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Two of my earlier posts cover this from different angles: 219. Mercola May Have Discovered the Rosetta Stone of Diet and Health and 310. How We Know That Seed Oils Are the Worst Foods in Human History. This essay is the unified version, with the terminology cleaned up, the globalist hand exposed, and the animal-product issue (beef, chicken, eggs, and pork) clarified.
Summary
• Industrial vegetable oils are not vegetables. They are extracted from seeds and grains in solvent baths, deodorized, bleached, and sold as cooking oil at a fraction of the price of animal fats.
• One molecule, linoleic acid (LA), drives most of the harm. Its half-life in human fat tissue is roughly 2 years. Three to 5 years of clean eating are needed to clear it.
• In the US, the LA in human fat tissue has more than doubled since 1959. So has every major chronic inflammatory disease.
• Randomized human trials show 62 percent more deaths, 86 percent more heart attacks, and 364 percent more cardiac deaths in groups switched from animal fat to LA-rich oils.
• Globalist money pushed this. Procter & Gamble launched Crisco in 1911. The corrupt American Heart Association blessed it. The FDA and USDA wrote the dietary guidelines around it.
• Eliminating these oils might plausibly cut inflammatory disease by half within a year, with maximum benefit in 5 years.
A Rosetta Stone to understand our rotten food supply
When I was younger, I went to the British Museum and put my hand on the Rosetta Stone. There was no glass, no rope, no museum guard waving me off. The 3.5-foot block of granodiorite sat in the open air. Twenty years later someone attacked it with a hammer, and the museum put it behind a barricade.
In 196 BC, scribes carved the same message into the Stone in three scripts: hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek. Using their knowledge of Greek, scholars decoded everything Egypt had ever written. One key, one cipher, one civilization deciphered.
Modern medicine needs the same kind of key. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disorders, depression, infertility, and Alzheimer’s have all surged in lockstep over the past century. Sugar, alcohol, glyphosate, antibiotics, and inactivity all play a part. The COVID injection killed Americans by the hundreds of thousands. But throughout all these factors, a single dietary variable correlates tightly with the rise of every chronic disease.
That variable is industrial vegetable oil.
The following terminology still throws me off
The phrase “seed oils” is commonly used, but it is imprecise. Avocado oil and olive oil are pressed from fruit and are suitable for cooking. The villain is the cheap, solvent-extracted, deodorized, refined product made from soybean, corn, canola, cottonseed, safflower, sunflower, peanut, rice bran, and grapeseed. I will use “industrial vegetable oils” or “seed oils” in this essay.
Five terms cover most of this field.
Saturated fats have every available carbon position locked down with hydrogen. They are stable, do not oxidize, and are the natural fats of beef, lamb, butter, ghee, coconut, and cocoa. These are the safest fats to eat and the safest fats to cook with.
Monounsaturated fats are missing one pair of hydrogens. Olive oil and avocado oil are mostly monounsaturated. Slightly less stable than saturated fat, healthy, and still fine for most cooking.
Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) are missing several pairs of hydrogens. They are unstable, oxidize readily, and break down into inflammatory compounds when exposed to heat, light, or air. PUFAs split into two families: omega-3 and omega-6. Both are present in food, and the balance is everything.
Omega-3 PUFAs include alpha-linolenic acid (ALA, found in flax), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, both found in fish). These are anti-inflammatory in moderate amounts.
Omega-6 PUFAs, chiefly linoleic acid (LA), are pro-inflammatory. Linoleic acid is the building block of nearly every industrial vegetable oil. It is the molecule that does the damage. When you read “high in PUFAs” on a wellness site, read “high in linoleic acid.”
Trans fats are PUFAs that have been industrially hydrogenated to make them solid. Margarine is the best-known example, launched by Crisco in 1911. They are universally toxic and have been restricted since 2015. They still show up in fried fast food, baked goods, microwave popcorn, frozen pizza, refrigerated dough, nondairy creamer, and stick margarine.
The mainstream still labels cholesterol “bad” or “good.” Cholesterol is neither. It is a structural molecule your liver makes because your cells cannot function without it. Statin drugs blunt this production and increase the rate of diabetes, dementia, and muscle damage. The whole “lower your cholesterol” project rests on a falsified hypothesis from the 1950s.
How they sold us poison
Crisco hit American kitchens in 1911. Procter & Gamble had cornered the cottonseed oil supply and needed to sell it. Hydrogenation turned the foul industrial waste into a solid white grease that looked like lard but cost far less. The marketing was relentless: cookbooks, radio ads, free samples to home economics teachers, and a “pure white” image positioned against animal fat.
In the 1950s, Ancel Keys ran his Seven Countries Study. He started with data from 22 countries. He dropped 16 because they did not fit his conclusion, and published the remaining 6 as proof that saturated fat caused heart disease. The American Heart Association seized on this work and has flogged it for 70 years, with money from the food industry flowing in to keep the story alive. Sugar, by the way, was deliberately exonerated by Harvard researchers paid by the Sugar Research Foundation in 1965, and the false blame was redirected at fat. The internal documents are now public.
By the 1970s, the USDA was telling Americans to “replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated oil.” By the 1980s, McDonald’s switched its fryers from beef tallow to industrial vegetable oil, and every other fast-food chain followed suit. Today the corrupt AHA still recommends “polyunsaturated fats” for “heart health” while running a $1.19 billion budget funded by sources it refuses to name.
Comment: Check the American Heart Association website for donors’ identities. While claiming they are funded by individuals, their funding graph shows most of their money as “other.” I covered this in Butchered by “Healthcare.”
Trace the money. Industrial agriculture grows commodity crops on subsidized land. Commodity crops get crushed for cheap oil. Cheap oil enters the food supply. The food supply makes the population sick. The sick population becomes a $4-trillion-a-year captive market for Pharma. The globalists who fund both ends of this loop have stated openly that they want the world population reduced by 80 percent. Cheap, slow-acting dietary toxins fit the brief.
The bad oils and the good ones: Linoleic acid as a percentage of common cooking oils.
Cut these out:
• Safflower oil: 75 to 78 percent
• Grape seed oil: 70 to 73 percent
• Sunflower oil: 65 to 68 percent
• Hemp oil: 54 to 60 percent
• Wheat germ oil: 55 percent
• Cottonseed oil: 54 percent
• Corn oil: 51 to 59 percent
• Soybean oil: 51 percent
• Walnut oil: 51 percent
• Sesame oil: 45 percent
• Rice bran oil: 39 percent
• Peanut oil: 32 percent
• Canola oil: 17 to 21 percent
Cook with these instead:
• Almonds: 24 percent
• Lard from pastured pigs: 10 percent
• Palm oil: 10 percent
• Olive oil (verified): 8 to 10 percent
• Beef tallow: 3 to 5 percent
• Cocoa butter: 3 percent
• Macadamia oil: 2 percent
• Butter: 2 percent
• Coconut oil: 2 percent
• Ghee: trace
The Mediterranean diet works because olive oil is mostly monounsaturated and has only 8 percent linoleic acid. The carnivore diet works because beef fat is mostly saturated and almost free of linoleic acid. Most of the fat in coconut is medium-chain saturated fat that the body burns rather than stores.
Two cautions on this list. First, 60 to 90 percent of the olive oil sold in American supermarkets is adulterated, often cut with cheap industrial seed oils. Buy a single-source, organic, cold-pressed product or do without. Second, canola oil appears acceptable on a percentage basis, with 17 to 21 percent linoleic acid. However, the manufacturing process is so brutal that the oil is partially oxidized before you ever buy it.
Canola: an industrial lubricant turned salad oil
Canola oil is pressed from rapeseed, a turnip relative grown across Europe since the 13th century. The original use was machinery oil. Rapeseed oil binds to wet metal better than any other lubricant, so steam ships and naval vessels ran on it through both world wars. The Allied effort built a Canadian industrial complex to crush and refine it.
When the war ended, demand collapsed. Canada had a glut of rapeseed and a chemistry industry built to process it. The original oil was high in erucic acid, which has been shown to damage the heart in animal feeding studies. Canadian breeders worked through the 1970s to lower the level of erucic acid. They named the new variety “canola” for Canadian Oil Low Acid, and rebranded an industrial lubricant as a kitchen oil. The first commercial sale was in 1978.
Modern canola production runs the seed through hexane, a petroleum-derived solvent, then through a deodorizer at temperatures over 400 degrees Fahrenheit, then through bleaching and refining. The finished product reaches the supermarket already partially oxidized. When you cook with it, oxidation accelerates. By the time it reaches your stomach, the oil is loaded with aldehydes, lipid peroxides, and 4-hydroxynonenal, which damage DNA and inflame blood vessels.
The story of canola is the story of every industrial vegetable oil. A waste product or industrial input gets reformulated, marketed as health food, and pushed onto a public that has no idea what it is consuming. Cottonseed oil, the original Crisco ingredient, follows the same template. So does soybean oil, which started as industrial waste from the soy meal feed business.
What these oils do to you
Every randomized controlled trial comparing saturated animal fat with industrial vegetable oil has shown that the latter was harmful.
The Sydney Diet-Heart Study (1966 to 1973, recovered data published 2013) split 458 men into two groups. The vegetable oil group had 62 percent higher all-cause mortality over 7 years. Increasing dietary linoleic acid to 12 percent of calories killed people at a rate equivalent to smoking 7 cigarettes a day.
The Minnesota Coronary Experiment (recovered data published 2016) showed 86 percent more heart attacks in the corn-oil-and-margarine group, even though their cholesterol numbers fell. Lowering cholesterol by feeding people industrial vegetable oil increased their rate of dying from heart attack.
The Rose Corn Oil Trial (1962) saw 364 percent more cardiac deaths in the corn oil group. The Los Angeles Veterans Administration Study found 82 percent more cancer deaths in the vegetable oil group, even though that group had half as many heavy smokers as the control. The MARGARIN Study (2002) showed 700 percent more strokes, heart attacks, and cardiovascular deaths in the high-linoleic-acid margarine group compared to a fish-oil group.
These are not fringe findings but the major randomized human trials of the 20th century, and every one of them indicts the industrial vegetable oils that the AHA still recommends.
The disease list:
• Cancer. Mouse studies show linoleic acid increases tumor metastasis 4-fold. Repeatedly heated soybean oil produces 16-fold tumor growth. Prostate cancer tracks corn oil intake.
• Heart disease. Linoleic acid oxidizes inside arteries and forms the oxidized LDL that drives atherosclerosis. The LDL number in your blood test is dangerous mainly when your diet is high in industrial vegetable oil.
• Obesity. PUFAs accumulate in fat tissue. Rats on safflower oil gained 12 percent more body weight than controls eating identical calories. Rabbits on repeatedly heated oil gained 45 percent more weight.
• Type 2 diabetes. Inflammation in fat tissue impairs insulin signaling.
• Alzheimer’s disease. Canola-fed mice formed beta-amyloid plaques and lost memory and learning ability. The dose was a human equivalent of 2 tablespoons of canola oil daily.
• Depression and anxiety. Soybean oil consumption reduces oxytocin, the bonding hormone, in the hypothalamus. Mice fed soybean oil show gene dysregulation linked to autism, anxiety, and depression. Monkeys on safflower-rich diets show measurable depression.
• Infertility. Mouse studies show high-PUFA diets in early life cause irreversible testicular damage and long-term sperm defects. Millennial infertility tracks the introduction of PUFA-loaded baby formula.
Soybean oil reduces the body’s production of oxytocin.
This is the hormone of love, trust, and pair-bonding. It is what mothers release during nursing, what couples release during sex, and what every healthy social interaction depends on. American children have been raised on soybean oil-based formula for 2 generations.
We talk about a mental health crisis, about loneliness, about young people who cannot form relationships. The biochemistry of bonding has been quietly removed from the food supply. No therapist or psychiatric drug fixes that.
Comment: Oxytocin is compounded and used as a medication to improve sexual bonding in couples. I have tried this and it works.
Oxidation and the deep fryer
Polyunsaturated fats have multiple double bonds where carbons are not saturated with enough hydrogen molecules. Each double bond is a vulnerable spot. Oxygen attacks the bond, breaks it, and produces aldehydes, peroxides, and free radicals. These damage DNA, cell membranes, and mitochondria.
The oils start oxidizing the moment the seed is crushed. They oxidize during extraction, deodorization, and bottling. They oxidize on the supermarket shelf. They oxidize in your fryer, in your salad dressing, and in your bloodstream. The deeper they get into your tissues, the more oxidation happens inside your body. Industrial vegetable oils are partially oxidized before you eat them, and they oxidize further once consumed.
Saturated animal fats lack the chemical structure to do this. They stay in your blood and tissues without producing free radicals. That is why butter, ghee, tallow, and coconut oil are safe to cook with at any temperature you would subject food to.
Every commercial fryer in America runs industrial vegetable oil at 350 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The oil sits there all day. It is heated, cooled, and reheated through every shift. By the end of the day, it is sludge.
A 2020 rabbit study tested unheated, once-heated, and repeatedly heated vegetable oil. Body weight increased 6 percent on once-heated oil and 45 percent on repeatedly heated oil compared to unheated. The repeatedly heated group showed liver toxicity, fatty liver, and metabolic damage. The 16-fold cancer growth I cited earlier came from another study using oil heated in a deep fryer.
French fries, fried chicken, donuts, fried fish, hash browns, tortilla chips, mozzarella sticks, onion rings: they are all cooked in repeatedly heated industrial vegetable oil. Fast food is worse than empty calories. It is a daily dose of oxidized lipid peroxides that incorporate themselves into your tissues and stay there for years.
The animal-product problem
Many readers know to skip the canola oil. Almost nobody knows that the commercially produced chicken, eggs, and pork they buy at the supermarket are loaded with linoleic acid because the animals were fed grain.
Cows have a four-chambered stomach. The bacteria in the rumen partially hydrogenate dietary PUFAs back into saturated fat. Grain-fed cattle produce beef with relatively low linoleic acid; grass-fed is better still, with an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of 1:1 to 2:1, compared with 8:1 in grain-fed. Sheep and goats have the same anatomy. Their meat and milk are clean.
Pigs have one stomach, eat what they are fed, and store it in their fat. Factory-farm pork and lard from corn-and-soy-fed hogs are full of linoleic acid. The lard available at the supermarket today is not the lard your grandmother cooked with. It contains the fats from the corn that the pig was fed. Heritage pasture-raised pork is the only pork worth buying.
Chickens also have only one stomach. Standard commercial layer feed in the United States is 60 to 70 percent corn and soy. The hen converts the linoleic acid in her feed into linoleic acid in her egg yolk and her body fat. Lab testing has shown that 2 organic Vital Farms eggs contain about as much linoleic acid as a serving of canola oil. Conventional eggs run an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of roughly 20:1. Pasture-raised eggs from corn-and-soy-fed hens still run about 11:1. Low-PUFA eggs from corn-and-soy-free flocks run 3:1 or better.
The eggs sold as “organic” or “pasture-raised” at Whole Foods are still mostly contaminated. The chicken in the rotisserie case at Costco is contaminated. The bacon, the sausage, and the pork chops at the grocery store are contaminated. If your protein comes from grain-fed animals with only one stomach, you are eating industrial vegetable oil even if you never pour it out of the bottle.
The fix is to source from pasture-raised, corn-and-soy-free farms. Beef from a known farmer like my friend Frank. Eggs from a backyard flock or a small farm with verified soy-free feed. If you cannot get organically raised animal products, eating the cleanest commercial cuts of beef, lamb, and goat is better than eating chicken or pork.
How long does it take to clear?
Linoleic acid in your fat has a half-life in human adipose tissue of approximately 600 to 680 days, about 2 years. That means if you stop eating it today, half of what is currently stored in your fat will still be there in 2 years. The rest takes 3 to 5 years on a clean diet to clear.
US data shows that human adipose tissue linoleic acid more than doubled between 1959 and 2008. Americans walking around today have linoleic acid concentrations that are 136 percent higher than those of their grandparents. Every cell membrane and every fat depot is more prone to oxidation than it was in 1950. This is the biochemical signature of an industrial diet.
I quit eating out
Every restaurant chef cooks with the cheapest oil in the supply catalog: canola, soybean, or a “vegetable blend.” Even high-end restaurants that say “we cook in olive oil” are using a cheap blend or finishing in olive oil while sautéing in canola.
Steakhouses sear in canola, Asian restaurants stir-fry in soybean oil, and diners scramble eggs in margarine. Hotels prepare every dish in industrial vegetable oil because the supply chain only stocks it. You cannot trust the menu, and you cannot trust the chef. Raw food is sometimes safe: sushi, sashimi, oysters, a plain green salad with oil and vinegar that you dress yourself; everything else is contaminated.
The only solution is to cook your food at home with butter, ghee, beef tallow, or coconut oil. That is inconvenient and antisocial, and it is also the only way to stop poisoning yourself.
How much modern disease comes from these oils?
The closest estimate from the available trial data: cutting these oils to near-zero levels would plausibly reduce the incidence of inflammatory disease by half within 1 year, with maximum benefit at 5 years.
That estimate aligns with the Sydney study (62 percent more deaths in the LA group) and the Minnesota experiment (86 percent more heart attacks). The MARGARIN trial reported 700% more cardiovascular events. Industrial vegetable oils are the single dietary variable that has tracked the rise of every chronic inflammatory disease over the past century. The correlation is so tight that causation is the simplest explanation.
Comment: I am not telling readers to live in fear of every restaurant meal forever. The body is resilient, and given clean inputs, it heals. After 1 year on home-cooked food and pasture-raised animal products, most people experience weight loss, increased energy, reduced joint pain, and clearer skin. The full benefit takes 5 years because that is how long the linoleic acid in your fat takes to leave. Be patient, be consistent, and stop apologizing to dinner hosts for eating clean.
What kills us
Morbid obesity, heavy smoking, industrial vegetable oils, and vaccines, including the COVID injection, are the largest contributors to inflammatory disease and premature death in the modern world. The vaccine point I have argued at length elsewhere and will not repeat here. The first three are dietary or behavioral and within your control today.
If you do nothing else after reading this:
• Throw out canola, soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower, and “vegetable” oils.
• Cook in butter, ghee, beef tallow, coconut oil, or a verified extra-virgin olive oil.
• Source your eggs and chicken from corn-and-soy-free pastured operations or do without.
• Eat beef, lamb, and goat in preference to chicken and pork.
• Stop eating out except for raw food.
• Read every label. The phrase “vegetable oil” on an ingredient list means “any of the cheap industrial oils we had on hand that day.”
The Rosetta Stone made unreadable script readable. With the same kind of key, the disease puzzle becomes legible. One molecule, one supply chain, one captured regulator, and one disease curve all converge. The curve turns up when industrial vegetable oils enter the food system and tracks every chronic illness from there. The whole pattern makes sense once you have the cipher.
Selected references
Ramsden et al. (2013), Use of dietary linoleic acid for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease and death: evaluation of recovered data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study. British Medical Journal.
Ramsden et al. (2016), Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment. British Medical Journal.
DiNicolantonio and O’Keefe (2018), Omega-6 vegetable oils as a driver of coronary heart disease: the oxidized linoleic acid hypothesis. Open Heart.
Guyenet and Carlson (2015), Increase in adipose tissue linoleic acid of US adults in the last half century. Advances in Nutrition.
Deol et al. (2020), Dysregulation of hypothalamic gene expression and the oxytocinergic system by soybean oil diets in male mice. Endocrinology.
Seed Oil Scout (2026), We tested every egg in Whole Foods, including Vital Farms.
Small Footprint Family, The inconvenient truth about canola oil.
Yoho (2023), 219. Mercola may have discovered the Rosetta Stone of diet and health.
Yoho (2024), 310. How we know that seed oils are the worst foods in human history.
Affiliate store: If you want to help me, I offer competitively priced affiliate products HERE that I have personally tested and used.
Parting shot #1: High-fructose corn syrup is a related problem
Fructose is metabolized only in the liver, where it cannot be stored as glycogen and is instead converted directly into fat. It also stimulates the brain’s reward circuit harder than glucose does, which makes sweetened drinks addictive in ways that table sugar is not. The same processed-food economy that delivers seed oils to every aisle of the grocery store delivers high-fructose corn syrup to every drink in the cooler. Read your labels and cut both.
Parting shot #2: Pharma treatments for Parkinson’s cause further brain damage
What neurologist warns you about this prior to handing out a prescription? None that I’ve ever met. From Unbekoming’s essay about Parkinson’s disease;
L-DOPA was introduced in the late 1960s. It crosses the blood-brain barrier and is converted to dopamine by aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase. In a brain whose dopaminergic neurons are dying, it provides the substrate the dying cells can no longer produce. It restores movement. For the first three to five years it does so reliably, and for many patients spectacularly. The clinical literature names the period: the honeymoon.
After the honeymoon, the picture changes. L-DOPA-induced dyskinesias — involuntary writhing movements that the drug itself causes — emerge in around 30 percent of patients by five years of treatment, and in the majority by ten to fifteen years. Estimates vary by cohort and definition; the AJMC review puts the figure at roughly 90 percent by nine to fifteen years, while the cleanest prospective study to date (the CamPaIGN cohort, thirteen-year follow-up) found 55.7 percent at ten years.⁶³ Whatever the precise number, the long-term reality is the same: most patients on chronic L-DOPA will develop dyskinesias, and the drug that gave them their lives back will, in time, take a different kind of bodily control away from them.
Motor fluctuations emerge alongside the dyskinesias: the on-off phenomenon, where patients oscillate between rigid immobility and sudden hyperkinetic states as drug levels rise and fall in the bloodstream. Impulse control disorders — pathological gambling, hypersexuality, compulsive shopping, binge eating — affect between 17 and 51 per cent of patients on dopamine agonists, which are added to L-DOPA when the latter alone is no longer enough.⁶⁴
The honest establishment statement is in the LEAP trial, published in NEJM in 2019. The investigators conducted a delayed-start randomised trial to determine whether early L-DOPA treatment slowed disease progression. It did not. The published conclusion: “This finding of no significant between-group difference at week 80 implies that levodopa had no disease-modifying effect.”⁶⁵ The American Academy of Neurology’s 2021 practice guideline states the matter plainly: “There are no current disease-modifying pharmacologic treatments for PD; current PD pharmacologic therapy is symptomatic only.”⁶⁶
After sixty years of pharmacology, the establishment offers no drug that alters the underlying lesion. Every available therapy is palliation of dopamine deficiency in a brain that continues to lose dopaminergic neurons, while the chemistry that has been killing them goes unaddressed.
What L-DOPA does, in the framework this essay has been building, is replace what the damaged cells can no longer make. It does nothing about the toxic burden that damaged them. The disease progresses. The drug’s effect on the cells that remain becomes increasingly chaotic as their numbers fall. The drug is symptomatic management of an ongoing poisoning.
Parting shot # 3
The audio on this is from an AI called 11labs.com. The process involved uploading the transcript and letting the application work. The interface is so terrible that I almost quit during production of this thing because it took just about as long to figure out how to use it as it would have taken to narrate it. I can’t tell this audio from my voice, but maybe you can.
