We haven’t finished an official article on our blog yet on all of the dangers of vegetable oils, so for today, I’m going to write up a quick summary of some of the bigger dangers of vegetable oil and put some quotes from a fantastic article I read the other day on a well known doctor’s website.
When I say “salad dressing and corn chips”, what I’m really talking about as you may have guessed is vegetable oil, the #1 killer in our food supply… and yes, many experts contend vegetable oil is significantly worse for us than even sugar (and sugar in anything but small quantities is pretty bad for us)
I’ll post a link to a really good article on this topic at the bottom of this email so you can read it in detail if you care to learn more, but I want to summarize the important points in this email…
First though, why do I even CARE about all this geeky nutrition stuff? Well, because it literally controls everything about your quality of life in my opinion… not only how lean vs how fat you are, or your energy and brain function on a daily basis, but vegetable oils are one of the MAIN causes of most degenerative diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, obesity, and is even a major contributor to cancer.
I’m not saying vegetable oil is the only “cause” of cancer, because obviously there are many environmental factors in cancer, such as chemical exposure, radiation, etc…but vegetable oil creates an environment in your cells that makes you more susceptible to cancer from all other exposures.
Most people don’t seem to grasp how important nutrition really is for every aspect of your quality of life, and they make statements like “just live a little and eat a donut”… honestly, I don’t equate “living a little” with eating donuts or chips or any other stuff that harms my quality of life. I’d rather eat a delicious steak or grass fed burger, and know I’m nourishing my body instead.
I’d rather have amazing energy, brain clarity, and LOOK & FEEL great every day instead of whatever 10 seconds of pleasure that a donut or chips might give to you. Plus, there are always better alternatives for a treat that doesn’t contain vegetable oil, such as dark chocolate, that I’d always rather enjoy instead of something cooked in vegetable oil.
I’ll post some important quotes from the article I mentioned in a second, but first I want to point out that it’s not necessarily the ratio of omega6 to omega3 fats that’s the most important. Most people falsely think that’s the only thing that matters. The truth is that the TOTAL amount of omega6 you eat is actually the most important thing to be careful of, and as long as you eat fish a couple times a week, you get plenty of omega-3. But what’s most important to me is that I get mostly saturated fat and monounsaturated fats, and limit the total amount of omega6 polyunsaturated fat.
Also, to clarify, when I say vegetable oils, I’m talking about corn oil, soybean oil, canola, cottonseed, safflower, sunflower, and even peanut oil. These all have too much omega6, even though some have a lot more than others. And vegetable oils are in almost ALL processed food these days, including anything deep fried like donuts, fried chicken, french fries, anything cooked in oil like corn chips and potato chips, and even salad dressings and hummus (unless the ingredient panel shows they’re ONLY made with olive oil, they usually have soybean or canola as the main oil).
Healthier fats would be saturated fats or monounsaturated fats… beef fat for example is almost 50/50 monounsaturated and saturated, but only has about 3-4% polyunsaturated, so that’s one reason I think beef fat is one of the healthiest fats. Coconut oil is about 92% saturated, so that’s good. Olive oil is mostly monounsaturated, so that’s usually good too, as long as it’s a quality olive oil that’s not fraudulently cut with vegetable oils. And butter is also mostly saturated and monounsaturated too, with very little polyunsaturated, so that’s good as well.
Ok, here’s some good quotes… note that when they mentioned “linoleic acid” (or LA for short), that means omega6 fats, since LA is the main omega6 fat we consume, and the most harmful…
“The missing hydrogen atoms make PUFAs (polyunsaturated) highly susceptible to oxidation, which means the fat breaks down into harmful metabolites. OXLAMS (oxidized LA metabolites) are what have a profoundly negative impact on human health. While excess sugar is certainly bad for your health and should be limited to 25 grams per day or less, it doesn’t oxidize like LA does so it’s nowhere near as damaging.”
“At a molecular level, excess LA consumption damages your metabolism and impedes your body’s ability to generate energy in your mitochondria.”
“Animals typically develop cancer once the LA in their diet reaches 4% to 10% of their energy intake, depending on the cancer.” (Note that most humans today are eating 15-20% of their calories from LA omega6, so you can see why this is concerning. The ancestral human diet is believed to be only about 2-3% omega6, and when you go much above that, significant health problems start to happen)
“Just adding the omega-6 fats to the diet caused the mice to become diabetic. They became insulin resistant, leptin resistant, obese, and the differences are pretty stark between the fat mice and the skinny mice…”
“We’ve got this huge disconnect between what the lab science tells us we should be doing and what our dietary guidelines tell us we should be doing. The scientists are saying, ‘Oh, look, it’s poison. It causes all the chronic diseases,’ and the government’s saying, ‘Eat lots of it.’ That’s not a good thing.” (speaking about LA omega6 again)
“If you feed mice lots of saturated fat, they don’t get fat and they don’t get sick. It’s only when you increase the LA in the diet from 1% to 8% that they become obese”
“the dramatic increase in LA — and the oxidative end products that cause the damage — is the primary cause behind the increase in chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
Simply lowering your LA intake to what your great-great grandparents used to eat, you can essentially eliminate almost every single one of the diseases that is now prematurely killing us.
Interestingly enough, there’s even evidence showing eliminating seed oils from your diet will dramatically reduce your risk of sunburn, which is something Goodrich experienced first-hand. “Susceptibility to UV radiation damage is controlled by how much polyunsaturated fats are in your diet,” he says. “It’s like a dial. They can control how fast it happens, and how fast you get skin cancer.”
ARDS and Covid Risks:
“Feeding seed oils to patients increased the rate of ARDS by seven times.” That equates to patients having a greater risk of death from Covid triggered ARDS if they have a lot of vegetable oils in their diet.
How Vegetable oils cause heart disease:
“Seed oils cause the LDL to oxidize, thereby forming foam cells. LDL in and of itself does not initiate atherosclerosis. LDL’s susceptibility to this oxidative process is controlled by the LA content of your diet”
“Beef, even conventional grain-finished beef, has low LA. Grass fed beef has higher DHA and CLA, which makes it a healthier option. Beef is also the primary source of carnosine, which has been shown to be anti-atherogenic.”
The full article also talks about relationships between omega6 LA consumption and alzheimer’s and brain cancer… so if you’re interested, check out the whole article to get the best understanding of all of this.
I also mentioned in an email I sent the other day about how chicken and pork have 10x the omega6 LA content of beef, bison or lamb… so again, if you want to be as healthy as possible, choose grass-fed RED meat instead of chicken or pork too.
To summarize as simply as possible, if you want to protect yourself from heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and many other diseases (and if you want to be lean too), minimize your omega6 intake as much as possible by avoiding vegetable oils, processed foods and fried foods, and focus on RED meat and fish for most of your fats, and foods like avocados, coconut oil, olives and olive oil, and butter as generally healthier sources of fat.
For some more reading that’s important to take control of your health for good, check out these stories below…
1. How to reverse type 2 diabetes naturally, while getting off drugs AND losing abdominal fat
2. These FOODS are making your fat cells sick, harming your hormones & damaging your joints
3. Here’s how vitally important vitamin D is for your immune strength
4. Why full-fat whole milk is healthier than low-fat or skim milk (the magic of dairy fat)
5. Drinking these fruit JUICES is just as bad as drinking soda
To your health…
Written by Mike Geary – Nutritionist, Author and Founder of TheNutritionWatchdog, September 14, 2020