The history and health effects of seed oils by Nina Teicholz

uh one of the things that a a lot of people talk about of course is sugar right and and refined carbohydrate and and something that a lot of people aren't that aware of is um seed oils so uh I I think it's quite important um for us to educate ourselves and the world around seed oil so Nina is going to tell us about um about what's happened in the past and and what this means for our health Nina thank you very much thank you thank you again I feel like I should have done a costume

change um like beonce or something but at my age I'm just so glad I know who that is so um okay so seed oils is something that I've studied for um for a good 20 years now um and you know if you live on Twitter or Instagram or whever it is all over seed oils is everywhere uh and you feel like there must be a large body of scientific literature backing up the all of these um these new influencers talking about seed oils so there's a lot of Confusion And I want to try to clear

up you know what even are seed oils and what is the actual evidence that they are um might be damaging for health so again my disclosures um I don't receive any industry funds of any kind um so what are seed oils um they are this is most of them um corn oil cotton seeds soybeans safflower uh rape seed oil peanut oil canola oil they're all relatively new um the history of our cooking fats was not seed oils these are the fats that we cooked with we cooked with talo that came from cattle SE which is

from um ruminant animals that comes around the organs uh lard which comes from pigs and butter these were the main cooking fats in the western world really the only cooking fats in the Western World um lard used to be popular it was not an insult to call somebody a lardy um if you can imagine that and I know that you're kind of thinking well what about olive oil didn't people cook with that but when I was researching olive oil for my book I found out that actually it is not an ancient food stuff it was

used as a for medicinal purposes it was used to anoint the body to make your muscles glisten in battle but it was not really used for food and cooking until uh the until the 19th century in Spain this is is a reference to in Greece um this what this archaeologic archaeologist found but it's also true in Spain and in Italy that there really is not evidence for use as in The Culinary sphere until the 1900s so olive oil was used um not so much so uh what oils used to be used for was um as

and was as a lubricant for Machinery in the industrial revolution I mean one of the main reasons that we hunted whales was to get whale oil was tremend that the oil from Wales was the main product that we got from them and that was used to lubricate the vast and growing amount of Machinery that was uh that was fueling the Industrial Revolution when we hunted out all the whales or most of them the Americans in the South who were growing cotton uh they discovered that cotton seeds which was a byproduct of their crop could be

crushed into oil cotton seed oil and that was uh the very beginning of oils as I'll explain that were used um in uh to become food stuffs in the US so I just want to pause for a moment and explain to you the chemistry of fatty acids uh and and to understand a saturated solid fat like butter which is the top molecule here you can see that it's a straight molecule and that and uh and that's and so those molecules St they stack on top of each other very neatly and that's why that is a

solid right these other molecules unsaturated fatty acids um they're unsaturated because there are many double bond in them you can see those double um like equal signs along the chain there they're squiggly molecules they don't stack neatly on top of each other therefore they have a lot of space between them and that's an oil so we're talking about unsaturated fatty acids these are um in oils it turns out that they're very unstable they um they go rancid easily they degrade over time and so there was the Great invention of being able to use oils uh

was to learn how to hydrogenate them this was a process that was invented by a German in the early 1900s and you could see it takes that squiggly molecule and uh and through a chemical process that I'll show you in a second it makes it it straight and flat so you can take an oil and make it and make it uh a straight molecule that allows it to be hardened it allows it to be a hard substance I mean so that all those molecules stack up against each other this process of hydrogenation turns out to

be a rather dramatic one it involves pressure heat hexane a solvent it uses a metal Catalyst it has to be steamed to eliminate bad odors it then has to be bleached to remove the gray color that comes out when it's gray it then needs to be winterized for stability and enhanced uh with artificial colors and synthetic vitamins it's a pretty extensive process I've actually been inside of a hydrogenation plant and it's just a huge massive operation but through hydrogenation these cotton that cotton seed oil uh that through Proctor and Gamble was the inventor of of

this product which came this is the first time that hardened oil came into the food supply as a food stuff in the form of Crisco so they had you know they they were able to harden the soil they looked at it they said hey that looks kind of like lard now that we've winterized and deodorized and stabilized it and bleached it and so let's try to sell it as a food stuff to people um that came in in 1911 was the very first Crisco that came into the food supply that's the very that's the first

time really that hydrogenated products came into the food supply and they had a huge marketing campaign telling women to leave large which was dirty and came from the abattoir The Slaughterhouse and and instead choose this this this new fangled fat that came out of clean sterilized labs and was much more appealing uh and and and you to leave your traditional ways behind so margarine was another hydrogenated product very similar to krisco it was meant to replace butter and it eventually did in large part and then eventually we got just plain old cooking oils when they

figure out they figured out how to do a very light touch form of hydrogenation that allowed for vegetable oils to sit on the shelf and not become rancid so all of these oils got a huge boost in 1961 when the American Heart Association really the first organization anywhere in the world told people to start eating these polyunsaturated oils instead of saturated fats in order as the best measure of prevention against heart disease it really all started with this recommendation in 1961 um it turned turns out from my research I found that the American Heart Heart

Association had an alliance with Proctor and Gamble again the maker of Chrisco Proctor and Gamble had back in 1948 virtually launched the American Heart Association by making it the recipient of um this radio show called Truth or Consequences and um and made it over it what it be today $17 million overnight and according to the American Heart association's own corporate history just launched the entire group and it was sort of the big the bang of big bu bucks that launched the group so it had a lot of backing from Proctor and Gamble and last time

I checked it still had backing from Proctor and Gamble and this enabled vegetable oils to become like medicine they were marketed as medicine take you know your doctor it was like something your doctor should prescribe to you maybe your you should have your eight-year-old worrying about cholesterol I think this ad was actually pulled out of circulation for being illegal and um and the vegetable oil manufacturers were very involved in spreading this message this was a book that was distributed free to thousands of doctors across the United States this is a Dr Jerry stamler who is

a colleague close colleague of anel keys it the whole book everything in it was sponsored by the corn Products company and the Wesson fund for medical research both vegetable oil manufacturers if you take just a quick look at this is polyunsaturated so this is vegetable oil consumption in the United States from virtually zero remember we didn't even consume vegetable oils before 1911 with Crisco up to today where there are 9 10% of all calories we consume this almost perfectly Pary parallels the rise in heart disease so it seems absurd that we should think that this

would fight heart disease when our increased consumption is in in correlates with the rise in heart dis disease it certainly didn't seem to prevent it so what are the sources of these fatty acids in our diet today most of them come from from these vegetable oils these polyunsaturated fats can also be found in nuts and seeds they can also be found in chicken quite a bit and and some pork products um depending on how the the pig is fed but most of it comes from polyunsaturated vegetable oils and just if you look at the top

chart here you can see that red line is soybean oil most of the most of the oil that we consume in the US at least is soybean oil that's what we're consuming what are the health effects well um so in those clinical trials on saturated fats that um I was describing and Arne made reference to those what we call the core trials um in almost all of those trials what they did is they took you know they took a regular diet was which at the time regular diet was considered 18% saturated fat which is very

high to us today but that was considered normal in the' 60s and 7s and they repl and they took so that was the control group The intervention group in these clinical trials was a group that instead of regular milk they got soy filled milk instead of regular cheese they got soy filled cheese they got some their version of The Impossible Burger so they had much higher content of vegetable oils in their diet so in effect those trials can be seen as clinical trials of vegetable oils you know what happens when you dramatically increase the content

of polyunsaturated fats in uh in somebody's diet so a little known result from those core trials is that in nearly a dozen of them four of which are listed here there was higher rates of death from cancer that's the experimental group this is from the LA veteran study this was a consistent finding across these trials higher rates of death from cancer this was so concerning to the National Institutes of Health that had they had us hosted a series of highlevel workshops um at least four that I know of maybe five where they brought together top

scientists at the time including anel keys and they said what do we do about this this cancer effect that we are seeing we can't you know we can't just ignore it um and so there was a lot of conversation I read all the reports that came out of it and basically their conclusion is we can't explain it but it is so important to lower cholesterol that's our dominant Public Health message today to prevent heart disease so we're just going to basically ignore these cancer results we think they're of secondary importance here are some other results

that came out of those core clinical trials in quite a few there were higher rates of gall stones um there was in some cases higher rates of stroke and in one trial there was um possible therosis of the liver now I want to make an important Clara just um clarification here which is that vegetable oils reliably lower your cholesterol so what we're seeing here in all of this the cancer the gallstones The Strokes it could be that this is caused by the vegetable oils it could also be that this is caused by lowering cholesterol in

fact some of the data I'm showing here show that some of these effects you can get you see when cholesterol is lowered through drugs which suggests that it's actually the lowering of cholesterol that uh has these health effects so um right in starting in the late 1970s with Mary enig an undersung hero who was the first person to find out out that uh or one of the first people who found out that hydrogenated oils the backbone of krisco and margarine that actually they contained trans fats and trans fats were harmful they caused heart disease also

Fred Kumo who spent his entire career fighting trans fats um and then later in the story came Walter Willet but um this led to effectively in the US to a ban on trans fats I think in the in Europe there's just a a severe limit on that but effectively we it was no longer possible to use these hydrogenated oils because of this side effect of the trans fats that they produced well what replaced trans fats you still had this basic problem which is that oils are unstable they go rancid they oxidize uh and so they

weren't really you can't you can't use you can't make a shelf stable product out of them you can't make cookies if the you know the Oreo cookie in the middle is greasy and and dribbling AP dribbling on the shelf that doesn't work all of those products had hydrogenated oil so what were food industry manufacturers going to replace them with well they did a number of things um they tried to use genetically modified soybeans in order to create oils that produced um a lesser amount of the fatty acids that tended to oxidize they you they switched

they started producing more sunflower oil which also has lower has is less um prone to oxidation and this is not on this uh slide but they started to use a lot of palm oil because that's very high in saturates um and to some extent coconut oil but that's more expensive but in many cases they just reverted back to using regular old oils and so one of the things that I discovered in doing my research was um that this was a huge problem especially in food service operations so uh you know they started just using regular

oils in friers in restaurants um and this was something you know PR previously they had used hydrogenated oils which were stable now they had regular oils and uh I learned about this from um somebody who worked a high level employ of lers Crockin and he told me that when this this transformation took place that trans fats were out regular oils were back in he said it was a huge problem for like McDonald's and Burger King that the oils were oxidizing and their oxidation products included things like polymers which is like a paint-like substance and they

were having this this kind of sticky paint-like substance built up on the walls they had to get extra strong cleaning solutions to get it off just imagine what was happening in the lungs of the workers who are who are you know uh standing over these friers they then um they then discovered that these oxidation products that were being created from these from oh sorry I just want to go back to this slide when I say oxidation products what do I mean it's this polyunsaturated oil so each one of those double bonds those little equal sign

each one of those can open up and attached to an oxygen so that's what oxidation is those under especially under light or heat as you know from your Chemistry Labs it speeds up the experiment the double bonds open up they attack they attach to oxygen that's oxidation and then oxidation drives inflammation so you have these heated oils in restaurants and they were finding that there were so many oxidation highly unstable oxidation products on the workers's uniforms that when they would take them in the dry in their little truck to the dryer to the lawn mat

they would burst into flames in the back of the truck they would just spontaneously burst into flames and then even after they had been cleaned in the washing machine they would burst into flames Again In the Heat of the dryer this was just a huge problem um and actually I don't know how they've solved it but um they it it speaks to the tremendous instability of these products this is just a few of the toxic oxy otion products that are produced by heated oils one very wellknown alahh um they're actually a former marker for cancer

you actually measure alahh tides to see a level of cancer in somebody's body they cause these oxidation um products called rapid cell death they interfere with your DNA and RNA um and they're implicated in neurod degenerative diseases another well-known oxidation product created by oils is acryline that's also uh you see that from in cigarette smoking in it causes inflammation and it these are known toxins that are products of heated oils so and we also know from the experiments of this Dr Chelan who works at University of Michigan that those products when you eat them in

fried she actually went around to Burger Kings in her neighborhood when you eat them they uh hundreds of them are absorbed into your body and they pass through the bloodb brain barrier so there's no question that these products enter our bodies um and that is why McDonald's used to fry their french fries in in Tallow uh because well this is also before um vegetabl oils even came along but it's a much more stable way to make your French fries all right uh where to find all these summaries on inflammation and oxidation really this the main

place I can't believe this at this still exists is the original work that I did in my book um which is in chapter 9 my book and is excerpted here um it's excerpted by this organization they have it on their website you can read it for free um the the the footnotes aren't there but if you want to read this whole story um you can read it there and I just want to in some um say what is it we do and we don't know about seed oils again because there's so much all over the

internet now about seed oils and I feel like it's just important to kind of clear the decks about where the science stands I think on cancer we have evidence from multiple randomized control clinical trials that is supported by mechanistic evidence and so I would say that's decent evidence to show that they these oils um are like I don't know what words to use are likely cause of cancer heart disease there's some evidence to support it from randomized control clinical trials such as the Minnesota uh coronary service survey uh it is a consistent finding that Strokes

are lower in people who consume more saturated fat uh and less unsaturated fat that's a consistent finding including in the pure study which is the largest observational study in the world um and it's very clear that seed oils cause inflammation through their oxidation um oh that slide wasn't even on the screen sorry there it is um other health effects gallstones could be the vegetable oils could be the lower cholesterol obesity there is some evidence there's evidence from three clinical trials that seed oils cause obesity uh but those have never been systematically reviewed uh there's at

least one mechanistic hypothesis that's been proposed by Michael eids in his Breer Nerge talk um diabetes I don't see any evidence at least that I have found that seed oils cause diabetes so so take away lessons for yourself for all of us avoid these oils if you can for salad dressings use olive oil or avocado oil which are low in the particular type of fatty acids linolic or linolenic that are more prone to oxidation for cooking use a stable fat any of the ones listed there and avoid fried food in restaurants sad to say or

say I'm allergic to oils please use better sometimes that works all right thank you for very much going over thank you Nina um the one thing that uh I kind of took away from that because I kind of I knew this stuff um was that you should follow the money right if you if you look at the history of the dietary guidelines and of oils and of the American Heart Association unfortunately I guess it's like that today in the world uh the other good thing is that in preparation for these um days I made contact

with the Gastronomy uh Department here at the center and I was a little bit fussy and I mentioned seed oils and they came back and said we don't use seed oils here oh so pretty good yeah any questions from the audience thank you please introduce yourself thank you very much hi enina thanks for a great talk um Beth zupek cania registered dietitian nutritionist from the US can you comment on algae oil which is a new um oil on the horizon it's actually from cultured vegetables there's not a lot of information on it but it's high

it's higher in monounsaturated fat than Olive and avocado oil so um I don't know anything about it but I would say the general principle of choosing oil oils that are higher in monounsaturated fats so that would be elic that is uh those fats will be more stable because monounsaturated mono means only one double bond only one opportunity to open up and oxidize versus linolic linolenic which are are the Omega sixes with multiple multiple double bonds poly unsaturated fats which have multiple opportunities to oxidize so anything that and mono unsaturated fats is good for you why

olive oil avocado o oil and maybe algae oil is better for you okay thank you any other questions from the audience maybe all sitting in shock um they're just hungry thank you very much all right thank [Applause] [Music] you