Top 10 Flaws in Mainstream Reporting of the Seed Oil Debate
I’ve spent nearly two decades thinking about how the foods we eat affect our health. In 2007, I lost my father to Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Six months later, my mother passed away from Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. Those experiences motivated me to understand why people get sick and what can be done about it. Since then, I’ve read countless studies on chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and dementia, along with the mainstream coverage and interpretation of those studies.
These "diseases of modernity" as they're called, which only became prevalent in the last century, now affect 60% of American adults, and 42% have multiple chronic conditions [1]. Chronic diseases cause 75% of all deaths globally, including 1.7 million American deaths every year [2, 3]. On average, Americans spend roughly 17% of their lives managing chronic diseases, often at great personal and financial cost. Healthcare expenditures in the US, 90% of which are related to managing chronic disease, reached $4.9 trillion in 2023, twice what the entire world spends on defense [4, 5, 6]. Clearly, this is an urgent problem.
While chronic disease is complex and surely multifactorial, one dietary shift stands out since rates began soaring: the increased consumption of vegetable oils derived from seeds—commonly known as “seed oils.” These include soybean, canola, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed, grapeseed, rice bran, peanut, and corn oil. Together, they now account for about 20% of the calories Americans consume and represent the fastest growing subsector of global agriculture [7, 8]. Seed oils appear in everything from salad dressings and oat milk to fried chicken and french fries. They are cheap, accessible, and mostly tasteless, making them the go-to fats in restaurants and packaged foods.
