Maintenance Phase - Seed Oils

00:00:00.000 dude i it took me so long to figure out that record days are your work day is the record

00:00:17.060 you're like one of those influencers who's like do you know how hard it is to be an influencer

00:00:20.760 look you know how hard my job is i am gonna show you my morning routine featuring saratoga water

00:00:27.020 i do crunches while i return business texts on my apple dude are you familiar with the weird

00:00:34.660 tech talks where they debunk the morning routines no what they'll have you know titles on the screen

00:00:40.040 like 5 37 waking up and then people will like stitch in and they'll be like actually in dallas

00:00:45.360 at 5 30 the sun is not in that position it's actually more like 7 30 dude you and i have

00:00:51.200 talked about i think we have a shared value around not letting the show just become a dunk fest 0.97

00:00:57.040 right no but like man if we didn't i would do such a fucking episode on those goddamn morning 0.97

00:01:02.280 just like what's on tiktok this week sucks on tiktok today i would do that so there's so many 0.99

00:01:08.380 people on tiktok who suck all right tag it tag it tag it what do you have what are you gonna 0.97

00:01:14.260 rhyme with seed oils i was gonna come up with i don't know what weed boils i don't know 0.99

00:01:19.540 do you want me to sit in silence and let you workshop

00:01:25.200 creed soils creed soil start singing a creed song uh hi everybody and welcome to maintenance

00:01:31.960 phase the podcast where they tried to bury us but they didn't know we were seed

00:01:36.700 that's terrible what's that even from they try to bury us and then we grow and we're here we're

00:01:44.600 seeds get used to it from your political organizing days i'm aubrey gordon i'm michael humps uh if

00:01:51.660 you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase

00:01:56.200 you can also subscribe on apple podcast it's the same audio content my goal aubrey what are we

00:02:03.640 talking about today we're talking about seed oils you're talking to me about seed oils and i'm so

00:02:08.680 excited because you and i have been making this show for long enough and have been talking about

00:02:14.440 far right wellness grifters long enough that seed oils just come up it's something that like

00:02:21.400 tucker carlson has touched on pete evans has talked about yes it's popped up a bunch of times

00:02:27.480 but i've never done like the in-depth fact check i was gonna say we have never done such an avengers

00:02:34.220 endgame ass episode well so this is the thing i'm fascinated about is like what is the origin story

00:02:39.520 of the seed oil stuff and like well who started it and why did so many people pick it up i have

00:02:44.800 noticed when i've told people like oh i'm researching an episode about seed oils three 0.94

00:02:48.280 quarters of my friends are like oh thank fucking god like what is this garbage but then like one 0.93

00:02:52.420 quarter of my friends are like what do you mean seed oils just for like the people who are like 0.98

00:02:57.280 blessedly offline we should give like a little overview of this panic for the people who don't 0.99

00:03:02.560 know who kendra who fell in love with her psychiatrist is fuck you for knowing that i 0.98

00:03:09.640 would know that i love i love that you knew kendra oh god so these if you go sort of on like 0.99

00:03:17.080 manosphere tiktok and substack etc i i pulled a couple like random headlines that are going around

00:03:23.840 one of them is how industrial seed oils are making us sick eight toxic seed oils is vegetable oil

00:03:30.920 bad for you the science behind the worst food in human history there's a documentary called

00:03:36.520 fed a lie the truth about seed oils there's this is how canada convinced you to eat engine

00:03:42.760 lubricant i love that we can blame canada wow so i am sending you a tweet from it's one of the 1.00

00:03:51.600 first avengers endgame appearances you have sent me a tweet fuck you first of all thank you rfk 0.99

00:03:59.680 jr is the poster of this tweet the tweet reads fast food is a part of american culture but that 0.99

00:04:06.560 doesn't mean it has to be unhealthy and that we can't make better choices did you know that

00:04:11.340 mcdonald's used to use beef tallow to make their fries from 1940 until phasing it out in favor of

00:04:17.940 seed oils in 1990 this switch was made because saturated animal fats were thought to be unhealthy

00:04:24.240 but we have since discovered that seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic.

00:04:30.320 Driving causes.

00:04:30.920 Interestingly enough, this began to drastically rise around the same time

00:04:35.800 fast food restaurants switched from beef tallow to seed oils in their fryers.

00:04:41.360 Great correlation.

00:04:43.020 That's how you know it's causal, because the two lines went up at the same time.

00:04:46.840 People who enjoy a burger with fries on a night out aren't to blame,

00:04:50.000 and Americans should have every right to eat out at a restaurant

00:04:52.600 without being unknowingly poisoned

00:04:54.840 by heavily subsidized seed oils.

00:04:57.620 Poisoned.

00:04:58.000 It's time to make frying oil tallow again.

00:05:03.340 It's so bad.

00:05:05.280 It's very sweaty.

00:05:06.700 Yeah.

00:05:06.960 If anyone knows sweaty, I know sweaty. 0.91

00:05:09.580 We know a sweaty little slogan.

00:05:11.160 We know a pun that doesn't work.

00:05:13.380 Excuse me.

00:05:14.500 It's approaching maintenance fees.

00:05:16.260 It's approaching tagline levels of bad. 0.99

00:05:19.700 uh i hate it here this sucks i remember the beef tallow shit i remember a bunch of people in the 0.99

00:05:27.780 90s being like the fries used to be good this whole kind of craze is like becoming slowly more 0.99

00:05:33.440 mainstream so earlier this year steak and shake announced that they're not gonna have any seed

00:05:38.420 oils on their menu they're switching to beef tallow i don't even know what this i don't think

00:05:41.880 we have this in seattle so like i've never even heard of this wake me up when it's burgerville

00:05:46.740 you know what i'm saying there's also something called the seed oil scout app that like lists

00:05:51.960 restaurants that use seed oils and there's like a really funny article about this whole trend

00:05:56.780 where people in new york started seeing signs like on lamp posts that said carbone puts seed oils in

00:06:05.300 their spicy rigatoni in all cats i heard about this i heard about this this is like oh got them 0.87

00:06:12.720 a friend from new york texted me was like why am i seeing these what the fuck is this the last thing 0.90

00:06:19.680 i want to send you is maybe the most profound example of a stopped clock is right twice a day 0.93

00:06:24.560 that we've ever had on this show okay you're gonna love this uh this is a tweet from andrew tate

00:06:31.180 friend of the show andrew tate the tweet uh opens in all caps seed oils seed oils omg seed oils 0.99

00:06:39.260 omg fucking omg seed oils fuck fuck omg fuck i can tell you losers have never had real enemies 0.99

00:06:47.200 you're afraid of sunflowers it's good it's a i'm sorry but it's a good tweet you've never had 1.00

00:06:54.900 enemies you're afraid of sunflowers you legit won't shut up about it such uninteresting lives 0.90

00:07:01.960 total losers so there's a giant jpeg in my head of that thing from the onion of like 0.95

00:07:08.020 heartbreaking the worst person you know just made a really great point 0.95

00:07:11.620 this is a very good point and a very terrible person you know this from knowing me for five

00:07:18.380 plus years i have like a little soundboard in my brain and one of the sounds that gets played

00:07:23.300 very often is the christian bale on set meltdown oh yeah oh good good for you

00:07:29.700 you have done that on the show numerous times and also it's really funny to think about a

00:07:34.820 grown man at the top of his field going yeah yeah yelling at like a teamster and i think

00:07:41.820 there's something really funny about like this like clear and present danger to society that

00:07:48.540 is andrew tate going you're afraid of sunflowers i know you have no enemies it's so good

00:07:54.040 unfortunately unfortunately it's good okay so okay we're gonna go through like the history of 0.64

00:08:01.820 this panic i spent so fucking long aubrey in like weird corners of the internet to figure out just

00:08:07.500 like where this comes from this is my main question i'm so curious but first we have to 0.78

00:08:13.880 talk about what are seed oils but first here's 10 more nightmare tweets for you i'm just gonna

00:08:18.860 we're gonna do that for two more hours and then i'll tell you the interesting part of this episode

00:08:23.220 next up dr phil aubrey can you name all hateful eight of the seed oils oh i can't this is what

00:08:30.700 they call them. I mean, it's got to be like canola slash rapeseed oil, right? Canola, I recently

00:08:36.240 learned stands for like Canadian something oil. Yeah. Depending on the source, it's either

00:08:41.720 a beshortening of Canada oil, low acid or a portmanteau of Canada oil, which should be

00:08:51.400 can oil. But yes, it's a version of, it's a specific breed of rape, which is the name of

00:08:58.700 the crop, like rapeseed, the name of the crop is rape. It has a Latin root that is actually

00:09:05.120 different from like the crime. The crime is from rapere, which means to steal or to snatch,

00:09:11.280 to take. Rapeseed is based on rapum, which is Latin for turnip. Convergent evolution. They both

00:09:17.500 just evolved into rape over time. And so if you read like back when I did human rights stuff,

00:09:22.620 we did a couple of projects with agricultural companies. And so I read like trade publications

00:09:26.020 and they'll just talk about like oh yeah like it's been a good year for winter rape we're really 1.00

00:09:30.200 optimistic about a central asian rape this year like it's just the name of the crop so it makes 0.99

00:09:35.620 sense obviously why people in the field were like oh man we really got to get another fucking name 0.96

00:09:39.200 for it yeah we've got a branding issue on our yeah so people in canada came up with they they bred 0.93

00:09:44.300 uh the the crop for specific characteristics and then people were like oh thank fucking god we have

00:09:49.600 another thing that we can call this so that's what canola oil is so okay so rapeseed oil soybean oil

00:09:55.580 is going to be in there that's the most commonly consumed seed oil in america but oftentimes it's

00:09:58.900 not actually called soybean oil it's just generic vegetable oil that you find at the store uh

00:10:03.120 cotton seed oil that's three that's as far as i get what else is in there there's also corn oil

00:10:09.040 oh geez of course grapeseed oil which is not the same as rapeseed oil sunflower oil safflower oil

00:10:14.960 rice bran oil and peanut oil fascinating that peanut oil counts as a seed oil i get it but

00:10:21.060 also soybean oil seems like another one where i'm like huh and also avocados have seeds but avocado

00:10:26.160 oil is not a seed oil because it comes from like the flesh sure olive oil similar possible thing

00:10:32.120 going on there the scientific community does not actually say seed oils like seed oils is a term

00:10:37.960 that doesn't really emerge until like 2015 in the academic literature they say polyunsaturated fatty

00:10:44.680 acids or poofas no i didn't want to say poofa all episode because that's what they call gay people

00:10:50.300 in britain and i didn't want to confuse our uk listeners well it's also so close to fupa it's 0.51

00:10:55.800 very it's very close to fupa i know and i'm gonna miss speak and say fupa like 15 times if we say

00:11:00.680 poofa the whole episode so i'm just gonna say seed oils even though like academically they don't

00:11:05.040 really like say that in the literature so obviously like we're not gonna get too deep into this but

00:11:09.060 like seed oils are like one of the first forms of food processing like you squeeze an olive and like

00:11:14.460 oil comes out this is like a thing that you can use in cooking so this is something that's been

00:11:18.180 of food for like thousands of years. The US consumption of seed oils is very low until

00:11:23.120 basically the 50s and 60s. As part of the panic around saturated fats, we talked about this in

00:11:28.820 our Snackwells episode, there was this diet hurt hypothesis that was like, okay, red meat and butter

00:11:34.160 and lard are really bad for you. So we need everybody to switch to unsaturated fat. This

00:11:39.520 was like the explanation for things like heart disease and strokes. And in 1961, the American

00:11:45.340 Heart Association released recommendations basically telling people like, hey, stop eating

00:11:49.840 butter, red meat, anything with saturated fat in it, and switch to seed oils. Although again,

00:11:55.380 they weren't calling them seed oils. And so around then, like butter consumption,

00:11:58.760 lard consumption all started plummeting like really noticeably if you look at the graphs.

00:12:02.300 And you have a huge increase in first in shortening, which is like things like Crisco,

00:12:06.760 but eventually that sort of gives way to more vegetable oils because vegetable oils are much

00:12:12.120 cheaper and much easier to process. In 1985, canola oil is introduced. It really is remarkable

00:12:18.320 how quickly consumption of seed oils increased. Starting in 1960, it's just like a vertical line

00:12:23.720 like we all started eating way more seed oils. So as this is happening, you basically have the

00:12:28.880 first inklings of the seed oil panic just in like the academic literature where people notice this

00:12:35.640 is like a really big trend. It's like, huh, Americans are eating like way more unsaturated

00:12:39.980 fats and like sure all of this is happening like this this interest in fatty acids basically

00:12:44.100 is happening at the same time that just like the field of nutrition is developing what you have

00:12:49.900 between like 1980 and roughly 2010 is a ton of studies just doing like super basic science on

00:12:56.560 like how do fatty acid molecules affect the body how does this affect like platelet aggregation

00:13:03.460 and like is this or is this not a vasodilator super technical stuff i'm gonna read you just

00:13:10.000 like a brief excerpt of one of these articles this is from a 1976 article it says seed oil

00:13:15.680 you have no real enemies colon so this is from 1976 it says spiral strips of rabbit thoracic

00:13:28.760 aorta were superfused with Krebs CG solution at 37 degrees centigrade containing a mixture of

00:13:33.980 antagonist and endomethacin. These indicate the contractile response produced by testing 50

00:13:38.560 micrograms of the incubation mixture of sheep seminal vesicle microsomes in a tube containing

00:13:43.540 50 micrograms of phosphate. The contractile response of superfused rabbit thoracic aorta

00:13:48.300 strips increased in a parallel linear fashion with increasing concentration of the endoperoxides

00:13:53.920 PG1, 2, and 3. This is gibberish to us, right? Like this is most sort of lay people would look

00:13:59.820 at this and be like, what the hell's going on? But this is essentially the scientific field,

00:14:04.360 just like exploring what does this mean? Like how do fatty acids affect the body?

00:14:09.300 And alongside all this basic research, people also start going back through old data sets and

00:14:13.680 being like, well, did people who ate more vegetable oil get sicker or less vegetable oil,

00:14:18.380 less sick, et cetera. They start doing new studies of like, let's ask people how much

00:14:22.200 poofa they're eating and like how they feel there's basically just like a huge amount of

00:14:26.000 just like stuff being produced you haven't been saying poofa so i was not ready for it i was not

00:14:31.580 ready for it i'm gonna do like one every 20 minutes keep me awake just for you keep me on my toes

00:14:35.560 the reason i'm talking about this and the reason i wanted to read that like extremely boring excerpt

00:14:40.240 is because we've seen this so many times where people do a lot of very good faith science and

00:14:45.520 it's kind of messy and it's very technical and there's just a huge body of literature

00:14:51.060 that if you're a lay person or especially like a bad faith grifter, it's very easy to dip into

00:14:57.500 this literature and pick something out and be like, oh, this, this means it's poison. 0.96

00:15:01.720 I've been telling you that I have been, uh, researching like sort of a Maha adjacent person. 0.99

00:15:09.140 And when people try to like fact check her work, uh, her response is very often like

00:15:15.460 there's at least one study that corroborates everything I'm saying here. And I'm like,

00:15:20.940 Yep.

00:15:21.240 That's not actually enough, my guy.

00:15:24.000 Well, that's the thing.

00:15:24.580 I mean, what you start finding is, you know, starting in the early 2000s, this, like, seed

00:15:28.760 oils are poisonous for you thing, you start seeing this pop up among, like, left-wing

00:15:35.720 anti-vaxxers.

00:15:37.440 Have you ever heard of the Westin A. Price Foundation?

00:15:41.120 Michael, I have been pulling together a research list on Westin A. Price to see if we need

00:15:46.580 to do a full episode.

00:15:47.680 We might need to do a full episode.

00:15:49.060 Yeah.

00:15:49.220 I'm sending you a excerpt from the Weston A. Price Foundation in 2002 in an article called

00:15:56.620 The Great Con Ola.

00:15:59.280 Wonderful.

00:16:00.740 Doesn't work, but you know, I see where they were going with this.

00:16:04.320 It says, quote, studies carried out at the health research and toxicology research divisions in

00:16:10.260 Ottawa, Canada, discovered that rats bred to have high blood pressure and proneness to stroke

00:16:17.180 had shortened lifespans when fed canola oil as the sole source of fat i'm just gonna bookmark

00:16:24.600 and say boom in that sentence alone there are bigger problems than canola oil the results of

00:16:32.420 later studies suggested that the culprit was the sterile compounds in the oil which quote make the

00:16:39.080 cell membrane more rigid and contribute to the shortened lifespan of the animals so here you see

00:16:45.360 there's a sort of weird cherry picking thing oh a study on like rats that are prone to stroke

00:16:50.340 it's shortened their life and it does that by like making the cell membrane more rigid

00:16:54.380 this is again very like technical it's not really giving you like a body of work like

00:16:59.500 were there other rat studies that were done it doesn't really tell you that right they're pulling

00:17:03.440 out one study i have a question about this sort of in situ are they using links or footnotes or

00:17:09.600 anything or are they just sort of paraphrasing again they do use footnotes and like if you

00:17:13.680 scroll all the way down to this thing it's like meticulously footnoted and i did actually go to

00:17:17.700 this study and like they're correct in this rat study the rats that were fed canola oil had

00:17:22.360 shorter lifespans like they're not lying about anything totally the reason that i ask is that

00:17:26.960 we've talked about two different sort of approaches to use of research by grifters

00:17:32.040 one is the dr oz approach where he describes a study you have to go try and find it based on

00:17:37.940 the description and like nothing matching that description exists right so i didn't know if we

00:17:42.620 were dealing with that or if we were dealing with the dave asprey type right where someone is like

00:17:47.260 footnoting you to death sort of counting on you not checking on the footnotes right and also

00:17:53.300 counting on you not checking on like what is the broader scientific consensus here exactly what you

00:17:58.680 have to do here is you don't just have to double check the citation you have to basically do a

00:18:02.540 completely new search for like meta analyses of canola oil's effects on rats and then even then

00:18:08.600 And it's like, well, it's rat study.

00:18:09.880 So it's not totally clear how to interpret that.

00:18:11.960 So this is the conclusion of this Weston A. Price blog post.

00:18:15.940 Canola oil is definitely not healthy for the cardiovascular system.

00:18:21.100 Like rapeseed oil, its predecessor, canola oil is associated with fibrotic lesions of the heart.

00:18:27.940 It also causes vitamin E deficiency, undesirable changes in the blood platelets and shortened lifespan in stroke-prone rats.

00:18:37.340 dude i just like i i love the idea of someone like reaching for the salad dressing and be like

00:18:43.380 no it shortens the lifespan of stroke prone rats it also sounds a little bit like they're just

00:18:48.860 dunking on rats the rats didn't know about beef tallow they're not even they don't even have a

00:18:55.100 morning routine they're not even doing crunches or reading bible verses even by the standards of

00:19:02.060 left-wing anti-vaxxers. This is pretty fringe. The first sort of, I guess, vaguely credible

00:19:08.140 mention of it that I could find is in 2008 in a book called Deep Nutrition,

00:19:14.300 Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by someone named Catherine Shanahan, who is a trained

00:19:20.440 geneticist. I found references to this in later sub-stack posts and stuff. I was like,

00:19:26.440 what is deep nutrition? What is this? It appears to be self-published. It's later published in

00:19:31.320 like 2017. I get the book. I do a control F for seed oils. And this is the first mention of it.

00:19:39.380 I'm just going to send you the full paragraph. It does boil down to economics. Autism is,

00:19:44.980 in my estimation, just another complication of the industrial diet, together with obesity,

00:19:50.160 diabetes, sleep apnea, hypertension, Alzheimer's and cancer. All these stem from the decision to

00:19:57.180 ignore nutritional practices that fortified our ancestors with genetic wealth. She has this whole

00:20:02.940 weird thing about how like your diet shows up in the structure of your face. She has a chapter

00:20:09.560 called The Sibling Strategy, where she looks at, you know, Matt Dillon, the actor, and then he has

00:20:15.320 a brother named Kevin Dillon, and she shows like both of their faces. And she's like, look how

00:20:19.680 ugly his brother is. And look how attractive Matt Dillon is. Like, that's because he's the older

00:20:24.720 sibling and like older siblings get better nutrition this is as a younger sibling this 0.93

00:20:29.800 is older sibling propaganda which isn't i mean i don't think that's fucking true but it's like

00:20:34.940 the literal thesis of the book is like beautiful people like ate better and like the way that you 0.80

00:20:42.060 eat is expressed through like your physical beauty dude this is i guarantee you this is

00:20:48.340 gonna be the one episode that my brother listens to of our show like ever and he's like that part

00:20:53.900 sounded true so the main thing that i want to convey here is that like seed oils is kind of

00:20:59.320 like a crank thing now like it mostly goes around like the crank right but like this has kind of

00:21:03.120 always been a crank thing i then found a couple of like little mentions of it in like slightly

00:21:08.700 more mainstream sources there's a 2015 harper's bazaar article called why you should try the

00:21:15.920 polyunsaturated fat free diet by a guy named stephen macari who's like a kind of a woo-woo

00:21:22.780 kind of life coach kind of guy.

00:21:26.280 I really like it when you talk through your teeth on this.

00:21:28.900 He's just like, I don't know what to say without being mean.

00:21:31.000 Yeah, totally. No, I get you.

00:21:32.960 But like, just like not a credible article.

00:21:35.660 I'll send you the sort of nut graph of that.

00:21:39.520 What if there was a substance that you were consuming regularly

00:21:42.620 that was severely hampering your efforts to get healthy?

00:21:46.360 What if this substance was linked to accelerated aging

00:21:49.540 and a variety of common health problems?

00:21:52.180 What if the substance was used in numerous quote unquote health foods and in numerous

00:21:57.520 restaurants?

00:21:58.820 What if you were taking supplements that contained high amounts of a harmful substance

00:22:03.180 that you were told was healthy?

00:22:05.580 Well, this is happening and you are most likely unaware of it.

00:22:09.880 The most damaging thing you can put in your body is not sugar and it's not gluten.

00:22:15.140 It's polyunsaturated fats.

00:22:17.800 When he talks about supplements here, he's talking about like fish oil supplements.

00:22:20.500 so he's kind of merging together omega-3s and omega-6s which we'll get into later and then also

00:22:25.520 he has this like accelerated aging none of the literature was about that even like the technical

00:22:31.140 literature was not about that but it's like you can see this stuff kind of bouncing around the

00:22:35.640 crankosphere and then everyone else just like doing improv on it they're like what if it also

00:22:39.860 affects your aging sure yes and exactly yes exactly alzheimer's yes yeah yeah yeah so in an

00:22:47.360 effort to try to understand like where this came from and sort of how it was bouncing around the

00:22:53.040 internet i went on twitter the last good thing about twitter is like it has a really good advanced

00:22:58.700 search function so i looked for every tweet with the phrase seed oils from 2006 to 2020

00:23:08.020 it's actually kind of remarkable how little there is there really isn't very much from before 2019

00:23:14.160 The authors of like the Harper's Bazaar article, there's also a random Forbes article.

00:23:18.780 That author is like tweeting about it.

00:23:20.420 But like no one is really talking about seed oils.

00:23:22.440 But then starting in 2018, you start seeing it bubble up as a kind of a B plot to the carnivore diet.

00:23:31.300 Joe Rogan has the Jordan Peterson carnivore special thing.

00:23:35.700 God, of course we're at Rogan.

00:23:37.560 That is July 2018.

00:23:39.220 And afterwards, you start seeing like random like carnivore diet accounts talking about it.

00:23:44.820 So there is someone named Woke Carnivore on Twitter.

00:23:50.640 Not particularly woke.

00:23:51.700 I was very disappointed.

00:23:52.640 I was going to say, we're in full internet Mad Libs.

00:23:55.900 He says, cutting out sugar, grains, and seed oils from your diet effectively cuts out all junk food.

00:24:02.480 In September of 2018, we have one of my favorite tweets.

00:24:08.040 There's so many bangers in this episode, Aubrey.

00:24:09.700 Here's one of the bangers.

00:24:11.260 So this is from someone named Seizure Salad.

00:24:14.440 Wasn't there some chat on Twitter about being immune to sunburn while avoiding seed oils?

00:24:20.920 I just realized I spent six hours in the sun with no sunscreen,

00:24:24.620 and I'm not even the slightest bit red, despite a long history of burning very easily.

00:24:30.260 These people latch on to things as, like, good or bad,

00:24:34.420 with no actual like biological basis for like what that is doing so it's like you cut out seed oils

00:24:40.000 and like you reduce your risk of heart attack by i don't know 10 or whatever fine like if that's

00:24:44.480 your belief fine but then it's like oh no seed oils are bad and they're poison and they're not

00:24:49.420 only poison if you eat them but also if you stop eating them like everything about your life gets

00:24:53.080 better you also don't sunburn i just realized i spent six hours in the sun with no sunscreen and

00:24:57.680 i'm not even the slightest bit red let me tell you from the voice of experience give it three more

00:25:03.120 hours yeah that's like those people that would be like why isn't the edible kicking in and then

00:25:09.420 like 90 minutes later they'll just tweet like potatoes yeah yeah yeah uh okay here's another

00:25:15.700 one from 2018 there is a picture that has uh three like spoonfuls or pats of different sort

00:25:25.140 of butters and butter substitutes there's a reduced fat margarine there is a full fat margarine and

00:25:30.900 there is one labeled natural butter they're all on sort of at different corners of a plate and

00:25:37.200 the margarine and reduced fat margarine are both being left alone and the natural butter is being

00:25:43.800 swarmed by ants and the tweet says even ants have enough brains to avoid seed oils if you are

00:25:53.020 no i just started reading this in my head in jeff foxworthy voice if you are smarter than

00:26:00.440 if you are smarter than a man say no to fake seed oil based meats and hashtag yes to meat

00:26:09.680 hashtag yes to meat is what i was like i'm sending it to aubrey

00:26:12.800 oh no it's good my hashtag yes to me you know that the next time i see you i will have needle

00:26:20.580 pointed onto like a throat hashtag yes to me to meet too curious yes the number two and then meet

00:26:32.400 oh god everybody agrees and like the twitter data shows that this this whole seed oils thing

00:26:39.560 explodes in october of 2020 with an episode of the joe rogan podcast is this one of the ones

00:26:48.320 where they're high on camera

00:26:50.160 or they get high first and then get on camera?

00:26:52.720 Aubrey, I listened.

00:26:53.660 It was three hours and nine minutes long 0.99

00:26:54.960 and I listened to the whole fucking thing. 0.99

00:26:56.040 You listened to a full episode? 1.00

00:26:57.400 Aubrey, they talk about bow hunting

00:26:59.060 for like 25 minutes.

00:27:00.200 I'm like not kidding.

00:27:01.320 Jesus hell's bells.

00:27:02.320 Joe Rogan's like, I was in an MMA fight

00:27:03.880 and I was thinking about bow hunting.

00:27:05.200 And I'm like, well, I'm thinking about hunting myself 0.99

00:27:06.960 with a fucking bow right now. 0.99

00:27:08.120 You know this. 1.00

00:27:08.880 I was a kindergarten classroom assistant for a while.

00:27:11.800 This is how the five-year-olds

00:27:14.480 preoccupied with masculinity would talk.

00:27:17.040 weapons and martial arts and like i'm really tough don't mess with me i know it just is

00:27:23.600 weird and sad to see in full-grown adults it's not hilarious like christian bale

00:27:30.040 so this is a joe rogan episode that is an interview with paul saladino so paul saladino

00:27:41.420 had asthma and eczema growing up at some point it appears to be in college he discovers the paleo

00:27:47.860 diet and it seems like the paleo diet really helps the eczema go away but then when he's in his final

00:27:53.960 year of medical school it like comes roaring back even like more he gets like sepsis at one point

00:27:59.980 he has like he he's it appears hospitalized at least according to him apparently the eczema was

00:28:05.260 so bad that he had to go on steroids oh wow he gains weight during this period partly because

00:28:10.000 of the steroids. So he's really insecure about that. And eventually he discovers the carnivore

00:28:16.000 diet. He is on Joe Rogan to promote his book, The Carnivore Code. And I'm going to send you

00:28:24.080 a excerpt from the introduction where he talks about how he discovered the carnivore diet.

00:28:29.780 I'll never forget the day I was listening to Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast while

00:28:34.760 driving to the Washington coast to go surfing. At the end of the podcast, I heard Jordan talk

00:28:41.600 about his meat-based diet. He related how it had helped his daughter Michaela overcome a lifetime

00:28:47.280 of severe autoimmune disease and how it had helped him lose weight and resolve his own sleep apnea

00:28:53.060 and similar autoimmune issues. Suddenly, I had a paradigm-shifting thought that changed the course

00:28:59.680 of my life from that moment forward? What if my own autoimmune issues and so many of the

00:29:05.840 inflammatory problems we see manifested as chronic disease today could be triggered by the plants we

00:29:12.880 are eating? The plants. Great. It's definitely the plant's fault. There's a couple of things

00:29:17.400 that are very notable to me here. First of all, he's on Joe Rogan talking about the carnivore

00:29:22.620 diet, but he's also inspired by Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is like creating grifters and then like

00:29:28.400 having the grifters on thank you so much joe rogan for inspiring my grift again like if you look at

00:29:34.140 the timeline there's something very weird about this because the episode with jordan peterson

00:29:39.240 where he promotes the carnivore diet is in july of 2018 paul saladino is promoting his book on

00:29:46.420 joe rogan in october of 2020 so only a little over two years has gone by since he discovered

00:29:52.780 the carnivore diet you know about like the schedule of book publishing like how long it

00:29:57.540 takes to get a book published written everything else this basically means that he started writing

00:30:02.060 the book almost immediately after he got on the carnivore diet right he heard that interview and

00:30:07.340 he was like people must know my story of this thing i'm about to try this thing that i've done

00:30:11.840 for like a little while yeah later says he was only on the carnivore diet for quote a year a 0.81

00:30:17.180 year and a half so he basically is just like immediately fucking giving people advice and then

00:30:22.700 his road to like becoming an influencer and like how he gets from like medical school to being a 0.67

00:30:30.780 guy with like i think two million followers on instagram like he's very popular on these social

00:30:36.260 media platforms he gets kicked off of them at various points for like spreading medical

00:30:39.080 misinformation but he becomes a very popular influencer relatively quickly but it's not

00:30:43.800 totally clear like financially how he did this he starts writing the book he starts again of course

00:30:50.880 he starts a supplement company step one monetize it it's called heart and soil absolutely not

00:30:58.820 three and a half out of five uh do you want to know who his business partner is aubrey

00:31:02.480 oh god joe rogan uh the liver king you you really are getting the band back together we really are

00:31:09.120 my god so he somehow like just finds this diet goes on the diet immediately starts like selling

00:31:15.860 the diet to people he also this is another like getting the band back together thing here i'm

00:31:22.500 gonna send you a clip of him so you can see this man sorry to this man this is a uh video of him

00:31:30.380 watch it together you sent me a video that's on twitter what happens when you click through to a

00:31:35.420 video post on twitter is that it automatically starts playing yeah and i reached for the pause

00:31:42.300 button and i was uh two seconds in which means that i am now paused on a screen full of organ

00:31:49.600 meat untrimmed organ meat and just the caption phrase is raw meat smoothie you might puke i got

00:31:57.680 i got like sick to my stomach watching this the first time i have almost puked on our show before

00:32:02.360 yeah that's true actually okay ready uh yeah kind of sound

00:32:05.340 let me show you guys how to make my morning raw meat smoothie this is definitely gonna trigger

00:32:11.780 some people, buckle up. All right, first thing, going to throw in some raw sheep's milk, 100%

00:32:17.420 grass-fed. Get all that cream in there. Going to throw in some organic glyphosate-free honey.

00:32:24.480 Got some blueberries, some frozen organic wild blueberries. I got some raw heart here. So I love

00:32:31.320 heart, especially raw. Incredible source of coenzyme Q10. Coenzyme Q10 is part of the electron

00:32:36.320 transport chain in the mitochondria of every cell in your body. And I try and eat a little bit of

00:32:41.020 heart every week sometimes i grill it sometimes i get a little crazy and i throw it into my smoothie

00:32:45.140 raw so colostrum my favorite i got whole package which has testicle oh liver and blood in it it's

00:32:52.300 really hard to find fresh stuff it's his supplement of course he's selling i'll just

00:32:55.620 empty those into the smoothie because that's the secret sauce for making it taste powder

00:32:59.660 testicle powder blend it up all right you guys ready for the money shot look at this

00:33:06.420 no no no cheers how good is it let's go blueberries good how could you beat that in the morning that

00:33:13.840 is like that'll get you going so i don't like it there are absolutely so there are 123 comments

00:33:22.220 on this video that i am not logged into twitter so i can't read them um but i guarantee you that

00:33:28.160 there are carnivore diet purists being like this isn't the carnivore diet oh what are those

00:33:32.960 blueberries doing in there what is that honey doing in there he has a video where he like

00:33:39.000 soaks strawberries in baking soda for 15 minutes and he's like that's how you get the pesticides

00:33:42.740 out yeah you soak them like beans for hummus all of the comments are like but then you rinse it 0.99

00:33:48.220 with tap water you're putting poison on it like everyone is roasting him for using fucking tap 0.99

00:33:53.540 water it's the funniest now there's fluoride in those fucking berries like like the trace 0.99

00:33:58.680 elements from fucking tap water oh but anyway this this is the real getting the band back together 0.98

00:34:03.960 in 2023 he did an erewan collab yeah to sell a fucking organ smoothie yeah so this is i found 0.98

00:34:15.380 an la times article about it these are the ingredients it says it's a concoction of 0.85

00:34:19.920 kefir beef organs raw honey blueberries bananas lucuma fruit sweetener coconut cream sea salt

00:34:27.980 maple syrup and so-called immuno milk oh no i know which consists of freeze-dried cow's

00:34:35.000 colostrum which is its initial breast milk after giving birth which is false it's actually womb

00:34:39.840 juice people who listen to our famously patreon bonus episode know that it's actually womb juice

00:34:44.320 only michael hobbs knows what colostrum really is i want everyone to know i'm doubling down boy

00:34:49.240 immuno milk has a real mystery meat vibe to it this movie cost 19 dollars we were paying 19 0.84

00:34:57.520 to eat beef organs and all of this other shit honestly given beef prices $19 is I don't know 0.97

00:35:04.520 what anything should cost could be worse beef at Erewhon are you aware Aubrey of this wired 0.97

00:35:09.240 headphones thing I know people who believe this wait do you really I absolutely know people who

00:35:15.100 will only take calls on like speaker or front like and will not hold the phone up to their head

00:35:21.320 do you mean your husband yeah yes surprise i'm heterosexual and married you're lying what aren't

00:35:31.260 you lying about bluetooth and men my husband knows the truth about 5g and chemtrails possibly knows

00:35:37.800 of anti-bluetooth guy he's also anti-receipts he has a thing where he says you should put on latex

00:35:43.720 gloves before you touch a cvs receipt or whatever because they're printed on paper that has like

00:35:49.020 that's made kind of like of like a sort of latex or rubber like it's not like paper paper is there

00:35:53.700 an argument for what happens if you do touch the receipts aside from having touched something made

00:35:58.960 out of plastic it's just this idea that like everyone in society every institution is constantly

00:36:03.980 trying to poison you yeah we're surrounded by like chemicals and like dangerous things and like

00:36:09.440 only you with like the secret knowledge the idea is the world is full of dangers you need to protect

00:36:17.380 yourself don't trust other people and definitely don't trust institutions to tell you the truth

00:36:24.640 right trust me a shirtless man in whole foods it's very wake up sheeple so we are going to watch

00:36:31.900 a clip of his appearance on the joe rogan experience i know i watched it at double

00:36:37.900 speed so this is gonna be my first time watching it at normal speed and the real driver here i

00:36:44.040 suspect is the last one jamie 10.18.09 citations look at the consumption of vegetable oil by

00:36:50.620 americans in since 1910 and that is a staggering amount you don't want to skateboard that ramp

00:36:58.720 that's tony hawk worthy man yeah that's tony hawk that's tony hawk worthy look at that man

00:37:03.260 and you can see soybean is the main one but canola sunflower cottonseed peanut and other

00:37:07.140 this is completely evolutionarily inconsistent this is completely

00:37:11.640 disynchronous with our evolution. We would never have been grinding soybeans up into oil. We

00:37:17.660 didn't have the ability to do this. And then you can get into all of the reasons this might be

00:37:22.160 doing this. But, you know, as I kind of dug into this, it gets a little bit deep in the weeds,

00:37:27.020 but at a molecular level, these polyunsaturated fats, they act differently in our body and we

00:37:33.020 don't fully have this figured out. But at the level of our mitochondria, it does look like

00:37:37.620 these polyunsaturated fats this linoleic acid rich vegetable oil is signaling things differently

00:37:42.700 jesus i think it's really there's a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that linoleic

00:37:46.040 acid is driving adipocyte hypertrophy meaning fat cells are getting bigger fat cells can do

00:37:51.300 two things they can get bigger or they can divide when fat cells get big and they don't divide they

00:37:56.360 eventually start leaking out inflammatory mediators leaking out free fatty acids you start

00:38:00.980 to see this this interesting set of data that points to the fact that maybe all these excess

00:38:04.740 linoleic acid is driving our fat cells to get really big, but isn't allowing them to divide

00:38:10.020 the way they're supposed to. His like stock in trade is throwing a bunch of like large vocabulary

00:38:16.620 words at you. Yes, science-y words. Science-y words. And at this time, he's tweeting under

00:38:21.420 the handle CarnivoreMD. He does have a medical degree, but in psychiatry. He didn't study

00:38:27.040 nutrition. What he does is he throws all these big words at you. These things that make it seem

00:38:31.840 like aha i'm like this big expert but like he doesn't actually have any training in this most

00:38:35.920 of the stuff that he says is not very true he's trying to obfuscate his lack of knowledge with

00:38:40.580 big words rather than just being like hey there's a big word let me explain it to you we were talking

00:38:44.460 earlier about um like clues to what he's doing and like who his audience might be we're finding

00:38:50.240 out here that his audience is specifically joe rogan yeah yeah just like big words were and like

00:38:55.680 I brought a visual aid and Joe Rogan's like, whoa, like the other sort of very funny epilogue

00:39:03.140 to this episode is that Paul Saladino, it's not even clear that he was on the carnivore diet

00:39:07.380 when he went on Joe Rogan. Oh my God. He says he was only on it for a year, a year and a half

00:39:13.000 in 2022. He makes a video of like, why I'm not on the carnivore diet anymore. And he says that when

00:39:19.860 he was on the carnivore diet, he says he experienced lower testosterone, sleep disturbances,

00:39:24.920 heart palpitations and muscle cramps he also talks about how you know that thing right before 1.00

00:39:30.340 you fall asleep where you kind of jerk yeah a hypnic jerk he says like his his jerks got way 0.99

00:39:36.880 worse when he was on the carnivore diet so bad that he had to stop the carnivore diet he's like 1.00

00:39:41.640 something is wrong with me so you went on joe rogan for three hours you didn't talk about one 0.96

00:39:46.980 downside of the carnivore diet you're selling a book called the fucking carnivore code later on 0.99

00:39:51.820 you're like oh yeah I like felt like shit when I was on the carnivore diet oh you didn't you 0.96

00:39:56.400 don't want to tell us that like you didn't think oh there's pros and cons to this diet what works 1.00

00:40:00.800 for me might not work for you he also the minute just like these fucking guys always do the minute 0.89

00:40:05.800 he goes off the carnivore diet he then gives an interview to some like other podcaster where he's 0.88

00:40:10.420 like oh yeah you know being in ketosis like oh it didn't work for me and I think it's not good for

00:40:15.440 other people either so he like immediately starts like giving advice and he's like he's like well

00:40:20.700 you know the carnivore diet a lot of that you know ketosis research that's based on animals and like

00:40:25.500 you really just can't extrapolate from animal studies i was like you were talking about mouse

00:40:30.680 studies on fucking joe rogan that's like half of what you talked about was like the fat cells and 0.92

00:40:34.400 fucking rats yeah it just again like this is part of the challenge with the like i experimented on 0.96

00:40:39.940 myself and of one kind of stuff yeah yeah yeah is that as you find that different practices work for 0.99

00:40:46.160 you in different life phases or when you're dealing with different health conditions or

00:40:49.680 when you're prioritizing different things, you are then sort of laundering your personal experience

00:40:56.800 as some form of scientific knowledge that has been tested. That's all he's doing. I think it

00:41:02.920 contributes to some of the weird murkiness that we have now about like people not really being

00:41:09.380 able to read a scientific study without thinking that there ought to be a individual instruction

00:41:14.800 at the end of it and that kind of thing so basically right after the joe rogan i god i

00:41:20.560 was about to say experience right after the joe rogan episode this does explode like you can see

00:41:24.960 it in the twitter data it starts showing up on places like breitbart and other right-wing media

00:41:29.660 sites like the truth behind seed oil friend of the no one breitbart so over the next couple years

00:41:34.480 this spreads around into various groups i just want to talk about a couple of the categories of

00:41:38.880 people that get obsessed with seed oils oh man can i make some guesses if you know what it's

00:41:43.760 gonna be it's like different flavors it's like a little neapolitan of like the worst people in

00:41:48.320 america it's just it's a list of moon juice locations yeah it's gonna be like gym bros 0.99

00:41:57.720 and a bunch of these fucking jokers are gonna get caught selling beef tallow as an alternative so 0.97

00:42:04.500 i'm sending you a tweet this is the first group that starts uh latching on to this this is someone 0.99

00:42:10.020 named andrew torba whose username is at based torba that's the first thing i'll tell you

00:42:19.460 that's how i know i don't know this guy because if i had never seen that before i would have

00:42:23.560 really made a meal out i hate these people but i kind of love these people like such parodies of 0.53

00:42:28.920 themselves what are you afraid of sunflowers based hobs the profile picture is just you with a katana 0.57

00:42:34.920 a sword mine is at ripped podcaster wait did i tell you i got a random text from like this guy 0.79

00:42:42.140 i met on the internet who i haven't seen in like six months randomly texted me at like nine in the

00:42:46.080 morning he's like uh i don't know if i should be telling you this but someone took your grinder

00:42:50.400 photos and uploaded them to tumblr it was on a tumblr called masculine men i was like yes so

00:42:59.080 that's why my handle is at hobbs masculine this is gonna go right to his head the thing is as long

00:43:04.300 as you don't see me moving or hear me speaking i'm so masculine as long as you don't know me

00:43:10.260 in any capacity i'm like so masculine tune in next week when i show up on lady like women

00:43:16.480 you know every time we record i text you afterwards i'm like was i mask enough on

00:43:23.800 the show totally seems super mask and you also text me i'm so glad you crossed your legs at the

00:43:29.080 ankle for the whole it's also funny to have that on the same day i checked our itunes reviews for 1.00

00:43:36.900 if books could kill and and one of them was just why is the woman talking so much

00:43:42.280 yeah the woman named michael is talking a lot all right read this extremely problematic tweet

00:43:51.060 sorry from based torba yeah read the base torba tweet kennedy banning seed oils in american food

00:43:56.720 will be the most consequential policy initiative of the last century no longer will our people be

00:44:03.520 sick and chronically ill no longer will they be jacked up on a cocktail of big pharma drugs for

00:44:09.820 these diseases people will be healthy and fit again this will lead to family creation this

00:44:16.520 will lead to far more right-wing voters half of the problem with liberalism is our miserable

00:44:22.780 drugged and diseased people this single move solves it all this one weird trick they don't

00:44:30.640 want you to know about raising birth rates by eating less salad dressing one might call it based

00:44:35.940 one might call this take based so this is the founder of gab which is like the mega mega right

00:44:44.760 wing website one of his other uh tweets from earlier in his career is few societies have 0.97

00:44:50.380 been sicker than the current year west and a large part of that sickness is due to jewish media and 0.92

00:44:55.440 technology being used to psychologically and spiritually castrate its citizens so these are 1.00

00:45:01.840 not people that are doing like dog whistles these are people that are just like whistling

00:45:05.480 like walking down the street whistling do the space lasers take part yeah exactly in the castration

00:45:11.320 so basically this is like one of the transmitters of like seed oil misinformation starting after the

00:45:17.200 Joe Rogan episode is just like straightforward, far right people. In 2021 and 2022, this also

00:45:22.820 becomes a big thing among crypto people. Fucking of course. I'm sending you again, kind of a good 0.96

00:45:30.600 tweet from like a guy that runs like a Bitcoin exchange or something. Almost every one of these

00:45:37.340 false quote unquote milks, oat, potato, pea, whatever, contains inflammatory seed oils,

00:45:44.220 typically sunflower or canola is fleeting smugness really worth developing metabolic 0.96

00:45:50.600 syndrome fuck off i sent this to every vegetarian i know is fleeting smugness 0.99

00:45:56.740 really worth developing metabolic syndrome 1.00

00:45:59.840 speaking of being being a terrible person read his own uh reply to this wow

00:46:08.960 the way these guys talk is so weird

00:46:12.480 they're like they have this weird like

00:46:14.320 Cormac McCarthy way of doing like sick

00:46:16.340 burns all the seed oil guzzlers 1.00

00:46:18.720 seething in my mentions 0.99

00:46:20.280 right now stay mad

00:46:22.480 metabolically impaired and 0.88

00:46:24.200 torpid thank you I 0.99

00:46:26.360 will you can

00:46:28.320 tell he had like the thesaurus open and like

00:46:30.260 the other window if you think I'm

00:46:32.320 not making myself a bumper

00:46:34.240 sticker that says mad metabolically

00:46:36.600 impaired and torpid

00:46:38.200 You got another thing coming.

00:46:40.620 The other group I want to talk about is, I read this term in one of the academic articles

00:46:46.660 that I saw, and I cannot stop thinking about it.

00:46:49.600 They called these people granola Nazis.

00:46:52.540 You sort of know what they mean, right?

00:46:54.300 The people who are, they're far right, but it's this sort of almost left-wing messaging

00:46:58.880 about like, we need to go back to the land.

00:47:01.220 We need to have a less corporately dominated public sphere.

00:47:05.760 But it's also fundamentally very right-wing.

00:47:07.520 Yeah, this is Liver King and all of his like, quote unquote, ancestral way of living stuff.

00:47:12.600 Very trad wife adjacent.

00:47:13.840 This whole seed oils thing, it's kind of perfect, right?

00:47:16.240 Because it's like, it's this ingredient that we're all eating a ton of that was invented in 1986, right?

00:47:21.180 Like basically in a lab, like it was bread.

00:47:23.220 It's now like a refined processed ingredient.

00:47:25.740 It fits really perfectly into this like modernity is killing us kind of narrative.

00:47:30.140 So the granola Nazis really picked this up.

00:47:32.140 And one of the main granola Nazis that gets, like, super obsessed with this and just, like, tweets out seed oils constantly is a Twitter account called Carnivore Aurelius.

00:47:42.300 I find this person very interesting as a kind of avatar of, like, the granola Nazi ideology.

00:47:50.540 And so I spent a long time, like, scrolling through this guy's feed.

00:47:53.320 You can find all kinds of other weird sort of sub-B plot conspiracy theories.

00:47:58.980 And I just want to go over them a little bit, partly because they're very funny. 0.65

00:48:02.140 And partly because like I think there's like this tendency to sort of launder these people or to think like, oh, all they want is for like us to have better diets or all they want is for like Americans to be healthier.

00:48:12.060 But this seed oil thing is kind of the tip of the iceberg of a bunch of just bizarre, deranged other narratives that are just not backed up by science and are oftentimes very openly reactionary.

00:48:23.280 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?

00:48:39.560 aubrey we're done we can stop recording that's it we've reached keep granola nazis 0.99

00:48:47.900 of bitcoin milk sure why not someone probably fucking has for fuck's sake we live in hell 0.98

00:48:55.860 it really it really delighted me so you can understand why i was a 0.99

00:49:00.940 reticent to close that tab without closing that loop first so another thing the granola nazis

00:49:06.660 are really into is ball sunning sure this is from uh carnivore aurelius considering throwing a

00:49:14.000 dating festival for carnivore singles steak eating galas good music cow milking bread baking

00:49:20.980 fighting workouts ball sunning this is the vision of the guerrilla nazis this is what we should all

00:49:27.180 be doing on weekends i love fighting don't forget we're also going to be fighting he also has one

00:49:32.500 that says wearing sunglasses in the sun makes you burn your body thinks you're indoors and doesn't

00:49:39.120 produce your natural sunscreen melanin uv light striking your eyes is one of the main signals for

00:49:45.480 your skin to start producing melanin so i love there's no sunglasses truthers as well as the

00:49:52.060 sunscreen truthers he also responded to the andrew tate tweet where andrew tate was like you

00:49:59.220 people have never had real enemies my new favorite tweet yeah this might be your new new favorite

00:50:05.240 tweet this is also a very good response oh i can't wait here is him responding to andrew tate

00:50:10.120 this is what seed oils do to your brain the seed oils increase stress disrupt hormones and lower

00:50:17.300 thyroid function despite having high tea loads of it is converting into estrogen causing balding 0.91

00:50:25.680 anger and this pms like i love it when the girlies are fighting it's like you guys

00:50:34.820 have a blast god cis dudes accusing other cis dudes of pmsing and also the balding

00:50:43.420 that like you have high tea but it is turning into estrogen due to seed oils everything about

00:50:48.900 this is so funny it's because it's like little i keep thinking of the vine where that like a 0.99

00:50:54.680 little like six-year-old kid is like you're messing with a future u.s army soldier like dumb little 0.97

00:51:00.380 losers like play acting as like as like the rock or something it's like this is not convincing to 0.99

00:51:06.680 anybody but also it's very funny to watch and i encourage it estrogen causes balding anger and 0.99

00:51:12.220 this pms like you know how women are always walking around bald and angry 0.86

00:51:19.960 and the thing is women are getting testosterone all the time but they're eating too much seed 1.00

00:51:25.480 oils and that's what turns it into estrogen and that's the only reason we have women exactly

00:51:29.860 because of the seed oils we started having women around the 50s 60s after the aha recommendations 1.00

00:51:35.240 i was just getting to that part of the history yeah women caused the obesity epidemic famously

00:51:41.140 so that's kind of the way that the seed oils panic is bouncing around on the right there's 1.00

00:51:45.480 various different flavors of it on the right. But then worryingly and inevitably, it also starts to

00:51:52.500 bounce around the kind of more credible parts of either center right or just like center left.

00:51:59.040 I am going to send you a excerpt from Chris Van Tilken's book on ultra-processed foods,

00:52:06.300 which we talked about in that episode. Oil for ultra-processed food needs to be bland,

00:52:10.400 plain and flavorless, so that it can be used to make any edible product. So manufacturers

00:52:16.960 refine the oil by heating, using phosphoric acid to remove any gums and waxes, neutralize

00:52:23.880 it with caustic soda, bleach it with a bentonite clay, and finally deodorize it using high

00:52:30.840 pressure steam. This is the process used to make soybean oil, palm oil, canola oil, and

00:52:37.560 sunflower oil for oils that make up 90% of the global market. So in some ways he's doing the

00:52:43.960 same thing that Paul Saladino is doing where he's using a lot of like big words. He's like

00:52:48.580 phosphoric acid, bentonite clay, deodorize. He's making this description of like processing

00:52:54.260 seed oil as like lurid as possible. I think it's interesting that he focuses on like

00:52:59.920 bleaching it and deodorizing it and not actually going like the purpose of those things is this,

00:53:06.300 right well also what's so interesting to me is like these people are obsessed with this idea

00:53:10.720 that there's like trace elements in our food that are harming us which again might actually be true

00:53:14.380 like i'm actually open to that discussion sure as long as it's like evidence-based but yeah the

00:53:19.560 purpose of all of this process is to reduce the chances of that happening part of the reason

00:53:25.220 they're doing this is to remove things like pesticides and like heavy metals things that

00:53:30.780 we don't actually want in our food supply and it's sort of like you don't want these things right

00:53:35.780 You're always talking about like how many particles of mercury are in the vaccines or whatever.

00:53:39.020 Okay, so you don't want these trace elements.

00:53:41.080 What would you like us to do about that?

00:53:43.080 If you just like squeeze a – I don't want to say rapeseed because it sounds so bad.

00:53:46.880 But like if you just squeeze a cottonseed and you get oil out of it, you don't want to just like be using that immediately.

00:53:52.080 And also it would go rancid on the shelf relatively quickly, which also poses food safety issues.

00:53:57.100 So like what do you actually want, right?

00:53:59.980 People say processing and he uses the term bleaching here.

00:54:03.480 And everybody always says like, oh, they're bleached.

00:54:05.780 Which seems to imply that, like, they're adding bleach to the oils.

00:54:09.140 But what they actually do, I mean, for most of these processes, if you look into it, they're basically filtering it.

00:54:14.160 So the bleaching process is you add charcoal to the oil, and charcoal loves to absorb little things.

00:54:20.400 Like, why people put charcoal on their face.

00:54:21.920 And, like, some people take, like, charcoal supplements.

00:54:23.720 You add charcoal to oil, and it absorbs a bunch of these, like, little tiny trace materials, and then you filter out the charcoal.

00:54:31.360 That process is called bleaching.

00:54:32.520 but nobody has bleached like added bleach to the oil during that right right it's not the stuff

00:54:38.140 you have to put gloves on to use in your shower or whatever yeah and like you add phosphoric acid

00:54:44.780 or oftentimes it's citric acid and then you like centrifuge it out so that those particles are but

00:54:49.820 you're basically separating out the components of the oil but you're centrifuging it and then

00:54:54.160 filtering it so you're kind of putting things in and then taking them out to make sure that you're

00:54:58.260 only left with the oil. Maybe phosphoric acid is really bad for you. Maybe there's trace elements

00:55:03.200 in the vegetable oil. Again, this kind of requires actual science to show that these things are in

00:55:08.640 the vegetable oils. And they've been tested a million times. And like, we just don't see large

00:55:12.720 amounts. In much of our life, much of culture, much of sort of the world, when there is new

00:55:19.300 science, we greet that or new technology, we greet that as an advancement and an exciting evidence

00:55:24.840 that we're like doing more of the right thing. And when it comes to food, we take that as like

00:55:31.000 a harbinger of bad things. Right. And we take that as a frightening thing rather than going,

00:55:36.220 wow, it's really cool that science has figured out how to make this oil shelf stable for a real

00:55:40.660 long time. And so lots of people can use it and it's pretty inexpensive. And fewer people get

00:55:44.940 sick from eating rancid oil. And it's like not actually proven to be bad for you. But if you

00:55:51.820 describe it in this kind of way yeah then it will get people more to the point of being like

00:55:57.800 even before you get to presenting any evidence about it one way or the other so the only kind

00:56:04.860 of part of this like ultra processed food sub narrative of seed oils that actually gave me

00:56:10.380 pause was there there's two ways of getting oil out of seeds one way is to just like press them

00:56:15.640 right this is like the cold expeller pressed whatever you see this on labels the other way

00:56:19.520 to do it is with chemicals. So you can cut the seeds into little tiny flakes and add something

00:56:24.920 called hexane to them. And hexane kind of like leeches out all of the oils. This is like super

00:56:30.300 industrial. It's like, it's cheaper than doing a press. It's more effective. So you get, I think

00:56:35.440 it's like 80% of the yield out of them rather than like 60%. It's much more efficient. And hexane is

00:56:40.620 like straightforwardly toxic. So when people in these facilities are putting hexane on the crops,

00:56:45.800 like they have to wear like hazmat suits. Like if you breathe in hexane, it's actually really bad

00:56:48.920 for you again this sounds terrible right it's like they're literally putting poison onto the

00:56:53.560 seeds to extract the oil and then like yes there are trace elements of hexane in vegetable oil this

00:56:59.460 is true that is a true statement i take it from you telling me about it and also it is nuts to me

00:57:07.420 like describing that in that way will get a bunch of people freaked out about what they're eating 0.91

00:57:12.080 but won't get them freaked out about the safety of the workers who have to put on fucking hazmat 0.99

00:57:16.240 suits. The person paying the biggest price is the person doing the work to make that process 0.98

00:57:21.580 happen. So when I first read about this in one of these like seed oil, anti-seed oil substacks or

00:57:26.040 whatever, I was like, oh, this actually sounds pretty bad. But then I went to, there's various

00:57:29.520 government reports on this. There's various academic reports on this. The first thing to

00:57:32.500 know about hexane is that it evaporates at very low temperature. So they actually add hexane to

00:57:37.380 seeds, get the oil out, and then they heat it up so that all of the hexane evaporates and they

00:57:42.060 actually capture the hexane and then they use it for like the next batch. You can just like keep

00:57:45.840 doing this over and over. Very little is actually left in the seeds. And there's been dozens of

00:57:50.700 studies on the hexane levels in vegetable oil. The fact that they're putting poison on the seeds to

00:57:55.520 get the oil out is not something that like academics are not concerned about or that like

00:57:58.920 the FDA is not concerned about. Like this is like, oh yeah, we should actually check like how much

00:58:02.660 there is. So this is an excerpt from a government report that was produced on this. In studies of

00:58:08.520 fully processed edible oil products carried out in the 1960s, it was determined that hexane residues

00:58:15.040 were generally at levels less than 10 parts per million. Investigations using more precise modern

00:58:21.240 analysis techniques in 1987 concluded that residual hexane residues for refined food products

00:58:28.020 would be less than two parts per million. If the standard assumption of 80 grams of fat consumed

00:58:34.540 per person per day is made, such residual levels would be the equivalent of no more than 2.29

00:58:41.220 micrograms per kilogram per day, which is a toxologically insignificant amount.

00:58:47.660 The most important phrase there is toxologically insignificant.

00:58:50.300 That's me too. I'm also toxologically insignificant.

00:58:53.960 There's also numerous tests on humans to just measure the amount of hexane in people's blood.

00:59:00.180 So as part of the NHANES study, starting in 2009, they started testing for hexane,

00:59:05.080 like how much hexane can we find in these people's tissues? And the levels were below

00:59:08.740 the point where they can even detect them. According to this government report, the biggest

00:59:12.940 risk of hexane exposure is actually a car exhaust. So for whatever reason, hexane is also present in

00:59:19.340 car gasoline. And so if you live in an urban area, you're also getting exposed at very low levels

00:59:25.200 to hexane. So the amount that you're getting in vegetable oil just isn't significant. And also

00:59:31.380 there's other sources of this in the world that we're also getting exposed to at trace amounts.

00:59:37.020 and we're not finding it in humans when we test them.

00:59:40.100 What they're doing is they're clearly seizing on anything

00:59:43.440 to say that like seed oils are poison.

00:59:46.140 Like you can tell the motivated reasoning, right?

00:59:48.520 They're like, how are they made?

00:59:49.260 Oh, they put poison on them.

00:59:50.180 Yes, there it is.

00:59:51.320 But like people have been looking at this for decades.

00:59:53.240 We just don't find large risks to the US population.

00:59:55.600 It's a rhetoric that's relying on hanging out

00:59:58.060 in your amygdala and freaking you out

01:00:00.140 and not ever making its way into your frontal lobe.

01:00:03.060 Now that the seed oils thing has kind of been folded

01:00:05.680 into the ultra processed food issue, you find sort of articles about how bad seed oils are in like

01:00:12.040 much more credible places. So this is from the Cleveland Clinic, talking about like the lack of

01:00:18.960 nutrients in seed oils, like all of the processing robs it of nutrients. So here's this.

01:00:24.960 Some seed oils would be high in vitamin E and phenols, if not for the refining process itself.

01:00:30.940 but they're typically very processed to help with taste color and shelf life quote the processing

01:00:37.780 of these oils strips the seeds of their nutrients and could potentially add harmful ingredients

01:00:43.160 the end result is oils with no real health benefits the specific thing of like they're

01:00:48.940 they're being denuded of their nutrients is something you always find like they used to

01:00:53.840 have antioxidants when they were like in the seeds but now they don't have antioxidants

01:00:58.080 The research for this made me super pilled on vitamin E because you always hear like,

01:01:03.300 oh, it strips the vitamin E out of the vegetable oil and butter is so high in vitamin E.

01:01:08.860 If you look up vitamin E deficiency, vitamin E deficiency almost never happens in the United

01:01:13.740 States.

01:01:14.060 This is not something that you need to worry about.

01:01:15.940 It's something that like premature babies often have a problem with absorbing fats.

01:01:20.200 If you have Crohn's disease, you can have it.

01:01:22.400 If you have like problems with your liver or kidney function, basically if you have

01:01:25.500 an underlying like pretty serious condition that affects your ability to absorb fat,

01:01:31.380 then you need to worry about vitamin E. But dietary sources of vitamin E are just not something you

01:01:36.860 need to worry about if you don't have a diagnosis of something like that. They're basically taking

01:01:40.660 this thing that is essentially a marketing claim, like, oh, look at all the vitamin E in this.

01:01:44.780 And they're acting as if this is something you need to think about. Like you can go your whole

01:01:48.640 life never thinking about your dietary sources of vitamin E. You just don't need to think about it.

01:01:53.780 So the fact that something doesn't have vitamin E is just irrelevant information.

01:01:58.160 It's kind of the same with the antioxidant thing.

01:01:59.960 I mean, the antioxidants that are present in seed oils are present in like lots of stuff.

01:02:04.440 I mean, even people who are eating at like the high end of seed oils, it's not that much of their consumption, right?

01:02:10.380 It's like maybe a couple tablespoons a day.

01:02:13.080 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.

01:02:19.400 But they were never that high to begin with.

01:02:20.980 You're not eating that much of them.

01:02:22.120 And it just, it just isn't really a meaningful contributor to your nutrient mix.

01:02:27.460 There's been a similar sort of freak out over the last couple of years in like weight loss

01:02:32.720 media spaces and particularly social media spaces about the idea of like cortisol face

01:02:38.920 or cortisol belly or whatever.

01:02:41.640 People just keep having to interview doctors going, you're talking about Cushing's syndrome.

01:02:46.700 It's really rare and your body changes really drastically and really quickly.

01:02:51.180 so like you know if you have it it's not just is this the reason why you're fatter than you want

01:02:56.620 to be like yeah that's not the same thing as like a medical condition and it just feels like

01:03:01.940 you know especially in a media landscape that includes things like the like everly well

01:03:08.580 home food intolerance tests and that kind of thing that we are sort of constantly muddying

01:03:15.140 the water between personal practices that make you feel a little better and like health conditions

01:03:21.160 that are known and treatable everyone is reaching for this way of like legitimizing whatever their

01:03:26.980 dietary stuff is or stuff is by reaching for like clinical language right which ends up further sort

01:03:33.460 of blurring the line so we're sort of moving toward better and better arguments against seed

01:03:39.520 oils like we started with like seed oils are destroying our birth rates from like the super

01:03:43.760 far right like that's just bananas we then get to the stuff of like they're putting chemicals in it

01:03:47.860 and like maybe it leaches out nutrients that's like roughly true but kind of like not meaningfully

01:03:52.560 true in a way that anybody needs to worry about by far the best argument against seed oils is

01:03:58.600 the balance of omega-6s versus omega-3s so i am going to send you an excerpt from a guy named

01:04:06.940 mark hyman this is a doctor who do you know him just much requested we've gotten so many dr hyman

01:04:15.280 requests this is one of those guys there's so many like mds like social media mds i'm so concerned

01:04:20.120 about this this is a guy who is one of the main sources of like seed oils misinformation starting

01:04:26.740 relatively early he actually started writing about in 2016 he's also i believe uh the founder

01:04:32.120 of what he calls the pegan diet what is that paleo and vegan wait so does that mean if you're

01:04:39.900 paleo and raw it's the paw diet let's keep going let's do this for the rest of that

01:04:46.760 yes and we've been talking about which puns are too sweaty and which are not

01:04:55.460 sweaty enough so let's just like really hone in so here is mark hyman on seed oils did you know

01:05:03.600 those who consume high levels of refined oils and low levels of omega-3 fats have higher rates

01:05:10.300 of depression, suicide, and homicide. People who eat seed oils have a higher rate of homicide as

01:05:16.000 wild. In prehistoric times, our ancestors consumed omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids in the healthy

01:05:22.160 ratio one to one. Since the advent of refined vegetable oils, however, most of us are eating

01:05:29.080 far more omega-6s than we should. The ratio can get up to 20 to 1 for people who eat a lot of

01:05:36.680 processed foods. This claim also shows up in the Maha report. It says seed oils contribute to an

01:05:43.400 imbalanced omega-6 omega-3 ratio, a topic of ongoing research for its potential role in

01:05:49.080 inflammation. This is a very common claim about seed oils that they have too many omega-6s and

01:05:54.940 And this ratio of omega-6s versus omega-3s is basically causing chronic inflammation.

01:05:59.720 It's like, what is making us sick?

01:06:00.720 Sort of the implication here is that foods as they are naturally produced

01:06:04.280 already reflect a one-to-one ratio of omega-6s and omega-3s.

01:06:09.780 And I don't know that that's true.

01:06:11.420 This omega-3, omega-6 ratio thing as an argument against seed oils is also kind of funny

01:06:16.100 because canola oil is pretty high in omega-3s.

01:06:19.480 Canola oil is around 10% omega-3s.

01:06:22.560 Olive oil is only 1% omega-3s.

01:06:24.580 That's funny.

01:06:25.560 I've seen debunkings of the seed oil thing that will be like, well, just because our

01:06:30.520 Paleolithic ancestors ate a certain way doesn't mean we have to, which is true.

01:06:35.060 Yeah.

01:06:35.440 However, did our Paleolithic ancestors eat a one-to-one ratio?

01:06:39.840 No, Michael, I didn't go galaxy brain enough.

01:06:43.740 We've been doing this show for so long and I should have known.

01:06:46.820 So this claim that our ancestors ate a one-to-one ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s appears to have

01:06:54.460 originated with like one lady. So there's a researcher named Artemis Simopoulos who is a

01:07:00.900 nutrition researcher. She writes the omega diet in 1999. She's like early on the train of like

01:07:08.220 omega-3s will fix us, omega-6s are poison. But what I've noticed in her work, I mean,

01:07:13.100 she's been publishing stuff about this for like 20 years. She often cites herself. So she'll say

01:07:17.820 like human beings evolved consuming a diet that contained equal omega-3s and omega-6s. And then

01:07:22.580 it's like footnote 14 and you go to footnote 14 and it's like Simopolis, 1999. First of all,

01:07:27.860 it's very sketchy to not just have a clear citation for something like that. Like that's

01:07:31.540 an empirical claim. When you finally follow back all of her citations, she doesn't really have any

01:07:36.920 basis for saying that. She eventually links to a couple of anthropological reports of current

01:07:41.940 hunter-gatherer societies where they do surveys of like caloric intake. But these surveys only

01:07:47.160 include saturated versus unsaturated fats and omega-3s and omega-6s are both unsaturated fats

01:07:53.160 so they're not really looking at that ratio basically she is extrapolating from the amount

01:07:58.480 of animal foods that these current hunter-gatherer societies are eating to say well animal foods tend

01:08:05.260 to be higher in omega-3s therefore if they're eating a lot of animal foods then they're going

01:08:09.880 to be getting more omega-3s than present-day humans the problem with that however is like

01:08:14.520 if you actually read the literature, the main thing that sticks out to you is the diversity.

01:08:18.380 So, I mean, there are like hunter-gatherer societies that are eating like 70% of their

01:08:21.540 calories from various, you know, meats and dairy kinds of products. But there's also some that are

01:08:25.580 eating like 10%. Sure. It's just really facile to say like, well, our ancestors ate a one-to-one

01:08:31.200 ratio. You know, we were talking earlier about like, we have these sort of filters around political

01:08:36.540 misinformation and disinformation, but less so. We don't exercise those in the same way when it

01:08:40.920 comes to like health and wellness stuff when a political figure harkens back to some sort of

01:08:46.620 like rhetoric of nostalgia and how things used to be better I think a lot of folks have a little

01:08:51.660 more muscle memory of going yeah what time period are you talking about and what are the things that

01:08:57.540 were better and who were they better for because usually that nostalgia when it's uh invoked by

01:09:03.340 the right is for like uh Jim Crow era right right and I think there is a similar sort of

01:09:09.800 set of rhetoric around like ancestral foods and eating like our ancestors and that sort of thing

01:09:16.480 without ever really reckoning with like what was the life expectancy at that point my guys 0.56

01:09:22.000 as long as we're doing this ancestral shit what were the rates of trichinosis the other claim 0.84

01:09:27.800 that i want to talk about is this idea that your omega-6 versus omega-3 ratio being out of balance 0.98

01:09:34.240 causes inflammation. This is something you see everywhere. It's like the ratio is out of whack.

01:09:39.980 It used to be one to one. Now it's 20 to one. And we have all these inflammation processes in

01:09:43.720 our body. This is what's making us sick. I found a super interesting article on this

01:09:47.040 called The Omega-6 Omega-3 Ratio, A Critical Appraisal and Possible Successor by William S.

01:09:52.660 Harris. So in this review, he basically notes that like among researchers, this thing about

01:09:59.580 the omega-6 omega-3 ratio that debate has been settled this is a thing that happened in like

01:10:04.800 the 90s and 2000s and like this ratio isn't really something that scientists refer to anymore so like

01:10:10.380 we publicly are reenacting a debate that scientists had like 20 years ago and like most of us just

01:10:15.840 weren't paying attention to so he says the increased risk for disease supposedly associated

01:10:20.060 with high omega-3 omega-6 ratio is classically attributed to the omega-6 being pro-inflammatory

01:10:25.180 and omega-3s being anti-inflammatory.

01:10:27.540 However, this view, which might have been reasonable in the 1970s,

01:10:30.620 is now far too simplistic and enjoys little to no direct support from studies in humans.

01:10:35.040 When this person says it's too simplistic,

01:10:37.380 do they offer some more like here's what the complexity around it looks like?

01:10:41.220 Aubrey, welcome to the next hour of your life.

01:10:43.120 Welcome to what we will be discussing.

01:10:46.220 She's one big segue.

01:10:47.980 This was like such a revelation to me and like so fun to read the literature on this

01:10:50.840 because this whole field is kind of asking the question,

01:10:53.220 what does it mean for something to be bad for you? Like you hear this all the time, right? You're

01:10:57.340 like, a brownie is bad for you. But like metabolically, chemically, what do we really 1.00

01:11:02.200 mean by that? So throughout this entire period where they're figuring out the basic science of

01:11:06.900 fatty acids, they basically come up with a model by which omega-6s would cause inflammation. So

01:11:12.820 this was kind of the original theory of why they're bad for you. Omega-6s contain something

01:11:17.420 called linoleic acid. When you eat it, it is then converted into something called arachidonic acid

01:11:22.900 inside of your body. Arachidonic acid is associated with inflammation, so that raises

01:11:27.380 inflammation markers. And then if you're operating under a state of chronic inflammation, that does

01:11:32.000 affect health outcomes later. So when you say omega-6s are bad for you, what you're really

01:11:35.720 talking about is like a four-stage process. And you're talking about contributing to but not being

01:11:41.820 the sole cause of that set of processes. This is also kind of like one of the funny things about

01:11:46.880 this because there are countries and there are like subnational regions where people eat way

01:11:51.040 more seed oils than other places. Like for whatever reason in Israel, they have a huge

01:11:55.020 consumption of seed oils and like they don't have like twice or three times or four times the amount

01:11:59.620 of heart disease. So if we're talking about something that's like a toxic substance, like

01:12:03.180 the thing the far right people are saying, it would just be really obvious. At the most, we're

01:12:07.600 talking about something that is contributing, like a meaningful contributor. But we're not talking

01:12:11.180 about like if you stop eating seed oils, you'll never have a heart attack like that. That just

01:12:14.520 isn't really like on the table as an option, essentially. Yeah, totally. And I think it's how

01:12:18.240 a lot of like popular health information gets disseminated right exactly is like leaving people

01:12:24.040 with that not really ever saying it out yeah yeah but leaving people with the distinct impression

01:12:29.280 that this is one of the only if not the biggest right contributors to like heart health issues

01:12:36.560 right so basically we originally had this model that was like okay omega-6s have linoleic acid

01:12:42.380 that converts to arachidonic acid and then arachidonic acid causes inflammation and

01:12:46.840 inflammation causes heart problems. The problem is over the course of the last couple of decades,

01:12:51.860 we've realized that every single step of that process is significantly more complicated.

01:12:56.260 So the first thing is it's true that omega-6s contain a lot of linoleic acid, but it's not

01:13:01.080 actually true that linoleic acid is converted to arachidonic acid. When you eat linoleic acid,

01:13:06.280 only about 0.2% is converted into arachidonic acid, which is allegedly like the sort of the

01:13:12.060 quote-unquote bad kind of acid, right? So very little of it is being converted. And also they've

01:13:16.320 done studies where they like massively increase people's linoleic acid consumption and their

01:13:22.660 arachidonic acid levels don't change at all. The other step of this is like the question of

01:13:27.800 is arachidonic acid bad? So they've also done studies where they just give people arachidonic

01:13:33.420 acid. Again, this is the kind of acid that is allegedly bad, right? This is the kind of acid

01:13:37.140 that causes inflammation in your body. They give people supplements directly supplementing

01:13:41.700 arachidonic acid in their bodies and their inflammation markers don't change.

01:13:45.220 okay this appears to be one of those things where it's essentially the animal models breaking down

01:13:51.540 that we see it in mice and rabbits and i think there was some studies in chimps as well

01:13:56.160 but in humans we just don't see a relationship between these acids and inflammation what

01:14:01.820 actually happens is it increases some markers of inflammation and it reduces other markers

01:14:06.540 of inflammation this is really eroding my confidence in the media literacy skills

01:14:10.620 of the audience of the founder of gab wait they're not looking at the cochran review

01:14:17.780 they're not going straight to primary sources and reading for comprehension the other kind

01:14:23.480 of work that they were doing over the last couple decades was just like looking at do

01:14:27.480 people with high levels of linoleic acid and arachidonic acid have worse outcomes and like

01:14:33.240 they don't there's a huge study in europe where they're they're taking blood work from 68 000

01:14:38.460 people and then following them over time to see who has part attacks and strokes and various other

01:14:43.760 things. And like, there's no relationship between linoleic or arachidonic acid and outcomes.

01:14:49.600 Okay, so I'm sending you an excerpt from a meta-analysis. This is not the Cochrane review,

01:14:54.760 but there is a Cochrane review on seed oils and it doesn't find any effect.

01:14:57.940 An analysis of 30 randomized controlled trials found that eating more linoleic acid was not

01:15:04.120 linked to higher blood levels of inflammatory markers. In another analysis on data from nearly

01:15:10.340 70,000 people, higher blood levels of both linoleic and arachidonic acid were linked to a

01:15:17.640 lower risk of cardiovascular disease. Great. So it's maybe making you healthier.

01:15:23.320 So there's actually like some evidence that it's actually protective.

01:15:27.520 So we're just careening toward a bunch of Joe Rogan listeners having worse heart health.

01:15:32.820 Yeah. I mean, I don't want to like go overboard. Another thing to mention is that a lot of the

01:15:37.580 cardiovascular disease risk stuff on seed oils that finds a benefit or finds no effect

01:15:42.720 is based on these kind of large population studies that we're always complaining about

01:15:46.800 on the show where they're just like, what do you eat? And then people can't remember stuff.

01:15:50.240 And then 20 years later, you're like, how many people died of heart attacks? So I don't want

01:15:53.100 to like all of a sudden say that those studies are good just because like I want to own Joe Rogan.

01:15:58.120 Like 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.

01:16:04.980 I'm not going to like make a claim like that, but what it does show is there's, there's no affirmative evidence that seed oils are bad for you.

01:16:11.600 Sure.

01:16:11.740 The sort of the, the consensus is that it, it either doesn't do anything or it's slightly protective.

01:16:18.020 Again, it just isn't really something that you need to think about.

01:16:20.480 Which I also just think about, like, as a, you know, 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.

01:16:37.500 and this is like a legitimating force for those folks.

01:16:40.460 Or they already have a real disordered relationship with food 0.78

01:16:44.600 and this gives them some scientific cover

01:16:47.300 to run further into that disordered relationship with food, right?

01:16:52.160 I also think about, you know,

01:16:54.740 a friend of mine was redoing his kitchen.

01:16:58.400 He's a carpenter.

01:16:59.740 He called me and was like,

01:17:00.880 what do you think about having two bowls in the sink

01:17:03.200 versus one bowl in the sink?

01:17:04.920 And I was like, uh...

01:17:06.080 What?

01:17:06.360 I don't, you know how some things are divided and there's like a separate area where the garbage disposal is and then a separate one where the drain is.

01:17:13.100 And he was like, a friend of mine is a chef and said, for food safety reasons, it's really helpful to have two bowls.

01:17:19.660 And I was like, look, I'm sure your friend is right.

01:17:22.880 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 compartments there are in my sink.

01:17:35.120 and i think that there's something similar here right that is like we all kind of know that we

01:17:41.340 got bigger fish to fry you kind of know what you could work on with your own eating or exercise or 0.92

01:17:46.400 whatever and usually it's shit like you didn't get enough sleep or you didn't go grocery shopping or 0.95

01:17:51.460 like it's like much bigger more present issues than like what kind of oil am i cooking with 0.98

01:17:59.300 when i cook my food at home like right you're cooking food at home you're buying and making

01:18:03.800 your own food you're already ahead of the game don't worry about it and here you are afraid of

01:18:08.380 sunflowers this is pms like behavior

01:18:33.800 Thank you.

Maintenance Phase - August 26, 2025

Seed Oils

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