Seed Oils

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Dude, it took me so long to figure out that record days are... Your workday is the record. You're like one of those influencers who's like, do you know how hard it is to be an influencer? Look, you don't know how hard my job is. I am gonna show you my morning routine featuring Sarah Togo of Water. I do crunches while I return business texts on my Apple Watch. Dude, are you familiar with the weird tech talks where they debunk the morning routines? No, what? Though they'll have titles on the screen, they'll be like, 537 waking up, and then people will like, stitch in, and they'll be like, actually, in Dallas at 530, the sun is not in that position. It's actually more like 730. Dude, you and I have talked about. I think we have a shared value around not letting the show just become a dunk fast, right? But like, man, if we didn't, I would do such a fucking episode on those goddamn morning. Just like, what's on TikTok this week? It sucks on TikTok today. I would do that so there's so many people on TikTok who suck. All right, tag it, tag it. Tag it. What do you have? What are you gonna rhyme with seed oils? I was gonna come up with the, I don't know what, weed boils. I don't know. Ah! Ah! Ah! If you want me to sit as silence and let you work out. You have to squeeze oils. Creeze soy oil starts singing a Creed song. Uh, hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase, the podcast where they tried to bury us, but they didn't know we were seed oils. That's terrible. What's that even from? You tried to bury us and then we grow and then what? We're here, we're seeds, get used to it. Is this from your political organizing days? I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm Michael Hump. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content. My, Star Call. Aubrey, what are we talking about today? We're talking about seed oils. You're talking to me about seed oils and I'm so excited because you and I have been making the show for long enough and have been talking about far right wellness grifters long enough. That seed oil has just come up. It's something that like Tucker Carlson has touched on. Pete Evans has talked about. It's popped up a bunch of times, but I've never done like the in-depth fact check. I was gonna say we have never done such an Avengers and Game Ass episode as this. Well, so this is the thing I'm fascinated about is like, what is the origin story of the seed oil stuff and like who started it and why did so many people pick it up? I have noticed when I've told people like, I'm researching an episode about seed oils. Three quarters of my friends are like, oh, thank fucking God, like what is this garbage? But then like one quarter of my friends are like, what do you mean seed oils? Just for like the people who are like blessedly offline, we should give like a little overview of this panic. For the people who don't know who Kendra who fell in love with her psychiatrist is. Fuck you for knowing that I would know that. He loved, I love the new Kendra. Oh God. So these, if you go sort of on like, manosphere, TikTok and substack, et cetera, I pulled a couple like random headlines that are going around. One of them is how industrial seed oils are making us sick. Eight toxic seed oils is vegetable oil bad for you. The science behind the worst food in human history. There's a documentary called Fed a Lie, the truth about seed oils. There's this is how Canada convinced you to eat engine lubricant. I love the weekend plan Canada. Wow. So I am sending you a tweet from this one of the first Avengers Endgame appearances. You have sent me a tweet. Fuck you first of all. Thank you. RFK Jr. is the poster of this tweet. The tweet reads, fast food is a part of American culture, but that doesn't mean it has to be unhealthy and that we can't make better choices. Did you know that McDonald's used to use beef talo to make their fries from 1940 until phasing it out in favor of seed oils in 1990? This switch was made because saturated animal fats were thought to be unhealthy, but we have since discovered that seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic. Driving causes. Interestingly enough, this began to drastically rise around the same time fast food restaurants switched from beef talo to seed oils in their friars. Great correlation. That's how you know it's causal, because the two lines went up at the same time. People who enjoy a burger with fries on a night out aren't to blame, and Americans should have every rate to eat out at a restaurant without being unknowingly poisoned by heavily subsidized seed oils. Weat. It's time to make frying oil talo again. It's so bad. It's very sweaty. Yeah. If anyone knows sweaty, I know sweaty. We know sweaty, little slogan. We know a pun that doesn't work. It's an approaching maintenance phase. It's at the prosing tagline levels. Oh, bad. I hate it here, this sucks. I remember the beef talo, shit. I remember a bunch of people in the 90s being like, the fries used to be good. This whole kind of craze is like becoming slowly more mainstream. So earlier this year, steak and shake announced that they're not going to have any seed oils on their menu. They're saying to beef talo. I don't even know what this, I don't think we have this in Seattle. So like, I've never even heard of this. Wake me up when it's burger belly. You know what I'm saying? There's also something called the seed oil scout app that like lists restaurants that use seed oils. And there's like a really funny article about this whole trend where people in New York started seeing signs like on lamp posts that said carbon puts seed oils in their spicy rigatoni in all cats. I heard about this. I heard about this. This is like, oh, got him. A friend from New York texted me and was like, why am I seeing these? What the fuck is this? The last thing I want to send you is maybe the most profound example of a stop the clock is right twice a day that we've ever had on this show. OK, you're going to love this. This is a tweet from Andrew Tate. Friend of the show, Andrew Tate. The tweet opens in all caps. Seed oil, seed oils. OMG, seed oils. OMG, fucking OMG, seed oils. Fuck, fuck, OMG, fuck. I can tell you losers have never had real enemies. You're afraid of sunflowers. It's good. I'm sorry, but it's a good tweet. You've never had enemies. You're afraid of sunflowers. You won't shut up about it. Such uninteresting lives. Total losers. So there's a giant JPEG in my head of that thing from the onion of heartbreaking. The worst person you know just made a really great point. This is a very good point and a very terrible person. You know this from knowing me for five plus years. I have a little sound board in my brain and one of the sounds that gets played very often is the Christian bail on set meltdown. Oh, yeah. Oh, good. Good for you. You have done that on the show numerous times. And also, it's really funny to think about a grown man at the top of his field going, dood dood. Yeah. Yeah, like a teaster. I think there's something really funny about this like clear and present danger to society that is Andrew take going, you're afraid of sunflowers. I know. You have no enemies. It's so good. It's unfortunatly. It's so funny. It's good. OK. So OK, we're going to go through the history of this panic. I spent so fucking long, obri-in weird corners of the internet to figure out just like where this comes from. This is my main question. I'm so curious. But first, we have to talk about what are seed oils. But first, here's 10 more nightmare tweets for you. I'm just going to, we're going to have for two more hours. And then I'll tell you the interesting part of this episode. Next up, Dr. Phil. Aubrey, can you name all hateful eight of the seed oils? Oh, I can't. This is what they call them. I mean, it's got to be like canola slash rape seed oil, right? Canola. I recently learned stands for like Canadian something oil. Yeah, depending on the source, it's either a beshortening of Canada oil low acid or a portmanteau of Canada oil, which should be canoial. But yes, it's a version of, it's a specific breed of rape, which is the name of the crop, like rapeseed. Yeah. The name of the crop is rape. It has a Latin root that is actually different from like the crime. The crime is from rapere, which means to steal or to snatch to take rape seed is based on rape hum, which is Latin for turn up. Oh, convergent evolution. They both just evolved into rape over time. And so if you read like back when I did human rights stuff, we did a couple projects with agricultural companies. And so I read like trade publications. And they'll just talk about like, oh, yeah, like it's been a good year for winter rape. Oh, really optimistic about central Asian rape this year. Like it's just the name of the crop. So it makes sense, obviously, why people in the field were like, oh, man, we really got to get another fucking name for it. Yeah, we've got a branding issue on our. Yeah. So people in Canada came up with a, they bred the crop for specific characteristics. And then people were like, oh, thank God, we have another thing that we can call this. So that's what canoal oil is. So, okay. So rape seed oil, soybean oil is going to be in there. That's the most commonly consumed seed oil in America. But oftentimes it's not actually called soybean oil. It's just generic vegetable oil that you find at the store. Cotton seed oil? That's three. That's as far as I get. What else is in there? There's also corn oil. Oh, geez, of course. Grape seed oil, which is not the same as rape seed oil. Sunflower oil, safflower oil, rice bran oil, and peanut oil. Fascinating that peanut oil counts as a seed oil. I know, but also soybean oil seems like another one where I'm like, huh, and also avocados have seeds, but avocado oil is not a seed oil because it comes from like the flesh. Sure, olive oil, similar possible thing going on there. The scientific community does not actually say seed oils. Like seed oils is a term that doesn't really emerge into like 2015. In the academic literature, they say polyunsaturated fatty acids or poofas. No. I didn't want to say poofa all of a sudden because that's what they call gay people in Britain. And I didn't want to confuse our UK listeners. Well, it's also so close to poopa. It's very close to poopa. I know. I mean, if we speak and say poopa like 15 times, if we say poofa the whole episode. Great. I'm just going to say seed oils, even though like academically, they don't really like say that in the literature. So obviously, like we're not going to get too deep into this, but like seed oils are like one of the first forms of food processing. Like you squeeze an olive and like oil comes out. This is like a thing that you can use in cooking. So this is something that has been in food for like thousands of years. The US consumption of seed oils is very low until basically the 50s and 60s. As part of the panic around saturated fats, we talked about this in our snack wells episode. There was this diet, hert hypothesis that was like, okay, red meat and butter and lard are really bad for you. So we need everybody to switch to unsaturated fat. This was like the explanation for things like heart disease and strokes. Right. And in 1961, the American Heart Association released recommendations, basically telling people like, hey, stop eating butter, red meat, anything to saturate a fat in it and switch to seed oils. Although, again, they weren't calling seed oils. And so around then like butter consumption, large consumption all started plummeting like really noticeably if you look at the graphs and you have a huge increase in first in shortening, which is like things like crisco. But eventually that sort of gives way to more vegetable oils because vegetable oils are much cheaper and much easier to process. In 1985, canola oil is introduced. It really is remarkable how quickly consumption of seed oils increased. Starting in 1960, it's just like a vertical line. Like we all started eating way more seed oils. So as this is happening, you basically have the first inklings of the seed oil panic just in like the academic literature where people notice this is like a really big trend. It's like, huh, Americans are eating like way more unsaturated fats. And like, sure. All of this is happening like this, this interest in fatty acids basically is happening at the same time that just like the field of nutrition is developing. What you have between like 1980 and roughly 2010 is a ton of studies just doing like super basic science on like, how do fatty acid molecules affect the body? How does this affect like platelet aggregation? And like, is this or is this not a vasodilator? Super technical stuff. I'm gonna read you just like a brief excerpt of one of these articles. This is from a 1976 article. It says, seed oil, seed oil, seed oil, seed oil, seed oil. You have no real enemies. Cool. Cool. So this is from 1976. It says spiral strips of rabbit thoracic aorta were super fused with crib's CG solution at 37 degrees centigrade containing a mixture of antagonist and endomethism. These indicate that contractile response produced by testing 50 micrograms of the incubation mixture of sheep seminal vesicle microzomes in a two containing 50 micrograms of phosphate. The contractile response of super fused rabbit thoracic aorta strips increased in a parallel linear fashion with increasing concentration of the endoparoxides PG1, 2, and 3. This is gibberish to us, right? Like this is most sort of lay people would look at this and be like, what the hell's going on? But this is essentially the scientific field just like exploring what does this mean? Like how do fatty acids affect the body? And alongside all this basic research, people also start going back through old datasets and being like, well, did people who ate more vegetable oil get sicker or less vegetable oil, less sick, et cetera? They start doing new studies of like, let's ask people how much poofa they're eating and like how they feel. There's basically just like a huge amount of just like stuff being produced. Do you haven't been saying poofas? I know what I never thought that was. I was not ready for that. I didn't do like one every 20 minutes. Keep me awake for you. Keep me awake for you. The reason I'm talking about this and the reason I wanted to read that like extremely boring excerpt is because we've seen this so many times where people do a lot of very good faith science and it's kind of messy and it's very technical. And there's just a huge body of literature that if you're a lay person or especially like a bad faith grifter, it's very easy to dip into this literature and pick something out and be like, oh, this means it's poison. I've been telling you that I have been researching like sort of a maha adjacent person. And when people try to like fact check her work, her response is very often. Like there's at least one study that corroborates everything I'm saying here and I'm like, that's not actually enough, my God. Well, that's the thing. I mean, what you start finding is you're starting in the early 2000s, this like seed oils are poisonous for you thing. You start seeing this pop up among like left wing anti-vaxxers. Have you ever heard of the Weston A. Price foundation? Michael, I have been pulling together a research list on Weston A. Price to see if we need to do a full episode. We might need to do a full episode. Yeah, I'm sending you an excerpt from the Weston A. Price foundation in 2002 in an article called The Great Khan, Ola. Wonderful. It doesn't work but you know, I see where they were going with this. It says quote, studies carried out at the health research and toxicology research divisions in Ottawa, Canada, discovered that rats bred to have high blood pressure and pronus to stroke had shortened lifespans when fed canola oil as the souls are so fat. They're just gonna bookmark and say, in that sentence alone, there are bigger problems than canola oil. The results of a later study suggested that the culprit was the sterile compounds in the oil, which quote, make the cell membrane more rigid and contribute to the shortened lifespan of the animals. So here you see there's a sort of weird cherry picking thing. Oh, a study on rats, they're prone to stroke. It's shortened their life and it does that by making the cell membrane more rigid. This is again very technical. It's not really giving you a body of work, like were there other rats studies that were done? It doesn't really tell you that, right? They're pulling out one study. I have a question about this sort of in situ. Are they using links or footnotes or anything or are they just sort of paraphrasing? Again, they do use footnotes. And like if you scroll all the way down to this thing, it's like meticulously footnoted and I did actually go to this study and like they're correct. In this rat study, the rats that were fed canola oil had shorter lifespans. Like they're not lying about anything. Totally. The reason that I ask is that we've talked about two different sort of approaches to use of research by grifters. One is the doctor Oz approach where he describes a study you have to go try and find it based on the description and like nothing matching that description exists, right? So I didn't know if we were dealing with that or if we were dealing with the Dave Asprey type where someone is like footnoting you to death, sort of counting on you not checking on the footnotes and also counting on you not checking on like what is the broader scientific consensus here? Exactly. What you have to do here is you don't just have to double check the citation. You have to basically do a completely new search for like meta analyses of canola oils effects on rats. And then even then it's like, well, it's rat studies. So it's not totally clear how to interpret that. So this is the conclusion of this Western A price blog post. Canola oil is definitely not healthy for the cardiovascular system. Like rapeseed oil, it's predecessor canola oil is associated with fibrotic lesions of the heart. It also causes vitamin E deficiency, undesirable changes in the blood platelets and shortened lifespan in stroke prone rats. Dude. I just like, I love the idea of some like reaching for the salad dressing and be like, no, it shortens the lifespan of stroke prone rats. It also sounds a little bit like they're just dunking on rats. The rats didn't know about beeftallow. They're not even, they don't even have a morning routine. They're not even doing crunches or reading Bible verses. Even by the standards of like left wing anti-vaxxers, this is pretty fringe. The first sort of, I guess vaguely credible mention of it that I could find is in 2008 in a book called Deep Nutrition, why your genes need traditional food by someone named Catherine Shanahan, who is a trained geneticist. I found like references to this in like later, like, such tack posts and stuff. I was like, what is deep nutrition? What is this? It appears to be self published. It's later like published published in like 2017. I get the book, I do a control F for seed oils. And this is the first mention of it. I'm just gonna send you the full paragraph. It does boil down to economics. Autism is in my estimation, just another complication of the industrial diet. Together with obesity, diabetes, sleep apnea, hypertension, Alzheimer's and cancer. All these stem from the decision to ignore nutritional practices that fortified our ancestors with genetic wealth. She has this whole weird thing about how like your diet shows up in the structure of your face. She has a chapter called The Sibling Strategy where she looks at, you know, Matt Dillon, the actor, and then he has a brother named Kevin Dillon and she shows like both of their faces and she's like, look how ugly his brother is. And look how much he has. Matt Dillon is like, that's because he's the older sibling and like older siblings get better nutrition. This is as a younger sibling. This is older sibling propaganda. Isn't it? I mean, I don't think that's fucking true. But it's like, the literal thesis of the book is like beautiful people like eight better. And like the way that you eat is expressed through like your physical beauty. Dude, this is, I guarantee you, this is gonna be the one episode that my brother listens to of our show like ever. And it's like that part sounded true. So the main thing that I wanna convey here is that like, Seedwell is kind of like a crank thing now. Like it mostly goes around like the crank rate. But like this has kind of always been a crank thing. I then found a couple of like little mentions of it in like slightly more mainstream sources. There's a 2015 Harper's Bazaar article called Why You Should Try The Polly Unsaturated Fat Free Diet by a guy named Steven McCarrie who's like, kind of a woo-woo, or a woo-woo, kind of life coach kind of guy. I really like it when you talk through your teeth, fellas. It's just like, I don't want to say without being totally knowing it. I hate you. But like, it's just like not a credible article. I'll send you the sort of nut graph of that. What if there was a substance that you were consuming regularly that was severely hampering your efforts to get healthy? What if this substance was linked to accelerated aging and a variety of common health problems? What if this substance was used in numerous quote unquote health foods and in numerous restaurants? What if you were taking supplements that contained high amounts of a harmful substance that you were told was healthy? Well, this is happening and you are most likely unaware of it. The most damaging thing you can put in your body is not sugar and it's not gluten. It's polyunsaturated fats. When you talk about supplements here, you talk about like fish oil supplements. So he's kind of merging together omega-3s and omega-6s, which we'll get into later. And then also he has this like accelerated aging. None of the literature was about that. Even like the technical literature was not about that. But it's like, you can see this stuff kind of bouncing around the crankosphere and then everyone else just like doing improv on it. They're like, what if it also affects your aging? Yes, and. Exactly, yes, exactly. All simers. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So in an effort to try to understand like where this came from and sort of how it was bouncing around the internet, I went on Twitter. The last good thing about Twitter is like, it has a really good advanced search function. So I looked for every tweet with the phrase seed oils from 2006 to 2020. It's actually kind of remarkable how little there is. There really isn't very much from before 2019. The authors of like the Harper's Bizarre article, there's also a random four of this article. That author is like tweeting about it. But like no one is really talking about seed oils. But then starting in 2018, you start seeing it bubble up as a kind of a B plot to the carnivore diet. Joe Rogan has the Jordan Peterson carnivore special thing. Of course we're at Rogan. That is July 2018. And afterwards you start seeing like random like carnivore diet accounts talking about it. So there is someone named woke carnivore honoring on Twitter, not particularly woke. I was very disappointed. I was gonna say we're in full internet madlibs. He says cutting out sugar, grains and seed oils from your diet effectively cuts out all junk food in September of 2018. We have one of my favorite tweets. There's so many bangers in this episode, Agree, here's one of the bangers. So this is from someone named seizure salad. Wasn't there some chat on Twitter about being immune to sunburn while avoiding seed oils? I just realized I spent six hours in the sun with no sunscreen. And I'm not even the slightest bit red despite a long history of burning very easily. These people latch on to things as like good or bad. With no actually like biological basis for like what that is doing. So it's like you cut out seed oils and like you reduce your risk of heart attack by I don't know 10% or whatever. Fine, like if that's your belief, fine. But then it's like oh no seed oils are bad and they're poison. And they're not only poison if you eat them, but also if you stop eating them like everything about your life gets better. You also don't sunburn. I just realized I spent six hours in the sun with no sunscreen and I'm not even the slightest bit red. Let me tell you from the voice of experience, give it three more hours. Yeah. That's like those people that would be like why isn't the edible kicking in? And then like 90 minutes later, they'll just tweet like potatoes. Yeah. Okay, here's another one from 2018. There is a picture that has three like spoonfuls or pats of different sort of butters and butters substitutes. There's a reduced fat margarine. There is a full fat margarine and there is one labeled natural butter. They're all on sort of at different corners of a plate and the margarine and reduced fat margarine are both being left alone and the natural butter is being swarmed by ants. And the tweet says even ants have enough brains to avoid seed oils. If you are smarter than me, no, I just started reading this in my head and Jeff Foxworthy voice. If you are smarter than me, if you are smarter than me, I can't say no to fake seed oil based meats and hashtag Yes to Meet. Hashtag Yes to Meet is what I was like, I'm sending it to Aubrey. Oh, no. It's good. Hashtag Yes to Meet. You know that the next time I see you, I will have needle pointed onto like a throat. Hashtag Yes to Meet. To meet to curious. Yes. The number two that meet. Oh, God. Everybody agrees and like the Twitter data shows that this whole seed oil thing explodes in October of 2020 with an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast. Is this one of the ones where they're high on camera or they get eye-first and then get on camera? Aubrey, I listened. It was three hours and nine minutes long and I listened to the whole fun thing of. You listened to a full episode? Aubrey, they talk about bow hunting for like 25 minutes. I like this.ordinaris So this is a Joe Rogan episode that is an interview with Paul Saladino. So Paul Saladino had asthma and eczema growing up. At some point it appears to be in college, he discovers the paleo diet and it seems like the paleo diet really helps the eczema go away. But then when he's in his final year of medical school, it like comes roaring back. Even more, he gets like sepsis at one point. He has like, he's, it appears hospitalized, at least according to him. Apparently the eczema was so bad that he had to go on steroids. Oh wow. He gains weight during this period partly because of the steroids. So he's really insecure about that. And eventually he discovers the carnivore diet. He is on Joe Rogan to promote his book, The Carnivore Code. I'm going to send you an excerpt from the introduction where he talks about how he discovered the carnivore diet. I'll never forget the day I was listening to Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast while driving to the Washington coast to go surfing. At the end of the podcast, I heard Jordan talk about his meat-based diet. He related how it had helped his daughter, Michaela, overcome a lifetime of severe auto-immune disease and how it had helped him lose weight and resolve his own sleep apnea and similar autoimmune issues. Suddenly, I had a paradigm-shifting thought that changed the course of my life from that moment forward. What if my own autoimmune issues and so many of the inflammatory problems we see manifested as chronic disease today could be triggered by the plants we are eating? The plants. Great. It's definitely the plants fall. There's a couple of things that are very notable to me here. First of all, he's on Joe Rogan talking about the carnivore diet, but he's also inspired by Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is creating grifters and then having the grifters on. Thank you so much, Joe Rogan, for inspiring my grift. Again, if you look at the timeline, there's something very weird about this because the episode with Jordan Peterson where he promotes the carnivore diet is in July of 2018. Paul Saladino is promoting his book on Joe Rogan in October of 2020. So only a little over two years has gone by. Since he discovered the carnivore diet, you know about the schedule of book publishing, how long it takes to get a book published, everything else. This basically means that he started writing the book almost immediately after he got on the carnivore diet. Right. He heard that interview and he was like, people must know my story of this thing I'm about to try. Something that I've done for like a little while later says he was only on the carnivore diet for a year, a year and a half. So he was like, immediately fucking giving people advice. And then his road to like becoming an influencer and like how he gets from like medical school to being a guy with like, I think two million followers on Instagram, like he's very popular on these social media platforms. He gets kicked off of them at various points for like spreading medical misinformation. But he becomes a very popular influencer relatively quickly, but it's not totally clear like financially how he did this. He starts writing the book. He starts again, of course, he starts a supplement company. Step one monetize it. It's called heart and soil. Absolutely not. Three and a half out of five. Do you want to know who his business partner is, Aubrey? God Joe Rogan. The liver king. You really are getting the band back together. We really are. Oh my God. So he somehow like just finds this diet, goes on the diet, immediately starts like selling the diet to people. He also, this is another like getting the band back together thing here. I'm going to send you a clip of him. You can see this man. Sorry to this man. This is a video of him. I'm watching together. You sent me a video that's on Twitter. What happens when you click through to a video post on Twitter is that it automatically starts playing. Yeah. And I reached for the pause button and I was two seconds in, which means that I am now paused on a screen full of organ meat, untrimmed organ meat, and just the caption phrase is raw meat smoothie. You might puke. I got, I got sick to my stomach watching this the first time. I almost pukeed on our show before. Yeah. Yeah, that's true actually. Okay, ready? Yeah, can I stand? Let me show you guys how to make my morning raw meat smoothie. This is definitely going to trigger some people. Buckle up. All right. First thing, going to throw in some raw sheep's milk, 100% grass fed. Get all that cream in there. I'm going to throw in some organic glyphosate free honey. Got some blueberries, some frozen organic wild blueberries. I got some raw heart here. So I love heart, especially raw. Heart. Incredible source of coins. I'm Q10. I'm part of the electron transport chain in the mitochondria of every cell in your body. And I try and eat a little bit of heart every week. Sometimes I grill it. Sometimes I get a little crazy and I throw it into my smoothie raw. So colostrum, my favorite. I got whole package which has testicle liver and blood in it. It's really hard to find fresh stuff. That's his stuff. Of course, he's a lifesaver. I'll just empty those into the smoothie because that's the secret sauce for making this taste powder. Has to go powder. Blah. Blend it up. Blah. All right, you guys ready for the money shot? Look at this. No, no. No. Check it. How good is that? Let's go. Blueberries. How could you beat that in the morning? That is like, that'll get you going. So I don't like it. There are absolutely. There are 123 comments on this video that I am not logged in Twitter so I can't read them. But I guarantee you that there are carnivore diet purists being like, this isn't the carnivore diet. What are those blueberries doing in there? What is that honey doing in there? He has a video where he like soaked strawberries in baking soda for 15 minutes and he's like, that's how you get the pesticides out. Yeah, you soak them like beans for hummus. All of the comments are like, but then you rinse it with tap water. You're putting poison on them. Like, everyone is roasting and we're using fucking tap water. It's the fun. It's the fun. There's fluoride in those fucking berries. Like the trace elements from fucking tap water. Anyway, this is the real getting the band back together. In 2023, he did an aeroan collab to sell a fucking organ smoothie to people. So this is, I found an L.A. Times article about it. These are the ingredients. It says, it's a concoction of caffir, beef organs, raw honey, blueberries, bananas, quema fruit sweetener, coconut cream, sea salt, maple syrup, and so-called immunomilk. Oh, no. Oh, no. Which consists of freeze-dried cow's colostrum, which is its initial breast milk after giving birth. Which is false. It's actually womb juice. People have this in their blood. Sure, famously. Patreon bonus episode knows that it's actually womb juice. Only Michael Huff knows what colostrum really is. I want everyone to know I'm doubling down. Boy, immunomilk has a real mystery meat vibe to it. This smoothie costs $19. People are paying $19 to eat beef organs and all of this other shit. Honestly, given beef prices, $19 is... I don't know what anything should cost anymore. Could be more beef at aeroan. Are you aware of this wired headphones thing? I know people who believe this. Wait, do you really? I absolutely know people who will only take calls on, like, speaker or fret, like, and will not hold the phone up to their head. Do you mean your husband? Yes. That's the thing. My hand that you're doing. Yeah. Surprise. I'm heterosexual and married. You're lying. What aren't you lying about? Bluetooth and men. My husband knows the truth about 5G and chemtrails. Possibly he knows of anti-bluetooth guy. He's also anti-receipts. He has a thing where he says he should put on latex gloves before you touch a CVS receipt or whatever. He's printed on paper that has, like, made kind of, like, a sort of latex or rubber. Like, it's not, like, paper paper? Is there an argument for what happens if you do touch the receipt, aside from having touched something made out of plastic? It's just this idea that, like, everyone in society, every institution is constantly trying to poison you. Yeah. We're surrounded by, like, chemicals and, like, dangerous things. And, like, only you would, like, the secret knowledge. The idea is the world is full of dangers. You need to protect yourself. Don't trust other people and definitely don't trust institutions. Yeah. Tell you the truth, right? But trust me, a shirtless man in Whole Foods. It's very wake-up sheeple. So we are going to watch a clip of his appearance on the Jo Rogan experience. I know. I watched it at double speed. So this is going to be my first time watching it at normal speed. And the real driver here, I suspect, is the last one, Jamie 10.18.09. Yes, I take a look at the consumption of vegetable oil by Americans since 1910. And that is a staggering amount. You don't want to skateboard that route. That's Tony Hawk for the man. Yeah, that's Tony Hawk. That's Tony Hawk, really. Look at that, man. And you can see soybean is the main one, but canola sunflower cotton, see peanut and other. This is completely evolutionarily inconsistent. This is completely distinctness with our evolution. We would never have been grinding soybeans up into oil. We didn't have the ability to do this. And then you can get into all of the reasons this might be doing this. But, you know, as I kind of dug into this, it gets a little bit deep in the weeds, but at a molecular level, these polyunsaturative fats, they act differently in our body. And we don't fully have this figured out. But at the level of our mitochondria, it does look like these polyunsaturative fats. This linoleic acid rich vegetable oil is signaling things differently. Jesus. I think it's really, there's a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that linoleic acid is driving a dipisite hypertrophy, meaning fat cells are getting bigger. Fat cells can do two things. They can get bigger or they can divide. When fat cells get big and they don't divide, they eventually start leaking out inflammatory mediators, leaking out free fatty acids. You start to see this interesting set of data that points to the fact that maybe all these excess linoleic acid is driving our fat cells to get really big, but isn't allowing them to divide the way they're supposed to. His, like, stock intrate is throwing a bunch of, like, large vocabulary words at this. Yes, sciencey words. Sciencey words. And at this time, he's tweeting under the handle Carnivore MD. He does have a medical degree, but in psychiatry, he didn't study nutrition. What he does is he throws all these big words at you. These things that make it seem like, aha, I'm like this big expert, but like, he doesn't actually have any training in this. Most of the stuff that he says is not very true. He's trying to obfuscate his lack of knowledge with big words, rather than just being like, hey, there's a big word. Let me explain it to you. We were talking earlier about, like, clues to what he's doing and, like, who his audience might be. We're finding out here that his audience is specifically Joe Rogan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just, like, big words, which, and, like, I brought a visual aid in Joe Rogan's, like, whoa! Yeah. The other sort of very funny epilogue to this episode is that Paul Saladino, it's not even clear that he was on the Carnivore diet when he went on Joe Rogan. Oh my God. He says he was only on it for a year, a year and a half. In 2022, he makes a video of, like, why I'm not on the Carnivore diet anymore. And he says that when he was on the Carnivore diet, he says he experienced lower testosterone, sleep disturbances, heart palpitations, and muscle cramps. He also talks about how, you know, that thing right before you fall asleep, where you kind of jerk? Yeah, a hypnic jerk. He says, like, his, his jerks got way worse when he was on the Carnivore diet. So bad that he had to stop the Carnivore diet. He's, like, something is wrong with me. So you went on Joe Rogan for three hours. You didn't talk about one downside of the Carnivore diet. You're selling a book called the fucking Carnivore code. Later on, you're like, oh, yeah, I like felt like shit when I was on the Carnivore diet. Oh, you didn't, you didn't want to tell us that? Like, you didn't think, oh, there's pros and cons to this diet. What works for me might not work for you. He also, the minute, just like these fucking guys always do, the minute he goes off the Carnivore diet, he then gives an interview to some like other podcaster, where he's like, oh, yeah, you know, being in ketosis, like, oh, it didn't work for me. And I think it's not good for other people either. So he, like, immediately starts like giving advice. And he's like, he's like, well, you know, the Carnivore diet, a lot of that, you know, ketosis research. That's based on animals and like, you really just can't extrapolate from animal studies. But as like, you were talking about mouse studies on fucking Joe Rogan. This like half of what you talked about was like a fat cells and fucking rats. Yeah, it just again, like, this is part of the challenge with the like, I experimented on myself and of one kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that as you find that different practices work for you in different life phases or when you're dealing with different health conditions or when you're prioritizing different things, you are then sort of laundering your personal experience as some form of scientific knowledge that has been tested. That's all he's doing. I think it contributes to some of the weird merciness that we have now about like people not really being able to read a scientific study without thinking that there ought to be a individual instruction at the end of it. And that kind of thing. So basically right after the Joe Rogan, I got I was about to say experience right after the Joe Rogan episode. This does explode. Like you can see it in the Twitter data. It starts showing up on places like Bright Bar and other right wing media sites. Like the truth behind seed oil. Friend of the no one. Bright Bar. So over the next couple of years, the spreads around into various groups. I just want to talk about a couple of the categories of people that get obsessed with seed oil. Oh man, can I make some guesses? If you know what it's going to be, it's like different flavors. It's like a little neopolitan of like the worst people in America. It's just it's a list of moon juice locations. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be like Jim bros and a bunch of these fucking jokers are going to get caught selling beef tallow as an alternative. So I'm sending you a tweet. This is the first group that starts latching onto this. This is someone named Andrew Torba whose username is at based Torba. That's the first thing I'll tell you. That's how I know I don't know this guy because if I had never seen that before, I would have really made a meal on it. I hate these people but I kind of love these people. Like such parodies of them. Who are you afraid of sunflowers? Based Hobbs. The profile picture is just you with a katana sword. Mine is at ripped podcaster. Wait, did I tell you? I got a random text from like this guy I met on the internet who I haven't seen in like six months. Randomly text me at like nine in the morning. He's like, I don't know if I should be telling you this but someone took your grinder photos and uploaded them to Tumblr. It was on a Tumblr called masculine men. Oh no. Yes. So that's why my window is at Hobbs masculine. This is going to go right to his head. I think it's as long as you don't see me moving or hear me speaking. I'm so masculine. As long as you don't know me in any capacity. I'm like so masculine. Tuna next week when I show up on lady like women. You know every time we record I text you afterwards. I'm like, was I masculine enough on the show? Totally. Totally. And you also text me. I'm so glad you crossed your legs at the ankle. It's also funny to have that on the same day. I checked our iTunes reviews for books good kill. And one of them was just, why is the woman talking so much? Yeah. The woman named Michael is talking a lot. All right. Read this extremely problematic tweet. Sorry from based tour. Yeah. Read the base tour between. The most consequential policy initiative of the last century. No longer will our people be sick and chronically ill. No longer will they be jacked up on a cocktail of big pharma drugs for these diseases. People will be healthy and fit again. This will lead to family creation. This will lead to far more right wing voters. Half of the problem with liberalism is our miserable drug disease people. This single move solves it all. This one weird trick they don't want you to know. About raising birth rates by eating less salad dressing. One might call it based. What might call this take based? So this is the founder of GAB, which is like the mega, mega right wing website. One of his other tweets from earlier in his career is, a few societies have been sicker than the current year west. And a large part of that sickness is due to Jewish media and technology being used to psychologically and spiritually castrate its citizens. So these are not people that are doing like dog whistles. These are people that are just like whistling. Like walking down the street whistling. Do the space lasers take part? Yeah, exactly. In the castration. So basically this is like one of the transmitters of like seed oil misinformation starting after the Jorogan episode. It's like straight forward for our right people. In 2021 and 2022, this also becomes a big thing among crypto people. Fucking of course. I'm sending you again, kind of a good tweet from a guy that runs like a Bitcoin exchange or something. Almost every one of these false quote unquote milks out potato P whatever contains inflammatory seed oils typically sunflower or canola. Is fleeting smugness really worth developing metabolic syndrome? Fuck off. I sent this to every vegetarian I know is fleeting smugness. It's a fucking metabolic syndrome. Speaking of being a terrible person, read his own reply to this. Wow. The way these guys talk is so weird. Oh no. They have this weird like Chromic McCarthy way of doing like sick burns all the seed oil guzzlers seething in my mentions right now. Stay mad, metabolically impaired and torpen. Thank you, I will. You can tell he had like this this sores open and like the other window. If you think I'm not making myself a bumper sticker that says mad, metabolically impaired and torpened. And torpen? You got another thing coming. The other group I want to talk about is I read this term in one of the academic articles that I saw and I cannot stop thinking about it. They called these people granola Nazis. You sort of know what they mean, right? The people who are they're far right, but it's it's the sort of almost left wing messaging about like we need to go back to the land. We need to have a less corporately dominated public sphere. Right. But it's also fundamentally very right wing. Yeah, this is liver king in all of his like quote unquote ancestral way of living stuff. Exactly. Very tradwife adjacent this whole seed oil thing. It's kind of perfect right because it's like if this ingredient that we're all eating a ton of that was invented in 1986. Right. Like basically in a lab like it was bread. It's now like a refined processed ingredient. It fits really perfectly into this like modernity is killing us kind of narrative. So like granola Nazis really picked this up. And one of the main granola Nazis that gets like super obsessed with this and just like tweets that seed oil is constantly is a Twitter account called carnivore are really us. I find this person very interesting as a kind of avatar of like the granola Nazi ideology. And so I spent a long time like scrolling through this guy's feed. You can find all kinds of other weird sort of sub B plot conspiracy theories. And I just want to go over them a little bit partly because they're very funny and partly because like I think there's like this tendency to sort of launder these people are to think like all they want is for like us to have better diets or all they want is for like Americans to be healthier. But this seed oil thing is kind of the tip of the iceberg of a bunch of just bizarre to ranged other narratives that are just not backed up by science and are oftentimes very openly reactionary. I will say just one thing I need to close this tab. But there is a response the next response down from all the seed oil guzzlers is someone responding and their response is just how has no one made a Bitcoin milk yet. Aubrey we're done we can stop recording that's it. We've reached the granola that's a Bitcoin milk sure why not someone probably fucking has. We don't have really really delighted music and understand why I was a person that tab without closing that loop first. So another thing the granola Nazis are really into is ball sunning sure this is from a carnivore are really us. Considering throwing a dating festival for carnivore singles steak eating galas good music cow milking bread baking fighting workouts ball sunning. This is the vision of the granola Nazis. This is what we should all be doing on weekends I love fighting. Don't forget we're also going to be fighting. He also has one that says wearing sunglasses in the sun makes you burn your body thinks you're indoors and doesn't produce your natural sunscreen. Melanon Michael you the light striking your eyes is one of the main signals for your skin to start producing melon. So I love there's no sunglasses truth as well as the sunscreen truth. He also responded to the Andrew Tate tweet for Andrew Tate was like you people have never had real enemies my new favorite tweet. Yeah, this might be your new new favorite tweet. This is also a very good response. I can't wait here is him responding to Andrew Tate. This is what seed oils do to your brain. The seed oils increase stress disrupt hormones and lower thyroid function. Despite having high T loads of it is converting into estrogen causing balding anger and this PMS like. I love it when the girls are fighting. You guys have a glass. God, since dudes accusing other sys dudes of PMS. It is so funny. And also the balding that like you have high T but it is turning into estrogen due to seed oils. I think about this is so funny. Because it's like little I keep thinking of the vine where that like a little like six year old kid is like you're messing with a future US Army soldier. Like dumb little losers like play acting as like as like the rock or something. This is not convincing to anybody but also it's very funny to watch and I encourage it. Estrogen causes balding anger and this PMS like. Every part you know women are always vlogging around bald and angry. I'm thinking women are getting testosterone all the time but they're eating too much seed oils and that's what turns it into estrogen. And that's all the reason we have women. Exactly because of seed oils. We started having women around the 50s 60s after the 8a recommendations. I was just getting to that part of the history. Yeah women caused the obesity epidemic famously. So that's kind of the way that the seed oils panic is bouncing around on the right. There's like various different like flavors of it on the right but then worryingly and inevitably. It also starts to bounce around the kind of more credible parts of either center right or just like center left. I am going to send you an excerpt from Chris Vantillicans book on ultra processed foods which we talked about in that episode. Oil for ultra processed food needs to be bland, plain and flavorless so that it can be used to make any edible product. So manufacturers refine the oil by heating using phosphoric acid to remove any gums and waxes. Neutralize it with caustic soda, bleach it with a bentonite clay and finally deodorize it using high pressure steam. This is the process used to make soybean oil, palm oil, canola oil and sunflower oil for oils that make up 90% of the global market. So in some ways he's doing the same thing that Paul Saladino is doing where he's using a lot of like big words. He's like phosphoric acid bentonite clay deodorize. He's making this description of like processing of seed oil as like lurid as possible. I think it's interesting that he focuses on like bleaching it and deodorizing it and not actually going like the purpose of those things is this right. Also, what's so interesting to me is like these people are obsessed with this idea that there's like trace elements in our food that are harming us. Which again might actually be true, like I'm actually open to that discussion as long as it's like evidence based. But the purpose of all of this process is to reduce the chances of that happening. Part of the reason they're doing this is to remove things like pesticides and like heavy metals. Things that we don't actually want in our food supply and it's sort of like you don't want these things right. You're always talking about like how many particles of mercury are in the vaccines or whatever. Okay, so you don't want these trace elements. What would you like us to do about that? If you just like squeeze a, I don't want to say rapeseed because it's so bad. If you just squeeze a cotton seed and you get oil out of it, you don't want to just like be using that immediately. And also it would go rancid on the shelf relatively quickly which also poses food safety issues. So like what do you actually want? Right. People say processing and he uses the term bleaching here and everybody always says like oh they're bleached. Which seems to imply that like they're adding bleach to the oils. But what they actually do, I mean for most of these processes, if you look into it, they're basically filtering it. So the bleaching process is you add charcoal to the oil and charcoal loves to absorb little things like why people put charcoal on their face. And like some people take like charcoal supplements. You add charcoal to oil and it absorbs a bunch of these like little tiny trace materials. And then you filter out the charcoal. That process is called bleaching but nobody is bleached like added bleach to the oil during the process. Right, right, it's not the stuff you have to put gloves on to use in your shower or whatever. And like you add phosphoric acid or oftentimes it's citric acid and then you like centrifuge it out so that those particles are basically separating out the components of the oil. But you're centrifuging it and then filtering it. So you're kind of putting things in and then taking them out to make sure that you're only left with the oil. Maybe phosphoric acid is really bad for you. Maybe there's trace elements in the vegetable oil. Again, this kind of requires actual science to show that these things are in the vegetable oils and they've been tested a million times. And like we just don't see large amounts in much of our life, much of culture, much of sort of the world. When there is new science, we greet that or new technology. We greet that as an advancement and an exciting evidence that we're like doing more of the right thing. And when it comes to food, we take that as like a harbinger of bad things. Right. And we take that as a frightening thing rather than going. Wow, it's really cool that science has figured out how to make this oil shelf stable for a real long time. Right. And so lots of people can use it and it's pretty inexpensive. People get sick from eating rancid oils. And it's like not actually proven to be bad for you. But if you describe it in this kind of way, then it will get people more to the point of being like, ooh, even before you get to presenting any evidence about it one way or the other. So the only kind of part of this like ultra processed food, sub narrative of seed oils that actually get me paused was there's two ways of getting oil out of seeds. One way is to just like press them. Right. This is like the cold, expel or pressed, whatever you see, this on labels. The other way to do it is with chemicals. So you can cut the seeds into little tiny flakes and add something called hexane to them. And hexane kind of like leeches out all of the oils. This is like super industrial. It's like it's cheaper than doing a press. It's more effective. So you get, I think it's like 80% of the yield out of them rather than like 60%. It's much more efficient and hexane is like straight forwardly toxic. So when people in these facilities are putting hexane on the crops, like they have to wear like hazmat suits. Like if you breathe in hexane, it's actually really bad for you. Again, this sounds terrible, right? It's like they're literally putting poison onto the seeds to extract the oil. And then like, yes, there are trace elements of hexane in vegetable oil. This is true. That is a true statement. I take it from you telling me about it. And also it is nuts to me like describing that in that way. We'll get a bunch of people freaked out about what they're eating, but won't get them freaked out about the safety of the workers who have to put on fucking hazmat suits. Right. The person paying the biggest price is the person doing the work to make that process happen. So when I first read about this in one of these like seed oil anti seed oil substacts or whatever, I was like, oh, this actually sounds pretty bad. But then I went to there's various government reports on this. There's various academic reports on this. The first thing to know about hexane is that it evaporates at very low temperature. So they actually add hexane to seeds, get the oil out, and then they heat it up so that all of the hexane evaporates. And they actually capture the hexane and then they use it for like the next batch. You can just like keep doing this over and over. Very little is actually left in the seeds. And there's been dozens of studies on the hexane levels in vegetable oil. The fact that they're putting poison on the seeds to get the oil out is not something that like academics are not concerned about. Or that like the FDA is not concerned about like this is like, oh, yeah, we should actually check like how much there is. So this is an excerpt from a government report that was produced on this. In studies of fully processed edible oil products carried out in the 1960s, it was determined that hexane residues were generally at levels less than 10 parts per million. Investigations using more precise modern analysis techniques in 1987 concluded that residual hexane residues for refined food products would be less than two parts per million. If the standard assumption of 80 grams of fat consumed per person per day is made, such residual levels would be the equivalent of no more than 2.29 micrograms per kilogram per day, which is a toxologically insignificant amount. The most important phrase there is toxologically insignificant. That's me too. I'm also toxologically insignificant. There's also numerous tests on humans to just measure the amount of hexane in people's blood. So as part of the NHANES study, starting in 2009, they started testing for hexane, like how much hexane can we find in these people's tissues, and the levels were below the point where they can even detect them. Wow. According to this government report, the biggest risk of hexane exposure is actually a car exhaust. So for whatever reason, hexane is also present in car gasoline. And so if you live in an urban area, you're also getting exposed at very low levels to hexane. So the amount that you're getting in vegetable oil just isn't significant, and also there's other sources of this in the world that we're also getting exposed to at trace amounts. And we're not finding it in humans when we test them. What they're doing is they're clearly seizing on anything to say that seed oils are poison. You can tell the motivated reasoning, right? They're like, how are they made? Oh, they put poison on them. Yes, there it is. But people have been looking at this for decades. We just don't find large risks to the US population. It's a rhetoric that's relying on hanging out in your amygdala and freaking you out and not ever making its way into your frontal lobe. And now that the seed oil thing has kind of been folded into the ultra processed food issue, you find articles about how bad seed oils are in like much more credible places. So this is from the Cleveland clinic talking about like the lack of nutrients in seed oils like all of the processing Rob's it of nutrients. So here's this. Some seed oils would be high in vitamin E and phenols if not for the refining process itself. But they're typically very processed to help with taste, color, and shelf life. Quote the processing of these oils strips the seeds of their nutrients and could potentially add harmful ingredients. The end result is oils with no real health benefits. The specific thing of like they're they're being denuded of their nutrients is something you always find like they used to have antioxidants when they were like in the seeds. But now they don't have antioxidants. The research for this made me super piled on vitamin E because you always hear like, oh, it's trips the vitamin E out of the vegetable oil and butter is so high in vitamin E. If you look up vitamin E deficiency vitamin E deficiency almost never happens in the United States. This is not something that you need to worry about. It's something that like premature babies often have a problem with absorbing fats. If you have Crohn's disease, you can have it if you have like problems with your liver or kidney function. Basically, if you have an underlying like pretty serious condition that affects your ability to absorb fat, then you need to worry about vitamin E. But dietary sources of vitamin E are just not something you need to worry about if you don't have a diagnosis of something like that. They're basically taking this thing that is essentially a marketing claim. Like, oh, look at all the vitamin E in this. And they're acting as if this is something you need to think about. Like you can go your whole life never thinking about your dietary sources of vitamin E. You just don't need to think about it. So the fact that something doesn't have vitamin E is just irrelevant information. It's kind of the same with the antioxidant thing. I mean, the antioxidants that are present in seed oils are present in like lots of stuff. I mean, even people who are eating at like the high end of seed oils, it's not that much of their consumption. It's like maybe a couple tablespoons a day. I mean, it is true that all of this processing that they do to oils does reduce the antioxidant count and like does reduce other nutrients. But they were never that high to begin with. You're not eating that much of them. And it just isn't really a meaningful contributor to your nutrient mix. There's been a similar sort of freak out over the last couple of years in like weight loss media spaces and particularly social media spaces about the idea of like cortisol face or cortisol belly or whatever. People just keep having to interview doctors going, you're talking about cushing syndrome. It's really rare and your body changes really drastically and really quickly. So like you know if you have it, it's not just is this the reason why you're fat or when you want to be? That's not the same thing as like a medical condition. And it just feels like, you know, especially in a media landscape that includes things like the like everly well home food intolerance tests and that kind of thing. That we are sort of constantly muddying the water between personal practices that make you feel a little better and like health conditions that are known and treatable. Everyone is reaching for this way of like legitimizing whatever their dietary stuff is or stuff is by reaching for like clinical language, which ends up further sort of blurring the line. So we're sort of moving toward better and better arguments against seed oils. Like we started with like seed oils are destroying our birth rates from like the super far right like that's just bananas. We then get to the stuff of like they're putting chemicals in it and like maybe it leaches out nutrient. That's like roughly true, but kind of like not meaningfully true in a way that anybody needs to worry about. I've heard the best argument against seed oils is the balance of omega sixes versus omega three's so I'm going to send you an excerpt from a guy named Mark Hyman. This is a sure who do you know him just much requested. We've gotten so many doctor Hyman I know requests this is one of those guys. I'm really like mds like social media mds. I'm so concerned about this. This is a guy who is one of the main sources of like seed oils misinformation starting relatively early. He actually started writing about in 2016. He's also I believe the founder of what he calls the pagan diet. What is that paleo and vegan? What does that mean if you're paleo and raw it's the paw diet? Let's keep going. Let's do this for the rest of that. We've been talking about which puns are too sweaty and which are not sweaty enough. And let's just let's really hone in. So here is Mark Hyman on seed oils. Did you know those who consume high levels of refined oils and low levels of omega three fats have higher rates of depression, suicide and homicide? People who eat seed oils have a higher rate of homicide as well. In prehistoric times our ancestors consumed omega six and omega three fatty acids in the healthy ratio one to one. Since the advent of refined vegetable oils however most of us are eating far more omega sixes than we should. The ratio can get up to 20 to one for people who eat a lot of processed foods. This claim also shows up in the maha report. It says seed oils contribute to an imbalanced omega six omega three ratio, a topic of ongoing research for its potential role in inflammation. This is a very common claim about seed oils that they have too many omega sixes and this ratio of omega sixes versus omega three is basically causing chronic inflammation is like what is making a six. The reason here is that foods as they are naturally produced already reflect a one to one ratio of omega sixes and omega three. So I don't know that that's true. This omega three omega six ratio thing as an argument against seed oils is also kind of funny because canola oil is pretty high in omega three. Canola oil is around 10% omega three all of oil is only one percent omega three. That's funny. I've seen debunkings of the seed oil thing that will be like well just because our paleolithic ancestors ate a certain way doesn't mean we have to which is true. However did our paleolithic ancestors eat a one to one ratio? Oh no Michael I didn't go galaxy brain enough we've been doing this show for so long and I shouldn't know. So this claim that our ancestors ate a one to one ratio of omega three is to omega sixes appears to have originate with like one lady. So there's a researcher named Artemis Simopolis who is a nutrition researcher she writes the omega diet in 1999. She's like early on the train of like omega three will fix us omega sixes are poison. But what I've noticed in her work I mean she's been publishing stuff about this for like 20 years. She often sites herself so she'll say like human beings evolved consuming a diet that contained equal omega three's and omega sixes and then it's like footnote 14 and you go to footnote 14 and it's like Simopolis 1999. First of all it's very sketchy to not just have a clear citation for something like that like that's an empirical claim when you finally follow back all of her citations. She doesn't really have any basis for saying that she eventually links to a couple of anthropological reports of current hunter gatherer societies where they do surveys of like caloric intake. But these surveys only include saturated versus unsaturated fats and omega three and omega sixes are both unsaturated fat. So they're not really looking at that ratio. Basically she is extrapolating from the amount of animal foods that these current hunter gatherer societies are eating to say well animal foods tend to be higher in omega three's. Therefore if they're eating a lot of animal foods then they're going to be getting more omega three's than present day humans. The problem with that however is like if you actually read the literature the main thing that sticks out to you is the diversity. So I mean there are like hunter gatherer societies that are eating like 70% of their calories from various you know meats and dairy kinds of products but there's also something that are eating like 10%. Sure. It's just really fast aisle to say like well our ancestors ate a one-to-one ratio. You know we were talking earlier about like we have these sort of filters around political misinformation and disinformation but less so we don't exercise those in the same way when it comes to like health and wellness stuff. When a political figure harkens back to some sort of like rhetoric of nostalgia and how things used to be better. I think a lot of folks have a little more muscle memory of going yeah what time period are you talking about and what are the things that were better and where they better for because usually that nostalgia when it's invoked by the right is for like Jim Crow era. Right right and I think there is a similar sort of set of rhetoric around like ancestral foods and eating like our ancestors and that sort of thing without ever really reckoning with like what was the life expectancy at that point my guys. As long as we're doing the San Sestral shit what were the rates of trick and no. The other claim that I want to talk about is this idea that your omega six versus omega three ratio being out of balance causes inflammation. This is something you see everywhere it's like the ratio is out of whack it used to be one-to-one now it's twenty-to-one and we have all these inflammation processes in our body this is what's making a sick. I found a super interesting article on this called the omega six omega three ratio a critical appraisal and possible successor by William S Harris. So in this review he basically notes that like among researchers this thing about the omega six omega three ratio that debate has been settled. This is a thing that happened in like the 90s and 2000s and like this ratio isn't really something that scientists refer to anymore so like we publicly are reenacting a debate that scientists had like 20 years ago and like most of us just weren't paying attention to. So he says the increased risk for disease supposedly associated with high omega three omega six ratio is classically attributed to the omega six being pro inflammatory and omega three is being anti-inflammatory. However this view which might have been reasonable in the 1970s is now far too simplistic and enjoys little to no direct support from studies in humans. When this person says it's too simplistic do they offer some more like here's what the complexity around it looks like. I'm welcome to the next hour of your life. Welcome to what we will be discussing. She's one big segue. This was like such a revelation to me and like so fun to read the literature on this because this whole field is kind of asking the question like what does it mean for something to be bad for you. Like here is all the time right you're like a brownie is bad for you but like metabolically chemically what what do we really mean by that. So throughout this entire period where they're figuring out the basic science of fatty acids they basically come up with a model by which omega sixes would cause inflammation so this was kind of the original theory of why they're bad for you. Omega sixes contain something called linoleic acid. When you eat it it is then converted into something called a racodonic acid inside of your body. A racodonic acid is associated with inflammation so that raises inflammation markers and then if you're operating under a state of chronic inflammation that does affect health outcomes later. So when you say omega sixes are bad for you but you're really talking about it's like a four stage process. And you're talking about contributing to but not being the sole cause of that set of processes. This is also kind of like one of the funny things about this because there are countries and they're like subnational regions where people eat way more seed oils than other places like for whatever reason. In Israel they have a huge consumption of seed oils and like they don't have like twice or three times or four times the amount of heart disease. So if we're talking about something that's like a toxic substance like the thing the far right people are saying it would just be really obvious. At the most we're talking about something that is contributing like a meaningful contributor but we're not talking about like if you stop eating seed oils you'll never have a heart attack like that. That just isn't really like on the table as an option essentially. Yeah totally and I think it's how a lot of like popular health information gets disseminated right exactly is like leaving people with that would not really ever saying it out. Yeah yeah but leaving people with the distinct impression that this is one of the only if not the biggest contributors to like heart health issues right. So basically we originally had this model that was like okay Omega sixes have little egg acid that converts to a racodonic acid and then a racodonic acid causes inflammation and inflammation causes heart problems. The problem is over the course of the last couple decades we've realized that every single step of that process is significantly more complicated. So the first thing is it's true that Omega sixes contain a lot of linoleic acid but it's not actually true that linoleic acid is converted to a racodonic acid when you eat linoleic acid only about 0.2% is converted into a racodonic acid which is allegedly like the sort of the quote unquote bad kind of acid right. So very little of it is being converted and also they've done studies where they like massively increase people's linoleic acid consumption and their a racodonic acid levels don't change at all. The other step of this is like the question of is a racodonic acid bad so they've also done studies where they just give people a racodonic acid. Again this is the kind of acid that is allegedly bad right. This is the kind of acid that causes inflammation in your body. They give people supplements directly supplementing a racodonic acid in their bodies and their inflammation markers don't change. Okay. This appears to be one of those things where it's essentially the animal models breaking down that we see it in mice and rabbits and I think there was some studies in chimps as well. But in humans we just don't see a relationship between these acids and inflammation. What actually happens is it increases some markers of inflammation and it reduces other markers of inflammation. This is really eroding my confidence in the media literacy skills of the audience of the founder of GAB. Like they're not looking at the cockroach review. They're not going straight to primary sources and reading for comprehension. The other kind of work that they were doing over the last couple decades was just like looking at do people with high levels of linoleic acid and a racodonic acid have worse outcomes and like they don't. There's a huge study in Europe where they're taking blood work from 68,000 people and then following them over time to see who has part attacks and strokes and various other things. And like there's no relationship between linoleic or a racodonic acid and outcomes. Okay. So I'm sending you an excerpt from a meta analysis. This is not the cockroach review but there is a cockroach review on seed oils and it doesn't find any effect. An analysis of 30 randomized controlled trials found that eating more linoleic acid was not linked to higher blood levels of inflammatory markers. In another analysis on data from nearly 70,000 people, higher blood levels of both linoleic and a racodonic acid were linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease. Great. So it's maybe making you healthier. So there's actually like some evidence that it's actually protective. So we're just careening toward a bunch of Joe Rogan listeners having worse heart health. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to like go overboard. Another thing to mention is that a lot of the cardiovascular disease risk stuff on seed oils that finds a benefit or finds no effect is based on these kind of large population studies that we're always complaining about on the show. Where they're just like, what do you eat and then people can't remember stuff? And then 20 years later you're like, how many people died of heart attacks? So I don't want to like all of a sudden say that those studies are good just because like I want to own Joe Rogan. I'm not going to like endorse these things, but I think what it what it shows is not necessarily seed oils are good for you. I'm not going to like make a claim like that. But what it does shows there's there's no affirmative evidence that seed oils are bad for you. Sure. The sort of the consensus is that it either doesn't do anything or it's slightly protective. Again, it just doesn't really something that you need to think about. Which I also just think about like as a person who's had an eating disorder and as a person who continues to have like pretty profound anxiety. I also just think about like the people who pick up this messaging the most and run with it the most are people who already have real high anxiety. And this is like a legitimating force for those folks. Or they already have a real disordered relationship with food. And this gives them some scientific cover to run further into that disordered relationship with food. Exactly. I also think about you know a friend of mine was redoing his kitchen. He's a carpenter. He called me and was like, what do you think about having two bowls in the sink versus one bowl in the sink? And I was like, what? I don't you know how some sinks are divided and there's like a separate area where the guy which is supposed to is and then a separate one where the drain is. And he was like, uh, friend of mine is a chef and said for food safety reasons. It's really helpful to have two bowls. And I was like, look, I'm sure your friend is right. But if I'm looking at what my food safety issues are, I got so many things to knock off the list before I even get down to the level of like worrying about how many apartments there are in my sink. And I think that there's something similar here, right? That is like we all kind of know that we got bigger fish to fry. You kind of know what you could work on with your own eating or exercise or whatever. And usually it's shit like you didn't get enough sleep or you didn't go grocery shopping or like it's like much bigger, more present issues than like what kind of oil am I cooking with when I cook my food? I don't like you're cooking food at home. You're buying and making your own food. You're already ahead of the game. Don't worry about it. And here you are afraid of sunflowers. This is PMS like behavior.