Beware, though: not all seed oils are created equal. Refined, bleached, and deodorized, just because an oil claims to be of a seed originally doesn’t mean it bears any resemblance to the husk-enclosed nugget of nutrition from which it came. We are, of course, talking about vegetable oils (otherwise known as industrial seed oils). High-temperature heating means that the unsaturated fatty acids within become oxidized, by-products of which have been found to be harmful
to human health. Then, the seeds are processed with a petroleum-based solvent (most often hexane) in order to maximise the amount of oil that can be extracted. Next, chemicals are added to deodorize the stench of those extracted oils, resulting in trans fats. Finally, more chemicals are added to improve the colour of the product. If that doesn’t sound awful enough, three further reasons you might want to step away from the bottle of industrial seed oil include:
1.
That adulterated oil is an evolutionary mismatch. We must eat in adherence to our species’ specific needs. The modern environment we’ve crafted isn’t compatible for the most part with our genes, and that is why there is the proliferation of chronic disease today, increased by consumption of industrial seed oils ever since the 1900s, as well as of refined sugar and excessive calories. Between only 1970 and the millennium, in fact, median consumption of soybean oil and other such industrial seed oils rose from just 4lb per annum per person to a stomachchurning 26lb per annum per person.
2. 3.
Those oils are generally from genetically modified crops. Certainly in the United States, where 88% of corn, 93% of soy, 94% of cotton, and 93% of rapeseed crops are GM.
Industrial seed oils are imbalanced in their Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acid ratio. Linoleic acid (the primary fatty acid in industrial seed oils) now forms 8% of total calorie intake; in hunter-gatherer societies, it was only 1%-3%. Yet, we humans cannot make fatty acids (polyunsaturated fats) ourselves and must eat them. Omega-3s (ALA, EPA, and DHA) are antiinflammatory, but Omega-6s are pro-inflammatory due to their increasing of arachidonic acid production – nonetheless, they’re necessary. Given that, ancestrally, the two were consumed at a ratio of 1:1, it is eye-opening that in the West that ratio is now between 10:1 to 20:1. 20
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