Hello Friends!

A couple of weeks ago I posted a picture on Instagram and said that I was listening to a podcast on the ‘dangers of vegetables oils.’  I got a lot of reaction to that post, with people wanting to know why something as innocent as vegetable oils could be dangerous.

Believe it or not, this is a very controversial subject in the nutrition world. For anyone who wants to eat foods that support their health, it’s an important topic to understand.

The History

First, a little background. Vegetable oils, aka ‘seed oils,’ are cooking oils made from things such as soybeans, cotton seeds, sunflower seeds, peanuts, and canola (rapeseeds).  It takes a lot of industrial processing to extract the oil from seeds, a process that wasn’t perfected until the early 1900’s with the invention of Crisco.  So, it was only 100 years ago that vegetable oil became a significant part of the human diet. Now, there are shelves full of oils made from different seeds and legumes in every grocery store.

Consumption really took off during the 1980’s when animal fats were thought to cause heart disease and people started to eat more restaurant and processed foods. These foods generally contain vegetable oils, especially soybean oil, because they are cheaper than animal fats and oils made by more traditional methods.

The Science (Simplified)

All oils and fats are composed of a mixture of 2 different types of fatty acids – saturated and unsaturated.  These types of fats differ in the number of double bonds they contain between their carbon atoms. A saturated fat has no double bonds; unsaturated fats have one (monounsaturated) or more than one (polyunsaturated).

two carbon atoms is inherently unstable. The bond can be broken, creating an energetic compound that causes damage in the body, a process called oxidative stress.

Fats are an important part of the human cell membrane, providing stability, helping to regulate the flow of nutrients into and out of cells and facilitating communication between cells. When unstable fats are incorporated into cell membranes and become oxidized, the oxidative stress can damage other parts of the cell, leading to a breakdown in cellular processes, with downstream effects that cause health problems.

If you remember trans fats, these are fats only rarely found in real foods. We began to eat large quantities of them when they were industrially produced and introduced into our food supply (the original solid Crisco was primarily trans fat).

Trans fats are different in shape and stability from most other naturally occurring fats. The reason they were so harmful is thought to be because that difference in shape and stability mattered when they were metabolized. They were incorporated into our cell membranes, and they disrupted our natural metabolic processes.  

Our bodies are wonderfully sophisticated, and they don’t react well to foreign substances that they haven’t evolved to use!

The Controversy

This is a very simple explanation of a complex topic.

If you search ‘are seed oils toxic’ on google or your favorite social media platform, you are going to find a lot of different opinions, pro and con, and people feel quite passionately about it on both sides.

Next week I’ll go a little deeper into the controversy and how I make sense of it for myself and my clients. Until then,

Until then,

Kristin Stitz and Real Food Power Nutrition LLC is a holistic nutrition consultant service in the business of providing nutrition guidance and individualized counseling for the purpose of education and support of client goals. This information is not to be taken as medical advice. Please see your doctor for diagnosis and treatment of specific medical concerns and conditions.