If you follow my blogs, you know I talk a lot about the harmful effects of vegetable oils and sugar.
Unless you’re cooking completely from scratch, you’re consuming these toxins.
You can’t simply say, I don’t cook with vegetable oil.
Although that’s a tremendous start, that’s not enough.
You have to move to the next level.
We need to take action and help our children.
They’re getting sicker and sicker at a younger age.
Voiced by Alex Clark (food activist, representing millennial women in their late 20’s and early 30’s): “By virtually every measure, millennials are more health conscious than any generation before us, but at the same time we’re also the sickest… The next generation of children is predicted to not outlive their parents if we continue on the trajectory we’re currently on.”
What! How can that be?
Eating vegetable oil and sugar triggers a cascade of free radicals that can interfere with nearly everything your cells need to do, leading to almost any disease you can name.
Getting all vegetable oils out of the American diet (and food system) and reducing sugar to a minimum would be a game changer.
It has the potential to turn the ship around and begin to reverse all our chronic diseases.
You know the diseases I’m talking about:
- Diabetes (Children today are 20% more likely to develop Type 1 Diabetes than they were 20 years ago.[1])
- Hypertension
- Heart Disease
- Lipid Problems
- Obesity (20% of children and adolescents in the U.S. have obesity, per the CDC)
- Polycystic Ovarian Disease
- Non-Alcoholic Liver Disease (20% of children and 45% of adults today suffer from non-alcoholic liver disease)
- Cancer (Childhood cancer rates are rising 8% each year.[2])
- Dementia
- Parkinson’s Disease
- Immune suppression.
- Autoimmune disorders
- IBS
- Increased intestinal permeability (aka: leaky gut)
- Allergies
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Stroke
- ADD/ADHD/Autism
- Infertility
- And the list goes on and on
But it will take a concerted effort from you and me and all those we can get on our band wagon.
To help you feel confident in educating others on the ill effects of vegetable oil, I want to explain exactly what they are.
Knowing where they come from and how they’re made should be enough to incentivize you to cut them completely from your diet and to sound the alarm.
First, it’s important to grasp that vegetable oils are NOT actually vegetable oils BUT seed oils.
They come from seeds whose job is to procreate. Hence, they work hard to protect themselves and do not naturally give up their oil.
Instead of using a slow-moving stone press to extract the oil, as was used traditionally for something like sesame seeds, the seed is crushed, then heated to a temp of 230° F.[3]
Then oil is squeezed out at pressures of 10-20 tons per inch, thus creating even more heat.
During the process, the oils are exposed to damaging light and oxygen. To extract the last 10% of the oil, processors use solvents, usually hexane.[4] (Hexanes are obtained chiefly by crude oil refining.[5],[6])
What comes out is a black, stinky gunk, unappetizing and inedible.[7]
So now what happens?
It takes twenty or so additional stages to bleach and deodorize the dark, stinky gunk.[8]
That is, the oil goes through a degunking process to cover up the rancidity and foulness and make it smell, look and taste good.
Then they’re put into plastic bottles and go on store shelves. The plastic and exposure to light further degrades them.
They are highly fragile, cause free radicals to form and are extremely carcinogenic.
Free radicals damage cell membranes, DNA, and other cellular structures and contribute to the formation of atherosclerotic plaque (plaque buildup in the arteries).[9]
Now you know why I said:
Knowing where they come from and how they’re made should be enough incentivize you to cut them completely from your diet and to sound the alarm.
The main oils to watch out for are: canola, corn, cottonseed, safflower, soy, sunflower, rice bran, and grapeseed.[10]
It doesn’t matter if it’s organic or not. If it’s organic and has gone through this process you don’t want to consume it.
If a bottle of oil says expeller or cold pressed, please verify that it is ONLY expeller or cold pressed and has not also gone through the refining process described above.
Expeller-pressed may simply mean the manufacturer didn’t use a solvent to maximize extraction.[11]
Knowing what’s true about the labeling may require a simple call to the company, a step well worth taking.
These oils (as with other food products) are basically by-products of industrial waste. In other words, they’re industrial waste repurposed.
And they’re cheap, much cheaper than real foods.
To give you an example of how they’re industrial waste repurposed, let’s take a brief look at the history of cottonseed oil.
Cottonseed oil was the foundation for the infamous Crisco and for margarine.
I don’t know about you. But the thought of eating cottonseeds is quite repulsive.
Besides not appealing to me to eat, cotton seeds are extremely toxic.
They produce acute poisoning, as well as cumulative effects after weeks or years of eating very small amounts.[12]
They’re so toxic that 19th century law prohibited them from being dumped near rivers.
Yet at the same time, products derived from cottonseed (oil, cellulose, flour and meal) and meat and milk from animals fed cottonseed, have been served as food in the 1800’s.[13]
By the 1860’s, cottonseed oil was commonly mixed into lard or olive oil and eaten by both humans and animals.
At that time, cottonseed oil was even more toxic than today because the seeds were not as heavily processed as now to remove gossypol, the major poison in cottonseeds – a yellow polyphenol pigment that serves as the cotton plant’s natural pesticide.
It had a bad odor from the trichloroethylene solvent, the rancid linoleic acid and the “foul-smelling” cyclopropene fats.[14]
Hence, manufacturers did not initially sell it as straight cottonseed oil. Rather they secretly added it to olive oil or lard, selling it in the U.S., Europe and Russia.
* * * * * * *
For you history buffs reading this, here are some more not-so-fun facts:
In 1899 David Wesson invented a deodorization process, and manufacturers began selling straight cottonseed oil.[15]
I bet you remember Wesson Oil if you grow up in the U.S.
By the early 1900’s, people and animals were consuming straight cottonseed oil, an industrial waste product, and continue to do so to this day.[16]
1911. Using a hydrogenation process invented in Germany, Proctor and Gamble marketed Crisco as a “pure” product. (As opposed to lard adulterated with cottonseed oil.)[17]
Is it man knows best? Or God knows best? Or man thinks he knows best?
Interestingly, the first heart attack was not until 1921, after we introduced these manmade industrial oils, and reduced the consumption of the God made fats that we’d been consuming since creation.
1954. The first tub-style margarine, Chiffon, was manufactured, containing 100 percent partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil and thus, containing trans fats in addition to the other poisons such as food dyes and flavorings.[18]
1956-1957. The American Heart Association (AHA) went on television to present the “diet-heart hypothesis,” telling Americans that saturated fat is unhealthy because it increases cholesterol, which clogs arteries, thus causing coronary artery disease. Consumption of meat, eggs and butter went down, and cottonseed oil consumption increased.[19]
Ironically (or not so ironically), the opposite of what the AHA expected occurred: deaths from coronary artery disease skyrocket.
1969. Crisco consumption in the U.S. peaked and then decreased rapidly. Interestingly, deaths from heart disease also peaked in 1969 and then rapidly decrease. This decline was attributed to statins.
However, because statins increase all-cause mortality, the fewer deaths from heart disease is more likely the result of lower Crisco consumption.
* * * * * * *
Vegetable oils contain mostly heat-sensitive polyunsaturated fats (aka PUFAs). They’re fragile fats that when heated become toxic compounds, including trans fats.[20]
This heat sensitivity issue means that all processed vegetable oils and all products containing vegetable oils*** contain trans fats – even when the label seems to guarantee them trans free.[21]
***Everything containing vegetable oil is almost every packaged item found on a grocery store shelf and used heavily in fast food chains and restaurants.
Chemical analysis has shown that even bottles of organic expeller-pressed canola oil contain as much as 5 percent trans fats, plus cyclic-hydrocarbons ( carcinogens) and oxyphytosterols (highly damaging to arteries).[22]
When you cut out vegetable oils and reduce sugar to a minimum, you’ll most likely be cutting out all highly processed and denatured foods.
You know what this means?
You’ll also be cutting out the 10,000 plus food additives found in America manufactured foods.[23]
Food additives that are toxic and intentionally addictive so that you will continue consuming foods that are killing you.
It’s important to recognize much of what goes into raising our food and manufacturing it into shelf stable products comes from a repurposing of industrial waste and warfare chemicals.
When the wars ended, the same companies responsible for the production of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War and for providing the chemicals used in Nazi nerve agents and gas chambers, needed a new market for their chemicals.
They quickly found a new purpose – spraying American farmland to kill bugs and pests.[24]
Let’s create a future where our food system is designed to nourish us and not destroy us.
Let’s give Alex and her generation the ability to raise children who are happy, healthy and mentally well.
The quickest way to do this is for us as consumers to start boycotting with our wallets.
This will entail speaking up to friends, family, neighbors, pastors, church leaders, and anyone you know who eats packaged foods and/or eats out to get them onboard too.
Practically speaking this means no more goldfish or Cheerios for the little ones. Not only do they contain industrial seed oils and sugar, they’re loaded with glyphosate.
Glyphosate is one of the most well-known and widely used poisons sprayed on American farmland. You can assume if the food is not organic, it’s likely contaminated with glyphosate.
Please share this and my other blogs with as many people as you can.
If you have other ideas of how we can procure change, pop them in the comment section below.
Thank you for listening and taking action.
May God’s peace and grace be upon you.
Karen
[1] https://rumble.com/v5fy7bv-american-health-and-nutrition-a-second-opinion.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
[2] Ibid
[3] Fallon S and Enig M Nourishing Traditions, New Trends Publishing Inc 2001. pp. 13-14
[4] Ibid
[5] https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/academic-and-educational-journals/hexane
[6] https://www.vedantu.com/chemistry/hexane
[7] Fallon S and Enig M Nourishing Traditions, New Trends Publishing Inc 2001. pp. 13-14
[8] Shanahan C Deep Nutrition. Flatiron Books 2016, p. 138
[9] Fallon S and Enig M Nourishing Traditions, New Trends Publishing Inc 2001. pp. 13-14
[10] Shanahan C Deep Nutrition. Flatiron Books 2016, p. 137
[11] Shanahan C Deep Nutrition. Flatiron Books 2016, p. 138
[12] Cotton Seed Toxicity, McGovern Tendler Joan, Wise Traditions in Food, Farming, and the Healing Arts, Volume 25 Number 2, Summer 2024
[13] Ibid
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid
[16] Ibid
[17] Ibid
[18] Ibid
[19] Ibid
[20] Dietary oxidized fatty acids: an atherogenic risk? Meera Penumetchaa M. Journal of Lipid Research, vol. 41, 1473-1480, September 200
[21] Shanahan C and L Deep Nutrition. Flatiron Books 2016, p. 135
[22] Formation of modified fatty acids and oxyphytosterols during refining of low erucic acid rapreseed oil, aka canola oil, Lambert PJ, Agic Food Chem, July 2003, 16;51(15):428:90
[23] https://rumble.com/v5fy7bv-american-health-and-nutrition-a-second-opinion.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
[24] Ibid
