TL;DR: What if saturated fat was never the villain? This episode reveals how seed oils, extracted using a petroleum-based neurotoxin, flooded our food supply and may be the real driver of heart disease. I walk through buried clinical trials, a massive Indian railway study that contradicted everything we were told, and the biochemistry of why your LDL matters less than what’s inside it. Click to listen.
Hi everyone,
Here’s something that still blows my mind:
To extract oil from soybeans, corn, or cottonseed, the food industry soaks them in hexane, a six-carbon molecule derived from gasoline refining. It’s a known neurotoxin. Then they evaporate it off and sell you the oil.
No label tells you this happened.
And yet, we’ve been told for decades that this industrial fat is healthier than the butter our grandparents used.
In Part 1 of this series, I showed you how the belief that saturated fat causes heart disease was built on flawed studies and buried data. Two randomized controlled trials, the Sydney Diet Heart Study and the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, were designed to prove the diet-heart hypothesis. When the results came back showing the opposite, they were never properly published.
In this past episode, I connect the dots.
In both of those trials, and in Ancel Keys’ famous Seven Countries Study, there was one variable nobody considered: seed oil consumption. And when you look at the data through that lens, the picture changes completely.
The groups with higher mortality weren’t eating more saturated fat. They were eating more seed oils.
I also share the story of Dr. Malhotra, who studied over a million Indian railway workers in the 1960s. North Indians smoked nine times more, ate 19 times more fat (mostly ghee), and consumed nine times more sugar than South Indians. By every modern metric, they should have had sky-high heart disease.
But it was the opposite. Heart attacks were six times higher in the South, where people cooked with peanut and sesame oils high in linoleic acid.
This episode explains why.
You’ll hear:
How linoleic acid shifts your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio from 4:1 to as high as 30:1
Why your LDL particles become “loaded guns” when they carry oxidizable fats
The step-by-step biochemistry of how oxidized linoleic acid initiates atherosclerosis
Why the Tokelauan Islanders, eating 60% of calories from saturated fat, have virtually no heart disease
What to replace seed oils with, and how to find balance without becoming a monk
There’s a simple lesson here:
It’s not how much LDL you have. It’s what’s inside it.
The food industry isn’t looking out for you. But now you have the information to look out for yourself.
Share this with someone who deserves to know what’s really in their cooking oil.