Euroviews. Seed oils are the new tobacco — and you need to know about it

It’s been a creeping health crisis for decades. Seed oils, highly refined industrial fats, are almost unavoidable in our diets. They are also one of the single biggest sources of total calorie intake and drivers of epidemics of ill health. And we need to know about it.

Previously the bugbear of a mix of concerned scientists, right-wing carnivores, and podcast hosts, seed oil awareness hit the big time in the US late last year: healthy lunchtime salad bowl brand Sweetgreens announced it was taking seed oils off the menu for cooking, citing health concerns, and was going to use Californian extra virgin olive oil instead. Other chains have followed.

In the US, there are now apps to find seed oil-free restaurants, a new “seed oil-free” food certification, and startups, like Zero Acre Foods, pushing novel cooking oils with no seeds in sight.

Full disclosure: I run a B2B regenerative olive oil company. This is why I started researching cooking oils in our food system. What I discovered truly shocked me and changed the way I eat. I’m passing it on.

What are seed oils? Why are they bad? 100 years ago, before P&G first started selling Crisco, a refined cottonseed oil derivative, as a food product, frying was only possible with animal products like lard or butter or plant-based oils, such as olive or palm, which were sometimes expensive or hard to get.

Other novel and cheap food oils followed, and now we consume vast amounts of sunflower, soybean (aka “vegetable oil”), canola or colza, grapeseed, peanut, and corn oils.

These are all polyunsaturated oils made from seeds. The oils are chemically extracted, heavily refined, and bleached in factories that resemble petroleum refineries.

This processing is part of the problem with seed