most effective bariatric surgery blocks the pathway from seed oils causing you to overeat. It is literally like a lobotomy. It cuts a pathway from your brain to your stomach, where your stomach detects seed oils coming in and converts them into a chemical called 2-AG that causes you to overeat. This is an endocannabinoid, much like THC, which causes you to want to eat. THC is actually used as a prescription drug called dronabinol, used to make people eat.

There’s an enormous amount of scientific evidence backing up the epidemiology of what all these societies start eating before they get fat and sick.

Are there any long-lived populations for whom seed oils play a significant role in the diet? None that I'm aware of. That’s the perfect question: where’s the healthy population that eats a lot of seed oils?

There isn’t one that I’m aware of.

Are you familiar with the Israeli Paradox?

The Israeli Paradox is about why Israelis, who are on this high seed oil diet for economic and religious reasons, have all sorts of health problems. Jewish immigrants coming into Israel from places like Ethiopia, who are much healthier, start getting sicker once they adopt the Israeli diet. Another great example is India. We’re all told to eat a high-carb, low-fat diet and get most of our fats from seed oils. That’s exactly what they do in India. They recently switched from ghee to seed oils and are now undergoing an epidemic of all the same chronic diseases that we have in America, most typically type 2 diabetes and obesity. So it’s a problem. I’ve been looking for the black swan for years. I’ve asked people, “Okay, great, show me the population that breaks this hypothesis.”

I read this hilarious paper once, and the author, an Indian scientist, was complaining about calling all these diseases Western diseases. He said, “That’s not fair; we discovered these diseases in India.” That’s true. Diabetes was first discovered in India about 2500 years ago, or at least first described. India also started eating seed oils about 5,000 years ago with things like sesame oil and grapeseed oil. Obviously, in India, there has been an influx of seed oils into the food supply, but there has also been modernization and industrialization of their food, including fast food. So what are the purported mechanisms? Why do you think seed oils could be at the root of this kind of disease we’re seeing so commonly?

Let’s talk about diabetes. Diabetes is a disease of carbohydrate intolerance, right? I will say that the best thing to do if you’re diabetic is to go on a low-carb diet, whether you’re type 1 or type 2. But carbohydrates clearly don’t cause diabetes because we know of many populations that consume high-carb diets and don’t get diabetes. If you’re a doctor at Harvard Medical School and you want to induce diabetes, you inject soybean oil into subjects to make them insulin-resistant. This is based on a model of medicine called Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN).

If a baby is born with short gut syndrome, they are given an infusion of fats and carbohydrates into their veins, typically using soybean oil. It was discovered in 1961 that you could use soybean oil to feed these children. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that this caused insulin resistance. If you use another formulation based on olive oil, which has much less of the problematic fat in soybean oil, they don’t get this reaction. They don’t become insulin-resistant or hypoglycemic. So, controlling for calories and fat content, it’s just that in one version, they’re using extra virgin olive oil, and in the other, they’re using soybean oil. It’s the soybean oil that seems to induce type 2 diabetes.

One of the manifestations of type 2 diabetes is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Everyone knows that if you drink too much, it will kill your liver. It turns out that consuming too many seed oils can also kill your liver. Children or adults put on soybean oil often develop liver failure in a similar way to what’s happening to many people in the United States. Thirty percent of people in the United States now have NAFLD, a disease that was unheard of until the 1980s. In the 1980s, the first few people discovered with NAFLD were elderly women who were accused of drinking too much, but they had never had alcohol.

In humans, if you inject soybean oil, it can lead to liver failure and liver cancer. NAFLD progressing to liver failure is now the leading cause of liver transplants in the United States. So, would the same not develop with an infusion of saturated fat or fructose? Well, doctors have found that if you give patients fish oil instead of soybean oil, it not only prevents liver failure but can cure partial liver failure. Fish oil is great.

A lot has been made about these oils imposing a potentially pro-inflammatory effect. You hear this all the time in the wellness world. There has been some pushback from those I would call seed oil apologists, who argue that there’s no solid data to say that seed oils are inflammatory.

So, are they inflammatory or not?

An important thing to note is that it’s generally thought there are two factors: the absolute level of consumption and the balance between omega-6 and omega-3 fats. Omega-6 fats are broadly pro-inflammatory, and omega-3 fats are anti-inflammatory.

Americans have a disease of chronic inflammatory conditions. If you want to test it, you reduce consumption and see if these inflammatory conditions improve.

This is what a doctor and scientist at the National Institute of Health, Christopher Ramsden, has done. He took people with chronic headaches and migraines, put them on a low seed oil diet, and their inflammation went down. Cutting seed oils was a better treatment for chronic headaches than any known drug. If seed oils don’t cause inflammation, why do they help resolve this inflammatory disease?

Chronic headaches and migraines affect about 15% of the population. Omega-3s are anti-inflammatory because they turn into resolvins, helping resolve the inflammatory cascade. Seed oils are inflammatory because they provide the precursors to our inflammation pathway. Chronic consumption or massive consumption of seed oils leads to inflammation. Like smoking, which causes inflammation and disease over time, seed oils have a similar effect. Seed oils break down in your body into highly toxic substances, causing protein degradation, DNA damage, and mutation

Chronic consumption or massive consumption of seed oils leads to inflammation. Like smoking, which causes inflammation and disease over time, seed oils have a similar effect. Seed oils break down in your body into highly toxic substances, causing protein degradation, DNA damage, and preferentially mutating the p53 anti-tumor gene, which is a cancer protection system in your body. The toxins that seed oils break down into disrupt this system. This is the most common genetic mutation found in all the cancers that have been increasing with the Western diet.

The smoking analogy is quite relevant here. They believe the chemical that causes cancer from smoking is acrolein, which is an aldehyde. Seed oils also convert into acrolein in the food we eat and in our bodies. This probably explains why smoking causes lung cancer but also cooking with seed oils causes lung cancer. It’s recognized as a cause of lung cancer in humans and is thought to be the cause of the epidemic of lung cancer primarily in women who’ve never smoked. Research from China suggests that these seed oils, which break down into carcinogenic chemicals, are inhaled when cooking dinner, leading to cancer.

Why are these oils so heat sensitive?

Without getting too technical, you’ve got saturated fats, monounsaturated fats like those in olive oil, and polyunsaturated fats. The more unsaturated the fat is, the more unstable it is, and the more likely it is to break down into toxic substances. This isn’t a problem with monounsaturated fats but is with polyunsaturated fats, even omega-3 fats, although those tend to break down into less harmful toxins. It just so happens that the toxins that omega-6 fats break into are far worse for us.

Polyunsaturated fats in seed oils differ from those in foods like wild fatty fish. Fish generally have omega-3 fats and a tiny amount of omega-6 fats. They are very susceptible to going bad, which is why fish stink when they go bad. Humans are very attuned to rancid omega-3 fats, which is why we don’t make french fries in fish oil. However, humans can't really smell rancid omega-6 fats, which makes them handy in processed foods. They go rancid, but people can’t detect it as easily.

In whole foods, you find antioxidants that protect these fats, which aren’t there after refining, bleaching, and deodorizing these grain and seed oils. While manufacturers do add antioxidants, the problem is that when you cook with seed oils, the antioxidants don’t protect the fats from heating. When you eat the fat, the antioxidants are separated from the fats and can’t protect them from oxidation in your body.

Vitamin E is an important fat-soluble antioxidant that exists in nature to protect these fats. Wherever you find a high concentration of polyunsaturated fats, you find a high proportion of vitamin E. Americans are eating more of these fats via grain and seed oils than ever before, but most don’t consume enough vitamin E. While frank deficiency is rare, about 90% of Americans don’t consume the RDA for vitamin E. It gets worse because studies have found that when you supplement vitamin E, it can make heart disease worse. In the body, vitamin E can act as a pro-oxidant of these omega-6 fats. Instead of protecting them, it stimulates oxidation. Vitamin C can also act as both an antioxidant and a pro-oxidant, depending on the circumstances.

So, they started supplementing with vitamin E, thinking it would solve the problem, but it made things worse. This is because it accelerates the oxidation of these very sensitive fats. We were arrogant to think we could just supplement our way out of the problem. Nutritionism often sounds like a good idea, but biology is incredibly complex. The people who invented seed oils thought they were doing a good thing, just like the doctors who did these vitamin E studies.

Is there any acute toxicity from consuming seed oils?

There are papers describing how high-seed oil diets can make people feel nauseous and sick. One scientist, Stephen Phinney, experimented on himself by feeding different fats directly into his stomach through a tube. He found that animal-based fats and olive oil didn’t cause nausea, but soybean oil did.

When you consume seed oils for years, they break down into highly toxic substances that are extremely damaging to your body, causing protein degradation, DNA damage, and mutations in the p53 anti-tumor gene, leading to cancer. This is why seed oils are compared to smoking, as both lead to chronic disease through similar mechanisms.

The commonality between the toxic effects of smoking and seed oils is acrolein, an aldehyde that is a known carcinogen. Seed oils convert into acrolein when heated, which explains why cooking with seed oils is linked to lung cancer, especially in non-smoking women. This is based on research from China showing the inhalation of these carcinogenic chemicals during cooking.

Polyunsaturated fats, particularly omega-6 fats found in seed oils, are highly susceptible to oxidation, especially when heated. This oxidation leads to the production of toxic substances like acrolein, contributing to chronic diseases and cancer. In contrast, monounsaturated fats, such as those found in olive oil, are more stable and less prone to oxidation.

The balance between omega-6 and omega-3 fats is crucial for health. Omega-6 fats are pro-inflammatory, while omega-3 fats are anti-inflammatory. The modern diet, high in seed oils, skews this balance, leading to chronic inflammation and disease.

In conclusion, chronic consumption of seed oils leads to the breakdown of fats into toxic substances, causing inflammation, chronic diseases, and cancer. Reducing seed oil consumption and increasing intake of stable fats like monounsaturated fats can help mitigate these health risks."