Are Seed Oils Actually Bad for You?
Strangers tell me their feelings about canola oil now. They find out I host a nutrition podcast and immediately need me to know that beef tallow fixed their knees. So here is the honest answer to the question everyone keeps asking: are seed oils bad for you? No. Not in any way the research backs up.
The fear has a great origin story, which is why it sticks. Cottonseed oil started in the 1800s as machine lubricant and lamp oil, industrial runoff nobody knew what to do with until somebody fried with it. Procter and Gamble turned it into Crisco, ran one of the loudest ad campaigns of the century, and a few decades later cut a generous check to the American Heart Association.
Do seed oils cause inflammation?
The chemistry that supposedly makes them inflammatory barely happens inside an actual body. Feed people more of the stuff, measure their blood, and the inflammation everyone warns about does not show up. The thing worth eating less of is ultra-processed food, which happens to be loaded with seed oils.
Is beef tallow better than seed oils?
Probably not, and possibly worse. Tallow is mostly saturated fat, and the people eating the most plant oil tend to outlive the people eating the most butter. If you want a real upgrade, olive oil and avocado oil have the stronger evidence. Forty-dollar tallow for your morning eggs is a personality choice.
So eat a fruit. Eat some salmon. Stop letting a cooking oil decide what kind of person you are.
References
Pett, K. D., Willett, W. C., Vartiainen, E., & Katz, D. L. (2017). The Seven Countries Study. European Heart Journal, 38(42), 3119–3121. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehx603
Ramsden, C. E., Zamora, D., Majchrzak-Hong, S., Faurot, K. R., Broste, S. K., Frantz, R. P., Davis, J. M., Ringel, A., Suchindran, C. M., & Hibbeln, J. R. (2016). Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: Analysis of recovered data from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968–73). BMJ, 353, i1246. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i1246
Su, H., Liu, R., Chang, M., Huang, J., & Wang, X. (2017). Dietary linoleic acid intake and blood inflammatory markers: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Food & Function, 8(9), 3091–3103. https://doi.org/10.1039/C7FO00433H
Zhang, Y., et al. (2024). Higher ratio of plasma omega-6/omega-3 fatty acids is associated with greater risk of all-cause, cancer, and cardiovascular mortality: A population-based cohort study in UK Biobank. eLife, 12, RP90132. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.90132
Zhang, Y., Chadaideh, K. S., Li, Y., Li, Y., Gu, X., Liu, Y., Guasch-Ferré, M., Rimm, E. B., Hu, F. B., Willett, W. C., Stampfer, M. J., & Wang, D. D. (2025). Butter and plant-based oils intake and mortality. JAMA Internal Medicine, 185(5), 549–560. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.0205
Kylee Welcome to Your Diet Sucks, the podcast that won't tell you canola oil is deadlier than cigarettes. I'm Kylee Van Horn. And I'm Zoë Rom. Zoë, today, canola oils, seed oils.
Zoë We're finally doing it. You win. Okay. We're doing it, we're doing seed oils. It's year two. The most requested episode. It's gotta be. Well, I mean, it is very requested. I also feel like it's one of the things we get asked on a lot of podcasts. I feel like when I'm out in the world and people find out I host a nutrition science podcast, they're immediately like, what do you think about beef tallow? And I'm like, ugh. The day is too young. I haven't yet had an entire pint of vodka, so I can't. I am excited because this is one that I was surprised this topic took on a new salience in political life. You know, this is something that, I'll be honest, prior to a year and a half ago, I had never once thought about. I probably would have been perfectly content to continue living my life without this encyclopedic knowledge of which oils come from seeds and which oils don't and saturated fat and trans fats and cholesterols and heart disease and frying oil and all of this stuff that has gotten wrapped up in this sort of bizarre quasi-culture proxy war. There's been so much chatter, so much in the socials about it, and it was one of those things that like whenever I would sort of rub elbows with this topic, I was kind of like, ugh, sigh, I just didn't see myself being very innately interested in it because I hadn't looked. Very closely into it previously. So I'm super excited to dive in because I think what's fascinating about this topic is it's actually a lot more nuanced and maybe sticky than I had priorly assumed. It's not just a 10-second debunk episode.
Kylee I mean, you mean we're not gonna say seed oils are good or seed oils are bad for you? Yeah, well...
Zoë We had this one person that was persistently messaging us for pooh-poohing us for being quote, pro seed oils, and like for the record, we are pro olive oil because olive oil slaps. This is not an opinion podcast. We're not here to litigate the moral goodness of seed oils. We do not work for the canola oil lobby. We're no pro. We're non con. We are here to wade into the evidence and to invite you to come along with us. On the slippery slip and slide of seed oil discourse. So I say let's oil up and strap in.
Kylee Yeah, it's kind of wild because canola oil, the most, it was like the most used cooking fat in America, started as an actual industrial waste. Wait, what? So it was a machine lubricant. Oh boy, this is inauspicious beginnings already. And then a soap company figured out how to make it look like lard and ran- It just gets worse. Ran a big ad campaign and then it got into your grandma's kitchen. And then decades later, the same company cut a very large check to the organization that would go and tell Americans that it was good for their hearts. So there's going to be a story here is what we're saying.
Zoë Oh boy. Yeah, I cannot wait to unpack the absolutely wild roller coaster that is the history of seed oils, but what I feel a lot is like it sort of comes from this place of everything you know about seed oils is wrong. Our culture has this almost kink for like this thing that you think is healthy is actually unhealthy, but when people on the internet say that you've been lied to about seed oil on the history, there's Um, there's some there there.
Kylee Yeah, I mean, they take the history and then they use it to kind of force you to believe something or sell something, right? That's what I feel. Incredible.
Zoë Incredible. The best uses of history to beat people into submission or to sell a supplement stack.
Kylee It's where we get all of our wellness culture.
Zoë Ideas. Okay, so maybe let's start by defining things. What actually is a seed oil? Have you heard of the hateful eight, Zoe? I'm assuming you're not talking about the Quentin Tarantino We
Kylee I mean, it does sound like it could be a feature film. It is. It is a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Zoë So outside of that, I'm going to sing.
Kylee The Hateful Eight are the internet's names for the main seed oils that-
Zoë We love a Dirty Dozen, a Naughty Nine, an Erratic Eleven, we can't get enough of it.
Kylee So seed oils are just cooking oils that are pressed or extracted from plant seeds. And the main ones are canola, corn, cotton seed, grape seed, soybean, rice bran, sunflower, and safflower. Okay, so the thing.
Zoë That tend to come in those like large yellow plastic containers.
Kylee Yeah, the thing that matters about these is that chemically they're high in polyunsaturated fat, and mostly one kind, which is our omega-6 fatty acids, which are specifically called linoleic acid?
Zoë I have a feeling this is like Chekhov's omega-6 linoleic acid, and this will become more important in-
Kylee Yep, most commercial versions of seed oils are extracted with heat in a solvent, usually hexane, and then refined. That's where the these-are-industrial feeling comes from, and honestly, it's not made up. I can see peop-
Zoë having questions about something that is extracted using a solvent like that, you know, doesn't exactly hit my ears
Kylee and spark joy. The bigger problem here is that they're basically in everything processed. So, our packaged foods, dressings, if something is fried in the fryer, protein bars, the cheap, shelf-stable, and neutral tasting. Ah, so.
Zoë Also, is a big reason that folks are linking seed oils to bad health, a lot of that is because they're in so many of these ultra-processed foods, and ultra-processed food, as we know, is a diet high and ultra processed food isn't that great for you. So is it even possible to separate those two things?
Kylee It's kind of difficult, right? Yeah. So when someone says, I cut seed oils out and I felt better, what they almost always are doing is cutting out a lot of the ultra-processed foods from their diet. And fried-
Zoë Food. Which, like... Yeah.
Kylee A lot of ultra-processed and fried food. When you stop doing that, you might feel better. Yeah. A lot of people are like, well, I lost weight because of this. And it's actually like, well, you stopped eating a lot ultra- processed foods. Same thing? Yeah.
Zoë There's a lot of confounding variables. Like, again, you would have to Kevin Hall your shit and, like, absolutely calorie and macro match everything, right?
Kylee He's back. Kevin Hall. He made it back into the episode. Obligatory Kevin Hall mention. And we know the ultra-processed food world does have its own problems that's hyperpalatable, calorie dense, typically low on nutrients, and engineered to override hunger and fullness cues. Yeah. The seed oil is a marker that a food is ultra-processed. It is not the mechanism that makes the food the problem.
Zoë Mm, okay.
Kylee So it's a correlation, but maybe not the actual smoking gun.
Zoë Got it. OK.
Kylee So, the honest version is, yes, we probably want to eat less ultra-processed food, but that doesn't mean that canola oil itself was poisoning you.
Zoë I love it. We are like six minutes in and it is already gloriously complicated.
Kylee Canola oil is poisoned. I mean, I have seen that TikTok. You've got the sign holding it up. Okay, but the suspicion isn't only about ultra processed food. There's a whole history here. And I know you did the research, Zoe, to take us through this history. There is a pretty-
Zoë long and, I'll say checkered, passed here. In 1900, seed oils were about 1% of the added fat in the American diet, which is pretty low, but by the end of the century they were about 85%. That's astounding. That is a complete overhaul of how a country eats in about 100 years, like in our grandparents' lifetimes, and it didn't happen by. Accident. Before that, before, you know, 1900, people cooked with animal fats, butter, lard, beef tallow for centuries. So it's coming back. It's coming back. We're going to cook like our grandparents again. And the oil that kicked this off wasn't even food. Like you mentioned, cottonseed oil was an industrial byproduct of the 1800s that was often used as machine lubricant. Lamp oil and soap, basically what this was, was the runoff of cotton processing. And then I guess someone was like, sick, let's fry with that.
Kylee They are multi-purpose, using this.
Zoë You know, the 1800s was a different time, I get that. I don't totally understand why you're trying to fry shit in cotton oil before you let women vote, but again, I wasn't there, so I don't know. It only became food because whale oil, which I want my like, make frying oil whales again hat, so bad. Whale oil got scarce and pretty expensive because of the whole it comes from whales thing. And petroleum took over for machinery, so suddenly there was all of this cottonseed oil sitting around with nowhere to go, and people were like, well, let's try that. So...
Kylee So how does the industrial waste end up in everyone's kitchen then?
Zoë Procter and Gamble, which you might know as The Soap Company. In 1908, they patented hydrogenation, so pumping hydrogen through liquid oil to make it solid so it looked and behaved like lard, which I guess shout out science for being like, what if we just put hydrogen in this cottonseed oil and eat? That would just never occur to me. It just seems like the worst version of mixology ever. But this is where our good friend Crisco was born. Which is short for crystallized cottonseed oil, and they launched it in 1911. This came with one of the most aggressive ad campaigns of the era. They hired J. Walter Thompson, who sold Crisco as this modern, scientific, and pure substance, claiming it was more digestible than animal fat, and they published a whole Crisco cookbook. They sent free samples to housewives and hospitals, and rewrote a ton of recipes, Swap out. Butter and Lard sort of having the OG TradWife influencer campaign.
Kylee So they didn't have house men that they sent this to, just housewives. So annoying, dude. To the cookbooks they're like, they're going to the housewives, they go into the house.
Zoë And the thing that's scary is it worked shockingly fast. Americans bought 2.6 million pounds of Crisco in 1912. Four years later, in 1916, 60 million in four years. And after that, it just scaled up. Soybean oil overtook cottonseed in the 30s. World War II rationed butter and lard for the troop so vegetable oils filled that gap at home. And canola and corn followed in the 50s and 60s. Wow, and that all came from the claim that it was more digestible than animal fat? Again, a claim that came out of a Madison Avenue marketing firm, not science. Wow.
Kylee That claim and the cookbooks. Hot takes. How does the cheap and shelf stable turn into... Art healthy?
Zoë So I think this is the part that does explain a lot of the modern discourse and almost paranoia here, because in 1948 Procter& Gamble, which was still very much in the vegetable oil business, donated $1.7 million to the American Heart Association, which in today's money would be $20 to $30 million. That's a pretty big chunk of change. Not nothing. Not nothing, if someone wanted to donate that to us. Would be great. Procter and Gamble, we're here. At the time, the American Heart Association was actually just a pretty small group of cardiologists, but within a decade, it had 300 plus chapters and was basically the most dominant voice in American heart health. And it was really quick to recommend vegetable oils, its donor's product. Over animal fact, that is a real documented conflict of interest where we have the receipts about the monetary donation. We do not have the scientific receipts showing why. So I do want to be fair here because there was also some a little bit of science happening. Heart disease at this time was the number one killer by mid-century and everyone was scrambling for an answer. I always like to imagine a bunch of scientists in a boardroom like smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey at noon being like, why, why is everyone dying of heart disease? We don't know why. So into this context, Steps Ansel Keys and his diet heart hypothesis that we've covered previously that saturated fat raises cholesterol, cholesterol causes heart disease. So... He reasoned if you swap animal fat for polyunsaturated fat. He joined the AHA's nutrition committee in 1961, and the guidelines told everyone to cut saturated fat and use vegetable oils instead. So he published what was known as the Seven Countries Study looking at heart disease rates, among other countries, which... As we discussed on our food policy episode from a while back had some criticism. The cherry picking that he's often accused of is that he looked at 22 countries originally and then just decided to publish on seven, which is a different number than 22 for those of you following at home. So he just published the data from the countries that fit his hypothesis and left out ones like France that didn't, where they eat a good bit of saturated fat and have like ballin' heart health. Right, I'm like, that's just... Not science, Ansel, thanks. And his defenders in a detailed 2017 paper argued that the 22 countries version misrepresents how the study was actually designed. So there is some complexity here. It's murky. This is the debate that has launched one million online Twitter wars that are extremely boring and not worth recapping here. But the criticism does have a real basis, but keys as a fraud is not exactly where expert consensus has landed either. And then here's the part that I think also earns a good bit of suspicion and skepticism. The Minnesota coronary experiment, finally not the starvation experiment, which was this big controlled trial, found that swapping in vegetable oil lowered cholesterol but didn't improve survival, and in some analyzes, people actually did worse. That data sat unpublished for decades and only got recovered and analyzed in 2016, Which, like... Shout out to the science archeologists out there that are like, wait, Minnesota! Let's dig this up! Yeah, they're like, what did you do with all that heart data? There's also been a not small amount of rebranding going on. Cotton seed oil sounds industrial and not at all like food. Soybean oil sounds weird as hell. Vegetable oil makes it sound like it came out of a garden. I'm not totally sure what it is. I mean...
Kylee And I mean, yeah, most people kind of don't know.
Zoë I honestly picture you like milking a carrot, like truly, like vegetable oil to me, I picture someone squeezing like a sweet pea. So the through line here is real, because there are genuine conflicts of interest. There are real methodological questions in this research, and there's a documented publication gap. So there are steps along the way that got us to where we are, where it's sort of opened up the space for everyone in the public to be like, don't trust science, Don't trust the medical establishment. They're just lying to you so that they can take money from big cotton seed, which had happened. Yeah.
Kylee And I think this is on both sides of the political spectrum, right? Where people are like, don't trust big, the seed oil. Oh, yeah, yeah. On the Republican and Democratic side. Yeah, it's like the whole.
Zoë Yeah, it's like the horseshoe of Joe Rogan, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Tucker Carlson are all touching tips here in this really cursed, holy seed oil trinity.
Kylee And then we've got our beef tallow.
Zoë I've got our beef tallow, like the Venn diagram of like weirdos who are into this shit is just like a stack of pancakes essentially. So given all of that, I think it's pretty normal that you'd expect the science on the oils to be just as damning for there to be an even clearer through line of here's the smoking gun. So let's do a little bit of role playing. I am a guy who has been on carnivore TikTok, and I'm going to tell you all of the things that I have seen online about seed oils. Wow. Ready? Go. I've been getting method with this. I've only been eating steak tartare all day. Perfect. Just kidding. I just ate a kale salad. It's like the least carnival. Kale salad and pomegranate is like an extremely NPR tote bag ass meal. Claim one. Omega-6 fatty acids cause inflammation. Linoleic acid turns into arachidonic acid, which makes these inflammatory compounds. Ergo, seed oils are inflaming all of us. In flaming. Inflaming!
Kylee I'm inflamed. So the pathway itself that you're talking about is technically real. Linoleic acid can become arachidonic acid, which is a building block for pro-inflammatory compounds. Got it. But the conversion rate's pretty low. We're talking like 0.2% of Linoleac acid you eat. Oh my god. Okay, great. So, and then when you run the actual trials, give people more linoleic acid and measure inflammation, you don't actually see that. Interesting. A 2017 meta-analysis of randomized trials found no real effect on inflammatory markers.
Zoë Ah, interesting. Okay.
Kylee And then Christopher Gardner at Stanford, who's about as credible as it gets, flat out calls the Omega-6 causes inflammation idea a mischaracterization of the science. So I would say this one's pretty weak. It might be true in like a petri dish, but when we're in actual humans, not really. Got it. But I do think it gets a little bit more complicated and that's where maybe our next claim is going. Yes, okay.
Zoë Yes. Okay. Claim number two, and this is one that I do hear from people who aren't just shirtless guys in a cold plunge, the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio. I'm going to cop to the fact that I have spent approximately 0% of my life thinking about my omega ratio. Am I digging myself into an early omega grave? I didn't know there were more than One omega.
Kylee Yeah, there's multiple.
Zoë Like mega three, six, why, why get a new name? Oh my God. What?
Kylee Why? Here's the challenge, and I do actually, I bring this up to certain people if I'm working with them and they're like, I really want to take a bigger deep dive on the details within my...
Zoë God, what is happening in your life that you want to get into the nitty-gritty on Omegas? I would literally rather watch every TV show Taylor Sheridan has ever made before I get into this. Before I get into this.
Kylee In all fairness, if you had chronic disease. I have not. That might be something you would wanna do. There we go. Something you would want to do.
Zoë Okay, so tell me more, tell me why. Tell me more, why?
Kylee Or propensity for a chronic disease. So over the last century, we have massively increased omega-6 consumption, while omega-3s, which tend to be inflammation balancing, stay low. So the idea here actually is that the two compete for the same enzymes. And when omega- 6 dominates omega- 3, the omega- three can't do as much, essentially. OK. So, when we look at what the ideal ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 should be is, it's something like from 2 to 1 to 4 to 1, and the average American is more 10 to 1 or 20 to 1. Oh boy, that's not- So that gap is-
Zoë That's like a score at the Harlem Globetrotters game.
Kylee Yeah
Zoë It's not what you want to see.
Kylee Here's the reframe, though, that matters. In a huge UK biobank study, 85,000 plus people, which is pretty big. It's a solid sample.
Zoë For example, when you look at studies of women in menopause, they'll be like 13 subjects. Yeah. So.
Kylee See, there are more than 13 people out there. This was done over 13 years as well, found that both high omega-6 and high omega 3 were linked to lower mortality. The problem wasn't necessarily too much omega- 6, it was too little omega-3. So it is that ratio. So, like, if you ate high omega-3 and high omega 6... They're saying there isn't higher mortality, there's actually lower mortality. Fascinating. But if there's a big gap there, then that's where the problem lies. And I do legitimately think there are a lot of people eating a lot of omega-6 and not a lot of omega three, because if you do some of that analysis, again, like not that I'm saying everyone needs to go out and analyze their fat break down here. You need to spend your-
Zoë You need to spend your one wild and precious life getting in the nitty. I mean, again, if you're struggling with chronic disease as a result of inflammation.
Kylee Or if you have a family history or something that's something maybe you want to look at. But when I have looked at it with people, the omega-3 consumption for a lot of people is not very high. And that typically is coming from things like your walnuts, chia, flax, fish, that sort of thing. Yeah.
Zoë I mean, you don't want to be in that 20 to 1 zone, so you keep saying that the fix is more omega-3, not just less omega-6, but how do you actually know if you're short on it? Like, I've never gotten my omega levels checked, if such a thing exists. Can't I just like throw a couple flax seeds in a smoothie and call it good?
Kylee Yeah, well, that's part of the problem, right? You're probably gonna have to, you will have to look a little bit more closely at it, unfortunately. Lame. Most people, they might be consuming a little of Omega-3 or they're like, oh, this is kind of like the carbs thing. I eat carbs, I love carbs. And then it's, when you get into it, it's like, but you're not eating enough of them. Yeah, yeah. And it's with the Omega- 3 is that I eat Omegas and it might be like one serving of flax a week. You're like maybe not. We're gonna need a little few more salmon there to bridge that gap. For someone that's vegan, that could be actually kind of tough because if you're not eating fish, that's- It's a lot of walnut.
Zoë The omegas are way less bile available in walnuts, right?
Kylee Yeah, and fish products are very high in Omega-3, so you need like two to three servings, roughly on average, of a four ounce portion of fish per week to get Omega- 3s that you need.
Zoë More fish than most americans.
Kylee Americans are eating for sure. Yeah. And then even so, if somebody's like, but I'm vegan and I don't need to eat fish. Then I'm like, well, you got to eat a lot of walnuts or chia seeds or flax seeds. And that might be a challenge because of what you said, the conversion rate isn't necessarily there to get that EPA and DHA that we are looking for. So can you tell me a little bit about that conversion thing? Like what?
Zoë What is that talking about?
Kylee There's a couple of different forms of Omega-3. We've got our... I feel like we got in deep so fast here. We have our ALA, we've got an EPA, and we've got our DHA. And our EPA and DHA are the ones that are more inflammation balancing, I guess. ALA can be converted to EPA and DHA, but that conversion rate is only about a 5% to 6% rate. That's not very high. That's NOT great. Yeah. So if you're trying to get two to three grams of EPA and DHA per day, and you are eating chia and flaxseed, it's going to be a lot of chia and Flax to get that two to 3 grams of EPA. That's a lot chia, dude. So like if you are saying, oh, I put flax in my oatmeal, I'm fine. That's not the same thing as eating fish a couple times a week. Yeah. So it's not... Nothing. It does help, but it might be a little bit more challenging than what people think. I mean, I guess a solution here might be taking like an Algo Omega supplement. If you're a vegan and you want to take a supplement, you could take an Alga one. Love it. Love algae. So that's where fish get their Omega-3s from their eating movie. Algae supplementation? Well, yes. Yes, exactly. They take a pill for that. Exogenous algae for fish. Yes. S- They're feeding on the algae, though, and they get that accumulation of omegas. It's like fish salad. If you want to go and scrape algae off the ocean floor and eat it, you can do that too. We empower you. My plant-based athletes. It's raw. I only eat raw.
Zoë The rawest algae I can find. So okay, claim three, and this is the one that I got to say I do find slightly convincing. And I have not seen a ton of debunks, so I'm excited to hear what you think. Tell me about the oxidation and the processing of these oils, because I hear that's a big concern.
Kylee I feel like online, I'm not sure how much this is talked about, but it is something that where if somebody's saying seed oils are completely fine and they're dismissing this idea, I think that can be a little bit problematic because this actually does have some claim to back it up. All right. Tell me. Where's the there there? Polyunsaturated fat, Zoe. OK. They have chemically fragile spots that react with oxygen and heat. That doesn't sound great if you're cooking with it. It's technically not, because if you heat the oil past a certain point, it can oxidize and change the shape of the oil and cause it to form compounds like lipid peroxides and aldehydes. Oh. And there's actual evidence that these can damage cells and may matter for heart disease.
Zoë That's not great, because the whole point of these oils, in a lot of cases, is cooking with them. It's not just, yes, it is in the salads and the protein bars and the whatnot, but a lot of folks are cooking with this stuff.
Kylee Of ironic, right? Because the heart disease component is promoted by the American Heart Association.
Zoë Honestly, American Heart Association, big egg on your face. Maybe don't promote anything that you can fry shit in. Yeah. You know, like, if like the AHA had like a preferred fryer brand, I'd be like, okay, guys. Yeah. It would be like the American Brain Association having a favorite NFL team.
Kylee Yeah. No. Yeah.
Zoë We need to not do that.
Kylee I think the key here is how we're using the oil, how we are consuming the oil. What conditions the oil is in, like if it's stored, if the oil is stored in a yellow bottle in a dark cabinet where it's not going to be exposed to light, because light can actually change the shape of oil. That's why it's in the yellow. Yeah. So that's another.
Zoë So the only problem with this thing we cook with is that it can't get hot or see light?
Kylee That feels like a flaw. Well, it's definitely more nuanced than like, it can't get hot past a certain temperatures when it changes shape. And so a lot of times that's when you're frying things and that's different than if you were to, I don't know, use this in a salad dressing or something. Things that are from a restaurant fryer maybe could be problematic. The other thing I do wonder about ultra-processed foods, say you're making a chip and you're using vegetable oil to make the chip, I'd be curious about how much that's oxidized when you're makin' the chip. Yeah. Like in a fryer or something?
Zoë I don't want to be curious about my chips. I want them to...
Kylee I want them to be safe and I don't want to think about my chips. I'm not saying this is like a moral hierarchy thing, but if you were having chips then maybe something like avocado oil would be a better choice in this situation. So again, not moral hierarching people, but something to think about. Yes. Okay.
Zoë Okay, so fourth claim, and this is a big one. This is one that I certainly see online a lot with anti-seed oil crowd on TikTok. Seed oil consumption skyrocketed. They sort of present it as if it maps perfectly with the rise of chronic disease in the U.S. Therefore, seed oils caused it. Right. Right.
Kylee And all the other things that changed didn't. Right, exactly. Yeah. I mean, but in all fairness, usage did go up, remember? Like, 85%. However, other things... The number of female astronauts also went up, and I don't think they caused it. Yeah, that's true. Screen time might have gone up, too. Yep. Sleep, sleep. People don't do that anymore. They just don't sleep. What is who she? Never met her. People's work schedules change. We talked about ultra-processed foods being introduced. A lot of more sitting around, not moving as much, so the entire way of living maybe changed a little bit? Yeah. Ha ha ha!
Zoë Seed oils aren't the only thing that changed in America since our grandparents were born. Just one ingredient.
Kylee It went up, and then we're declaring it the cause of chronic disease. Bing, bing, boom. Science.
Zoë Yeah, that's one I always get really uncomfortable when people bring out those really naughty looking charts. Yes. Okay. So flip it for me. Let's steel man this. Let's look at the other side here. So in the everyone calm down, seed oils are totally fine camp, what are they thinking about and gesturing at here?
Kylee So in this camp, the strongest evidence is gonna be in the cardiovascular health realm. So swapping saturated fat for polyunsaturated fat in seed oils reliably does lower LDL and that's replicated across a lot of studies. In a big 2025 JAMA study, about 221,000, a lot bigger than that, 85,000 people study. Found the people eating the most plant oils had 16% lower overall mortality than the lowest, while the biggest butter eaters had 15% higher. Interesting. Lower cancer and heart death, too. Okay. The catch is what they compared it to. So almost all of this is seed oils versus Butter, lard, tallow, and against those, seed oils win. But the smarter critics aren't saying eat butter. They're saying use olive oil and avocado oil instead. And so that comparison hasn't really been run in a head-to-head. Mm-hmm.
Kylee Trial or study. Got it. So both things can be true at once seed oils are better than butter and olive oil is better than seed oils. Got it, okay. Kudos to olive oil. Shout out olive oil! Extra virgin olive oil has great data, partly the fat, but also it has polyphenols and antioxidants. That doesn't necessarily, though, make canola oil poison, which is what is touted online. It just makes olive oil a potential better option, a higher option on the tiers.
Zoë Okay, so the idea of some of this science being complicated, if not straight out like compromised, is still kind of like lodged in my head. Is there a funding problem at all in here? Because that should go both ways when we look at the science, right?
Kylee Yeah. Well, when we get down into it, right, there's, I feel like there's always going to be some funding challenges behind these things.
Zoë Yes, you need money to do things, and money can make doing things well hard. Very hard.
Kylee Shout out to our Patreon. Shout out our Patreon!
Zoë Not at all funded by the seed oil lobby.
Kylee This podcast, not at all powered by seed oils. So one of the biggest pro-seed oil research groups is the Soy Nutrition Institute. I mean, that just sounds like a villain. It sounds like the most boring villain of all time. It's funded by the soy industry, Zoe. That is disclosed, and it means that you need to read their work more carefully. But then the exact same scrutiny applies to studies funded by the beef and dairy industry on the other side. Here's looking at you, beef tallow. Oh, tallow! So, funding doesn't automatically make research wrong, but it does mean that you need to look a little harder at it. So, the way we actually evaluate any of it, which listeners, you guys out there can do it, too, was to look at a randomized trial or just observational. What they'd measured how long did they follow people, and does it replicate? One study also is never the full story, so the pattern across independent research is the story, and the pattern for harm from normal seed oil use just isn't there. Got it. I feel like normal is load-bearing. Yeah, I know. That's...
Zoë I'm kind of wondering what normal means. What like ab, or what abnormal, which I guess, again, if you're getting that 20 to one ratio, girl. Yeah, but to some extent.
Kylee I could see that though.
Zoë What would that look like? Is that something you've ever seen with someone you've been working with? Not just, oh my god, your seed oils are off, but I'm guessing that a ratio like that would be enmeshed in a tough diet regardless. It wouldn't be the only canary in that coal mine.
Kylee Yeah, I mean, this is hard because, like, again, I don't want to get up on a moral hierarchy, but if somebody is eating ultra-processed foods throughout their entire day, they're gonna get a high intake of omega-6. For sure. Like, that's kind of the reality. Yeah. We're never on this podcast to, like put anyone down on their choices and whatever they have to do to f- fuel themselves, but I think when you look at it that way, it's like, wow, you have to rely on a lot of convenience foods due to access or your financial situation, etc. It might make it harder for you.
Zoë Like you said, it's just so tough because there is, you know, an access food justice and food equity thing here and like yelling at people to make frying oil tallow, again, does nothing to improve people's like access to kitchens, access to fresh food, ability to cook, make fruit and vegetables affordable. You're just shaming people for their choices and not asking yourself like, well, why do some people have genuinely worse and fewer choices? Than I, a grown man frying his Thanksgiving turkey and beef tallow while wearing jeans, has.
Kylee Yeah, exactly
Zoë And again, it's a lot of these things are like, they're connected, right? Like that seed oil is connected with really high ultra-processed food consumption, and it doesn't mean that if you so much as look at a Pop-Tart, your omega ratio is going to tank.
Kylee And if you remember that study that I was just talking about earlier, even though someone had a high omega-6 consumption, if they also had a higher omega-3 consumption, the outcomes were a little different. Right. Eat a Pop-Tart, eat a salmon. Yeah. Boom. Balance. Pop-tarts with salmon! The world's
Zoë This is the weirdest breakfast. Recovery next recovery option. You want to have an extremely weird poop. Can of tuna with a Pop-Tart. My, my, my yeah.
Kylee Like, chicken of the sea, pop-tart. Ew. Ugh. I want to hear this from your journalistic perspective. Why does this particular story grab people so hard?
Zoë I think the thing that interests me about seed oils, because to be honest, like I said, my interest doesn't naturally gravitate towards this because it is kind of wonky and I don't spend a ton of time obsessing about my omega ratio, and I am fascinated at how this has become such a large part of our cultural nutrition conversation lately. And I think that it's so compelling because it has a nearly perfect narrative structure. It has a villain in industrial food. It's got this Jafar-ass side of the spectrum. And then a hero in the form of animal fat and ancestral eating and churning butter and eating the way that your grandma used to eat. And if you just simply sub butter in where you used to have seed oils, bing, bang, boom, it's a perfect, simple fix. There's also this community of people who feel like they've woken up to something everyone else is too asleep to see. So it falls into this narrative that we're. Really seeing as part of the ma-ha movement of doctors don't want you to know and this health information you've been told is totally wrong. And yeah, there's some parts of it that are wrong. It wasn't more easily digestible. That was just an advertising campaign. It wasn't good for all the things that it was sold as. But that also doesn't mean that you need to like ball out on tallow. So because mistrust was earned early on... That mistrust when filtered through the lens of social media and bad science communication and even worse, American politics by the time it comes out the other end, it's like the world's most cursed game of telephone where people don't even know about the omega ratio any more. So this idea that you've been lied to by the medical establishment and I alone have The truth is this irresistible sort of earworm for anyone who feels like they've been failed by the medical establishment or the food system, which I think in our country is everyone. Like is there anyone who's like, oh yeah, 100% food system sick, doctors, incredible rave review across the board. Never had a bad time. So I think the uncomfortable and really interesting part here is, is that these things have failed a lot people. A lot of the promises that we were sold on in terms of seed oils ability to prevent chronic disease. Wasn't accurate. And so when someone says everything you were told about food is wrong, there's a seed of truth there. There's an oily little seed and that taps into a real grievance, even when the specific claim is way out over its skis. So seed oils end up standing in for this much bigger and more legitimate anxiety about the whole food Because, again, if you look at the typical American diet, how people eat... The access that we have to foods, the amount of food that Americans eat that is deep-fried, I think you'd have to be kind of willfully ignorant to be like, nope, flying colors, things look awesome, right? So it acknowledges the fact that a lot of us feel pretty bad about our food system and feel pretty about diet and rather than saying, well, let's look at social determinants of health and let's get into the weeds about the nutrition and. The ways that science or marketing has been compromised, it subs in this easy answer and all you have to do is fry shit in beef tallow. Mm-hmm. Ugh, so.
Zoë I think that the thing that's really fascinating is that this truly stopped being a nutrition conversation a long, long time ago. So I am curious from your perspective, how did cooking oil end up as essentially a proxy culture war? Why is this something that people attach their whole identity to? Like that's a whole thing online where people's whole thing is avoiding seed oils, opening Tallow Restaurants and Sheryl Himes.
Kylee Well, we were mentioning it earlier, but the wellness left, and then the populist right, everyone's furious about it. Oh yeah. Yes. So we've got the two sides being furious about the same thing, which is probably one of the only things.
Zoë I mean, it could be Mobile, Alabama, or Marin County, California, and it's a horseshoe.
Kylee Yeah, we've got crunchy mom feeds, we got carnivore corners, right-wing influencer Mike Sanovic. I hate that I know.
Zoë I hate that I know who he is.
Kylee Basically, diagrammed it. Left-wing hypochondria is COVID. The right-wing version is seed oils and grocery store receipt. It's so true.
Zoë Seed oils really are the grocery store receipts of the food system right now.
Kylee So, I mean, I think the uniting thing here, which you mentioned, is like a distrust in big food and the medical establishment. And seed oils give this shared villain. And then the grievances cross both party lines, and then they have the same wrong target there. Yep. It's the perfect symbol because it's a one-word loyalty test. Yeah. Oil free which they have it in. I think they have in restaurants now
Zoë They do, when TJ and I were just in California and on the menus, there would be seed oil and it was all these things where it was like, where would you put a seed oil in this kale salad? I'm at a restaurant, please do not serve me salad dressing out of a jar. I'm paying you to do one thing and it's not give me shit out of the jar. It like, it almost, it's one of those things like when I see the word clean on any product, I'm like, well, you think I'm fucking stupid so I don't want to use it, which is how I feel about seed oils on menus now.
Kylee Well, it's like that, well, you want to be, well maybe not you, but people then want to feel like they're part of some kind of tribe, right? Correct. They're like, oh, I'm part of this. We know that. We know the truth, we're...
Kylee Anti-seed oil. God. Just have a better personality, you know? An IDA becomes their whole identity, which is one of the reasons why we started this podcast. Exactly. Okay.
Zoë Exactly. Because people just can't be normal about anything. Not about water, not about their step count, not about avocados.
Kylee Be cool. Be cool! It's not fringe anymore, and this is the part that people miss. The current RFK Junior era. Has called seed oils one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic, and he's been promising to end the war on saturated fat with his tallow products. Oh my god. Yes! How did this become public health policy, you guys? Yeah, so now we've got the new federal dietary guidelines listing butter and beef tallow right next to olive oil as acceptable cooking fats. Wow. So amazing. I'm super excited as a dietician to be during this right now.
Zoë Again, at night, when I can't sleep, I picture the food-merkin and how grapes and butter are right next to each other. It's awful. It keeps me up at night. I pity the graphic designer that was given that absolute shit gig and was wired the grapes and the butter so close. My god. One of these things is not like the-
Kylee Like the other. Then this is where, like, all the brands come in, right? Because if we've got this culture war with food products, we can sell things. That's what's always so-
Zoë funny is that people are like, boo, big food, which, like, merited, big ag, a lot of criticisms. Industrial food, a lotta criticisms, but people's answer to it is also industrial food, but we put the word primal on it. Yeah. It's the same thing, you guys. Just a different label.
Kylee So we've got steak and shake switching its fryers to beef tallow. My god. Then RFK Jr. Showed up and praised them for RFK-ing the fries, so we- Okay, I really dislike-
Zoë I really dislike the verb RFK-ing anything.
Kylee Is this in our Urban Dictionary now? No. I hate it. There are even, so you gotta get one of these, making frying oil tallow again hats. No. Sweet Green, which I'm really disappointed in you Sweet Green. Same. Ran a seed oil free menu. This is the-
Zoë thing that always bums me out is I, in the course of being in my natural habitat, run into this. There is not a world where I can just not be in this discourse because I go to California sometimes and eat salad.
Kylee Are you part of the Seed Oil Free Alliance certification? What? That's another thing. You have to buy packaged goods that are part of Seed oil free alliance, Zoe.
Zoë Ugh, incredible.
Kylee Now we've got, that's the marketing strategy. Perfect. So here's the part that everyone should be a little bit bothered by. Okay, if you're not bothered yet. As a populist revolt against industrial corporate food, in practice it handed the beef and tallow industry its best marketing cycle in decades and talk people into swapping one industrial fat for another one with worse cardiovascular data. Yeah, and people are- So great.
Zoë It's developed this, like, health halo, right? Like, we talked, we, in our, like skin care episode, we did a while back, tallow has now been cast as this, like, uncritically, like it's good for everything. And people are, like putting it on their faces, which, like the TLDR on that is don't. Like, it is not good for your skin. Like, you do not need to put no tallow on your face. Like, and it's just become this thing that people see as shorthand for... Because they've been told by our government that it's healthy, which makes me feel like a tinfoil hat crank to be like, stop listening to the tallow cranks. The tallow crank. Be normal. Don't put tallow on your skin and in your hair. And like, there's like protein powders that have like a tallow component. It's like this thing where it's just getting shoehorned into everything because people have been told it's health and now it's appearing everywhere.
Kylee And almost everyone's then, like, selling a product, right?
Zoë Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, so, like, every big anti-seed oil influencer I have found in researching this has something to sell. There's the tallow skincare, grass-fed beef fat, carnivore protein bars that cost, like $30, and also... Carnivore and protein bars. Okay. Yeah. Aren't short... Aren't... Which, like... It's like a... Is that, like a meat bar? It's just like a meat tube. It's a meat stick. Yeah it's like wet meat stick, dude. I'm not... Will not be sampling. And it's the same as a drug company funding research on its own drug. Their interest is in you believing that the problem is real and that their product is the only one that can fix it. Doesn't mean they're wrong about everything, right? It just means you need to read them harder and be skeptical of the meat stick they're selling you. So we talked about the naturalistic fallacy or the appeal to tradition and the idea that our ancestors ate this way framing. Is really selectively applied here, too, because a lot of those ancestors didn't live to be particularly old. Many of them died of infections we now cure in a day and had zero access to a vegetable. Like do you know anyone recently who has died of bari-bari or rickets? I don't. It's a feature, not a bug, of the food system, you know? So there are a lot of really accurate criticisms of our modern food system. And there are just as many accurate criticisms of food systems of the past. We haven't fixed anything and we haven't really, we haven't fixed anything. And I feel like beef tallow is a problem in search of a solution. Is a solution in search for a problem, but actually just introduces a whole new problem into the system.
Kylee Yeah, I wanna, okay, I want to go back. Maybe should we cover the structural piece?
Zoë Yeah, because I think this is the piece that like really does bug me because the seed oil panic takes a structural problem and turns it into a personal shopping decision, right? Because the real issue is that our entire food environment is built around cheap, ultra-processed, hyper-palatable food because that's what's profitable. That is the system and this is baked in at every level. Also simply yelling at people to buy tallow. Reframes this as something that you fix one person at a time in the grocery store, which extremely conveniently and not at all surprisingly, lets the food system off the hook and doesn't fix anything. We don't have to assess how we got here. What was the bad science? What was bad marketing? Take a good look at the food merkin that's telling us that grapes are butter. And it's the most classic wellness move in their playbook is to take this collective problem. To not look at social determinants of health, but to sell it back to you as a personal failing and a product that you can buy at the link in our bio.
Kylee I do kind of wonder then how that makes people feel, like, if they're like, oh, I can't even afford tallow, you know? Like, do I feel bad about myself if I can afford tallows? I guess.
Zoë I don't know how much tallow costs. I don't know exactly. If it's coming through the Strait of Hormuz right now, I can imagine that.
Kylee Now I can imagine that being a big problem. Well, I'm kind of wondering, like, from a process, ultra-process food standpoint, I mean, I'm sure it's coming in ultra- process foods or something, but I haven't really seen it. It is, it is. I haven't seen it a ton, and I'm kinda like, well, what if somebody is like, well, I can only afford to buy these chips that are ultra- processed, but they don't have tallow in them. Exactly.
Zoë Exactly, right, because it's like this thing of like, a lot of people eat the way that they do because of economics and yelling at them to eat tallow doesn't address the incentives. We have to change the incentives, it just introduces a new and like mutated but still fucked up set of incentives that encourages people with also really wild profit motives to be like, here is the solution. Here's the one good way to eat. It's not like, well, let's actually look at like what we're feeding our kids. School lunches, and let's look at food deserts and the fact that you can't buy prepared foods with SNAP and WIC money, so that incentivizes the purchasing of ultra-processed foods, and instead we're just going to yell at people about avocado oil. So. Huh. I just have to take a deep breath. But I do want to know, because this is such a part of your world, where does your own profession, where do your people come down on this issue?
Kylee I think most dieticians would say that seed oils aren't a meaningful health concern, but from my perspective, I think we can't just dismiss the oxidation and processing of the oils and also the omega-6 and omega-3 ratio and consumption.
Zoë So are you telling me that it's nuanced and you think a lot of people are getting it wrong who are yelling on
Kylee both sides. Yeah. Well, I think unfortunately what happens is people yell on both sides and then they lose credibility. Like dieticians will lose credibility because they're not.
Zoë Because they're like, this doesn't matter, this isn't important, shut up about the beef tallow. And then people are like, well, no, because I'm looking around at our world and I can tell the shit is fucked. Exactly. So, I'm gonna go with the tallow guy and the jeans.
Kylee More nuanced conversation, which people don't like.
Zoë No, they do not, as we can attest. Ugh, huge bummer. So I do want to get even more concrete about the risks of treating seed oils as the enemy, because I sense there's some downsides. So I want to start with the low-hanging beef fruit here. Is switching to tallow any better?
Kylee Uh, probably not. Oh! Might be potentially worse. Oh boy. Okay.
Kylee When we look, like, tallow is mostly saturated fat, and the strongest data we have, that JAMA study that I mentioned earlier found the heaviest butter and saturated fat eaters had higher mortality rates while the plant oil eaters had lower. Now, remember, it didn't mention, like olive oil, et cetera, but still, that is, I feel like, something to consider. Sure is. So you might be trading something neutral or fine for something with worse evidence behind it, and then you're paying a shit ton of money for it, right? Sure are. Some of those things, I think they're like 50 bucks or something.
Zoë Yeah, like, it's gotta cost like $100 to get the turkey fryer amount of tallow that RFK thinks we need.
Kylee So I would say it's maybe a lateral move, but maybe even worse?
Zoë Yeah, it's like when you like on like an airplane flight, when you pay 70 bucks to be upgraded and you're in the seat directly next to the one you were sitting in, but because you're in an emergency row, you actually can't even put your bag under. So now you're just stuck clutching your tote bag full of wet meat sticks while you take off from DIA. Like, like.
Kylee You're like, why didn't I just have some Oliver Avocado, Oliver Avacado oil instead? I should have just settled for economy. I know, right?
Zoë So what do you think is the cost of the worry and the discourse and this idea that seed oils are like the decline of modern civilization sucking all the oxygen out of the room?
Kylee I mean, it's like wild how much attention this is getting online. Real wild. So I feel like it's just getting a little bit out of hand how much attention this getting and then comparing it to how much it actually matters. Now again, I would say if you're somebody that is eating fried like restaurant food all the time, have a high risk for cardiovascular disease and have chronic diseases, maybe You do want to. Pay more attention to it, but an occasional, like, going out to eat or having some omega sixes is not something that I think we need to be stressing as much about.
Zoë What about for athletes and active folks? Because we haven't really touched on those specifics as of yet.
Kylee I mean, the athlete context is real, but the opposite of what the fear crowd actually says. So if we look at endurance athletes, we do have more oxidative stress from training.
Zoë Sure do.
Kylee So the fat quality might matter a little bit more, but that's a reason to prioritize like our olive oil or avocado oil, not panic about having some canola oil.
Zoë Eat a salmon, don't like freak out and bring your own oil to the restaurant.
Kylee Yeah, and I was, I mean, this is for everyone. Like, why can't we just focus on eating enough omega-3s? It's like, add something in versus panicking and restricting and cutting everything. And restricting and cutting everything.
Zoë Starting an entire seed oil-free restaurant when it's like, what if we just had a piece of fish on offer?
Kylee Or, I mean, it's flax, chia, walnuts are going to help some, move the needle some. Love it. So I feel like that plays a role in the, like the ratio thing we were talking about. Out.
Kylee Um, and then if you are cooking, maybe use more of a stable cooking oil, avocado oil, uh, olive oil that is, you need to look at your olive oil though, to make sure it is able to handle a higher, higher smoke point. Um, And then if, you have like your extra virgin olive oil for finishing, like don't, don't be reusing that. Don't be, uh, cooking at high temperatures with that, I will say.
Zoë Yeah, treat yourself. One of my favorite books ever is Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which is a cookbook, but it also has a lot of super cute illustrations and really good, like, evidence-based guides for, like here's how to choose different types of oil for different things and learning how to, like actually use the shit in your kitchen and understand why things work. Like, if you're someone who listens to the show and you like food and science, you will like this cookbook. Highly recommend.
Kylee Amazing.
Zoë Love the recommendation. Yep. So I feel like there has to be a downside, especially for active people, to buy into this idea.
Kylee Well, I think if we look at the population, we have this tendency for orthorexia, clean eating, maybe needing to feel like they need to cut back on fats and change body composition. And so that's where I think part of the problem comes in is like, we start getting afraid of seed oils and fats and all of that, and then under do it on overall energy intake.
Zoë Yeah, I mean, if you had asked me to forecast what is going to be the most popular cultural conversation in nutrition, I would never in a million years have guessed seed oils are gonna be the thing that people are asking me about at every Christmas party I go to.
Kylee I know, it's kind of wild, like...
Zoë It's like, oh my god, ask me something that's not seed oils or GLP ones.
Kylee So yeah, I feel like the RFK Junior time frame here has really amped up the senior oil conversation, I felt like. This is a royal conversation, I feel like.
Zoë I wish I had bought stock in beef tallow. OK, so bottom line, what should people actually do, and what should just stop worrying about?
Kylee Okay, so eating more omegas, we mentioned that a couple of times. Eat more, eat more. Eat more omagas to help kind of fix that ratio. Be smart about heat and what oil you're using when you're cooking. So if you're a using a low temperature cooking oil and you're frying things in it, that's probably not a great thing because those can oxidize and change the shape of the at itself. Woo. Um. Stop auditing packaged food for seed oils. Just be cool, man. Read something else. Yes, read something else, caveat though, I mentioned it earlier, if all you eat is processed, ultra processed foods, maybe you do want to pay attention to that a little bit more. Correct. Maybe add some more vegetables into your diet. Eat a fruit. Try to, try to. Don't. Cut out fats to dodge seed oil. So again, like if you end up doing that and you have high energy needs and you're cutting fat out, that can affect hormone health, that can effect vitamin absorption. You need fats to function as an athlete.
Zoë Mm. Okay. So I feel like I came into this a little bit confused and just like unsure why maybe this is taking up so much space. And now I feel I have a better idea just in terms of how, I mean, the science is pretty nuanced. There are, I mean the history is both wild and extremely up and down in terms of like, well, yeah, you can kind of see how the seeds of distrust were sown here. And you can really see where people are coming from. Where they sort of latch onto these ideas of like, no, this is wrong, the medical establishment is wrong and science is wrong. And that gets totally blown out of proportion. But this isn't something I've been thinking about. And it seems like I kind of have permission to continue not to think about it too much in so far that I'm eating a well-rounded diet with food that I like, not only eating ultra-processed hyper-palatable foods that have cottonseed oil. And then for some...
Kylee Reason. Thanks Procter& Gamble. I mean, I think the big thing is like just not not spiraling like and saying like, Oh, my God, I just had canola oil. I'm a terrible person. I'm going to get all these exorcism now chronic health conditions. Yeah, it's to me it's similar to like the the clean eating and trying to I really see it in the orthorexic crowd of like, oh, like these seed oils, they're so bad and I'm gonna
Zoë It rationalizes their desire for control and it gives it like a oh I'm not being weird about food I totally can worry about this, and I should worry about it. And I saw a million TikToks about how it's totally cool for me to be super freaked out about cotton seeds.
Kylee Interesting. Are you freaked out about cotton seeds? Not at all. Not the slightest.
Zoë I did, I did as research go through my oil cat like in my little pantry to see what seed oils I had and like we do have like one small thing of canola oil that I was like well this is crazy expired so I've like never used it before. I have no idea what I originally bought it for and I also I guess I had like a ton of mystery oils where I was like hmm that's way too many different types of coconut oil in here. Mystery oils. The sweet oils, where I was like, what did I buy this for? Get us an oil.
Kylee Yes, the oil.
Zoë But, you know, I, this one is really interesting and I just find it so fascinating that it has become this like almost like this quasi religious political movement and the signifier of like what type of American you are and what kind of diet you eat because while there are some things to think about here, definitely not enough to be like the basis for a
Kylee The seed oil tallow movement. It's a movement. They have hats. It really is. They have hat. So we need to get those.
Zoë Well, we'll get hats, so, yeah. I guess what are you walking away with from this episode?
Kylee I'm walking away with being cool. No, if you want to use olive oil and avocado oil as your main sources of oils, great. If you want use some canola oil, great, if want to used salad, great no, just evaluating your relationship to the seed oils and the use of oil in general, I guess I would say. And... Um, if you think that you are at risk because of a chronic health condition, or maybe you're not eating enough omega-3s, et cetera, then maybe make some changes. But for the most part, people don't need to, to freak out about it. Alright. Boil well. So we are not selling tallow. We're not selling it yet.
