let's talk about seed oils the dreaded seed oil debate should we fear them or not fear them let's assume somebody is going to maintain calories like they're not adding seed oils as a source of additional calories above what they would normally be taking in but let's say they have the choice they can consume a seed oil like canola oil or soybean oil or they can consume olive oil in place of it and let's just compare like which one is better if either and is there anything inherently bad about seed oils and i want to make sure that we talk about the processing because people will say ah the seed oils aren't bad if they come from a quality source but most of the seed oils are through this high pressure high temperature refinement process and that's the problem so what's the deal with seed oils okay the big picture is that people over vilify seed oils one side over vilify seed oils just like the other side over vilifies let's say your standard you know land animal fats like beef tallow butter lard but when you compare those two like seed oils versus the butter beef tallow lard you compare the evidence base of those two things you can find more dirt as far as adverse health outcomes from the land animal fats compared to the seed oils and and that is the reality of the matter um it's really weird that seed oils are being vilified right now because that's not the scientific consensus uh people who have their nose in the literature are are just kind of scratching their heads at the whole seed oil scare thing and there are some people on the fringe who laser in on their philosophies and ideologies about seed oils but then all you need what you need to do is ask a short set of questions okay and you specified the seed oils in the question which is great i mean that you're you're ahead of like everybody else so what seed oil are we talking about what what kind of dosage are we talking about and um what health outcome are you concerned with and then what trial do you find most compelling that supports your fear of the seed oil and so everybody like nine out of ten people immediately will say ah okay you want to know what seed oil canola oil okay great let's look at the canola oil literature and one of the hardest things to do is find dirt on canola oil amidst all of the positive effects in almost every trial of canola oil there is even a meta-analysis comparing directly the effect of canola oil versus olive oil on blood lipid profile and maybe you know unsurprisingly to to some but surprisingly to most canola oil outperforms olive oil for improving blood lipids in the sense of um lowering ldl cholesterol that's surprising to me because i assumed that olive oil can do no wrong you know what i i was i was taken aback by that too i i would have been just fine with seeing there's no damn difference one of these anti-climactic results but when you take a look at canola oil's composition it has a kind of an extraordinarily high proportion of omega-3 fatty acids compared to olive oil and compared to the rest of the seed oils for that omega-3 i thought it was high in omega-6 it's it does contain omega-6 and that is the predominant um fatty acid in canola but it has a high omega-3 content as well it has a high proportion of omega-3 i don't know the exact proportion of omega-3 but what makes canola kind of special as far as the vegetable oils go is its high omega-3 content wow okay um that's going to surprise a number of people including me my sense is that any ill effects to come from seed oils are because of who seed oils hang out with yeah right this is sort of the old uh if you're old enough uh like me to remember i'm 49 turning 50 in september so i'm not quite 53 but um we're of the same generation and and there was we grew up without the internet right well there was a discussion around cannabis for instance we've done several episodes about it we didn't paint it as good or bad although i do believe that young people especially young males smoking high thc cannabis can predispose to psychosis i mean there's a bunch of debate around this but back in the day it was if you use cannabis soon you'll be using crack cocaine that was kind of like the argument right over time people realize that cannabis has its own potential benefits and its own potential risks right depending on a number of things it seems that people who consume a lot of seed oils consume them in conjunction with a lot of starches and perhaps with added sugars as well and when you lump those together you end up with a pro-inflammatory often hypercaloric uh set of conditions and people aren't getting enough quality protein and then we know what that picture looks like it looks like the united states of america yeah right or most of the united states of america and so i do think that there's something about who olive oil and grass-fed butter hang out with that has the opposite effect like people go oh this is a really high quality olive oil generally in my mind are the sort of people who are thinking about the quality of the salad ingredients they're thinking about the sourdough bread uh as opposed to maybe a more refined sugar containing bread and the people who talk about grass-fed butter are thinking about the quality of the meat sources and they're not eating other protein sources that are laid in with other you know preservatives so to me i think a lot of this quote-unquote seed oil debate will be resolved when we start pulling apart the individual components they're riding in the wrong vehicle right right and i and i think that um from a cost perspective you know this hadn't occurred to me until i started voicing a little bit of this online in which case you learn a lot uh quickly and what i learned was you know there were a number of people who said yeah i'm hearing all this great stuff about grass-fed butter and olive oil but there are people for whom the cost margins are just too high to consume all organic and or olive oil and and you know and you have to listen to that and say okay well you know for people needing to feed an entire family um you know perhaps some of these other fat sources uh are more affordable and therefore what are the real health risks with those so anyway i was a bit of editorializing there but um i have a feeling some of this is going to shake out in the in the in the fine parsing of these different diets i think people oversimplify it what people do with seed oils is what people do with dairy they say dairy as if it's some monolithic thing you know with dairy you've got the hard cheeses you've got butter you've got yogurt you've got milk of varying fat levels you know um you're kind of hard pressed to find negative stuff on yogurt you're you'd be kind of hard pressed actually to find negative stuff on hard cheeses um butter of of all of the you know the range of dairy foods butter is the one that you can find the dirt on um similar story with seed oils like try to find some negative stuff on flax seed chia seed sesame seed uh you can't i mean yeah if you dig hard enough you can try to find some negative stuff on canola it's very tough too um even things like soybean oil and corn oil you can look at the literature and it doesn't paint this sinister picture either and so i think people are missing the forest for the trees in general when they're focused on honestly the cooking oils you shouldn't be drowning or deep frying your stuff on a regular basis anyway so um yeah and and beyond that when you look at the effects of seed oil that are examined in the literature for various outcomes you know everything from the intermediate outcomes like biomarker effects all the way to the in quotes hard end points like mortality heart attack you know cardiac events and heart disease so the hard end points as well as the intermediate or soft end points they're all superior with the seed oils compared to butter um lard beef tallow on the whole so there is a severe misunderstanding and falsely founded scaremongering with respect to seed oils to the point where i just think it's incredibly silly people just have to get a hold of themselves and focus on the overall quality of the diet and not really get into these absolute you know death matches over what oils they use to cook their foods i am a huge extra virgin olive oil fan that is my go-to that's what i love i could honestly i could like do shots of the stuff i love it that much delicious yeah and um and i i love sesame oil you know but sesame is a seed oil but sesame oil has been consumed by very healthy populations throughout asia for the last 5 000 years um and so i i don't necessarily like canola oil you know like as far as the sort of the stickiness and the oddness about it but i i'll still acknowledge that the literature shows overwhelmingly positive stuff about it in the majority of trials um but i prefer olive oil and and i would almost feel more comfortable recommending that if if you like olive oil then that should be your go-to rather than oils that are i guess maybe frankensteined or engineered to a degree and you mentioned the the whole idea of the like how these oils are produced like one of the concerns is hexane use to extract the oils from the seed cakes and stuff like that so they the use of solvents to get these oils out of their native source uh i there's some interesting literature showing higher hexane levels in um olive oil than in i forget it was some some other seed oil whether it was canola or sunflower and so but nevertheless the hexane amounts were well below established safe thresholds and so i think i really do think that people are getting sort of lost in the weeds and kind of missing the forest for the trees focusing on the little grains of sand and missing the big boulders