Pod Insights The Sporkful Seed Oils Are The Latest Battle In The Cooking Fat Wars About this episode In America, the cooking fat you use — lard, butter, shortening, oil — has long been a signifier of health, virtue, and class. What is it about fat that gets us so riled up? Reporter Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong looks at four battles over cooking fats in America over the last 150 years, starting with lard vs. Crisco, all the way to our current panic over seed oils.
Transcript 7,974 words · 16 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:08 Dan Pashman? Please note, this episode contains references to dieting and weight loss.
1:14 Dan Pashman? Eleanor Roosevelt is like a margarine influencer?
1:18 Speaker 01 Now just imagine her doing like the little influencer hand with the stick of margarine.
1:22 Dan Pashman? Come with me as I go to the store to get some good luck margarine.
1:25 Speaker 01 Get ready with me with my margarine toast.
1:34 Dan Pashman? This is the Spork Fall. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. So the other day, I was in the grocery store picking up a few things, including some canola oil. Now, I mostly use canola or olive oil in my cooking, occasionally butter. As I grabbed this bottle of canola oil, I thought to myself, is this a seed oil? Like, I hear all this talk about seed oils, and I don't even know if I'm using one. So like any human in the year 2025, I start Googling in the supermarket aisle. Yes, it's a seed oil. Is that bad? Some people on social media say yes, but it seems most legitimate scientists say no. In fact, there's some evidence the canola oil improves cholesterol levels better than olive oil.
2:18 Dan Pashman? Now I'm literally reading abstracts from research papers in the grocery store. Can a guy just make dinner?
2:26 Dan Pashman? The way people cook and what we cook is obviously different in different parts of the world, right? And of course, it's changed a lot over the generations. But one thing has been a constant for centuries: fat. Whether it's butter, or oil, or some kind of animal fat, if you're cooking or baking, you're pretty much always using some kind of fat. But which one you use isn't just about what you're making. In America, your cooking fat has long been a signifier not only of health, but also of virtue and class. So who decides which fats are the right ones? And what does it say about our culture that the same fat can go from being good to bad to good again? Why can't we make up our minds? Joining me now to answer these questions is food reporter Adwoa Jamabrempong. Hey, Ajwa.
3:09 Speaker 01 Hey, Dan.
3:10 Dan Pashman? So you have done a deep dive on cooking fats. What prompted this?
3:15 Speaker 01 So I've been really fascinated by the amount of change in American food culture. And cooking fats have such a heavy cultural assimilation component. Like, my parents are from Ghana, and the most important fat in West African cooking is palm oil, which makes total sense. It's native to the region, and it's been part of the culinary culture for at least 5,000 years. But over the past 20 or 30 years, palm oil has been demonized in the US. Crusades against its inclusion in Girl Scout cookies, the works. And now my mom is much more likely to cook with olive or avocado oil. I really wanted to know what drives these cultural shifts.
3:51 Dan Pashman? So basically, what you're telling me is that in the span of a couple of decades, information being hurled at your mom about which cooking fats are the right ones undid 5,000 years of culinary history.
4:02 Speaker 01 Basically, the American do.
4:05 Dan Pashman? So we've decided that to explore these big questions, we're going to zoom in on four specific time periods to look at how American attitudes towards certain fats have changed. First, the late 1800s and early 1900s. Next, the period after World War II into the 50s and 60s. Then the 1990s, and finally, today.
4:24 Speaker 01 Yes, and it's a bit like professional wrestling, right? Like, each era has its cooking fat hero and its cooking fat villain. And they tend to switch sides over time. So around the turn of the last century, people are moving away from an agrarian lifestyle and into cities. Fewer people are growing their own food, so they don't know where their food is coming from, which is not working out so well for them.
4:46 Speaker 02 In the late 1800s, one out of six deaths in the United States was attributed to adulterated or contaminated food. So that's a significant public health risk. Like, it was not a trivial statistic.
4:59 Speaker 01 Ben Cohen is a professor of engineering studies and environmental studies at Lafayette College. He's also the author of the book Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food. Ben says that in that era, people became very skeptical of the food they were buying, unsurprisingly, given how many people were getting sick from food. And even if they weren't being poisoned, there was another cause for skepticism. Was the product what it said it was?
5:27 Speaker 02 Late 1800s, this is called the gilded age. Gilded as in the shiny covering on top is concealing the truth underneath. And so we can't just trust what we see.
5:36 Speaker 01 Now, the most dramatic revelation of what was happening behind the scenes in our food system came from muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair.
5:44 Dan Pashman? Yeah, right. Like, we did a story years ago on the Sporkful about lard. So the short version of the story, around 1900, lard was on pretty much every stove top in America. Then Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, comes out, 1906. And it's got this famous scene of workers falling into vats of lard, thereby becoming part of the product. After that, lard started to gain a reputation for being unclean.
6:06 Speaker 01 And beside workers falling into the vats, people suspected that lard was being adulterated in other ways, too.
6:12 Speaker 02 One of the biggest contaminants that people were worried about in the later 1800s was cottonseed oil. They thought their lard was being cut with cottonseed oil and that this wasn't healthy and that they weren't getting what they paid for. There was widespread concern that this was tricking the consumer.
6:28 Speaker 01 So just a few months after The Jungle comes out, the government responds as to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act. That would eventually lead to the creation of the FDA, which is the start of government regulation of the food system. And now that lard has been disgraced in the public eye, there's a sneaky marketing twist in the cooking fat that rises to replace it.
6:49 Speaker 02 There was a new product that came about where they kind of concealed what was in it. And that product was called Crisco. Crisco is a neologism that stands for crystallized cottonseed oil.
6:59 Speaker 01 But people didn't know that. Procter and Gamble failed to mention their new product was made from the same thing people were worried about in their lard. Instead, they encouraged consumers to trust them as a company rather than get too picky about every single product. That was a strategy other companies would adopt, too. Building brand confidence meant people were less likely to ask too many questions. And because companies weren't required to disclose product ingredients, a lot of times they just didn't. Instead, ads would say things like, "Crisco is Crisco and nothing else."
7:31 Speaker 02 And so, under that brand name, they were able to develop trust in a product that Crisco was easily sold and easily used, and people weren't concerned that they were going to get sick.
7:41 Dan Pashman? So, there's a couple of interesting things about this. First of all, just the role of marketing in determining what people perceive as clean and healthy. But then also, just like the amount of trust that was placed in corporations back then. Nowadays, we're kind of all a bit cynical, but back then, they were like, "Well, corporations wouldn't hurt us."
7:58 Speaker 01 Well, I think part of it was that it's this new technology that people weren't really aware of yet, right? So, if in the public eye, lard is dirty, something made in a lab must be clean. And cottonseed oil gets turned into Crisco by a lab process called hydrogenation. It was developed in the early 1900s, and it allows you to convert liquid oils into a solid. And there are other important changes happening around this time, too, namely, the birth of American nutrition science. A lot of people who'd started out in agriculture, analyzing soil components, started following those nutrients into our food. And as researchers were discovering the benefits of potassium and magnesium in our diets, companies were racing to include these things in their products and advertising.
8:43 Speaker 01 Here's Emily Cantwell. She's an associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa, and she writes about the way we relate to food as a society.
8:51 Speaker 03 The history of nutrition science research occurred in tandem with new food products that were immediately promising health benefits for the nutrients or the vitamins that they had just discovered. From the very beginning in the 19th century, that scientific understandings of food and what's in it and how it might affect our bodies has been promoted with particular brands, particular products, and particular promises about what it might do for us.
9:19 Speaker 01 This is where we start getting the idea that food is not just about getting enough to eat. It's also about demonstrating our values and social status. Emily calls this the moralized chain of consumption, where our choices aren't just about price, or convenience, or even tradition. They also reflect how we want to be seen in the world.
9:40 Speaker 03 The way that we attach a moral value to particular ingredients, or even smaller than that, a macronutrient, a component in food, so then it's good or bad. So then foods that contain it become good or bad. And then we, as the eaters who consume it, become good or bad.
10:00 Speaker 01 So at the end of our first era, food is becoming more than just nourishment. We're starting to see health, and social status, and virtue converge on our plates. In 1935, Proctor and Gamble put out a cookbook called Crisco Recipes for the Jewish Housewife, which was marketed to Eastern European Jewish immigrants. It turns out, Crisco is kosher. It was also considered modern and American.
10:23 Dan Pashman? Right, unlike the traditional Jewish cooking fat, schmaltz, which is rendered chicken fat.
10:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, and for a lot of immigrant communities, not just Eastern European ones, Crisco was part of the path to assimilation.
10:35 Dan Pashman? Okay, so to recap, in the early 1900s, the cooking fat war is between lard and Crisco, and Crisco is winning. Lard is perceived as the bad guy, dirty and suspicious. Crisco is the future, clean and healthy, and the obvious choice for people who want to show that they're real Americans.
10:51 Speaker 01 Yep. And now let's jump ahead to our next era, which is the 1950s and 60s. And in one corner of this era's wrestling ring, we have butter.
11:02 Speaker 03 So until sort of mid-century, the majority of public health, medicine, nutrition, were worried about people not getting enough to eat. Butter was once a food that was encouraged because it was tasty. It provided enough calories and made sure that you were vital and vigorous and had enough to eat.
11:18 Dan Pashman? So coming into this period, butter was one of the good guys. But then I'm guessing, Adwoa, that things change, given that like a lot is changing in America around this time. It's after World War II. Americans are getting more affluent. You see the rise of the middle class, the growth of suburbia and supermarkets that always have enough food.
11:35 Speaker 01 And overflowing supermarket shelves mean more choices to make. Plus, at the same time, you have the birth of television. So now there's all these TV ads selling washing machines, dishwashers and vacuums to middle-class women.
11:49 Dan Pashman? And that's when you start to see this archetypal White House wife who's vacuuming in pearls and always has a picture-perfect dinner on the table when her husband gets home.
11:57 Speaker 01 It's a lot of pressure to be perfect. And Emily says that's not an accident.
12:02 Speaker 03 When the modern advertising industry is getting its tactics, you know, performing itself, that is that moment. That it's not just about selling, you know, this is the product, this is what it does, this is how much it costs. All of a sudden, right? It's about this is the problem that it can help solve. This is who you can be when you use it. And then often the ad is also planting the seed, right? For the consumer anxiety that it can then be this self for.
12:27 Speaker 01 This is really when the relationship between what you eat and who you are is cemented. And this is also when our previous hero, butter, starts getting some real competition from margarine.
12:39 Dan Pashman? OK, so this era is butter versus margarine.
12:43 Speaker 01 Yes. So margarine was invented in France in 1869 to help feed Napoleon's army. At first, it's made out of whatever animal fat they can find. But then hydrogenation, the same technological glow up that enabled Crisco, meant they could start making margarine out of vegetable oil. And when World War II started, America was facing the same problem Napoleon had, not enough dairy to feed the troops. So margarine swoops in to save the day. Then, after wartime rations are over, companies pivot and rebrand it as this modern, affordable alternative to butter. Margarine even catches the eye of none other than Eleanor Roosevelt. So once she's out of the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt starts leaning into humanitarian work.
13:28 Speaker 01 She was the first American delegate to the UN General Assembly. And within the UN, she pushes for an agency that focuses on food and nutrition.
13:37 Dan Pashman? Oh, so like, long before Michelle Obama was working on food system issues, it was Eleanor Roosevelt?
13:42 Speaker 01 Yes, and in 1959, she's in this commercial where at first, she's talking about feeding the hungry.
13:49 Speaker 04 I wonder if you realize that more than two thirds of the people in the world are underfed. I'm confident that America could lead the way in helping to feed the starving people of the world.
14:00 Dan Pashman? Wait, can I just jump in here? Like, did all Americans back then have quasi-British accents?
14:05 Speaker 01 Eleanor Roosevelt is like the queen of received pronunciation, so she was kind of like living in the mid-Atlantic. Now, keep in mind, this is an ad, but it takes a minute to figure out what she's selling.
14:16 Speaker 04 I hope that more ways can be found to send them good nutritious foods, like the new Good Luck margarine. Years ago, most people never dreamed of eating margarine, but times have changed. Nowadays, you can get a margarine like the new Good Luck, which really tastes delicious.
14:35 Speaker 01 So this is a huge shift in marketing. Like, here we have a quasi-governmental figure endorsing a specific commercial product on television. So what Eleanor Roosevelt is doing with this ad is helping margarine pivot from basically hardship butter into this wholesome, virtuous, maybe even patriotic product. And decades before I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, margarine marketing was comparing itself to dairy. Good Luck even had this ad campaign that was kind of like a winky, whose tagline was, "You can't tell Good Luck from you-know-what."
15:07 Dan Pashman? To me, this rebranding of margarine also points to a larger issue that I think connects to a lot of what we're talking about today, which is that corporations and marketers have a vested interest in pushing the hot new trends, right? Like, it's hard to keep selling the same product year after year. So changing what's considered healthy and good gives you the chance to launch the next cool thing.
15:28 Speaker 01 Plus, margarine offers another marketing advantage.
15:32 Speaker 01 Since it's artificially produced, you can cut the amount of fat, you can add vitamins, you can actually manipulate its nutritional profile.
15:40 Dan Pashman? And I would think that this time in the late 50s and early 60s is also when marketers start to really lean even more heavily on the idea that we can have better nutrition through science. People are just more used to man-made products now. And the Jetsons are on TV with their futuristic kitchen, the space programs coming. We're entering this bright technological future where food's created in a lab are going to be better than anything we can grow in the ground.
16:05 Speaker 01 Emily says margarine was really the beginning of what she calls functional nutrition.
16:09 Speaker 03 So I think about food optimization, that instead of just eating a food because you think it's delicious, or your grandmother cooked with it, or it's something you're really familiar with, or it's something that grows in the soil where you also grew up. Instead, we look at every single food and we expect it to offer us a benefit. And often, it's not just so we can be healthy, but so we can be better than best. So we can be the healthiest human ever. We can compete with everyone and we can make sure that we come out on top.
16:39 Speaker 01 And then there's one more big thing that happens around this time. In 1967, Senators Joseph Clark and Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., go on a tour of the Mississippi Delta. In the deep south, they see a level of hunger that shocks them. And a Senate committee forms to explore whether Americans are eating enough. But over the course of a decade, the committee also starts looking more deeply at what we're eating and why. And when their report finally comes out, it includes something completely new.
17:10 Speaker 03 Starting in 1977, there's guidance issued that encourages people to limit and avoid the consumption of certain foods and nutrients.
17:21 Dan Pashman? So this is the first time the government tells Americans to avoid eating too much of certain foods. Is that right?
17:27 Speaker 01 Yeah. And all of a sudden, many foods that were once seen as helpful for their high calorie count are in the crosshairs.
17:34 Speaker 03 Fat becomes a food that all of a sudden we're supposed to limit and avoid because it has more calories per gram than other nutrients, that it could lead to weight gain, and that it could lead to perhaps a host of diet-related diseases like heart disease and diabetes.
17:48 Speaker 01 So now butter is no longer the golden child. Instead, its younger sibling margarine eclipses it. Remember, because it's made in a lab, you can adjust the fat content and then sell it as a health product. And marketers aren't the only ones trying to influence Americans' food decisions anymore. The government has also entered the chat.
18:09 Dan Pashman? And I would imagine it becomes something like a feedback loop, right? The government issues nutritional guidelines. Companies start to market products based on how well they line up with those guidelines. And that marketing serves to further reinforce what the government says you should be eating.
18:23 Speaker 01 Totally. So as we wrap up our second era and enter the 90s, we're heading for a perfect storm of functional food, an obsession with being thin, and questions of who to trust when the food industry and the government start to play overlapping roles.
18:40 Dan Pashman? That's all coming up. Stick around.
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22:30 Dan Pashman? Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman, and I want to give a quick shout out to a new cookbook that's out that I really love by my friend Katie Parla. Now, if you listen to this show for a while, you know Katie Parla. She showed my pasta tour group around Rome, of course, but you also heard her here on the podcast during our Anything's Possible series. She was my guide in Rome when I was doing my cookbook research. And let me tell you, Katie knows Rome so well that her new book is Rome: A Culinary History Cookbook and Field Guide to the Flavors That Built a City. This book is like the culmination of Katie's 20 years spent living in Rome. What I love about her work is that it's not just about the recipes. The photography is beautiful. It's about the culture. It's about the city. It's about the place. It really transports you. And Katie
23:14 Dan Pashman? looks at how the Roman table has evolved from the Iron Age to today and why it remains one of the world's most compelling places to eat. You can get Katie's book wherever books are sold, and you can even get signed copies through her website, katieparla.com. All right, back now to our episode, and welcome back reporter Adwoa Jima-Brempong.
23:31 Speaker 01 Hey, Dan.
23:32 Dan Pashman? So we're discussing cooking fat trends in America by zooming in on four periods in American history. We covered lard versus Crisco at the turn of the last century and the time after World War II when margarine triumphed over butter. That era ended with the creation of the first government nutrition guidelines, and in particular, the idea that Americans are consuming a lot of fat. Now, we jump ahead to the 1990s.
23:54 Speaker 01 So in the 90s, we are really, really obsessed with being thin. It was an absolutely miserable time to be a young girl.
24:02 Dan Pashman? I mean, I definitely remember that the two worst things you could do back then were to eat fat and to be fat. And I know that a lot of it was that we started to hear that there was this obesity epidemic, which then led to a sort of moral panic.
24:13 Speaker 01 So you were kind of taught to be afraid of food and almost taught to be afraid of your body. There was so much pressure to be thin. So now, the food industry is working overtime, trying to rebrand certain foods as diet-friendly. And from diet pills like Fen-Phen to heavily processed snacks, people were turning to science as a way to save us from ourselves.
24:34 Dan Pashman? Okay, so who are the players in the cooking fat war of the 90s?
24:38 Speaker 01 So this one is less of a battle of the titans and more of a brawl between several types of fat. The biggest food controversy in the 90s was about trans fats. And a lot of these terms can be confusing, so here's a quick primer. Saturated fat is solid at room temperature. Things like butter and lard are high in saturated fat. Unsaturated fat is liquid at room temperature. So things like olive oil and vegetable oil are high in unsaturated fat. In the 80s and 90s, the nutritional guidance from the government is unsaturated fats, good, saturated fats, bad. The problem is that since unsaturated fats, the good guys, are liquid at room temperature, they have a much shorter shelf life.
25:21 Speaker 01 Plus saturated fats, the bad ones, just taste richer and more filling.
25:27 Dan Pashman? Okay, so now companies have a problem. The fats that made their products taste delicious and keep on the supermarket are now the bad guy.
25:34 Speaker 01 Exactly. So in the 80s, many companies pivoted from saturated fats to artificial trans fats, which seemed like the best of both worlds. Trans fats are liquid fats that have gone through a chemical process to make them solid at room temperature. This is hydrogenation, that same thing that gave us Crisco and margarine in the early 1900s. Coming into the 1990s, all kinds of products had been reformulated to incorporate trans fats rather than saturated fats. So now trans fats are in everything from snack foods like Oreos to products like Hamburger Helper, which was marketed to working class Americans as a nutritious, inexpensive way to feed a family. I also remember growing up, there were all these super sweet neon snacks with no fat
26:18 Speaker 01 at all that have completely disappeared from stores today. Here's Professor Emily Cantwell again.
26:24 Speaker 03 I hosted an event for my student that was all snack foods that came out in the 90s when I was a kid. Pizza rolls and gushers and food by the foot, you know, all these snacks that come out during that time, that the way we thought about what was a healthy food that you would feed your child was so different.
26:41 Dan Pashman? Totally. I remember Snack Wells. Do you remember Snack Wells? Like they were this fat-free snack food in a green container. And in particular, they had a thing called Snack Wells Devil's Food Cookie Cakes. I don't know how they did it. It was like a soft chocolatey cake with like a little tiny coating of sort of like frosting, vanilla frosting, and then a very thin, more hard chocolate shell, not crunchy, but like just firm enough, like an icing that you bit through it. And it was so good. And they were fat-free. And back then, like that was all that mattered. Didn't matter how much sugar or whatever else was in them that made it possible. They were fat-free, so they were amazing.
27:18 Speaker 01 I love that this is 30 years ago when you still have like dreams of Snack Wells.
27:23 Dan Pashman? I loved me some of those Devil's Food cookie cakes. Those things were good.
27:26 Speaker 01 Diet snacks just make me think of Weight Watchers. And there were so many weight loss gurus at the time.
27:32 Dan Pashman? Right, like, I don't know if people remember Susan Powder. She had buzz cut, blonde hair, and she had an infomercial that was called Stop the Insanity. And I still, I can remember her telling sort of her origin story of how she became this like diet weight loss guru. You know, she said she was overweight and then she was trying to lose weight with whatever regimen was her thing. And one day she was walking in the mall and realized that her thighs weren't rubbing together anymore. And that was like her big triumphant moment.
28:00 Speaker 01 Okay, hearing that she's the one who popularized the thigh gap definitely puts her in my pantheon of villains.
28:06 Dan Pashman? I don't know if she used that term, but she definitely, I definitely remember her talking about that idea.
28:11 Speaker 01 Still villain. But I feel like no one represented our obsession with weight better than Oprah Winfrey. On a now infamous episode of her talk show, Oprah comes on stage in this cute pair of Calvin Klein jeans, dragging a red wagon with a giant plastic bag full of something.
28:31 Speaker 06 I have lost, as of this morning, as of this morning, 67 pounds since July 7th. 67 pounds and 30 inches from my bust, my waist and my hips. 7, 12, 11, I think it is. And this, let me tell you, those of you who are starting dieting or dieting a little bit, this is what 67 pounds of fat looks like. I can't, I can't lift it. Now, when you talk about, Jimmy, is this gross or what?
29:04 Speaker 01 So first of all, Oprah lost all this weight in four months, which is three times faster than what's considered a healthy rate of weight loss. To do it, she went on a liquid diet. She must have lost an incredible amount of muscle. I'm not surprised she couldn't lift 67 pounds. But while she's struggling to have this giant bag of animal fat, what's the first thing out of her mouth?
29:25 Speaker 06 When you talk about making yourself the best you can be, do, I'm glad.
29:30 Speaker 01 Making yourself the best you can be. If you didn't try eating less fat and being less fat, even starving yourself for months if that's what it took, then you were worthy of derision and disgust in front of a live studio audience. Against that backdrop, of course, you're going to pick up a pack of Snackwells. And anxieties about food aren't something you can just avoid. You gotta eat. Here's Professor Ben Cohen again.
29:55 Speaker 02 The consistency with which we interact with food every day, all the time, is is more visible and more pronounced and more choice-based than any other kind of environmental resource. So sure, we we interact with energy probably as much, but we don't have to think about it or make a choice. And so it does beget the opportunity for much more attention to how we decide what we're going to eat.
30:20 Speaker 01 Which meant that people were more in need of guidance than ever. In its crusade against saturated fats, the nutrition science community repeatedly said that trans fats were nothing to worry about. But research was beginning to show that trans fats can raise your levels of bad cholesterol, while lowering levels of good cholesterol, leading to a higher likelihood of heart disease. So the government started discussing changing nutritional labels to specifically call out trans fats. Now, the food industry had access to the same research, and they were working to get out ahead of it. So by the time those government guidelines rolled out, not only had most companies remove trans fats from their products, they started to tout that on the front of their labels. Trans fats went from being health darlings to pariahs
31:05 Speaker 01 in the span of a decade. The whiplash was intense.
31:09 Dan Pashman? And I have to say, like, this kind of whiplash, this is exactly what breeds skepticism among consumers, skepticism of companies and of the government. People think, they tell us one thing is healthy, then a few years later, it's the worst thing you can ever eat. So why should we believe anything they say?
31:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, like, government and marketing and science all felt equally implicated in the trans fat debacle.
31:35 Dan Pashman? So we're coming to the end of our third era with even more distrust of industry and government. People are desperate to find someone who they think can tell them that their food is healthy and safe.
31:46 Speaker 01 Which ushers in our final era. Today, enter influencers.
31:52 Speaker 07 When I eat a strict carnivore, high-fat diet, I burn fat like crazy.
31:58 Speaker 08 I have the ability to reduce sugar intake from my diet, and so do you. Is it easy? No.
32:03 Speaker 09 When you only eat protein, your body starts breaking down muscle tissue instead of fat.
32:08 Speaker 03 Yogurt has a lot of protein, sure, but what it's missing is fiber.
32:13 Speaker 07 When I am hungry throughout the day, which is kind of rare, cold butter.
32:17 Speaker 08 Drink more water.
32:18 Speaker 09 A great thing to add, one to two tablespoons of psyllium husk powder.
32:22 Speaker 10 Even the doctors prescribing you to eat more heart-healthy grains don't know what the truth is. They're confused.
32:33 Speaker 01 Here's Professor Emily Cantwell again.
32:36 Speaker 03 At this moment, when trust in advertising is starting to fall away, consumers have this perceived enhanced trust, right, of an influencer as someone who's sharing of their lives, of their experiences. And so they're trading in a currency of authenticity, transparency, this sense of enhanced realness that starts in that early 2000s period and has only escalated to the point where we are now, where there is such low trust in advertising, in industry, in institutions, in governments, in science.
33:09 Speaker 01 So now it's like, choose your own expert.
33:12 Dan Pashman? And also influencers have the appearance of independence. You know, like the thinking goes, well, this person making salad in their sunny kitchen doesn't work for a big corporation or a government agency, so they have no reason to lie to me.
33:24 Speaker 01 Right. Like, at one time skepticism over the food industry and its cozy relationship with the government was seen as kind of a leftist center thing. But over time, concern about what we were putting in our bodies spread across the political spectrum. That included both food and vaccines, both of which have become deeply politicized in the COVID era.
33:44 Dan Pashman? And I do have to say, like, the change in guidelines during the early pandemic, even if they were well-intentioned and based on the best science available at the time, all that back and forth sowed more mistrust among people who were already skeptical of government guidelines. You know, like, in some ways, it was like trans fats all over. People think, these so-called experts keep changing their minds, maybe they aren't experts at all.
34:07 Speaker 01 This brings us to our current bad fats, as described by Dr. Kate Shanahan. Here she is being interviewed last year by Dave Asprey, who calls himself the father of biohacking.
34:18 Dan Pashman? You talk about the hateful eight oils. What are the hateful eight oils?
34:24 Speaker 11 So the hateful eight are the ones that we want to avoid.
34:26 Speaker 01 They are canola, corn, cottonseed, a villain again, grape seed, rice bran, safflower, soybean, and sunflower oils. These are the seed oils that sent you into a tailspin at the grocery store, Dan. And if you're like, but wait, I'd never heard of seed oils before this year? You have. The term seed oil is a rebrand of vegetable oil.
34:48 Dan Pashman? Wait, you're telling me that, like, after all this discussion of seed oils, they're just vegetable oils?
34:53 Speaker 01 Yes.
34:54 Dan Pashman? And so what, like, people who are against these oils, call them seed oils because it sounds unknown and bad?
35:01 Speaker 01 I mean, basically, like, vegetable oil sounds neutral, maybe even wholesome. But like, seed oil is this villain, something unfamiliar, and therefore something possibly dangerous. Kate Shanahan, who we just heard, is one of the people who started this crusade against quote-unquote "seed oils." The claim is because these eight oils are rich in omega-6 acids, they're inflammatory and bad for you. But the science doesn't bear that out.
35:26 Dan Pashman? As I learned when I spent a half hour in the grocery store reading academic papers. You know, but like, what's interesting to me is that now the information on what's healthy is not always coming from corporations or government. It's often coming from influencers or that girl you went to high school with who's now selling supplements out of her garage. And these people on social media, like I said, they have this veneer of authenticity and independence, but they often have no legitimate expertise.
35:52 Speaker 01 Not to mention, sometimes they're getting paid by the same companies that have lost our trust in the first place. But now, ideas that were once on the fringe are making their way to the highest levels of government.
36:03 Speaker 12 Seed oils are one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods.
36:11 Speaker 01 That's current Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr. So in 1967, his father helped launch the idea that scientific research and government expertise should inform what Americans eat. And 60 years later, RFK Jr. is still asking questions about the health of the American diet. The difference is that in the 70s, the Senate Committee drew from a wide range of expertise to make recommendations that Americans could trust. But today's Kennedy is espousing pseudoscience and telling people to abandon seed oils in favor of animal fats.
36:44 Dan Pashman? Dun, dun, dun, full circle.
36:46 Speaker 01 Yep, and RFK Jr. is especially big on beef tallow.
36:51 Speaker 02 There is a specific irony around beef tallow.
36:53 Speaker 01 Here again is Professor Ben Cohen, our expert on the panic around adulterated foods. Beef tallow is rendered beef fat, which is made using the same process as its close cousin, lard, which is rendered pork fat. Shout out to Upton Sinclair.
37:08 Speaker 02 There's an irony that it does call back to like meatpacking. It just matters mainly where's the beef coming from? Where are the cows coming from? How are they raised? Who's handling it? What's the process?
37:17 Speaker 01 So you're right, we've come full circle. Slaughterhouses were what kickstarted the movement for food safety. And the idea was that pure, lab-processed foods were going to save us. But ironically, here we are 100 years later. Government figures are nostalgic for beef tallow and FDA regulations are being rolled back.
37:37 Speaker 02 Just beef tallow alone doesn't really, I think, mean anything. It's, well, how do we get it? Where is it from? And what's our participation in that process? I think part of the attempt is a sense of returning to some perceived golden era.
37:53 Speaker 01 Or a gilded one. Ben says we have the same concerns now as we did in the early 1900s. That deception occurs at a widespread scale and that we might be cheated or poisoned by our food. And some social scientists have even suggested that we might be entering a parallel gilded age today. I asked Ben what he thought about that.
38:13 Speaker 02 There are not really parallels that we're in. It's the same Gilded Age. It just had a slight departure, maybe in the middle of the 20th century. Maybe post-New Deal to Great Society, that era creates this impression that we've moved beyond the Gilded Age. And so when we talk about we're returning to one, I'm not sure if we ever really left.
38:33 Dan Pashman? So that's our fourth and final era. And Adwoa, I want to just take a step back from everything we've heard because I'm curious, like, what does all this say about our culture around food and health and all these other issues? Does this happen everywhere or is this uniquely American?
38:51 Speaker 01 Honestly, it might be.
38:52 Dan Pashman? Okay.
38:53 Speaker 01 Ben and Emily told me that the origins of American food science came from studying what European countries were doing. But starting with Reagan, a lot of that government regulatory action was slowly dismantled. Like, I live in Portugal and EU regulations are still very much intact, so I don't have these anxieties about whether I'm being cheated or poisoned in the grocery store aisle.
39:14 Dan Pashman? Right.
39:15 Speaker 01 Ben says that European countries have another advantage over the US: longstanding food cultures.
39:21 Speaker 02 Because we don't really have a standard American diet, it leaves more space for people to worry that we're not doing the right thing because there's no anchor to return to.
39:27 Dan Pashman? That does make a lot of sense. Like, food is part of culture. Culture is always going to change and evolve. Winds are going to blow in different directions over time and marketing is going to make those winds blow stronger. But in America, we don't have that rootedness to prevent us from totally blowing away.
39:47 Speaker 01 Yeah. And Professor Emily Cantwell thinks that that lack of anchor might actually be the strongest feature of the American food system.
39:56 Speaker 03 In some ways, nutrition and making meaning of food through nutrition is one way you can define what American food culture is. And so in that way, it sort of changes, right? When a new research finding is communicated in a way that's confusing or misleading for people to understand. And the way that aligns with the way marketing, right, is always trying to make this compelling pitch to change people's Of what it is, you know, to eat healthfully, to figure out what's right to eat. Advertising, right, from when it becomes this modern industry. Its whole job is to help consumers become informed and modern, to keep up with the trends, right, to be able to be these fashionable, modern people, living in the fastest, most
40:39 Speaker 03 exciting time, right, that it ever happened. But from a health perspective and from a food culture perspective, we don't need our food lives to be trendy. I worry we're getting farther and farther away from the truly simple foundational ideas about how to eat well. And the further and further we get away from those, the easier it is to confuse us.
41:07 Dan Pashman? Well, Adwoa Jimabrampong, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing this story.
41:11 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me.
41:13 Dan Pashman? You can find more of Adwoa's food reporting at Gravy, Milk Street, and NPR's The Indicator. Special thanks also to Bill Harris, David Schleifer, and Selena Wong. Next week on the show, I welcome back Samin Nosrat to the show. Samin just published her new book, Good Things Now. She swore she'd never read a cookbook with traditional recipes, but that's exactly what she did with this new one. So what changed? We'll talk about that and the difficult personal period she went through after the success of her first cookbook. That's all next week. While you wait for that, one, check out last week's episode about cooking with a brain injury. It's up now. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage.
41:57 Dan Pashman? Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful.
42:13 Dan Pashman? This episode was reported by Adjoa Jemabrempong and was produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern. And senior producer Andres O'Hara. It was edited by Camille Stanley. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. And our interns are
42:26 Speaker 13 Morgan Johnson.
42:27 Dan Pashman? And
42:27 Speaker 13 Jasmine Sutherland.
42:29 Dan Pashman? Music help from Black Label Music. This workful is a production of Sirius XM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
42:37 Speaker 14 And I'm Amado from Portland, Oregon, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
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