Vegetable Oil – Your Worst Enemy, Ubiquitously Hidden in Plain Sight

“Thanks to vegetable oil’s inherent ability to inhibit life, vegetable oils are the chemicals that preserve a Twinkie for years on end.  More than any other ingredient, vegetable oil is what puts the “junk” in junk food.”

Deep Nutrition, Catherine Shanahan, M.D.

If you go to your pantry right now and pick up, say, dried cranberries, what ingredient(s) would you expect to see on the list?  Maybe, like me, you’d think “cranberries?”  And, like me, you’d be wrong.  I was shocked to find both cranberries and sunflower oil on that list of ingredients.  In fact, go pull down anything boxed or bagged from your pantry.  Cereal?  Bread? Tortilla chips?  Yep, most likely all contain vegetable oil.  Or check out your hummus, creamer, even some plant-based milks.  It is staggering to find that nearly every processed food contains vegetable oil, and usually a blend of multiple vegetable oils, as a preservative.  Is this a bad thing?  Yes, it really, really is.

So, what are vegetable oils?  Well, unlike the name, they are certainly not vegetables, nor are they derived from them.  Vegetable oils are oils extracted from seeds.  Specifically, vegetable oils include: 

* Canola oil (also known as rapeseed oil – lovely name)

* Sunflower oil

* Safflower oil

* Grapeseed oil

* Soybean oil

* Cottonseed oil

* Sesame oil

* Palm (kernel) oil

While the seeds in their whole food form are healthy, the extensive amount of processing that must take place to extract oil from the seeds results in a pre-oxidized product containing unnaturally high levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which are highly unstable and prone to further oxidation.  The PUFAs found in these oils are omega-6s, which your body does need, but which it needs in a balanced ratio with your omega-3s.  Unfortunately, because of the extraordinarily-processed nature of the Standard American Diet (SAD (a very apt acronym)), people are now consuming excessive amounts of omega-6s compared to omega-3s, which results in a chronic inflammatory state. 

“Vegetable oil is undoubtedly the most unnatural product we eat in any significant amount.”

Deep Nutrition, Catherine Shanahan, M.D.

But what are the real detriments to our bodies and minds of consuming vegetable oils?  My best friend, who is an amazing doctor, and a concerned mom like myself, introduced me to a book called “Deep Nutrition, Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food,” written by Catherine Shanahan, M.D., who does a deep dive into the mechanisms through which vegetable oils wreak havoc on our bodies, and, in her opinion (in combination with public enemy number two, sugar), are the undeniable cause of the modern-day epidemic of obesity and disease we see so readily today.  Indeed, before the rise of processed foods and their star ingredient, vegetable oil, we didn’t see the staggering levels of cancers, auto-immune diseases, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and so many other debilitating conditions that seem to now affect the majority of our population.  But here we are.

Vegetable oils damage our bodies systemically, and have a particularly detrimental effect on the brain.  Shanahan labels vegetable oils as “Brain Killers,” and the perfect “brain-eating toxins,” because, through several systemic mechanisms, vegetable oils attack your brain.  If that sounds scary, it is.  Shanahan identifies multiple ways in which vegetable oils directly or indirectly damage the brain (and every other bodily system along the way).  Below is a summary of Shanahan’s highly-detailed explanation (which I recommend reading in full) of how vegetable oils wage war on your brain.

1.   Degradation of Gut Health – We need stomach acids to break down our food.  But in the presence of vegetable oils, stomach acids interact with our food compounds differently, creating oxidative reactions that form MegaTrans fats that damage the stomach lining and cause inflammation.  And that pro-inflammatory effect impacts the rest of the digestive tract as the vegetable oil makes its way down.  Not only does this lead to short-term bouts of heartburn, gastritis, and other digestive symptoms, but, chronically, can lead to ulcers and cancer.  Moreover, inflammation can reduce the production of stomach acid, which leads to inadequate absorption of essential vitamins and antioxidants.  Ultimately, this will completely wreck the gut microbiota, leading to a dearth of the “good guy” bacteria, and a reduced production of our feel-good neurotransmitters (over 90% of which are produced in the gut!).  You may have heard of the gut-brain connection, which is a literal connection via the vagus nerve (which runs from the brain stem to the colon).  As a result, the health of our gut is directly related to, and impacts, our mental health.  Food is mood—literally.  By damaging the health of our gut, vegetable oils are directly impairing mental health. 

2.  Antioxidant Reduction – The brain, more than any other organ, needs antioxidants.  The brain functions in a highly explosive way, requiring consistent mitigation.  The byproducts created by mitochondrial reactions (energy production through the electron transfer process) in the brain, are like little sparks flying.  And this is combined with the highly-flammable, naturally-occurring PUFAs that make up the brain’s synaptic connections (communication system).  To avoid a fire, your brain needs antioxidants, some of which your body makes, and some of which you need through diet (which your body can’t make on its own).  Unfortunately, if the lipoproteins that transport the dietary antioxidants to the brain are also carrying vegetable oils, the anti-oxidants will use their one life to neutralize the MegaTrans fats in the vegetable oil, and won’t even reach the brain.  This leaves your brain without its primary defense system.  Starved of antioxidants, as Shanahan bleakly puts it, “the brain suffers a slow death by oxidative stress,” which is what we see in (the alarmingly high and rising cases of) cognitive dementia.  Yikes.

3.  Blood Flow – Your brain (like your body), requires increased blood flow to function.  This is accomplished through arterial dilation (expansion of the arteries).  In short, when cells are running low on fuel, they produce nitric oxide, which signals blood vessels to dilate.  Antioxidants protect nitric oxide, and therefore arterial dilation.  As discussed above, because vegetable oils rob the brain of antioxidants, you would correctly suspect reduced arterial dilation, and therefore blood flow, to the brain.  And without increased blood flow, the brain can’t function optimally, meaning brain fog and mental fatigue.  What’s more, heating vegetable oil makes matters infinitely worse, as the heating process creates more distorted fats from the oil.  Shanahan discusses a mind-blowing study finding that a single meal of fries cooked in week-old vegetable oil (meaning it was heated and re-heated numerous times, causing increasingly more toxic byproducts) caused blood flow disruption to the brain lasting 24 hours!  If there’s no take-away other than this, it’s that you should avoid french fries at all costs the day before an exam!

4.  Immune Function – White blood cells are part of the immune system, 70% of which is linked directly to the gut.  White blood cells themselves are like little soldiers, identifying pathogens in the gut and taking them to the lymphatic system for analysis in order to produce appropriate antibodies for the next invasion.  But they also need to be good at discriminating the good guys from the bad guys.  If they can’t, you get into the territory of auto-immune issues, where your body’s defense system is attacking the body itself.  Because vegetable oils create inflammation in the gut, they are essentially creating a constant high-threat level, putting white blood cells on alert.  And the more bad guys identified by the white blood cells as a result of this inflammation, the more likely it is for the white blood cells to eventually get confused and misidentify a good guy, resulting in an auto-immune reaction.  “By inciting chaos, vegetable oil confuses the immune system and ultimately gets the body to turn on itself in ways that can lead to auto-immune brain disorders like multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), Parkinson’s, and all other neurodegenerative processes we now understand result at least in part from auto-immune attacks.”  This is also why allergies and gluten sensitivities are on the rise – our bodies are less able than they were historically (before the rise of processed foods) to effectively discern the good bacteria from the bad, causing an over-active immune system.  Maybe you can thank vegetable oil for your seasonal allergies.

5.  Toxic Overload – The pro-inflammatory and pro-oxidative environment created by the toxic byproducts of processing the PUFAs contained in vegetable oil also disrupts cellular communication in the brain and causes DNA mutation.  Basically, the toxic byproducts destroy nerve cell highways, making memory formation difficult, which is why this process is implicated in cognitive dementia, including Alzheimer’s.  But this process doesn’t just affect the aging mind.  These toxins also cause gene mutations and prevent genes from replicating properly, which is a process that affects the developing brain, and plays a role in autism.  Shanahan actually refers to autism as “ De Novo Gene Mutation Syndrome,” and vegetable oil happens to be the number one culprit in creating these mutations.  Both expectant moms and children should avoid vegetable oils for this reason alone.

Unfortunately, vegetable oils are ubiquitous.  We’re likely not going to be able to fully avoid them, especially in a restaurant setting.  But there are some things we can do.

1.  Read labels with care.  If you’re not going to ban all processed foods from your home (that would be laudable), you can at least become an attentive label reader.  Not all processed foods contain vegetable oils.  Some crackers, like Mary’s Organic, or Hu crackers, are free of them.  If you look, you may be able to find vegetable-oil-free options.

2.  Don’t cook with vegetable oils.  Heating vegetable oils makes matters even worse.  So when it comes to cooking, stick with extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, or avocado oil (paying attention to their respective smoke points).

3.  Ask for modifications when eating out.  My husband would tell you I’m the annoying patron who nearly always asks for modifications when I order food.  I’m not ashamed.  If you’re ordering food, ask what something is cooked in, and see if olive oil or grass fed butter could be used instead.  This may not be possible with french fries, but could be with other menu items, like stir fries.

4.  Try making some things at home instead of buying the processed version.  Not everyone has time to do this, but if you do, try making some staples at home.  Things like hummus are actually really easy to make! 

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This may all sound pretty dramatic.  I think it actually is.  We’ve all heard on repeat the health advice to eliminate processed foods and shop the perimeter of the grocery store.  But until digging into this research, I didn’t really realize why.  It makes sense that consuming (especially in the quantities we do in this country) a product that’s not only not food, but is a legitimate toxin, would destroy our bodies and minds.  One of Shanahan’s Hawaiian patients told Shanahan that paniolos (Hawaiian cowboys) “used to cure hide leather to make their saddles using cottonseed oil, but did they eat the stuff? Ho, brah, dat’s lolo (“crazy”). 

I can’t say I disagree.