Seed Oils

Why are you, as a man, afraid of sunflowers. Support us: Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks! The O6-O3 ratio: A critical appraisalSeed Oils: Are They Actually Toxic? No need to avoid healthy omega-6 fatsOmega-6 Fatty Acids and Risk for Cardiovascular DiseaseDo Seed Oils Make You Sick? Seed oils: Are they healthy or harmful? ToxGuide: HexaneDietary linoleic acid intake and bl...

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Dude, it took me so long to figure out that record days are, your workday is the record.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  You're like one of those influencers who's like, do you know how hard it is to be an influencer?

• 0:21Speaker 00

  Look.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Do you know how hard my job is?

• 0:22Speaker 00

  I am gonna show you my morning routine featuring Saratoga water.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  I do crunches while I return business texts on my Apple Watch.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Dude, are you familiar with the weird TikToks where they debunk the morning routines?

• 0:37Speaker 00

  No, what?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  They'll have, you know, titles on the screen. They'll be like, 5:37 waking up. And then people will like stitch in and they'll be like, actually in Dallas at 5:30, the sun is not in that position. It's actually more like 7:30.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  Dude, you and I have talked about, and I think we have a shared value around not letting the show just become a dunk fest, right?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  But like, man, if we didn't, I would do such a fucking episode on those goddamn mornings.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Just like, what's on TikTok this week? Sucks on TikTok today.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  I would do that, so there's so many people on TikTok who suck.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  All right, tag it, tag it.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Tag it.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  What do you have? What are you gonna rhyme with seed oils?

• 1:15Speaker 00

  I was gonna come up with, I don't know what, weed boils. I don't know.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Do you want me to sit in silence and let you workshop that?

• 1:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Creed soils, Creed soils, start singing a Creed song.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Oh, hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast where they tried to bury us, but they didn't know we were seed oils.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  That's terrible. What's that even from?

• 1:41Speaker 00

  They tried to bury us and then we grow and the blah, blah, blah.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  We're here, we're seeds, get used to it. Is this from your political organizing days?

• 1:48Speaker 00

  I'm Aubrey Gordon.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  I'm Michael Hump.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Uh, if you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Seed stuff. Aubrey, what are we talking about today?

• 2:04Speaker 00

  We're talking about seed oils. You're talking to me about seed oils and I'm so excited. Because you and I have been making this show for long enough and have been talking about far-right wellness grifters long enough. That seed oils just come up. It's something that like Tucker Carlson has touched on. Pete Evans has talked about.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  It's popped up a bunch of times, but I've never done like the in-depth fact check.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, we have never done such an Avengers Endgame ass episode.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Well, so this is the thing I'm fascinated about is like, what is the origin story of the seed oil stuff? And like, who started it and why did so many people pick it up?

• 2:44Speaker 01

  I have noticed when I've told people like, oh, I'm researching an episode about seed oils. Three quarters of my friends are like, oh, thank fucking god, like, what is this garbage? But then like one quarter of my friends are like, what do you mean seed oils? Just for like the people who are like blessedly offline, we should give like a little overview of this panic.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  For the people who don't know who Kendra, who fell in love with her psychiatrist is.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Fuck you for knowing that I would know that.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  I love, I love that you knew Kendra.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  God. So these, if you go sort of on like Manosphere, TikTok and Substack, et cetera. I pulled a couple like random headlines that are going around. One of them is how industrial seed oils are making us sick. Eight toxic seed oils. Is vegetable oil bad for you? The science behind the worst food in human history. There's a documentary called Fed a Lie: The Truth About Seed Oils. There's This Is How Canada Convinced You to Eat Engine Lubricant. I love that we can blame Canada.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  So I am sending you a tweet from, it's one of the first Avengers Endgame appearances.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  You have sent me a tweet, fuck you, first of all.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  RFK Jr. is the poster of this tweet. The tweet reads, "Fast food is a part of American culture, but that doesn't mean it has to be unhealthy and that we can't make better choices. Did you know that McDonald's used to use beef tallow to make their fries from 1940 until phasing it out in favor of seed oils in 1990?" This switch was made because saturated animal fats were thought to be unhealthy. But we have since discovered that seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Driving causes.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Interestingly enough, this began to drastically rise around the same time fast food restaurants switched from beef tallow to seed oils in their fryers. Great correlation.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  That's how you know it's causal, because the two lines went up at the same time.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  People who enjoy a burger with fries on a night out aren't to blame, and Americans should have every right to eat out at a restaurant without being unknowingly poisoned by heavily subsidized seed oils.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Poisoned.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  It's time to make frying oil tallow again.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  It's so bad.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  It's very sweaty.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  If anyone knows sweaty, I know sweaty.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  We know a sweaty little slogan. We know a pun that doesn't work. Excuse me.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  It's approaching maintenance fees.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's approaching tagline levels of bad.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  Uh, I hate it here. This sucks. I remember the beef tallow shit. I remember a bunch of people in the 90s being like, "The fries used to be good."

• 5:30Speaker 01

  This whole kind of craze is like becoming slowly more mainstream. So earlier this year, Steak and Shake announced that they're not gonna have any seed oils on their menu.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  Aw, come on.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  They're switching to beef tallow. I don't even know what this, I don't think we have this in Seattle. So like, I've never even heard of this.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Wake me up when it's Burgerville, you know what I'm saying?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  There's also something called the Seed Oil Scout App that like lists restaurants that use seed oils. And there's like a really funny article about this whole trend, where people in New York started seeing signs, like on lamp posts, that said, "Carbone puts seed oils in their spicy rigatoni," in all caps.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  I heard about this. I heard about this.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  This is like, "Ooh, got 'em."

• 6:13Speaker 00

  A friend from New York texted me and was like, "Why am I seeing these? What the fuck is this?"

• 6:18Speaker 01

  The last thing I want to send you is maybe the most profound example of a stopped clock is right twice a day that we've ever had on this show.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  You're gonna love this.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Uh, this is a tweet from Andrew Tate.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Friend of the show, Andrew Tate.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  The tweet opens in all caps. Seed oils, seed oils, OMG, seed oils, OMG, fucking OMG, seed oils. Fuck, fuck, OMG, fuck. I can tell you losers have never had real enemies. You're afraid of sunflowers.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  It's good. It's a, I'm sorry, but it's a good tweet. You've never had enemies. You're afraid of sunflowers.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  You legit won't shut up about it. Such uninteresting lives. Total losers.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  So there's a giant JPG in my head of that thing from the Onion of like, heartbreaking. The worst person you know just made a really great point.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  This is a very good point and a very terrible person.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  You know this from knowing me for five plus years. I have like a little soundboard in my brain and one of the sounds that gets played very often is the Christian Bale onset meltdown of like, oh, good, good for you.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  You have done that on the show numerous times.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  And also it's really funny to think about a grown man at the top of his field going,

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yelling at like a teenster.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  And I think there's something really funny about like this like clear and present danger to society that is Andrew Tate going, you're afraid of sunflowers.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  I know. You have no enemies. It's so good. Unfortunately, unfortunately.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  Funny.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  It's good.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  So, okay, we're gonna go through like the history of this panic. I spent so fucking long, Aubrey, in like weird corners of the internet to figure out just like where this comes from.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  This is my main question. I'm so curious.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  But first, we have to talk about what are seed oils?

• 8:15Speaker 00

  But first, here's 10 more nightmare tweets for you.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna, we're gonna do that for two more hours and then I'll tell you the interesting part of this episode.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Next up, Dr. Phil.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Aubrey, can you name all hateful eight of the seed oils?

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Oh, I can't.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  This is what they call them.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  I mean, it's gotta be like canola slash rape seed oil, right? Canola, I recently learned stands for like Canadian something oil.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, depending on the source, it's either a be shortening of Canada oil low acid or a portmanteau of Canada oil, which should be Canoil? But yes, it's a version of, it's a specific breed of rape, which is the name of the crop, like rape seed.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  The crop is rape. It has a Latin root that is actually different from like the crime. The crime is from rapere, which means to steal or to snatch, to take. Rape seed is based on rapum, which is Latin for turnip. Convergent evolution, they both just evolved into rape over time. And so if you read like, back when I did human rights stuff, we did a couple of projects with agricultural companies. And so I read like trade publications and they'll just talk about like, oh yeah, like it's been a good year for winter rape. We're really optimistic about Central Asian rape this year. It's just the name of the crop. So it makes sense, obviously, why people in the field were like, oh man, we really got to get another fucking name for it.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've got a branding issue on our hands.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  So people in Canada came up with, they bred the crop for specific characteristics. And then people were like, oh, thank fucking God, we have another thing that we can call this. So that's what canola oil is.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  So, okay, so rape seed oil, soybean oil is going to be in there?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  That's the most commonly consumed seed oil in America, but oftentimes it's not actually called soybean oil. It's just generic vegetable oil that you find at the store.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Uh, cottonseed oil?

• 10:04Speaker 01

  That's three.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  That's as far as I get. What else is in there?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  There's also corn oil.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Oh geez, of course.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Grape seed oil, which is not the same as rape seed oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, rice bran oil and peanut oil.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Fascinating that peanut oil counts as a seed oil.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  I know, right?

• 10:20Speaker 00

  But also soybean oil seems like another one where I'm like, huh?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  And also avocados have seeds, but avocado oil is not a seed oil because it comes from like the flesh.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Sure, olive oil, similar possible thing going on there.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  The scientific community does not actually say seed oils. Like seed oils is a term that doesn't really emerge until like 2015. In the academic literature, they say polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFA's.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  No.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  I didn't want to say PUFA all up to because that's what they call it. Gay people in Britain and I didn't want to confuse our UK listeners.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Well, it's also so close to fupa.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  It's very, it's very close to fupa. I know. I'm gonna misspeak and say fupa like 15 times if we say poofer the whole episode. So I'm just gonna say seed oils, even though like academically, they don't really like say that in the literature. So obviously, like, we're not gonna get too deep into this, but like, seed oils are like one of the first forms of food processing. Like, you squeeze an olive and like oil comes out. This is like a thing that you can use in cooking. So this is something that's been in food for like thousands of years. The US consumption of seed oils is very low until basically the 50s and 60s. As part of the panic around saturated fats, we talked about this in our snack wells episode. There was this diet hurt hypothesis that was like, okay, red meat and butter and lard are really bad for you. So we need everybody to switch to unsaturated fat.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  This was like the explanation for things like heart disease and strokes.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And in 1961, the American Heart Association released recommendations, basically telling people like, hey, stop eating butter, red meat, anything with saturated fat in it and switch to seed oils. Although, again, they weren't calling them seed oils. And so around then, like butter consumption, lard consumption all started plummeting, like really noticeably if you look at the graphs. And you have a huge increase in first in shortening, which is like things like Crisco. But eventually, that sort of gives way to more vegetable oils because vegetable oils are much cheaper and much easier to process. In 1985, canola oil is introduced. It really is remarkable how quickly consumption of seed oils increased. Starting in 1960, it's just like a vertical line, like we all started eating way more seed oils.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  So as this is happening, you basically have the first inklings of the seed oil panic. Just in like the academic literature where people notice this is like a really big trend. It's like, huh, Americans are eating like way more unsaturated fats. And like, all of this is happening, like this, this interest in fatty acids, basically, is happening at the same time that just like the field of nutrition is developing. What you have between like 1980 and roughly 2010 is a ton of studies just doing like super basic science on like, how do fatty acid molecules affect the body? How does this affect like platelet aggregation? And like, is this or is this not a vasodilator? Super technical stuff.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm gonna read you just like a, a brief excerpt of one of these articles. This is from a 1976 article.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  It says, "Seed oils, seed oils, OMG seed oils."

• 13:18Speaker 01

  You have no real enemies.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Colon.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  So this is from 1976. It says, "Spiral strips of rabbit thoracic aorta were super fused with CRIB's CG solution at 37 degrees centigrade containing a mixture of antagonist and endomethacin. These indicate the contractile response produced by testing 50 micrograms of the incubation mixture of sheep seminal vesicle microzomes in a tube containing 50 micrograms of phosphate. The contractile response of super fused rabbit thoracic aorta strips increased in a parallel linear fashion with increasing concentration of the endo peroxides PG1, 2, and 3." This is gibberish to us, right? Like, this is most sort of laypeople would look at this and be like, "What the hell's going on?" But this is essentially the scientific field just like exploring, "What does this mean? Like, how do fatty acids affect the body?" And alongside all this basic

• 14:10Speaker 01

  research, people also start going back through old data sets and being like, "Well, did people who ate more vegetable oil get sicker or less vegetable oil, less sick, etc.? They start doing new studies of like, let's ask people how much poofer they're eating and like, how they feel. There's basically just like a huge amount of just like, stuff being produced."

• 14:27Speaker 00

  You haven't been saying poofer, so I was not ready for it.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I know, but I can't tell myself.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  I was not ready for it.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do like, one every 20 minutes.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  Keep me awake.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Just for you.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Keep me on my toes.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  The reason I'm talking about this and the reason I wanted to read that, like, extremely boring excerpt is because we've seen this so many times where people do a lot of very good faith science, and it's kind of messy, and it's very technical, and there's just a huge body of literature that if you're a layperson, or especially like, a bad faith grifter, it's very easy to dip into this literature and pick something out and be like, "Oh, this this means it's poison."

• 15:01Speaker 00

  I've been telling you that I have been researching, like, sort of a Maha adjacent person. And when people try to like, fact check her work, her response is very often like, "There's at least one study that corroborates everything I'm saying here." And I'm like, "That's not actually enough, my guy."

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing. I mean, what you start finding is, you know, starting in the early 2000s, this, like, Seed oils are poisonous for you thing. You start seeing this pop up among like left wing anti vaxers. Have you ever heard of the Weston A. Price Foundation?

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Michael, I have been pulling together a research list on Weston A. Price to see if we need to do a full episode.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  We might need to do a full episode.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  I'm sending you a excerpt from the Weston A. Price Foundation in 2002 in an article called "The Great Khan Ola."

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Wonderful.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Doesn't work, but you know, I see where they were going with this.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  It says, quote, "Studies carried out at the Health Research and Toxicology Research Divisions in Ottawa, Canada, discovered that rats bred to have high blood pressure and proneness to stroke had shortened lifespans when fed canola oil as the sole source of fat." I'm just gonna bookmark and say,

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  "In that sentence alone, there are bigger problems than canola oil." "The results of a later study suggested that the culprit was the sterol compounds in the oil, which, quote, 'make the cell membrane more rigid and contribute to the shortened lifespan of the animals.'"

• 16:44Speaker 01

  So here you see, there's this sort of weird cherry picking thing. Oh, a study on like rats that are prone to stroke. It shortened their life and it does that by like making the cell membrane more rigid. This is again, very like technical. It's not really giving you like a body of work, like were there other rat studies that were done? It doesn't really tell you that, right? They're pulling out one study.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  I have a question about this sort of in situ. Are they using links or footnotes or anything, or are they just sort of paraphrasing?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Again, they do use footnotes. And like, if you scroll all the way down in this thing, it's like meticulously footnoted. And I did actually go to this study and like, they're correct. In this rat study, the rats that were fed canola oil had shorter lifespans. Like, they're not lying about anything.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Totally. The reason that I ask is that we've talked about two different sort of approaches to use of research by grifters. One is the Dr. Oz approach where he describes a study, you have to go try and find it based on the description. And like, nothing matching that description exists, right? So I didn't know if we were dealing with that, or if we were dealing with the Dave Asprey type.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Where someone is like, footnoting you to death, sort of counting on you not checking on the footnote.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  And also counting on you not checking on like, what is the broader scientific consensus here?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. What you have to do here is you don't just have to double check the citation. You have to basically do a completely new search for like, meta-analyses of canola oil's effects on rats. And then even then, it's like, well, it's rat study. So it's not totally clear how to interpret that. So this is the conclusion of this, Weston A. Price blog post.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Canola oil is definitely not healthy for the cardiovascular system. Like rapeseed oil, its predecessor, canola oil is associated with fibrotic lesions of the heart. It also causes vitamin E deficiency, undesirable changes in the blood platelets, and shortened lifespan in stroke-prone rats. Dude.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  I just like, I love the idea of someone like, reaching for the salad dressing and be like, no! It shortens the lifespan of stroke-prone rats!

• 18:47Speaker 00

  It also sounds a little bit like they're just dunking on rats.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  The rats didn't know about beef tallow.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  They're not even, they don't even have a morning routine. They're not even

• 18:58Speaker 00

  doing crunches or reading Bible verses.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Even by the standards of like, left-wing anti-vaxxers, this is pretty fringe.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  The first sort of, I guess vaguely credible mention of it that I could find is in 2008, in a book called "Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food", by someone named Catherine Shanahan, who is a trained geneticist. I found like, references to this in like, later, like, Substack posts and stuff. I was like, what is deep nutrition? What is this? It appears to be self-published. It's later like, published, published in like, 2017. I get the book, I do a Ctrl+F for seed oils, and this is the first mention of it. I'm just gonna send you the full paragraph.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  "It does boil down to economics. Autism is, in my estimation, just another complication of the industrial diet, together with obesity, diabetes, sleep apnea, hypertension, Alzheimer's, and cancer."

• 19:55Speaker 00

  All these stem from the decision to ignore nutritional practices that fortified our ancestors with genetic wealth.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  She has this whole weird thing about how like your diet shows up in the structure of your face. She has a chapter called "The Sibling Strategy" where she looks at, you know, Matt Dillon, the actor? And then he has a brother named Kevin Dillon and she shows like both of their faces and she's like, "Look how ugly his brother is and look how attractive Matt Dillon is." Like, that's because he's the older sibling and like older siblings get better nutrition.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  This is, as a younger sibling, this is older sibling propaganda.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Which isn't, I mean, I don't even think that's fucking true, but it's like, the literal thesis of the book is like, beautiful people like ate better and like, the way that you eat is expressed through like your physical beauty.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Dude, this is, I guarantee you, this is gonna be the one episode that my brother listens to of our show, like ever. And he's like, "That part sounded true."

• 20:54Speaker 01

  So, the main thing that I want to convey here is that like, seed oils is kind of like a crank thing now, like it mostly goes around like the crank, right? But like, this has kind of always been a crank thing. I then found a couple of like little mentions of it in like slightly more mainstream sources. There's a 2015 Harper's Bazaar article called "Why You Should Try The Polyunsaturated-Fat-Free Diet" by a guy named Stephen Macari, who's like a, kind of a woo-woo, like a woo-woo kind of life coach kind of guy.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  I really like it when you talk through your teeth on this.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  He's just like, "I don't know what to say without being..."

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. No, I get you.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  But like, just like not a credible article. I'll send you the sort of nut graph of that.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  What if there was a substance that you were consuming regularly that was severely hampering your efforts to get healthy? What if this substance was linked to accelerated aging and a variety of common health problems? What if this substance was used in numerous quote-unquote "health foods" and in numerous restaurants? What if you were taking supplements that contained high amounts of a harmful substance that you were told was health? Well, this is happening and you are most likely unaware of it. The most damaging thing you can put in your body is not sugar and it's not gluten. It's polyunsaturated fats.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  When he talks about supplements here, he's talking about like fish oil supplements. So he's kind of merging together omega threes and omega sixes, which we'll get into later. And then also he has this like accelerated aging. None of the literature was about that. Even like the technical literature was not about that. But it's like, you can see this stuff kind of bouncing around the crankosphere. And then everyone else is just like doing improv on it. They're like, what if it also affects your aging?

• 22:40Speaker 00

  Sure. Yes, and?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yes, exactly.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Alzheimer's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  So in an effort to try to understand like where this came from and sort of how it was bouncing around the internet. I went on Twitter. The last good thing about Twitter is like it has a really good advanced search function. So I looked for every tweet with the phrase seed oils from 2006 to 2020. It's actually kind of remarkable how little there is. There really isn't very much from before 2019. The authors of like the Harper's Bazaar article, there's also a random Forbes article. That author is like tweeting about it, but like no one is really talking about seed oils. But then, starting in 2018, you start seeing it bubble up as a kind of a B plot to the carnivore diet.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Joe Rogan has the Jordan Peterson carnivore special thing.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Of course we're at Rogan.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  That is July 2018. And afterwards you start seeing like random like carnivore diet accounts talking about it. So there is someone named woke carnivore on Twitter. Not particularly woke. I was very disappointed.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, we're in full internet Mad Libs.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  He says, "Cutting out sugar, grains and seed oils from your diet effectively cuts out all junk food." In September of 2018, we have one of my favorite tweets. There's so many bangers in this episode, Aubrey. Here's one of the bangers. So this is from someone named Seizure Salad?

• 24:14Speaker 00

  Wasn't there some chat on Twitter about being immune to sunburn while avoiding seed oils? I just realized I spent six hours in the sun with no sunscreen and I'm not even the slightest bit red despite a long history of burning very easily.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  These people latch on to things as like good or bad with no actual like biological basis for like what that is doing. So it's like you cut out seed oils and like you reduce your risk of heart attack by, I don't know, 10% or whatever. Fine, like if that's your belief, fine. But then it's like, oh no, seed oils are bad and they're poison. And they're not only poison if you eat them, but also if you stop eating them, like everything about your life gets better. You also don't sunburn.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  I just realized I spent six hours in the sun with no sunscreen and I'm not even the slightest bit red. Let me tell you from the voice of experience, give it three more hours.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's like those people that'd be like, why isn't the edible kicking in? And then like 90 minutes later, they'll just tweet like potatoes.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Uh, okay, here's another one from 2018.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  There is a picture that has, uh, three like spoonfuls or pats of different sort of butters and butter substitutes. There's a reduced fat margarine, there is a full fat margarine, and there is one labeled natural butter. They are all on sort of at different corners of a plate and the margarine and reduced fat margarine are both being left alone and the natural butter is being swarmed by ants. And the tweet says, even ants have enough brains to avoid seed oils.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  If you are, no, I just started reading this in my head in Jeff Foxworthy voice. If you are smarter than an ant, if you are smarter than an ant, say no to fake seed oil based meats and hashtag yes to meat.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Hashtag yes to meat is what? I was like, I'm sending it to Aubrey.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Oh no.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  It's good.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  My god.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Hashtag yes to meat.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  You know that the next time I see you, I will have needle pointed onto like a throat.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Hashtag yes to meat.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  To meat, too curious. Yes.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  The number two and then meat. Oh, God.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Everybody agrees and like the Twitter data shows that this, this whole seed oils thing explodes in October of 2020 with an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Is this one of the ones where they're high on camera or they get high first and then get on camera?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Aubrey, I listened. It was three hours and nine minutes long and I listened to the whole fucking thing.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  You listened to a full episode?

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Aubrey, they, they talk about bow hunting for like 25 minutes. I'm like not kidding.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  Jesus, hell's bells.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Joe Rogan's like, I was at an MMA fight. I was thinking about bow hunting. And I'm like, well, I'm thinking about hunting myself with a fucking bow right now.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  You know this. I was a kindergarten classroom assistant for a while. This is how the five-year-olds preoccupied with masculinity would talk. Weapons and martial arts and like, I'm really tough. Don't mess with me.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  I know.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  It just is weird and sad to see in full grown adults. It's not hilarious like Christian Bale.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  I know.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  So this is a Joe Rogan episode that is an interview with Paul Saladino.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  So Paul Saladino had asthma and eczema growing up.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  At some point, it appears to be in college, he discovers the paleo diet and it seems like the paleo diet really helps the eczema go away. But then when he's in his final year of medical school, it like comes roaring back even like more. He gets like sepsis at one point. He has like, he, he, he's, it appears hospitalized, at least according to him. Apparently the eczema was so bad that he had to go on steroids.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  He gains weight during this period, partly because of the steroids. So he's really insecure about that. And eventually he discovers the carnivore diet. He is on Joe Rogan to promote his book, The Carnivore Code. And I'm going to send you a excerpt from the introduction where he talks about how he discovered the carnivore diet.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  I'll never forget the day I was listening to Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast while driving to the Washington coast to go surfing. At the end of the podcast, I heard Jordan talk about his meat-based diet. He related how it had helped his daughter Michaela overcome a lifetime of severe autoimmune disease, and how it had helped him lose weight and resolve his own sleep apnea and similar autoimmune issues. Suddenly, I had a paradigm-shifting thought that changed the course of my life from that moment forward. What if my own autoimmune issues and so many of the inflammatory problems we see manifested as chronic disease today could be triggered by the plants we are eating?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  The plants.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Great. It's definitely the plants' fault.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  There's a couple of things that are very notable to me here. First of all, he's on Joe Rogan, talking about the carnivore diet, but he's also inspired...

• 29:24Speaker 00

  By Joe Rogan.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Joe Rogan is like, creating grifters, and then like, having the grifters on.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Thank you so much, Joe Rogan, for inspiring my grift.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Again, like, if you look at the timeline, there's something very weird about this, because the episode with Jordan Peterson where he promotes the carnivore diet is in July of 2018. Paul Saladino is promoting his book on Joe Rogan in October of 2020. So only a little over two years has gone by since he discovered the carnivore diet. You know about, like, the schedule of book publishing, like, how long it takes to get a book published, written, everything else. This basically means that he started writing the book almost immediately after he got on the carnivore diet.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  Right. He heard that interview and he was like, "People must know my story of this thing I'm about to try."

• 30:10Speaker 01

  This thing that I've done for like, a little while. He later says he was only on the carnivore diet for, quote, "a year, a year and a half." So he basically is just like, immediately fucking giving people advice. And then, his road to like, becoming an influencer, and like, how he gets from like, medical school to being a guy with like, I think, 2 million followers on Instagram, like, he's very popular on these social media platforms. He gets kicked off of them at various points for like, spreading medical misinformation. But, he becomes a very popular influencer relatively quickly, but it's not totally clear like, financially how he did this. He starts writing the book, he... He starts, again, of course, he starts a supplement company.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Step one, monetize it.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  It's called Heart and Soil.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Absolutely not.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Three and a half out of five. Uh, do you want to know who his business partner is, Aubrey?

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Oh, God, Joe Rogan?

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Uh, the Liver King.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  You, you really are getting the band back together.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  We really are, my God. So he somehow like just finds this diet, goes on the diet, immediately starts like selling the diet to people. He also, this is another like getting the band back together thing. Here, I'm gonna send you a clip of him so you can see this man.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Sorry to this man.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  This is a, uh, video of him. Watch it together.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  You sent me a video that's on Twitter. What happens when you click through to a video post on Twitter is that it automatically starts playing.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  And I reached for the pause button and I was, uh, two seconds in, which means that I am now paused on a screen full of organ meat.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Untrimmed organ meat and just the caption phrase is raw meat smoothie.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  You might puke. I got, I got like sick to my stomach watching this the first time.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  I have almost puked on our show before.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true, actually.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Okay, ready?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, kind of sound.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Let me show you guys how to make my morning raw meat smoothie. This is definitely gonna trigger some people. Buckle up. All right, first thing, gonna throw in some raw sheep's milk, 100% grass fed, get all that cream in there. Gonna throw in some organic glyphosate free honey, got some blueberries, some frozen organic wild blueberries. I got some raw heart here. So I love heart, especially raw.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Heart.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Incredible source of coenzyme Q10. Coenzyme Q10 is part of the electron transport chain in the mitochondria of every cell in your body. And I try and eat a little bit of heart every week. Sometimes I grill it, sometimes I get a little crazy and I throw it into my smoothie raw. So colostrum, my favorite. I got a whole package which has testicle.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Liver and blood in it. It's really hard to find fresh stuff.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  It's his supplement, of course, he's selling.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  These are lifesaver. I'll just empty those into the smoothie because that's the secret sauce for making it taste amazing.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Testicle powder.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Blend it up.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  All right, you guys ready for the money shot? Look at this.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  No, I'm not.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Cheers.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Oh, what is it?

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Let's go.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  Blueberries.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Blueberries.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Good.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  How could you beat that in the morning? That is like, that'll get you going.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  So, I don't like it.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  There are absolute, so there are 123 comments on this video that I am not logged into Twitter, so I can't read them. But I guarantee you that there are carnivore diet purists being like, "This isn't the carnivore diet."

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  "What are those blueberries doing in there? What is that honey doing in there?"

• 33:37Speaker 01

  He has a video where he like soaks strawberries in baking soda for 15 minutes, and he's like, "That's how you get the pesticides out."

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, you soak them like beans for hummus.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  All of the comments are like, "But then you rinse it with tap water? You're putting poison on them." Like, everyone is roasting over using fucking tap water. It's the funniest shit.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Fucking, now there's fluoride in those fucking berries!

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Like, oh geez. Like the trace elements from fucking tap water. But anyway, this, this is the real getting the band back together. In 2023, he did an Arowan collab.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Yes!

• 34:08Speaker 01

  To sell a fucking organ smoothie to people.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Yes!

• 34:13Speaker 01

  So, this is, I found an LA Times article about it. These are the ingredients. It says, "It's a concoction of kaffir, beef organs, raw honey, blueberries, bananas, leucuma fruit sweetener, coconut cream, sea salt, maple syrup, and so-called immunomilk."

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Oh no.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  I know.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Oh no.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Which consists of freeze-dried cow's colostrum, which is its initial breast milk after giving birth. Which is false, it's actually womb juice. People who listen to our Patreon bonus episode know that it's actually womb juice.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Only Michael Hobbs knows what colostrum really is.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  I want everyone to know I'm doubling down.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  Boy, immunomilk has a real mystery meat vibe to it.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  This smoothie cost $19. We were paying $19 to eat beef organs and all of this other shit.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Honestly, given beef price is $19 is not...

• 35:04Speaker 01

  I don't know what anything should cost anymore.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Could be worse. Beef at Arowan?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Are you aware, Aubrey, of this wired headphones thing?

• 35:10Speaker 00

  I know people who believe this.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Wait, do you really?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  I absolutely know people who will only take calls on like speaker or like and will not hold the phone up to their head.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Do you mean your husband?

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Surprise, I'm heterosexual and married.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  You're lying. What aren't you lying about? Bluetooth and men.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  My husband knows the truth about 5G and chemtrails.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Possibility knows of anti Bluetooth guy. He's also anti receipts. He has a thing where he says you should put on latex gloves before you touch a CVS receipt or whatever because they're printed on paper that has like this made kind of like of like a sort of latex or rubber like it's not like paper, paper.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Is there an argument for what happens if you do touch the receipts aside from having touched something made out of plastic?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  It's just this idea that like everyone in society, every institution is constantly trying to poison you. We're surrounded by like chemicals and like dangerous things and like only you with like the secret knowledge.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  The idea is the world is full of dangers. You need to protect yourself. Don't trust other people and definitely don't trust institutions to tell you the truth, right?

• 36:25Speaker 01

  But trust me, a shirtless man in Whole Foods.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  It's very wake up sheeple.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  So we are going to watch a clip of his appearance on the Joe Rogan experience. I know. I watched it at double speed. So this is gonna be my first time watching it at normal speed.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  And the real driver here, I suspect, is the last one, Jamie. 10.18.09.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Yes, citation.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  If you look at the consumption of vegetable oil by Americans in since 1910. And that is a staggering amount.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  You don't want to skateboard that ramp.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  That's Tony Hawk worthy, man.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's Tony Hawk.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  That's Tony Hawk worthy. Look at that, man. And you can see soybean is the main one, but canola, sunflower, cottonseed, peanut and other. This is completely evolutionarily inconsistent. This is completely dis-synchronist with our evolution. We would never have been grinding soybeans up into oil. We didn't have the ability to do this.

• 37:19Speaker 04

  And then you can get into all of the reasons this might be doing this. But, you know, as I kind of dug into this, it gets a little bit deep in the weeds. But at a molecular level, these polyunsaturated fats, they act differently in our body. And we don't fully have this figured out. But at the level of our mitochondria, it does look like these polyunsaturated fats, this linoleic acid-rich vegetable oil, is signaling things differently.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  I think it's really, there's a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that linoleic acid is driving adipocyte hypertrophy, meaning fat cells are getting bigger. Fat cells can do two things. They can get bigger or they can divide. When fat cells get big and they don't divide, they eventually start leaking out inflammatory mediators, leaking out free fatty acids. You start to see this, this interesting set of data that points to the fact that maybe all these excess linoleic acid is driving our fat cells to get really big, but isn't allowing them to divide the way they're supposed to.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  His, like, stock in trade is throwing a bunch of, like, large vocabulary words at you.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Yes, sciency words.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Sciency words. And at this time, he's tweeting under the handle CarnivoreMD. He does have a medical degree, but in psychiatry. He didn't study nutrition. What he does is he throws all these big words at you, these things that make it seem like, aha, I'm like this big expert. But like, he doesn't actually have any training in this. Most of the stuff that he says is not very true. He's trying to obfuscate his lack of knowledge with big words, rather than just being like, hey, there's this big word, let me explain it to you.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  We were talking earlier about, um, like, clues to what he's doing and like, who his audience might be. We're finding out here that his audience is specifically Joe Rogan.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Just like, big words were, and like, I brought a visual aid, and Joe Rogan's like, whoa, like, alright.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  The other sort of very funny epilogue to this episode is that Paul Saladino, it's not even clear that he was on the carnivore diet when he went on Joe Rogan.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  He says he was only on it for a year, a year and a half. In 2022, he makes a video of like, why I'm not on the carnivore diet anymore. And he says that when he was on the carnivore diet, he says he experienced lower testosterone, sleep disturbances, heart palpitations, and muscle cramps. He also talks about how You know that thing right before you fall asleep where you kind of jerk?

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, a hypnic jerk.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  He says like his, his jerks got way worse when he was on the carnivore diet so bad that he had to stop the carnivore diet. He's like, something is wrong with me. So you went on Joe Rogan for three hours. You didn't talk about one downside of the carnivore diet. You're selling a book called The Fucking Carnivore Code. Later on, you're like, oh yeah, I like felt like shit when I was on the carnivore diet. Oh, you didn't, you didn't want to tell us that? Like, you didn't think, oh, there's pros and cons to this diet? What works for me and might not work for you? He also, the minute, just like these fucking guys always do, the minute he goes off the carnivore diet, he then gives an interview to some like other podcaster where he's like, oh yeah, you know, being in ketosis, like, oh, it didn't work for me. And I think it's not good for other people either.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  So he like immediately starts like giving advice. And he's like, he's like, well, you know, the carnivore diet, a lot of that, you know, ketosis research, that's based on animals and like, you really just can't extrapolate from animal studies.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  We

• 40:29Speaker 01

  And like, you were talking about mouse studies on fucking Joe Rogan. That's like half of what you talked about was like the fat cells in fucking rats.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it just, again, like, this is part of the challenge with the like, I experimented on myself and of one kind of stuff.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Is that as you find that different practices work for you in different life phases or when you're dealing with different health conditions, or when you're prioritizing different things, you are then sort of laundering your personal experience as some form of scientific knowledge that has been tested.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's all he's doing.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  I think it contributes to some of the weird murkiness that we have now about like people not really being able to read a scientific study without thinking that there ought to be a individual instruction at the end of it and that kind of thing.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  So basically, right after the Joe Rogan, I, I got, I was about to say experience. Right after the Joe Rogan episode, this does explode. Like you can see it in the Twitter data, it starts showing up on places like Breitbart and other right-wing media sites, like The Truth Behind Seed Oils.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Friend of the no one, Breitbart.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  So over the next couple of years, this spreads around into various groups. I just want to talk about a couple of the categories of people that get obsessed with seed oils.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Oh man, can I make some guesses?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  You know what it's gonna be. It's like different flavors. It's like a little Neapolitan of like, the worst people in America.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  It's just, it's a list of moon juice locations.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's gonna be like gym bros and a bunch of these fucking jokers are gonna get caught selling beef tallow as an alternative.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  So I'm sending you a tweet. This is the first group that starts latching on to this.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  This is someone named Andrew Torba, whose username is at Based Torba.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  That's the first thing I'll tell you. That's how I know I don't know this guy. Cause if I had never seen that before, I would have really made a meal out of it.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  I hate these people, but I kind of love these people. Like such parodies of themselves.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  What are you afraid of? Sunflowers?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Based Hobbs.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  The profile picture is just you with a katana sword.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Mine is at ripped podcaster. Wait, did I tell you? I got a random text from like this guy I met on the internet who I haven't seen in like six months randomly texted me at like nine in the morning. He's like, I don't know if I should be telling you this, but someone took your grinder photos and uploaded them to Tumblr. It was on a Tumblr called masculine men. I was like, yes. So that's why my handle is at Hobbs masculine.

• 43:01Speaker 00

  This is gonna go right to his head, folks.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  The thing is, as long as you don't see me moving or hear me speaking, I'm so masculine. As long as you don't know me in any capacity, I'm like so masculine.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Tune in next week when I show up on Lady Like Women.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  You know, every time we record, I text you afterwards. I'm like, was I masked enough on the show? It seems super masked.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  And you also text me, I'm so glad you crossed your legs at the ankle for the whole.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  It's also funny to have that. On the same day, I checked our iTunes reviews for If Books Could Kill and, and one of them was just, why is the woman talking so much?

• 43:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, the woman named Michael is talking a lot.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  All right, read this extremely problematic tweet.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Sorry, from Based Torba.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, read the Based Torba tweet.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Kennedy banning seed oils in American food will be the most consequential policy initiative of the last century. No longer will our people be sick and chronically ill. No longer will they be jacked up on a cocktail of Big Pharma drugs for these diseases. People will be healthy and fit again. This will lead to family creation. This will lead to far more right-wing voters. Half of the problem with liberalism is our miserable, drugged, and diseased people. This single move solves it all. This one weird trick they don't want you to know.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  About raising birth rates by eating less salad dressing.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  One might call it based, Mike. One might call this take based.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  So, this is the founder of Gab, which is like the mega, mega right-wing website. One of his other tweets from earlier in his career is, "Few societies have been sicker than the current year West, and a large part of that sickness is due to Jewish media and technology being used to psychologically and spiritually castrate its citizens." So, these are not people that are doing like dog whistles. These are people that are just like whistling, like walking down the street, whistling.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  Do the space lasers take part?

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  In the castration.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  So basically, this is like one of the transmitters of like seed oil misinformation, starting after the Joe Rogan episode, is just like straightforward for our right people. In 2021 and 2022, this also becomes a big thing among crypto people.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  Fucking of course.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  I'm sending you, again, kind of a good tweet from like a guy that runs like a Bitcoin exchange or something?

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Almost every one of these false quote-unquote "milks," oat, potato, pea, whatever, contains inflammatory seed oils, typically sunflower or canola. Is fleeting smugness really worth developing metabolic syndrome? Fuck off.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  I sent this to every vegetarian I know. Is fleeting smugness really worth developing metabolic syndrome?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Speaking of being, Mr. Chang, of being a terrible person, read his own, uh, reply to this.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  The, the way these guys talk is so weird.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  They're like, they have this weird, like Cormac McCarthy way of doing, like, sick burns.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  All the seed oil guzzlers seething in my mentions right now. Stay mad, metabolically impaired and torpid. Thank you, I will.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  You can tell he had like the thesaurus open and like the other window.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  If you think I'm not making myself a bumper sticker that says mad, metabolically impaired and torpid.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  And torpid?

• 46:38Speaker 00

  You, you got another thing coming.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  The other group I want to talk about is, I read this term in one of the academic articles that I saw, and I cannot stop thinking about it. They call these people granola Nazis. You sort of know what they mean, right? The people who are, they're far right, but it's, it's this sort of almost left-wing messaging about like, we need to go back to the land. We need to have a less corporately dominated public sphere.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  But it's also fundamentally very right-wing.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is Liver King and all of his like quote-unquote ancestral way of living stuff.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Very trad wife adjacent.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  This whole seed oils thing, it's kind of perfect, right? Because it's like, it's this ingredient that we're all eating a ton of that was invented in 1986, right? Like basically in a lab, like it was bred, it's now like a refined, processed ingredient. It fits really perfectly into this like modernity is killing us kind of narrative. So the granola Nazis really picked this up. And one of the main granola Nazis that gets like super obsessed with this and just like tweets at seed oils constantly is a Twitter account called Carnivore Aurelius. I find this person very interesting as a kind of avatar of like the granola Nazi ideology. And so I spent a long time like scrolling through this guy's feed.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  You can find all kinds of other weird sort of sub-B plot conspiracy theories. And I just want to go over them a little bit, partly because they're very funny. And partly because like, I, I, I think there's like this tendency to sort of launder these people or to think like, oh, all they want is for like us to have better diets. Or all they want is for like Americans to be healthier. But this seed oils thing is kind of the tip of the iceberg of a bunch of just bizarre, deranged other narratives that are just not backed up by science and are oftentimes very openly reactionary.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  I will say just one thing, I need to close this tab, but there is a response, the next response down. From all the seed oil guzzlers is someone responding and their response is just, "How has no one made a Bitcoin milk yet?"

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Aubrey, we're done. We can stop recording. That's it. We've reached peak granola Nazi. A Bitcoin milk? Sure.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Why not? Someone probably fucking has. For fuck's sake, we live in hell.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  It really, it really delighted me, so you can understand why I was reticent to close that tab without closing that loop first.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  So, another thing the granola Nazis are really into is ball sunning.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  This is from Carnivore Aurelius. "Considering throwing a dating festival for carnivore singles. Steak-eating galas, good music, cow milking, bread baking, fighting, workouts, ball sunning."

• 49:23Speaker 00

  Good lord.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  This is the vision of the granola Nazis. This is what we should all be doing on weekends. I love fighting.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  Don't forget, we're also gonna be fighting.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  He also has one that says, "Wearing sunglasses in the sun makes you burn. Your body thinks you're indoors and doesn't produce your natural sunscreen, melanin."

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Michael.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  "UV light striking your eyes is one of the main signals for your skin to start producing melanin."

• 49:47Speaker 00

  Michael.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  So I love there's no sunglasses truthers, as well as the sunscreen truthers.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Michael.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  He also responded to the Andrew Tate tweet, where Andrew Tate was like, "You people have never had real enemies."

• 50:01Speaker 00

  My new favorite tweet.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. This might be your new, new favorite tweet. This is also a very good response.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Oh, I can't wait.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Here is him responding to Andrew Tate.

• 50:10Speaker 00

  "This is what seed oils do to your brain. The seed oils increase stress, disrupt hormones, and lower thyroid function. Despite having high T, loads of it is converting into estrogen, causing balding, anger, and this PMS-like behavior."

• 50:31Speaker 01

  I love it when the girlies are fighting. It's like, you guys have a blast in there.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  God, cis dudes accusing other cis dudes of PMSing.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  It's so funny. And also the balding that like, you have high T, but it is turning into estrogen due to seed oils.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Everything about this is so funny.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  It's because it's like little, I keep thinking of The Vine where that like little like six year old kid is like, "You're messing with a future US Army soldier." Dumb little losers, like play acting as like, as like The Rock or something. It's like, this is not convincing to anybody, but also it's very funny to watch and I encourage it.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  Estrogen causes balding anger and this PMS like.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  It's every part. You know how women are always walking around bald and angry?

• 51:22Speaker 01

  And the thing is, women are getting testosterone all the time, but they're eating too much seed oils and that's what turns it into estrogen.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  And that's the only reason we have women.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Exactly, because of the seed oils. We started having women around the 50s, 60s after the AHA recommendations. I was just getting to that part of the history.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, women caused the obesity epidemic famously.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  So that's kind of the way that the seed oils panic is bouncing around on the right. There's like various different like flavors of it on the right. But then worryingly and inevitably, it also starts to bounce around the kind of more credible parts of either center right or just like center left. I am going to send you a excerpt from Chris Van Tullikin's book on ultra-processed foods, which we talked about in that episode.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  Oil for ultra-processed food needs to be bland, plain and flavorless so that it can be used to make any edible product. So manufacturers refine the oil by heating, using phosphoric acid to remove any gums and waxes, neutralize it with caustic soda, bleach it with a bentonite clay, and finally deodorize it using high-pressure steam. This is the process used to make soybean oil, palm oil, canola oil and sunflower oil, four oils that. Make up 90% of the global market.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  So in some ways, he's doing the same thing that Paul Saladino is doing where he's using a lot of like big words. He's like phosphoric acid, bentonite clay, deodorize. He's making this description of like processing of seed oil as like lurid as possible.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  I think it's interesting that he focuses on like bleaching it and deodorizing it.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  And not actually going like, the purpose of those things is this, right?

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Well, also, what's so interesting to me is like, these people are obsessed with this idea that there's like trace elements in our food that are harming us, which again, might actually be true. Like, I'm actually open to that discussion.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  As long as it's like evidence-based. But

• 53:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  The purpose of all of this process is to reduce the chances of that happening. Part of the reason they're doing this is to remove things like pesticides and like heavy metals, things that we don't actually want in our food supply. And it's sort of like, you don't want these things, right? You're always talking about like how many particles of mercury are in the vaccines or whatever. Okay, so you don't want these trace elements. What would you like us to do about that?

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  If you just like squeeze a, I don't want to say rape seed because it sounds so bad, but like, if you just squeeze a cotton seed and you get oil out of it, you don't want to just like be using that immediately. And also, it would go rancid on the shelf relatively quickly, which also poses food safety issues. So like, what do you actually want, right? People say processing, and, and he uses the term bleaching here, and everybody always says like, oh, they're bleached, which seems to imply that like they're adding bleach to the oils. But what they actually do, I mean, for most of these processes, if you look into it, they're basically filtering it. So the bleaching process is you add charcoal to the oil, and charcoal loves to absorb little things. Like why people put charcoal on their face and like, some people take like charcoal supplements.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  You add charcoal to oil, and it absorbs a bunch of these like little tiny trace materials, and then you filter out the charcoal. That process is called bleaching, but nobody has bleached, like added bleach to the oil during that process.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  Right, right, right. It's not the stuff you have to put gloves on to use in your shower or whatever. Yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  And like, you add phosphoric acid, or oftentimes it's citric acid, and then you like centrifuge it out so that those particles are, but you're basically Separating out the components of the oil, but you're centrifuging it and then filtering it. So you're kind of putting things in and then taking them out to make sure that you're only left with the oil. Maybe phosphoric acid is really bad for you. Maybe there's trace elements in the vegetable oil. Again, this kind of requires actual science to show that these things are in the vegetable oils. And they've been tested a million times and like, we just don't see large amounts.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  In much of our life, much of culture, much of sort of the world, when there is new science, we greet that or new technology. We greet that as an advancement and an exciting evidence that we're like doing more of the right thing. And when it comes to food, we take that as like a harbinger of bad things, right? And we take that as a frightening thing rather than going, wow, it's really cool that science has figured out how to make this oil shelf stable for a real long time. And so lots of people can use it and it's pretty inexpensive.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  And fewer people get sick from eating rancid oil.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  And it's like not actually proven to be bad for you, but if you describe it in this kind of way.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  Then it will get people more to the point of being like, ooh.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  Even before you get to presenting any evidence about it, one way or the other.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  So the only kind of part of this like ultra-processed food sub-narrative of seed oils that actually get me pause was there, there's two ways of getting oil out of seeds. One way is to just like press them, right? This is like the cold expeller pressed, whatever you see this on labels. The other way to do it is with chemicals. So you can cut the seeds into little tiny flakes and add something called hexane to them. And hexane kind of like leaches out all of the oils. This is like super industrial. It's like, it's, it's cheaper than doing a press. It's more effective. So you get, I think it's like 80% of the yield out of them rather than like 60%. It's much more efficient and hexane is like straightforwardly toxic. So when people in these facilities are putting hexane on the crops, like they have to wear like hazmat suits.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Like if you breathe in hexane, it's actually really bad for you. Again, this sounds terrible, right? It's like they're literally putting poison onto the seeds to extract the oil. And then like, yes, there are trace elements of hexane in vegetable oil. This is true.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  Is a true statement. I take it from you telling me about it. And also, it is nuts to me. Like, describing that in that way will get a bunch of people freaked out about what they're eating, but won't get them freaked out about the safety of the workers who have to put on fucking hazmat suits.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  The person paying the biggest price is the person doing the work.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  To make that process happen.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  So when I first read about this in one of these like seed oil, anti-seed oil substacks or whatever, I was like, oh, this actually sounds pretty bad. But then I went to, there's various government reports on this. There's various academic reports on this. The first thing to know about hexane is that it evaporates at a very low temperature. So they actually add hexane to seeds, get the oil out, and then they heat it up so that all of the hexane evaporates. And they actually capture the hexane and then they use it for like the next batch. You can just like keep doing this over and over. Very little is actually left in the seeds. And there's been dozens of studies on the hexane levels in vegetable oil. The fact that they're putting poison on the seeds to get the oil out is not something that like academics are not concerned about, or that like the FDA is not concerned about. Like, this is like, oh yeah, we should actually check like how much there is. So this is

• 58:04Speaker 01

  an excerpt from a government report that was produced on this.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  In studies of fully processed edible oil products carried out in the 1960s, it was determined that hexane residues were generally at levels less than 10 parts per million. Investigations using more precise, modern analysis techniques in 1987 concluded that residual hexane residues for refined food products would be less than two parts per million. If the standard assumption of 80 grams of fat consumed per person per day is made, such residual levels would be the equivalent of no more than 2.29 micrograms per kilogram per day, which is a toxologically insignificant amount.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  The most important phrase there is toxologically insignificant.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  That's me, too. I'm also toxologically insignificant.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  There's also numerous tests on humans to just measure the amount of hexane in people's blood. So as part of the NHANES study, starting in 2009, they started testing for hexane, like, how much hexane can we find in these people's tissues? And the levels were below the point where they can even detect them.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  According to this government report, the biggest risk of hexane exposure is actually a car exhaust. So for whatever reason, hexane is also present in car gasoline. And so if you live in an urban area, you're also getting exposed at very low levels to hexane. So the amount that you're getting in vegetable oil just isn't significant. And also, there's other sources of this in the world that we're also getting exposed to at trace amounts. And we're not finding it in humans when we test them. What they're doing is they're clearly seizing on anything to say that, like, seed oils are poison. Like, you can tell the motivated reasoning, right? They're like, how are they made? Oh, they put poison on them. Yes, there it is. But like, people have been looking at this for decades. We just don't find large risks to the US population.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  It's a rhetoric that's relying on hanging out in your amygdala and freaking you out and not ever making its way into your frontal lobe.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  And now that the seed oils thing has kind of been folded into the ultra-processed food issue, you find sort of articles about how bad seed oils are in, like, much more credible places. So this is from the Cleveland Clinic, talking about, like, the lack of nutrients in seed oils. Like, all of the processing robs it of nutrients. So here's this.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Some seed oils would be high in vitamin E and phenols if not for the refining process itself. But they're typically very processed to help with taste, color, and shelf life. Quote, "The processing of these oils strips the seeds of their nutrients and could potentially add harmful ingredients. The end result is oils with no real health benefits."

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  The specific thing of, like, they're being denuded of their nutrients is something you always find. Like, they used to have antioxidants when they were, like, in the seeds, but now they don't have antioxidants. The research for this made me super pilled on vitamin E, because you always hear, like, oh, it strips the Vitamin E out of the vegetable oil and butter is so high in vitamin E. If you look up vitamin E deficiency, vitamin E deficiency almost never happens in the United States. This is not something that you need to worry about. It's something that like premature babies often have a problem with absorbing fats. If you have Crohn's disease, you can have it. If you have like problems with your liver or kidney function. Basically, if you have an underlying like pretty serious condition that affects your ability to absorb fat,

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  then you need to worry about vitamin E. But dietary sources of vitamin E are just not something you need to worry about. If you don't have a diagnosis of something like that. They're, they're basically taking this thing that is essentially a marketing claim. Like, ooh, look at all the vitamin E in this. And they're acting as if this is something you need to think about. Like you can go your whole life, never thinking about your dietary sources of vitamin E. You just don't need to think about it. So the fact that something doesn't have vitamin E is just irrelevant information.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  It's kind of the same with the antioxidant thing. I mean, the antioxidants that are present in seed oils are present in like lots of stuff. I mean, even people who are eating at like the high end of seed oils. It's not that much of their consumption, right? It's like maybe a couple tablespoons a day.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  I mean, it is true that all of this processing that they do to oils does reduce the antioxidant count and like does reduce other nutrients. But they were never that high to begin with. You're not eating that much of them and it just, it just isn't really a meaningful contributor to your nutrient mix.

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  There's been a similar sort of freak out over the last couple of years in like weight loss media spaces and particularly social media spaces about the idea of like cortisol face or cortisol belly or whatever.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  People just keep having to interview doctors going, you're talking about Cushing's syndrome. It's really rare and your body changes really drastically and really quickly. So like you know, if you have it, it's not just, is this the reason why you're fatter than you want to be? Like, that's not the same thing as like a medical condition. And it just feels like. You know, especially in a media landscape that includes things like the like Everly Well home food intolerance tests and that kind of thing, that we are sort of constantly muddying the water between personal practices that make you feel a little better and like health conditions that are known and treatable.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  Everyone is reaching for this way of like legitimizing whatever their dietary stuff is or health stuff is by reaching for like clinical language.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  Which ends up further sort of blurring the line.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  So we're sort of moving toward better and better arguments against seed oils. Like we started with like, seed oils are destroying our birth rates from like the super far right. Like that's just bananas. We then get to the stuff of like, they're putting chemicals in it and like, maybe it leaches out nutrients. That's like roughly true, but kind of like not meaningfully true in a way that anybody needs to worry about. By far, the best argument against seed oils is the balance of omega sixes versus omega threes. So I am going to send you an excerpt from a guy named Mark Hyman. This is a doctor who, do you know him?

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Just much requested. We've gotten so many Dr. Hyman requests.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  I know. This is one of those guys, there's so many like MDs, like social media MDs. I'm so concerned about this. This is a guy who is one of the main sources of like seed oils misinformation, starting relatively early. He actually started writing about in 2016.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  He's also, I believe, the founder of what he calls the Pegan Diet.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  What is that?

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Paleo and vegan.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Wait, so does that mean if you're paleo and raw, it's the paw diet? Let's keep going.

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  Let's chew this for the rest of that.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  We love that the same. Yes, and.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  We've been talking about which puns are too sweaty and which are not sweaty enough. So let's just like really hone in.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  So here is Mark Hyman on seed oils.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  Did you know those who consume high levels of refined oils and low levels of omega-3 fats have higher rates of depression, suicide, and homicide?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  People who eat seed oils have a higher rate of homicide is wild.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  In prehistoric times, our ancestors consumed omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids in the healthy ratio, one to one. Since the advent of refined vegetable oils, however, most of us are eating far more omega-6s than we should. The ratio can get up to 20 to 1 for people who eat a lot of processed foods.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  This claim also shows up in the Maha Report. It says, "Seed oils contribute to an imbalanced omega-6/omega-3 ratio, a topic of ongoing research for its potential role in inflammation." This is a very common claim about seed oils, that they have too many omega-6s, and this ratio of omega-6s versus omega-3s is basically causing chronic inflammation. It's like, what is making us sick?

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Sort of the implication here is that foods, as they are naturally produced, already reflect a one-to-one ratio of omega-6s and omega-3s. And I don't know that that's true.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  This omega-3/omega-6 ratio thing as an argument against seed oils is also kind of funny, because canola oil is pretty high in omega-3s. Canola oil is around 10% omega-3s. Olive oil is only 1% omega-3s.

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  That's funny.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  I've seen debunkings of the seed oil thing, that will be like, "Well, just because our paleolithic ancestors ate a certain way, doesn't mean we have to," which is true. However, did our paleolithic ancestors eat a one-to-one ratio?

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  No, Michael, I didn't go galaxy brain enough. We've been doing this show for so long, and I should have known.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  So, this claim that our ancestors ate a one-to-one ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s appears to have originated with like, one lady. So, there's a researcher named Artemis Semopoulos, who is a nutrition researcher. She writes "The Omega Diet" in 1999. She's like, early on the train of like, omega-3s will fix us, omega-6s are poison? But what I've noticed in her work, I mean, she's been publishing stuff about this for like 20 years, she often cites herself. So she'll say like, human beings evolved consuming a diet that contained equal omega threes and omega sixes. And then it's like footnote 14, and then you go to footnote 14, and it's like Simopolis, 1999.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  First of all, it's very sketchy to not just have a clear citation for something like that. Like, that's an empirical claim. When you finally follow back all of her citations, she doesn't really have any basis for saying that. She eventually links to a couple of anthropological reports of current hunter gatherer societies where they do surveys of like caloric intake. But these surveys only include saturated versus unsaturated fats.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  And omega threes and omega sixes are both unsaturated fats. So they're not really looking at that ratio. Basically, she is extrapolating from the amount of animal foods that these current hunter gatherer societies are eating to say, well, animal foods tend to be higher in omega threes. Therefore, if they're eating a lot of animal foods, then they're going to be getting more omega threes than present day humans. The problem with that, however, is like, if you actually read the literature, the main thing that sticks out to you is the diversity. So I mean, there are like hunter gatherer societies that are eating like 70% of their calories from various, you know, meats and dairy kinds of products. But there's also some that are eating like 10%.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  It's just really facile to say like, well, our ancestors ate a one to one ratio.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  You know, we were talking earlier about like, we have these sort of filters around political misinformation and disinformation, but less so. We don't exercise those in the same way when it comes to like health and wellness stuff. When a political figure hearkens back to some sort of like rhetoric of nostalgia and how things used to be better, I think a lot of folks have a little more muscle memory of going, yeah, what time period are you talking about? And what are the things that were better? And who were they better for? Because usually that nostalgia, when it's invoked by the right, is for like Jim Crow era.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  And I think there is a similar sort of set of rhetoric around like ancestral foods and eating like our ancestors and that sort of thing without ever really reckoning with like, what was the life expectancy at that point, my guys?

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  As long as we're doing this ancestral shit, what were the rates of trichinosis?

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  The other claim that I want to talk about is this idea that your omega-6 versus omega-3 ratio being out of balance causes inflammation. This is something you see everywhere. It's like, the ratio's out of whack, it used to be 1 to 1, now it's 20 to 1, and we have all these inflammation processes in our body, this is what's making us sick. I found a super interesting article on this called "The Omega-6/Omega-3 Ratio: A Critical Appraisal and Possible Successor" by William S. Harris. So in this review, he basically notes that like, among researchers, this thing about the omega-6/omega-3 ratio, that debate has been settled. This is a thing that happened in like the 90s and 2000s, and like, this ratio isn't really something that scientists refer to anymore.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  So like, we publicly are reenacting a debate that scientists had like 20 years ago, and like, most of us just weren't paying attention to. So he says, "The increased risk for disease supposedly associated with high omega-3/omega-6 ratio is classically attributed to the omega-6 being pro-inflammatory and omega-3s being anti-inflammatory. However, this view, which might have been reasonable in the 1970s, is now far too simplistic and enjoys little to no direct support from studies in humans."

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  When this person says it's too simplistic, do they offer some more like, here's what the complexity around it looks like?

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Aubrey, welcome to the next hour of your life.

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  Oh, hey!

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Welcome to what we will be discussing.

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  She's one big segue.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  This was like such a revelation to me, and like so fun to read the literature on this, because this whole field is kind of asking the question, like, what does it mean for something to be bad for you?

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Like, you hear this all the time, right? You're like, a brownie is bad for you. But like, metabolically, chemically, what do we really mean by that? So throughout this entire period where they're figuring out the basic science of fatty acids, they basically come up with a model by which omega-6s would cause inflammation. So this was kind of the original theory of why they're bad for you. Omega- Omega 6s contain something called linoleic acid. When you eat it, it is then converted into something called arachidonic acid inside of your body. Arachidonic acid is associated with inflammation, so that raises inflammation markers. And then if you're operating under a state of chronic inflammation, that does affect health outcomes later. So when you say omega 6s are bad for you, what you're really talking about is like a four-stage process.

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  And you're talking about contributing to, but not being the sole cause of that set of processes.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  This is also kind of like one of the funny things about this because there are countries and they're like sub-national regions where people eat way more seed oils than other places. Like, for whatever reason, in Israel, they have a huge consumption of seed oils. And like, they don't have like twice, or three times, or four times the amount of heart disease. So if we're talking about something that's like a toxic substance, like the thing the far-right people are saying, it would just be really obvious. At the most, we're talking about something that is contributing, like a meaningful contributor, but we're not talking about like, if you stop eating seed oils, you'll never have a heart attack. Like, that just isn't really like on the table as an option, essentially.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. And I think it's how a lot of like, popular health information gets disseminated, right?

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  Is like, leaving people with that, not really ever saying it outright.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  But leaving people with the distinct impression that this is one of the only, if not the biggest

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  contributors to like, heart health issues, right?

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  So basically, we originally had this model that was like, okay, omega 6s have linoleic acid, that converts to arachidonic acid, and then arachidonic acid causes inflammation, and inflammation causes heart problems. The problem is, over the course of the last couple decades, we've realized that every single step of that process is significantly more complicated. So, the first thing is, it's true that omega 6s contain a lot of linoleic acid, but it's not actually true that linoleic acid is converted to arachidonic acid. When you eat linoleic acid, only about 0.2% is converted into arachidonic acid, which is allegedly like the sort of the quote-unquote "bad" kind of acid, right? So very little of it is being converted, and also, they've done studies where they

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  like massively increase people's linoleic acid consumption, and their arachidonic acid levels don't change at all. The other step of this is like- Like the question of is arachidonic acid bad? So they've also done studies where they just give people arachidonic acid. Again, this is the kind of acid that is allegedly bad, right? This is the kind of acid that causes inflammation in your body. They give people supplements, directly supplementing arachidonic acid in their bodies, and their inflammation markers don't change.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  This appears to be one of those things where it's essentially the animal models breaking down. That we see it in mice and rabbits, and I think there was some studies in chimps as well. But in humans, we just don't see a relationship between these acids and inflammation. What actually happens is it increases some markers of inflammation, and it reduces other markers of inflammation.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  This is really eroding my confidence in the media literacy skills of the audience of the founder of GAB.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Wait, they're not looking at the Cochrane Review?

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  They're not going straight to primary sources and reading for comprehension?

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  The other kind of work that they were doing over the last couple of decades was just like looking at, do people with high levels of linoleic acid and arachidonic acid have worse outcomes? And like, they don't. There's this huge study in Europe where they're, they're taking blood work from 68,000 people, and then following them over time to see who has heart attacks and strokes and various other things. And like, there's no relationship between linoleic or arachidonic acid and outcomes.

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Okay, so I'm sending you an excerpt from a meta-analysis. This is not the Cochrane Review, but there is a Cochrane Review on seed oils, and it doesn't find any effect.

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  An analysis of 30 randomized controlled trials found that eating more linoleic acid was not linked to higher blood levels of inflammatory markers. In another analysis on data from nearly 70,000 people, higher blood levels of both linoleic and arachidonic acid were linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease. Great. So it's maybe making you healthier.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  So there's actually like some evidence that it, it's actually protective.

• 1:15:27Speaker 00

  So we're just careening toward a bunch of Joe Rogan listeners having worse heart health?

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I don't want to like go overboard. Another thing to mention- Is that a lot of the cardiovascular disease risk stuff on seed oils that finds a benefit or finds no effect is based on these kind of large population studies that we're always complaining about on the show where they're just like, what do you eat? And then people can't remember stuff. And then 20 years later, you're like, how many people died of heart attacks? So I don't want to like, all of a sudden, say that those studies are good, just because like, I want to own Joe Rogan. Like, I'm not gonna like endorse these things, but I think what it, what it shows is not necessarily seed oils are good for you. I'm not gonna like make a claim like that. But what it does show is there's, there's no affirmative evidence that seed oils are bad for you.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  The sort of the, the consensus is that it, it either doesn't do anything, or it's slightly protective. Again, it just isn't really something that you need to think about.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  Which I also just think about, like, as a, you know, person who's had an eating disorder, and as a person who continues to have, like, pretty profound anxiety, I also just think about, like, the people who pick up this messaging the most and run with it the most are people who already have real high anxiety, and this is like a legitimating force for those folks.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  Or they already have a real disordered relationship with food, and this gives them some scientific cover to run further into that disordered relationship with food, right?

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  I also think about, you know, a friend of mine was redoing his kitchen. He's a carpenter. He called me and was like, what do you think about having two bowls in the sink versus one bowl in the sink? And I was like, uh.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:17:06Speaker 00

  I don't, you know how some sinks are divided, and there's like a separate area where the garbage disposal is, and then a separate one where the drain is?

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  And he was like, a friend of mine is a, a chef, and said, for food safety reasons, it's really helpful to have two bowls. And I was like, look, I'm sure your friend is right, but if I'm looking at what my food safety issues are, I got so many things to knock off the list before I even get down to the level of like worrying about how many compartments there are in my sink. And I think that there's something similar here, right? That is like, we all kind of know that we got bigger fish to fry. You kind of know what you could work on with your own eating or exercise. Or whatever. And usually it's shit like you didn't get enough sleep, or you didn't go grocery shopping. Or like, it's like much bigger, more present issues than like,

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  What kind of oil am I cooking with?

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  When I cook my food at home?

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:01Speaker 00

  You're cooking food at home. You're buying and making your own food. You're already ahead of the game. Don't worry about it.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  And here you are afraid of sunflowers. This is PMS-like behavior.