I Stopped Cooking With Seed Oils for a Reason
December 2024: A letter for people who could benefit from another perspective.
Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
It seems I always get behind on things at this time of year, even when we’ve kept Christmas gifts and other activities to a minimum. The short days are at odds with the increase in things to do; the extra to-do items are at odds with the cultural craving for Christmas movies. Alas, this letter is out later than I’d intended.
Christmas is typically a time of warmth in the cold, light in the dark, and feasting in the winter, reminding me of the Richard Adams quote, “Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.”
For me, that’s mostly true. Winter has a quiet and beauty that I like for its own reasons, but much of what I appreciate is the relative warmth of hot meals, lit beeswax candles, extra blankets, and pleasant gatherings.
If the world seems to be getting darker, then, perhaps the Light of Jesus looks brighter as “proof against it.”
For someone seeking light in the dark, the first eighteen verses of the Gospel of John come as excellent news (“gospel” does mean “good news”). They speak of Jesus, saying,
“In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
John 1:4-5 (ESV)
That whole first section of the Gospel of John is worth reading in full. It serves as a pitch-perfect reminder—or, for some, fresh news—that God arrived in the flesh to bring His light to a dark and broken world.
There’s a sense in which the gospel is still news, even for those of us who’ve been in the Church for a long time. Every time God reveals Himself to us in new ways, every time someone repents and turns to Jesus Christ, it’s good news again.
If you need “good news of great joy” today, especially if this idea is new or unfamiliar, you can read through any of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John), or for a well-written summary, see my friend Tina Marie Cox’s website, Let’s Be Real: “Real Good News”. If you don’t know Christ yet and want to, I also suggest starting with John Piper’s message, “What Must I Believe to Be Saved?”
May your Christmas be merrier than you expect; may your new year be filled with the hope that won’t disappoint.
Seed Oils and Personal Health
As some of you know, I used to get lots of migraines, and now I don’t. The rest of this letter is about that.
For anyone who hasn’t yet enjoyed this unique experience, a migraine is a neurological phenomenon that is usually (not always!) characterized by a bad headache. They often come packaged with light sensitivity, sound sensitivity, nausea, and sometimes little freebies like transient aphasia. It’s not just a headache.
Some people get warning signs that a migraine is on the way, called an “aura”, and many migraine sufferers also experience a little encore: the postdrome, or a “migraine hangover” the next day, which, in my case, looks like fatigue and low productivity.
I have medication that stops the actual migraine, now, but the side effects leave me useless most of the day. I would estimate I used to have around eight migraine days a month, not enough to count as chronic, but enough to be frustratingly disruptive. When you add the postdromes, I’d guess the effects of migraines drained about half of my waking life.
Early in 2023, a friend I find reasonable—able to research, able to evaluate new information effectively, and not prone to conspiracy theories—read Deep Nutrition by Dr. Catherine Shanahan, more popularly called Dr. Cate.
This friend calls her “the crazy seed-oil lady”, yet the science cited in her book persuaded him that the use of seed oils—at least, large quantities of certain unstable seed oils, especially when broken down by high heat—can be unhealthy.
So, he suggested I try not eating them to see if my migraines improved.
What counts as a “seed oil” here? Dr. Cate’s website has a detailed FAQ about the topic for anyone who wants to go down that particular rabbit hole. The short answer is a particular subset of oils made from the seeds of plants, including corn, canola, cottonseed, soybean, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, and ricebran oils.
These oils are in many ordinary American foods, and most ordinary Americans’ kitchens. My first reaction, when he suggested this, was that I didn’t have the energy to deal with something so huge.
But I didn’t have the energy because I was having so many migraines. And I was tired of being out of energy because of migraines, and I was out of ideas. It wasn’t all-or-nothing advice. I only needed to start reducing those oils, and see if it made a difference.
It wasn’t quite as hard as I’d expected, especially at first. My husband and I bought some avocado oil from a reputable brand to replace canola and sunflower as a neutral-enough roasting oil, to handle higher temperatures than olive oil. I also started checking ingredients on packaged foods, but I didn’t ask questions at restaurants yet.
I was skeptical. “They’re just plant oils,” I thought. But, slowly, after a couple of weeks or so, I started to notice I did, in fact, have fewer migraines.
I couldn’t be sure if the oils were the cause. I was maybe stressing less, maybe sleeping better. Anything could have been the reason for the relative improvement in health.
It took months of waffling on this diet, sometimes making mistakes, occasionally flat-out YOLO-ing, for me to believe this was actually a consistent migraine trigger. Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches, cooked in peanut oil, don’t bother me, and when I found out, after unexpected migraines, that they use canola oil for the fries, I truly became a believer.
I no longer YOLO with seed oils. The results are painful and so not worth it. But I reject an all-or-nothing approach, which, in eating, can lead to orthorexia. This isn’t like celiac disease or an allergy that causes anaphylaxis. I can handle small amounts, like store-bought hummus with a little canola, or pastry with a tiny percentage of shortening, or a few small french fries. The mental toll of going to zero likely isn’t worth it.
I ask questions at restaurants if I really want something fried (rarely, the answer to “what is this cooked in?” has been “lard”); otherwise, I try to avoid fried foods almost entirely. I don’t eat potato chips much anymore, because the avocado-oil ones are so expensive. Instead, I roast potatoes and eat oil-free crackers that are also expensive, but at least go nicely with hummus.
So there’s a degree to which the obvious “healthfulness” of my food has improved, but not much. I use a lot more butter. I don’t avoid salt. The oils do seem to be the problem.
Seed Oils and Public Controversy
Anecdotes are not science, and the fact that my story is not unique still is not proof seed oils cause problems. But individual stories aren’t all we have.
For example, a 2021 article in the New York Times describes a study in which a better balance of omega-3 to omega-6 oils (tested with more fish and/or fewer seed oils, which were called “vegetable oils” in less-recent writing on the subject) significantly reduced the number of “headache days” the participants suffered (Anahad O’Connor, “Why Migraine Sufferers May Want to Eat More Fish”, New York Times, 2 August 2021). Other research suggests it’s not the omega balance, but some other mechanism; in any case, those who avoided vegetable/seed oils in that study had the biggest reduction in migraine days.
In his article, O’Connor acknowledges the reasons we use vegetable oils in the first place—the apparent cardiovascular benefits as compared to animal fats—while explaining how harmful these oils seem to be for migraineurs. It’s detailed. The tone is neutral. The study and the article are useful contributions to this discussion.
I bring this up because things have changed. Today, more people are aware of the seed-oil debate. It’s easier to find seed-oil-free packaged foods, and some restaurants are beginning to shift.
And to my continual dismay, the idea is linked, seemingly inescapably, to certain other ideas.
Earlier this month, The Atlantic published an article in response to comments by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on using beef tallow for frying instead of seed oils (Yasmin Tayag, “America Stopped Cooking With Tallow for a Reason”, 2 December 2024).
I usually like The Atlantic. At its best, it publishes excellent writing by authors of different viewpoints who capably capture the many shades of complicated issues.
It is a magazine, not a newspaper; it provides commentary on news, rather than objective news itself. The writers are all biased, because they are humans writing opinions. Not every article is a long-form masterpiece; they publish lots of short pieces online each month by a variety of people about many, many topics.
Tayag’s article, to me, fails completely to handle the issue with the nuance I’ve come to expect from this magazine. Perhaps her goal was to limit the scope to a single facet of the seed-oil conversation for her short article. Unfortunately, the effect is a lot of detail painted away with a broad brush.
The anti-seed-oil position is presented this way:
“But in recent years, a fringe theory has gained prominence for arguing that seed oils are toxic, put into food by a nefarious elite—including Big Pharma, the FDA, and food manufacturers—to keep Americans unhealthy and dependent. Most nutrition scientists squarely dismiss this idea as a conspiracy theory.”
Yes, if you bind “seed oils are toxic” to “nefarious elite”, it is trivial to dismiss the overall idea as a conspiracy theory.
The rest of the article builds on this creaky foundation. Tayag does offer a brief mention that the science on at least some of this, as it relates to cardiovascular health in particular, is unsettled (Dr. Cate thinks the well-known studies on the subject were deeply flawed, but that’s outside both the scope of this letter and my current ability to know things). In general, though, Tayag weaves the anti-seed-oil position together with a sense of anti-establishment paranoia and RFK’s own motives, politicizing—really, tribalizing—the topic.
While responding to a particular statement from a particular person, Tayag fails to acknowledge that the discussion about seed oils is far, far broader. She takes the bait of the tallow-vs-seed-oils dichotomy; olive and avocado oils don’t exist here. She focuses on cardiovascular research; other systems of the body don’t exist here.
What’s more, the idea that any people experience observable, reproducible consequences from consuming lots of these oils is absent.
A different article the New York Times published last month, also in response to RFK’s particular claims, carries a very different message from their 2021 article: Alice Callahan, “Are Seed Oils Actually Bad for You?”, 9 Nov 2024. Callahan writes, “Several concerns about seed oils have been simmering online, but none are borne out in the research, experts say.”
The research they shared in 2021 about migraineurs doesn’t count, I suppose.
The conspiracy theory about financial interests in seed oils is, I think, a wholly separate discussion from the issue of whether these types of oils cause detectable injury to humans.
I think both of those are separate questions from whether beef tallow is healthier than we’ve been told.
But if you tie the practical questions about food (“will this oil harm me?” and “what ingredients would I use instead?”) to the much nuttier-sounding question of why these ingredients prevail (“are Big Pharma and the government trying to keep us sick and stupid?”)—if you cannot discuss one topic without the other—it can discredit people who experience real, specific consequences for eating these oils.
Hi! That’s me. So I find myself having uphill conversations to defend the reality that avoiding seed oils helps me, and that there’s research supporting that, that it’s not placebo only. The conspiracy topic is far outside the scope of this letter (and my interest).
If you’re someone who lives with migraines, or other health issues, maybe it’s worth cutting out seed oils for a few weeks to see if it helps. Seed oils’ effects on various systems in our bodies are apparently quantifiable in published research. It doesn’t solve every issue for everyone (not even all migraines), but trying won’t hurt much. Because I was blessed to get the idea filtered through a reasonable person, I’m writing this for anyone who needs that now.
I hope you can hear the idea above all the nonsense it’s attached to.
(I know the overall idea for cutting out seed oils is to stop the damage we can’t see, not just to reduce acute symptoms, but that’s a battle that needs clear, published studies. I don’t have the education to vet every published paper on the topic well enough to confidently endorse the conclusions they make. This is just to respond to a world that doesn’t know about the tangible symptoms of people like me.)
I also don’t have data to suggest beef tallow is the solution. While I do eat more grass-fed butter than I used to, I lean heavily on olive and avocado oils (look for brands that haven’t been implicated in counterfeit-oil scandals). I have little to say about beef tallow.
The human body is incredibly complicated. Many of the studies and other papers related to this topic involve details I’ve never heard of before (e.g., this review). We are made of wildly complex systems, and foods can apparently have wildly unexpected effects on our bodies.
While the researchers research, it’s worth it for me to make choices based on detectable effects, even if I don’t know what particular metabolic pathways are involved in the genesis of a migraine.
And if it’s worth it for you, too, I hope you take the chance to find out.
Writing Updates
I’m still working on my novel and my other ongoing projects. And I wrote this Substack letter.
This one took more work than I thought it would. Challenges with the tone, the scope, and the sheer amount of information led to many extra hours of editing. I now think I can stand behind what I’ve written.
I’m planning to send a short letter for January. With Christmas and life, and the amount of hours this particular letter took, I want a break.
That’s it for this December! I wish you a merry Christmas and happy New Year.
If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae
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