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November 19, 2024 - 11:55am
Seed oils have become a new front in the culture wars, with the Right and Left staking out new positions over the controversial food substance.
Last week, the New York Times published an article purporting to debunk claims made by RFK Jr. about the potential negative health impacts of seed oils — refined, industrially produced oils such as canola and soybean oil, often called vegetable oils. Deferring to experts, the author argued that vegetable oils are linked to better heart health.
Kennedy, who was recently named by Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has been calling for McDonald’s to return to frying foods in beef tallow rather than vegetable oil. He has claimed the oils are “one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic”.
A former Democrat, RFK Jr. is emblematic of the partisan realignment on the issue. Distrust of Big Food and the official narrative on health and medical science was, until recently, considered Left-wing. Nearly a decade ago, Malcolm Gladwell complained that McDonald’s had “ruined French fries” by replacing the animal fat in their fryers with vegetable oil.
The comment from Gladwell came during a podcast episode about a rarely discussed medical study from the 1960s which challenged the purported health benefits of vegetable oils. The study, a randomised, controlled trial of 9,000 participants, upended the conventional wisdom that vegetable oils were better for heart health, a conclusion which had been based largely on observational studies rather than controlled trials. Gladwell praised the study as “challenging 50 years of medical orthodoxy.”
Around 2021, the issue became splintered along partisan lines, as various figures from the online Right began to challenge seed oil’s purported health benefits. Much of this can be attributed to an influential Twitter account, Seed Oil Disrespector, whose meme-heavy posts about the purported health risks of seed oils, shared using the language of the online Right, spread so quickly through the community that it spurred accusations of industry astroturfing.
The Right’s scepticism of seed oils grew as many figures grew distrustful of medical authority. This became particularly pronounced during the Covid pandemic, with conservatives pushing back against the Covid vaccine and related mandates, often claiming that the financial interests of Big Pharma were being considered above the health of ordinary Americans. In a similar way, some on the Right pointed to the financial motives of major food corporations which produce seed oils as influencing medical organisations, who in turn recommended their products.
In the decade prior, such critiques were mainstream on the Left. A 2016 article in Psychology Today noted that the American Heart Association began arguing seed oil products were healthier than animal fats like butter and lard after the parent company of Crisco gave them $1.75 million. “Political, financial, and even egotistical” influences, rather than science, had led to the medical community’s strong stance that animal fats were bad for heart health, the author wrote. A similar 2017 article in the Los Angeles Times argued that “longstanding bias, commercial interests and the AHA’s need to reaffirm nearly 70 years of its ‘heart healthy’ advice” had led to the endorsement of seed oils and their derivatives as a healthy alternative.
As the Right has become more sceptical of seed oils and other processed foods, the Left-leaning media has become less interested in scientific debate on the subject, and more focused on the Right-wing fad component. The NYT article broke from this trend, citing several nutritional experts to argue that seed oils are not a health concern. “The claim that seed oils are ruining our health is especially rankling to nutrition scientists,” it read, “who see them as a big step forward from butter and lard.”
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SubscribeReally? This is going to be the first of the big debates between the left and right?
Is there nothing we can’t have a left – right division on. Seed oils!
Haha, even stuff like this, where both sides have agreed on it (10 years apart), it still becomes a politically divided issue. Sheesh.
I’m waiting for RFK to start trying to freak everyone out over the dangers of chlorinated water. Can’t wait for that ‘debate’.
As I keep saying on X and everywhere else, left and right have flipped generally. It will probably turn out to be a temporary phenomenon but it is real and is evident in many areas of public policy.
there’s a dynamic where the left overvalues moral purity and group identity, and then gets reflexively pushed into doing the opposite of anything the right is doing
This is the NYT article which helpfully explains to its readers that “Technically, not all of the “hateful eight” oils – which also include cottonseed, soybean, safflower, grapeseed and rice bran oils are made from seeds. Soybean oil, for example, is made from a bean.”
The author supposedly has a PhD in nutrition from the University of California.
The New York Times corrected that article on November 12 to note that a bean is a seed, so soybean oil is also a seed oil.
It doesn’t really matter either way unless you eat lots of fried food.
That’s not really true. It’s in most processed foods including foods where fat is an ingredient which originally would have been an animal fat. So any pastry, baked good, cake, biscuits unless premium and sold as “all butter” will contain soybean oil or more usually in Europe rapeseed oil. Mayonnaise and salad dressings, most processed food eg ready meals, all those sauces ready made to cook with like pasta sauces, cheap pesto, Pataks etc curry pastes, even things like stock cubes, unless you search assiduously for high quality ones that only contain chicken or beef fat. Then it’s in the animal feed so modern pork fat and chicken fat contains more omega6 than 50+ years ago and on and on.
Yawn, Who care? Another luxury belief. We are so pampered and well taken care of, this is all we think about?
If big food is pro seed oils, I’m marching in the other direction – and without statins.
Wise idea. Big food has form for foisting on us uninformed consumers other stuff that does us harm. Think High Fructose Corn Syrup, another favourite of theirs which arguably is the factor most responsible for the current obesity epidemic.
High-fructose corn syrup is most responsible for the current obesity epidemic? I don’t see how it could be. It’s a drop-in substitute for sucrose, or table sugar. Chemically there’s no real difference, as both are just about half fructose and half glucose.
“Big Food” prefers high-fructose corn syrup because the government has made it cheaper and it has a longer shelf life. The precise percentages of fructose and glucose can be specified too. But high-fructose corn syrup is no more responsible for obesity than table sugar.
Coincidentally we are just in the process of increasing our tallow usage, partly due to taste, partly health hopes but also because we have beef fat to spare. But for those who don’t see https://jesspryles.com/how-to-render-fat/
Anyone who’s read Lewis & Lewis’s interesting—as well as relatively short—book, The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America, won’t be surprised. In fact, according to the Lewis brothers, most issues—given enough time—swing, switch, from Left to Right, from Right to Left.
I’m afraid that if and when we ever finish untangling this knot of personal connections, financial incentives, and mutually beneficial arrangements between corporations, academia, and government we’re going to reach the disturbing conclusion that our perception of what was ‘true’ and ‘scientific’ for most of the period from the 1960’s through the present was not decided by science or reason but by who was investing how much money into which particular research topic. I’ve always believed that the things we think are ‘true’ and ‘facts’ are in fact constructs of ideas whose origin is the same as the most ludicrous fantasies ever concocted, that is the human mind and human reason. We flatter ourselves with notions progress and base our superiority on the supposed ‘objectivity’ of science and scientists. We have effectively elevated scientists to the role of distributors of ‘truth’ and ‘wisdom’ in our society, a place once occupied by priests, oracles, and prophets, but are they truly worthy of such a weighty responsibility. Is it wise to assign any one group of people such unchecked power?
Being raised within a western civilization that reveres scientific understanding and achievement, we tend to assume our beacons of truth are better, truer, and wiser than those of past ages, but how much of that is our own prejudice, our own perspective? We accept the world we were born into and seldom question such basic assumptions, but we should. We should ask whether our scientists are really more objective or more worthy of our trust than the priests of our ancestors, or might they simply be people with similar ideas, values, skills, personalities, and experiences that arrive at similar conclusions for similar reasons. Even more importantly, might ‘scientists’ prove just as susceptible to corruption by money and power as the priests, imams, and popes were? Might they dismiss, out of the best of intentions, any information or person who tends to question their objectivity or their conclusions? Might their corruptions and failings lead to consequences just as egregious as the Inquisition or the Crusades? I don’t presume to answer such questions. I doubt anyone can, but we at least ought to have enough humility to ask them. There should be no forbidden questions, no topics that are considered untouchable. RFK may or may not be right about seed oils, but surely, by forcing people to ask and consider the question, we will either reaffirm our old views or form new ones. We must never cease to ask questions of our leaders, of our thinkers, and of ourselves. The older I get, the more convinced I become that the questions are far more important than the answers.