Have you ever wondered why chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer have skyrocketed over the past century? I have, and my research led me to one surprising culprit – seed oils.
Seed oils like soybean, canola, grapeseed, sunflower, safflower, and corn oils seem innocent enough. Yet they may be wreaking havoc on our health. As we'll explore, these oils have only entered the food supply recently due to modern industrial processing methods. They differ drastically from the traditional fats humans evolved to eat.
Consuming seed oils is especially problematic on diets like the carnivore diet. The carnivore diet aims to eliminate inflammatory foods and rely on the most nutritious animal foods that fuel human evolution. Seed oils directly oppose this objective.
In this article, I'll break down why seed oils and the carnivore diet don't mix well. You'll learn:
- How seed oils differ from traditional fats
- The unique risks of seed oils
- Why seed oils trigger inflammation
- How Industrial Processing Damages Seed Oils
- Why you won't find seed oils on the carnivore diet
Equipped with this knowledge, you can make informed decisions about these ubiquitous oils. Let's analyze why seed oils may not be as heart-healthy as we believed.
The Novel Nature of Seed Oils
For over a million years, our hunter-gatherer ancestors chiefly consumed animal fats along with modest amounts of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. They had no means to extract oils from seeds or grains. The small amounts of polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) they ate came from nuts, seeds, and animals eating wild plants.
Flash forward to the 20th century when modern industrial processes allowed extracting oils from seeds for the first time. With solvents and pressing equipment, manufacturers now harvest vast quantities of seed oils that humans never before consumed.
Meanwhile, the fats we evolved eating – meat fats, butter, ghee, tallow, duck fat, olive oil, etc. – have nourished humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet somehow seed oils escaped questioning as heart disease rose exponentially while saturated animal fats became vilified.
Ask yourself: if no human faced chronic disease subsisting on animal foods for millennia are novel seed oils a missing piece of the puzzle?
Why Seed Oils Differ From Traditional Fats
What’s the matter with seed oils? For starters, they have an unbalanced omega-6 to omega-3 ratio compared to traditional fats. They also contain oxidized omega-6 fats our bodies struggle to process.
Seed oils can have omega-6 levels exceeding 30% of total fatty acids. Some, like safflower and grapeseed oils, eclipse 70% omega-6s! And they provide negligible omega-3s in comparison. Our ancestral diets maintained a healthier 1-to-1 to 4-to-1 omega-6 to omega-3 balance.
Secondly, seed oils contain delicate polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) that oxidize easily. Just bottling seed oils exposes them to heat, light, and oxygen, forming free radicals and toxic breakdown products. Our bodies have difficulty processing these damaged fats.
Furthermore, seed oils lack the natural antioxidants found in whole nuts, seeds, and animals that help prevent rancidity. Nutrients shield the small amounts of PUFAs in their original whole food package. Yet modern processing strips this protection away.
In summary:
- Seed oils deliver unprecedentedly high levels of omega-6 PUFAs
- Lack of omega-3s to balance this ratio
- Contain easily oxidized PUFAs prone to damage
- Lose antioxidant protection through processing
These attributes can trigger inflammation and disease. Next, let’s examine the inflammatory cascades seed oils initiate.
Why Seed Oils Promote Inflammation
Inflammation underlies modern chronic illness, from heart disease to dementia. Seed oils drive this inflammation in three key ways:
- Their high omega-6 levels: Omega-6s compete with anti-inflammatory omega-3s. Disturbing this delicate balance provokes systemic inflammation.
- Oxidized PUFAs: When seed oil PUFAs oxidize, they create free radicals and toxins that activate inflammatory pathways.
- Gut irritation: Seed oil consumption is linked with intestinal permeability (“leaky gut”), allowing inflammatory particles to enter circulation.
Additionally, some scientists implicate omega-6s in increased blood clotting and depressed immune function – two hallmarks of heart disease and cancer.
In short: balanced omega-3 status tames inflammation. Meanwhile, excess omega-6s from fragile seed oil PUFAs trigger whole-body inflammation when they oxidize. This sparks disease progression.
Industrial Processing Corrupts Seed Oils
The fact that seed oils oxidize so easily makes producing them without damage nearly impossible. High temperatures and chemical solvents during industrial manufacturing heighten this susceptibility.
Here’s what mass-scale seed oil processing looks like:
- Seeds are cleaned and crushed
- Solvents like hexane extract the oils
- Equipment heats oils to remove remaining solvents
- More heat clarifies oils by removing proteins and minerals
- Deodorization requires extremely high temperatures
Exposing delicate seed oil PUFAs to this barrage of heat, oxygen, light, and chemicals causes substantial oxidative damage. Nutrition stripped away means fewer antioxidants to protect what’s left.
Analyses show that 65-90% of omega-6 fatty acids in processed oils are oxidized to some degree. Think consumption of these heated, molecularly damaged oils makes sense?
Our bodies react to these adulterated, foreign substances predictably – with systemic inflammation.
Why You Won’t Find Seed Oils On The Carnivore Diet
The carnivore diet aims to eliminate inflammatory foods and rely solely on nourishing animal foods. This aligns more closely with our evolutionary diet.
By removing dairy, vegetables, carbohydrates, sugars, and plant oils, carnivore limits exposure to immunogens and anti-nutrients. Nutritious animal foods become the building blocks of health.
Consuming oxidized, inflammatory seed oils contradicts these carnivore principles. Seed oils displace healthier traditional fats. Their damaged fatty acids trigger inflammation. Gut irritation allows inflammatory particles into circulation.
Further, pairing seed oils with red meat causes more oxidation of both substances. This generates atherosclerotic plaque formation – an instigator of heart disease.
On the other hand, animal fats like lard, tallow, duck fat, bacon grease, and beef dripping nourished our ancestors for eons. Their chemistry suits our physiology. These time-tested fats provide stable energy and satiation.
So if embarking on the carnivore diet, expect to avoid all seed oils. Even “healthy” oils like olive or avocado should be limited. Instead, embrace beef tallow, lard, duck fat, ghee, and other soothing animal fats our forebears thrived on. This aligns with the carnivore premise – food choices that nourish, rather than inflame.
Key Takeaways: Seed Oils and the Carnivore Diet
In closing, here are key reasons why seed oils are excluded from the carnivore diet:
- No ancestral precedent for high omega-6 seed oil consumption
- Their unnaturally high, easily oxidized PUFA content promotes inflammation
- Processing at high heat damages fragile PUFAs into toxic compounds
- Gut irritating effects allow inflammatory particles into circulation
- Displace health-protective animal fats humans progressed and reproduced eating
- Contradict the core carnivore premise – eat nourishing not inflammatory foods
In my opinion, this evidence convinces me that seed oils have no place in a nourishment-focused, inflammation-fighting carnivore-style diet. I hope these explanations help clarify why these vegetable oils fail to make the carnivore cut.