Are seed oils the real villain?
If you're new here, welcome. A lot of you found me through the Karen Hunter Show this week, and this is what I do: I help you navigate the difference between propaganda and truth so we can make truly healthy choices. I'll be back on the show this Wednesday at 5pm Eastern on SiriusXM Channel 126, so tune in.
Today we're taking on the loudest food fight on the internet.
Seed oils. Half of social media says they're toxic sludge destroying your health. The other half, backed by the industry, says they're heart-healthy and you should use them freely. Both sides are selling you something. The industry is selling oil. The fear-sellers are selling the rescue: the tallow, the supplements, the seed-oil-free brands, and a villain that lets a meat-heavy plate off the hook. Let's find the truth.
Start with what these oils actually are. Safflower, sunflower, soybean. They are not poison, and your body genuinely needs the omega-6 fats they contain. Omega-6 is essential. The problem was never the nutrient.
The problem is the dose. These oils are cheap, so they ended up in nearly everything on the shelf. The result is that most Americans now consume many times more omega-6 than our bodies were built for, while getting very little omega-3. Those two fats work as a team, and they compete for the same enzymes in your body. When omega-6 floods the system and omega-3 barely shows up, the balance tips toward inflammation, and chronic inflammation is the quiet root of most of the disease around us.
And canola, the one in nearly everything? My issue there is different. Canola is a marketing name, invented in the 1970s for a redesigned version of rapeseed, an oil the world had used to lubricate machinery, because the original was too harsh to eat. The name literally stands for Canada plus oil. What sits on the shelf today is one of the most heavily refined products in the food supply, an industrial oil start to finish, and I do not use it. Cheap and everywhere is not a health credential.
Here's the proof that balance is the issue and not the ingredient. Omega-6 shows up naturally in walnuts, sunflower seeds, and whole grains, and nobody is getting inflamed from walnuts. In whole foods, omega-6 arrives in modest amounts, packaged with fiber, minerals, and omega-3s alongside it. Your body handles it beautifully. It is the overuse, bottle after bottle poured into the food supply, and our overconsumption of it, that turned an essential nutrient into a burden.
Let's be real about where that overconsumption lives. It is not in anyone's home cooking. It is in the made-up fake food. Doritos, Takis, snack cakes, the coffee creamer that is really just seed oil and corn syrup in a costume, the deep fryer at every drive-through. Products built from seed oil, corn syrup, artificial colorings, and preservatives, with the fiber stripped out and the fat turned up. Add the heavy meat intake and low fiber of the standard American diet, and the seed oil debate starts to look like a distraction from the diet actually hurting people: low fiber, heavy meat, ultra-processed, and drowning in omega-6.
So no, I will not tell you to fear a bottle of sunflower oil. And I will not tell you it's health food either. Here is what I will tell you. Eat whole foods, mostly plants. Keep oil low, and sautƩ in water or broth, which works better than people think. If you do use oil, reach for olive or avocado. Both are built mostly of omega-9, a fat your body can actually make on its own, and they carry a fraction of the omega-6 load of the oils flooding the food supply. Then feed the other side of the balance. Hemp seeds deliver omega-6 and omega-3 in the proportion your body was built for. Chia seeds and flax seeds go further and tip the scale back toward omega-3, which is exactly what a diet drowning in omega-6 needs.
Do that, and the seed oil question mostly answers itself. The fight is loud because outrage sells. The truth is quieter: it was never one ingredient. It is the whole pattern, and the pattern is yours to change.
Dr. Ruby šæ | With love and light
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