The Oil Spill You Haven’t Heard About
The Ultra-Empowered Series
The (Vegetable) Oil Spill
Welcome to the first article in the Ultra-Empowered series, the follow up to my Ultra-Exposed article that exposed the health impacts of ultra-processed food. In this article, I’m going to spill the beans on a very different kind of oil spill: the vegetable oil spill. Let’s get started!
It might seem unusual to start this series by discussing cooking oil since it is not immediately apparent why cooking oil is important or, frankly, how they’re different from another. To be clear, this article is not an indictment of cooking oil; this article is meant to highlight the differences between oils that have been used for thousands of years without issue with industrial vegetable oils that are in nearly every processed food, marketed as healthy, yet are anything but.
Olive Oil
Since seeing is believing, let’s begin with two videos of how oils are made, starting with one of the oldest oils—olive oil. Here is a video on how its made (5 min):
If you didn’t have the time to watch the video, I’ll let you in on a little secret—it’s surprisingly simple. Here is how you make olive oil:
Collect olives from olive tree
Wash olives
Grind olives but control for temperature (cold pressed)
Press olives to extract oil
Collect and bottle oil, which can be tasted like wine for purity and flavor
Canola Oil
Now contrast that with how one of the newest and most popular oils on the scene—canola oil—is made (5 min):
If you didn’t have the time to watch the video, I’ll do a summary of this process, too. In contrast to olive oil, here is how you make canola oil:
Harvest canola seed
Crush seeds
Pressurize seeds to extract oil and create canola cake (which still has oil in it)
Wash canola cake in a solvent for 70 minutes to extract the remaining oil
Ground remaining canola cake and sell as animal feed
Refine collected oil
Refine step 1 - wash oil for 20 minutes in sodium hydroxide
Refine step 2 - Bleach oil to lighten the color
Refine step 3 - Deodorize oil using a steam injection process
Bottled and sell. Yum!
Now I’m not sure about you, but the first process sounds delightful, like making a fine wine, while the second process sounds terrifying. I would venture to say that if canola oil had a big stamp on it that said “Bleached & Deodorized” we would probably buy a lot less of it! What’s also terrifying about that video is that the narrator drolls on and on at the beginning about the health virtues of canola oil only to describe a process that seems like it needs a defense attorney.
For most of you, I’m confident I could rest my case here. The idea that a substance immersed in solvent, washed in sodium hydroxide, bleached, and deodorized could harm you seems self-explanatory. BUT…what does the science say?
For that I’m going to bring in Dr. Cate Shanahan, creator of the the PRO Nutrition program for the Los Angeles Lakers and author of Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food. In her book, Dr. Shanahan argues that vegetable oils are “bad for many reasons—from damaging arteries to causing fatty liver and interfering with cell development.” To make this argument, Dr. Shanahan uses evidence from lipid scientist Gerhard Spiteller, who is the lead author of over 130 published scientific articles, and his research, for our purposes here, comes to a fairly simple conclusion: “cholesterol and saturated fats are not your heart’s enemy; industrial fat products, the vegetable oils, are.” [emphasis added]
I’ll really try to steer clear of getting technical, but it suffices to say that the chemical explanation for why these oils are dangerous has to do with how vegetable oils—which are refined, bleached, and deodorized—have fatty acid changes during heating and processing that don’t happen with natural fats. That’s as technical as this article is going to get. If you want to get more technical, go read Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food. It’s a great book, but, fair warning, it is dense.
With the technical out of our system, lets turn to the timeline. While the story of vegetable oil begins with Napoleon trying to create a butter that won’t spoil for his army (margarine), the story in America starts in 1910, when Procter & Gamble filed a patent application for Crisco, making vegetable oil a relatively new substance (The Atlantic). This date is interesting because, as Dr. Shanahan notes:
In 1900, heart disease was rare. By 1950, heart problems were killing more men than any other disease. Now, at the dawn of the second millennium, heart disease is the number-one cause of death in both men and women. Natural fat consumption: down. Processed fat consumption: up. Heart disease: up—way up.
In fact, over the past century, “butter consumption dropped to less than one quarter of what it was [yet] … vegetable oil consumption went up five-fold.” Visually, vegetable oil consumption looks like this (from Jeff Nobbs):
And while I understand there is a correlation v. causation challenge coming, let’s—just for fun—look at what chronic disease in America looks like, too. This first graph is from the CDC:
And this is from Jeff Nobbs):
Since 1935 rates of chronic conditions like heart disease, asthma, cancer, and diabetes have grown 700%, yet Americans are smoking less, drinking less, and exercising more.
What’s going on?
From a global standpoint—that is, the standpoint of the forest through the trees, there have been three major shifts in our food production over the last 100 years:
The creation of ultra-processed foods that have been chemically altered with artificial flavors, additives, and other ingredients—ingredients like vegetable oil
The transition from farm to feedlot
The introduction—and now reliance—on chemical fertilizers and pesticides
We’ll get to these in turn during the Ultra-Empowered series, but from a more local standpoint—that is, the standpoint of this post—let’s talk about vegetable oil. The statistical research on vegetable oil isn’t great. The recency of its creation coupled with the level of industry funding into “research” and marketing on vegetable oil’s behalf makes parsing out good studies from garbage very difficult.
For example, the American Heart Association (AHA), which to this day fully supports vegetable oils, began doing so after Procter and Gamble, the makers of hydrogenated vegetable oil, raised 1.7 million dollars on its behalf. Based on this calculator, that 1.7 million dollars had the equivalent purchasing power of about 21 million dollars today. So, a lot!
Financial entanglements aside, I found three studies that I think are well-designed, objective, and worth sharing. First, Time Magazine’s When Vegetable Oil Isn’t as Healthy as You Think is pretty balanced. This article was based on a study in the BMJ by Christopher Ramsden, a medical investigator at the National Institutes of Health.
In the study, more than 2,300 men and women were randomly assigned to a diet in which all the oils were replaced with vegetable oils, or a control diet high in animal fats and margarines. Ramsden found that those who ate more vegetable oils (primarily corn oil) did indeed lower their cholesterol by nearly 14% compared with those who did not, but that after a year or more, they did not see any lower rates of heart disease or dying from heart events. In fact, for every 30mg/dL drop in cholesterol, there was a 22% increased risk of death. So people who ate animal fats tended to live longer than those who switched to vegetable oils. [My emphasis]
What’s interesting about this study about this study is that the results are what Deep Nutrition predicts, namely that your risk of death does not appreciably increase from eating natural fats; it increases from consuming industrial fats. In other words, we’ve demonized cholesterol—which doesn’t kill you—and lowered it by creating and using an industrial fat that does.
Two other studies merit mentioning, both from the National Library of Medicine. The first is the 2015 study “Does cooking with vegetable oils increase the risk of chronic diseases?: a systematic review.” After reviewing twenty-three publications, the study concluded that
(1) the myth that frying foods is generally associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is not supported by the available evidence;
(2) virgin olive oil significantly reduces the risk of CVD clinical events, based on the results of a large randomized trial that included as part of the intervention the recommendation to use high amounts of virgin olive oil, also for frying foods
Again, this is another study that includes a large randomized trial and is in-sync with the theme of Deep Nutrition—fat is not the enemy; industrial fat is. The reduction in cardiovascular disease from using virgin olive oil—a natural fat—is exactly what Deep Nutrition predicts.
Last up is a 2018 study also published in the National Library of Medicine on the tie between vegetable oils and coronary heart disease. This study was also predicated on a review of the existing literature, and it concluded that vegetable oils are likely a major dietary culprit for causing coronary heart disease (CHD).
This shouldn’t surprise us because—to reiterate—this product has been immersed in solvent, washed in sodium hydroxide, bleached, and deodorized.
What To Do
So what do you do with this new information?
Start with this. Start by simply noticing all the places vegetable oil is hiding. Hint: it’s everywhere. There are few, if any, ultra-processed foods that don’t include some form of vegetable oil as an ingredient. My wife and I started looking and found it in places you would never dream: like our coffee creamer!
Second, stop using it when you cook. While the breath of oils that are vegetable oils is significantly more vast and complicated than you would expect, Dr. Shanahan has a diagram that sorts the good from the bad. My wife and I have it on our refrigerator, and it is officially located here:
Last, you can’t escape vegetable oils. They are in pretty much every ultra-processed food. While its realistic to limit ultra-processed food, its totally unrealistic—or at the very least highly impractical—to cut them out all together. So the last tip is to notice where they are, and choose the option without them when possible. It’s not always possible. It’s not always practical. But…when you can, make the swap.
That’s it for today. Thank you for reading!
Until next time,
-Tully-