Industrial Vegetable Oils: A Rosetta Stone of Modern Disease
When I was younger, I went to the British Museum and put my hand on the Rosetta Stone. There was no glass, no rope, no museum guard waving me off
The 3.5-foot block of granodiorite sat in the open air. Twenty years later someone attacked it with a hammer, and the museum put it behind a barricade.
In 196 BC, scribes carved the same message into the Stone in three scripts: hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek.
Using their knowledge of Greek, scholars decoded everything Egypt had ever written. One key, one cipher, one civilization deciphered.
If we had not found this invaluable stone, we would have no idea what Egyptian hieroglyphics mean.
Modern medicine needs the same kind of key. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disorders, depression, infertility, and Alzheimer’s have all surged in lockstep over the past century.
Sugar, alcohol, glyphosate, antibiotics, and inactivity all play a part. The COVID injection killed Americans by the hundreds of thousands. But throughout all these factors, a single dietary variable correlates tightly with the rise of every chronic disease.
That variable is industrial vegetable oil.
The following terminology still throws me off
The phrase “seed oils” is commonly used, but it is imprecise. Avocado oil and olive oil are pressed from fruit and are suitable for cooking. The villain is the cheap, solvent-extracted, deodorized, refined product made from soybean, corn, canola, cottonseed, safflower, sunflower, peanut, rice bran, and grapeseed.
I will use “industrial vegetable oils” or “seed oils” in this essay. Five terms cover most of this field.
Saturated fats have every available carbon position locked down with hydrogen. They are stable, do not oxidize, and are the natural fats of beef, lamb, butter, ghee, coconut, and cocoa. These are the safest fats to eat and the safest fats to cook with.
Monounsaturated fats are missing one pair of hydrogens. Olive oil and avocado oil are mostly monounsaturated. Slightly less stable than saturated fat, healthy, and still fine for most cooking.
Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) are missing several pairs of hydrogens. They are unstable, oxidize readily, and break down into inflammatory compounds when exposed to heat, light, or air. PUFAs split into two families: omega-3 and omega-6. Both are present in food, and the balance is everything.
Omega-3 PUFAs include alpha-linolenic acid (ALA, found in flax), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, both found in fish). These are anti-inflammatory in moderate amounts.
Omega-6 PUFAs, chiefly linoleic acid (LA), are pro-inflammatory. Linoleic acid is the building block of nearly every industrial vegetable oil. It is the molecule that does the damage. When you read “high in PUFAs” on a wellness site, read “high in linoleic acid.”
Trans fats are PUFAs that have been industrially hydrogenated to make them solid. Margarine is the best-known example, launched by Crisco in 1911. They are universally toxic and have been restricted since 2015.
They still show up in fried fast food, baked goods, microwave popcorn, frozen pizza, refrigerated dough, nondairy creamer, and stick margarine.
The mainstream still labels cholesterol “bad” or “good.” Cholesterol is neither. It is a structural molecule your liver makes because your cells cannot function without it. Statin drugs blunt this production and increase the rate of diabetes, dementia, and muscle damage.
The whole “lower your cholesterol” project rests on a falsified hypothesis from the 1950s.
How they sold us poison
Crisco hit American kitchens in 1911. Procter & Gamble had cornered the cottonseed oil supply and needed to sell it. Hydrogenation turned the foul industrial waste into a solid white grease that looked like lard but cost far less.
The marketing was relentless: cookbooks, radio ads, free samples to home economics teachers, and a “pure white” image positioned against animal fat.
In the 1950s, Ancel Keys ran his Seven Countries Study. He started with data from 22 countries. He dropped 16 because they did not fit his conclusion, and published the remaining six as proof that saturated fat caused heart disease.
The American Heart Association seized on this work and has flogged it for 70 years, with money from the food industry flowing in to keep the story alive. Sugar, by the way, was deliberately exonerated by Harvard researchers paid by the Sugar Research Foundation in 1965, and the false blame was redirected at fat.
The internal documents are now public.
By the 1970s, the USDA was telling Americans to “replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated oil.” By the 1980s, McDonald’s switched its fryers from beef tallow to industrial vegetable oil, and every other fast-food chain followed suit.
Today the corrupt AHA still recommends “polyunsaturated fats” for “heart health” while running a $1.19 billion budget funded by sources it refuses to name.
Comment: Check the American Heart Association website for donors’ identities. While claiming they are funded by individuals, their funding graph shows most of their money as “other.” I covered this in Butchered by “Healthcare“.
Trace the money. Industrial agriculture grows commodity crops on subsidized land. Commodity crops get crushed for cheap oil. Cheap oil enters the food supply. The food supply makes the population sick.
The sick population becomes a $4-trillion-a-year captive market for Pharma. The globalists who fund both ends of this loop have stated openly that they want the world population reduced by 80 percent. Cheap, slow-acting dietary toxins fit the brief.
The bad oils and the good ones: Linoleic acid as a percentage of common cooking oils
Cut these out:
• Safflower oil: 75 to 78 percent
• Grape seed oil: 70 to 73 percent
• Sunflower oil: 65 to 68 percent
• Hemp oil: 54 to 60 percent
• Wheat germ oil: 55 percent
• Cottonseed oil: 54 percent
• Corn oil: 51 to 59 percent
• Soybean oil: 51 percent
• Walnut oil: 51 percent
• Sesame oil: 45 percent
• Rice bran oil: 39 percent
• Peanut oil: 32 percent
• Canola oil: 17 to 21 percent
Cook with these instead:
• Almonds: 24 percent
• Lard from pastured pigs: 10 percent
• Palm oil: 10 percent
• Olive oil (verified): 8 to 10 percent
• Beef tallow: 3 to 5 percent
• Cocoa butter: 3 percent
• Macadamia oil: 2 percent
• Butter: 2 percent
• Coconut oil: 2 percent
• Ghee: trace
The Mediterranean diet works because olive oil is mostly monounsaturated and has only 8 percent linoleic acid. The carnivore diet works because beef fat is mostly saturated and almost free of linoleic acid.
Most of the fat in coconut is medium-chain saturated fat that the body burns rather than stores.
Two cautions on this list. First, 60 to 90 percent of the olive oil sold in American supermarkets is adulterated, often cut with cheap industrial seed oils. Buy a single-source, organic, cold-pressed product or do without.
Second, canola oil appears acceptable on a percentage basis, with 17 to 21 percent linoleic acid. However, the manufacturing process is so brutal that the oil is partially oxidized before you ever buy it.
Canola: an industrial lubricant turned salad oil
Canola oil is pressed from rapeseed, a turnip relative grown across Europe since the 13th century. The original use was machinery oil. Rapeseed oil binds to wet metal better than any other lubricant, so steam ships and naval vessels ran on it through both world wars.
The Allied effort built a Canadian industrial complex to crush and refine it.
When the war ended, demand collapsed. Canada had a glut of rapeseed and a chemistry industry built to process it. The original oil was high in erucic acid, which has been shown to damage the heart in animal feeding studies.
Canadian breeders worked through the 1970s to lower the level of erucic acid. They named the new variety “canola” for Canadian Oil Low Acid, and rebranded an industrial lubricant as a kitchen oil. The first commercial sale was in 1978.
Modern canola production runs the seed through hexane, a petroleum-derived solvent, then through a deodorizer at temperatures over 400 degrees Fahrenheit, then through bleaching and refining.
The finished product reaches the supermarket already partially oxidized. When you cook with it, oxidation accelerates. By the time it reaches your stomach, the oil is loaded with aldehydes, lipid peroxides, and 4-hydroxynonenal, which damage DNA and inflame blood vessels.
The story of canola is the story of every industrial vegetable oil. A waste product or industrial input gets reformulated, marketed as health food, and pushed onto a public that has no idea what it is consuming.
Cottonseed oil, the original Crisco ingredient, follows the same template. So does soybean oil, which started as industrial waste from the soy meal feed business.
What these oils do to you
Every randomized controlled trial comparing saturated animal fat with industrial vegetable oil has shown that the latter was harmful.
The Sydney Diet-Heart Study (1966 to 1973, recovered data published 2013) split 458 men into two groups. The vegetable oil group had 62 percent higher all-cause mortality over 7 years.
Increasing dietary linoleic acid to 12 percent of calories killed people at a rate equivalent to smoking seven cigarettes a day.
The Minnesota Coronary Experiment (recovered data published 2016) showed 86 percent more heart attacks in the corn-oil-and-margarine group, even though their cholesterol numbers fell.
Lowering cholesterol by feeding people industrial vegetable oil increased their rate of dying from heart attack.
The Rose Corn Oil Trial (1962) saw 364 percent more cardiac deaths in the corn oil group. The Los Angeles Veterans Administration Study found 82 percent more cancer deaths in the vegetable oil group, even though that group had half as many heavy smokers as the control.
The MARGARIN Study (2002) showed 700 percent more strokes, heart attacks, and cardiovascular deaths in the high-linoleic-acid margarine group compared to a fish-oil group.
These are not fringe findings but the major randomized human trials of the 20th century, and every one of them indicts the industrial vegetable oils that the AHA still recommends.
The disease list:
• Cancer. Mouse studies show linoleic acid increases tumor metastasis 4-fold. Repeatedly heated soybean oil produces 16-fold tumor growth. Prostate cancer tracks corn oil intake.
• Heart disease. Linoleic acid oxidizes inside arteries and forms the oxidized LDL that drives atherosclerosis. The LDL number in your blood test is dangerous mainly when your diet is high in industrial vegetable oil.
• Obesity. PUFAs accumulate in fat tissue. Rats on safflower oil gained 12 percent more body weight than controls eating identical calories. Rabbits on repeatedly heated oil gained 45 percent more weight.
• Type 2 diabetes. Inflammation in fat tissue impairs insulin signaling.
• Alzheimer’s disease. Canola-fed mice formed beta-amyloid plaques and lost memory and learning ability. The dose was a human equivalent of 2 tablespoons of canola oil daily.
• Depression and anxiety. Soybean oil consumption reduces oxytocin, the bonding hormone, in the hypothalamus. Mice fed soybean oil show gene dysregulation linked to autism, anxiety, and depression. Monkeys on safflower-rich diets show measurable depression.
• Infertility. Mouse studies show high-PUFA diets in early life cause irreversible testicular damage and long-term sperm defects. Millennial infertility tracks the introduction of PUFA-loaded baby formula.
Soybean oil reduces the body’s production of oxytocin
This is the hormone of love, trust, and pair-bonding. It is what mothers release during nursing, what couples release during sex, and what every healthy social interaction depends on. American children have been raised on soybean oil-based formula for two generations.
We talk about a mental health crisis, about loneliness, about young people who cannot form relationships. The biochemistry of bonding has been quietly removed from the food supply. No therapist or psychiatric drug fixes that.
Comment: Oxytocin is compounded and used as a medication to improve sexual bonding in couples. I have tried this and it works.
Oxidation and the deep fryer
Polyunsaturated fats have multiple double bonds where carbons are not saturated with enough hydrogen molecules. Each double bond is a vulnerable spot. Oxygen attacks the bond, breaks it, and produces aldehydes, peroxides, and free radicals.
These damage DNA, cell membranes, and mitochondria.
The oils start oxidizing the moment the seed is crushed. They oxidize during extraction, deodorization, and bottling. They oxidize on the supermarket shelf. They oxidize in your fryer, in your salad dressing, and in your bloodstream.
The deeper they get into your tissues, the more oxidation happens inside your body. Industrial vegetable oils are partially oxidized before you eat them, and they oxidize further once consumed.
Saturated animal fats lack the chemical structure to do this. They stay in your blood and tissues without producing free radicals. That is why butter, ghee, tallow, and coconut oil are safe to cook with at any temperature you would subject food to.
Every commercial fryer in America runs industrial vegetable oil at 350 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The oil sits there all day. It is heated, cooled, and reheated through every shift. By the end of the day, it is sludge.
A 2020 rabbit study tested unheated, once-heated, and repeatedly heated vegetable oil. Body weight increased 6 percent on once-heated oil and 45 percent on repeatedly heated oil compared to unheated.
The repeatedly heated group showed liver toxicity, fatty liver, and metabolic damage. The 16-fold cancer growth I cited earlier came from another study using oil heated in a deep fryer.
French fries, fried chicken, donuts, fried fish, hash browns, tortilla chips, mozzarella sticks, onion rings: they are all cooked in repeatedly heated industrial vegetable oil.
Fast food is worse than empty calories. It is a daily dose of oxidized lipid peroxides that incorporate themselves into your tissues and stay there for years.
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here substack.com
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