Seed Oils: Should You Be Worried?
The dangers of (talking about) seed oils
Several months ago (roughly 5 moons 🌑 if you use moon time, shoutout to the fellow lunartics), a friend of Zest who works at the Sweetgreen headquarters informed us that Sweetgreen was about to ditch every single seed oil in their restaurant and commit to using exclusively olive oil (seed oils are cooking oils that include vegetable oils, canola oil, sunflower oil, grapeseed oil, corn oil, safflower oil, soybean oil, and cottonseed oil).
Leading up to this news, we had taken notice of an increasingly large and loud online cohort making—quite frankly—very scary claims about seed oils. And until we heard the news about Sweetgreen, that's all we thought it was: a loud online cohort. So we decided to investigate, and here's what we found.
What are the claims about seed oils? 📋
That seed oils cause bodily inflammation which increases your risk of things like acne, obesity, eczema, fatigue, IBS, bloating, celiac disease, heart disease, and even cancer. The claims center around a correlation between increased consumption of seed oils and rising rates of some of the aforementioned conditions.
Who's making these claims? 🤳
Health influencers, particularly on TikTok and Instagram (we won’t name names, but many have hundreds of thousands of followers and are named Brendan or Paul).
Why are these claims scary? 😱
Because these oils are everywhere! They're in your house, they're in my house (woah, fourth wall break), they're in restaurants, snack foods, frozen dinners, microwave popcorn, etc. So if the claims against seed oils are true, we're going to have to make big changes to the way we live.
Is there evidence to support these claims? 🔬
There is a lot of evidence... to the contrary. We’re not denying anyone’s personal experience with their diet, but the current data consistently shows that seed oils are no worse for you than any other type of fat, and some meta analyses actually point to a reduction in mortality and risk of cardiovascular disease.
So why are we even talking about this? 👀
Because we feel passionately about fostering relationships with food that are built on positivity, and because scary claims with life or death stakes are extremely difficult to ignore, regardless of what your better conscience tells you. It is easy for content like that to win attention, incite engagement, and gain momentum. And when an idea picks up enough speed, science doesn't really stand a chance.
Sweetgreen did not abandon seed oils on the advice of food scientists or nutritionists, they did it because enough people were asking them to. And those people were only asking because someone online with their own supplement brand and an admittedly pretty hot body were loud enough to be convincing.
Look, Sweetgreen switching to olive oil is not the end of the world, we love olive oil. But this kind of misinformation compounds, and it can really impact the way individuals move through the world as it relates to eating. At Zest, our mission is to share knowledge that makes your world more nourishing, and a very important piece of that education will eventually include nutrition. We are extremely motivated to help stop these cycles, so that even when science doesn't stand a chance, Zest does 😤
A final note
Seed oils are cheaper and more versatile than animal fat or olive oil, so they are more often used in ultra-processed foods like those in the snack aisle. So as the consumption of ultra-processed foods increases, so does the consumption of seed oils... Just food for thought. Yeah, it was an intentional pun 🤘