Seed Oils: Should You Switch to Butter?

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Festes. And today on the show, we are pitting facts against fats. For years, the top dogs in nutrition have been howling about how foods like butter and bacon are bad for us because they are packed with saturated fats. And instead, they say, we should be eating vegetable oils. These oils are filled with a different combination of fats that experts have told us are good for us. But there's a trend that's popping off right now that says that these top dogs are barking up the wrong tree. And in fact, butter is healthy, and those vegetable oils, which are probably sitting on your kitchen countertop right now, are actually incredibly dangerous and might even be killing you. Medical science is messed up when it comes to nutrition. This is doctor Kate Shanahan. She's a family physician who's been raging against the nutrition science machine. It's just so wrong. It's morally wrong. It's ethically wrong. It's shocking. And I just after twenty years, I still haven't gotten over it. Kate has a big problem with vegetable oils that are extracted from seeds, the so called seed oils. What exactly are the seed oils? The problematic seed oils are a collection of eight highly refined industrially processed vegetable oils, specifically soy, safflower, sunflower, corn, cottonseed, canola, and rice bran and grapeseed oil. Kate calls these oils the hateful eight. You might have noticed your olive oil is still fine, but canola oil and soybean oil, they are in the bad books. It's the vegetable oils that are often yellow when come in those giant plastic bottles, and you'll find them in lots of different foods. So, they are in salad dressing. Your canned tuna preserved veggies are in, even olives these days, they're often in soy oil. Frozen dinners, gator tots, microwave popcorn, granola, you know, supposedly healthy granola. In a book that Kate wrote on this topic, which really helped kick off this new seed oils trend, she wrote that, quote, avoiding vegetable oils is the most important action you can take to improve your health, end quote. Because according to Kate, eating a lot of seed oils produces a ton of inflammation in your body, increasing your risk of an array of diseases, from heart disease to cancer. If I were to list all of the diseases you can get by eating seed oils, this podcast would be going on for until tomorrow. There's too many. It's every single one they contribute to. And so instead of eating these seed oils, Kate wants you to be chowing down on something else, saturated fat. The very fats that doctors will tell you to avoid. We're talking about, you know, fatty cuts of meat like steak and, you know, pork and bacon and dairy fat, like butter and cheese and cream and eggs. This is really the list of, like, the demonized list for this is really like a no, …