Foundational Health Principle 2: Don’t Eat Seed Oils
Fact of the day: Today, soybean oil is the single-largest source of calories in the United States. 120 years ago, it didn’t exist.
As many of you know, I’m starting a company that issues diet and lifestyle habit plans to prevent and reverse disease – which unlocks tax-free spending. Food and exercise are medicine – they can and should be prescribed more.
Emails over the coming weeks will share the 25 principles True Medicine uses to base our recommendations. The highest-leverage thing the United States could do is move healthcare policy to incentivize these principles.
Today’s focus is on seed oils. Look in your fridge; you’ll probably see them hiding everywhere – even in “healthy” items, from organic humus to artisanal oat milk. Today, almost everyone is falling victim to hidden inflammatory oils, which are wrecking our health.
These seed (or vegetable) oils include canola, corn, soybean, grapeseed, safflower, peanut, palm, and cottonseed. Look at almost any label, and you’ll almost certainly see one of them.
The case against seed oils is simple:
They are generally high in omega-6 fats, which increase inflammation in the body.
The body treats these oils as unknown foreign invaders (thus the inflammatory response) – because they are seed oils that didn’t exist until 120 years ago (i.e., for 99.9999% of human evolution).
Because seed oils are cheaper to produce (if you want to lose your appetite, watch this video of the manufacturing process), they have taken a share in the American diet from fats that humans have relied on for thousands of years – like olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil and animal-based fat (like butter, tallow or ghee). These are primarily omega-3 anti-inflammatory fats.
Combined with the disastrous 1990s guidance to reduce fat in favor of carbohydrates, we have robbed our diet of an essential anti-inflammatory food (omega-3 fats) and substituted it with inflammatory oils and sugar.
To learn more about the negative impact of seed oils, check out this post from Zero Acres.
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Calley Means 