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Seed Oils Are the Root of All Chronic Diseases
Do yourself and your family a favor and carefully watch this short film. It has the potential to extend your life and improve your health.
Excessive linoleic acid (Omega 6) intake may be the greatest contributor to chronic disease, even more so than sugar.
In this film, Dr. Mercola explains how too much linoleic acid can endanger your health and which foods to avoid so you can protect yourself from its health effects.
Seed Oils Are Far Worse Than Sugar
While most nutritional experts blame the epidemic of chronic disease on the increase in sugar consumption, the role of sugar is relatively minor when compared to the impact of seed oils.
In 1822 the average U.S. sugar consumption was 6 pounds per person per year. This rose to a high of 108 pounds per person per year by 1999. This is a 17-fold increase, but seed oils went up 25-fold during that same time period.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, cardiologist Dr. Robert Atkins was largely responsible for creating the interest in low-carb (low-sugar) diets that seemed to work for many. However, eliminating foods like french fries, potato chips, breads, pasta, pizza and donuts not only eliminates sugar-based carbs, but also seed oils. It is not intuitively obvious, but the carb-loaded foods his diet eliminated are also loaded with dangerous refined seed oils.
Processed foods typically contain about 21% sugar. However, up to 50% or more of the overall calories contained in most processed foods come from seed oils. The connection is further confirmed by looking at the U.S. carb consumption. It’s been declining since 1997, yet obesity and Type 2 diabetes have steadily increased. Interestingly, this continued rise coincides with the surge of seed oil consumption.
Another major reason why seed oils are exponentially more pernicious to your health than sugar is that they last much longer in your body. The half-life of LA is around 600 to 680 days, or approximately two years. This means it will take you about six years to replace 95% of the LA in your body with healthy fats. This is the primary reason for keeping your LA intake low as possible.
Meanwhile, your glycogen stores will be exhausted in about one to two days. So if you go on a sugar binge, that sugar doesn’t stick around for years destroying your health like the LA in seed oils does.
How Excess LA Consumption Can Wreck Your Health
The main reason why excess LA causes disease is that it prevents your mitochondria from working well. Mitochondria are subcellular organelles responsible for producing most of your cellular energy in the form of ATP, and without ATP, your cells cannot function and repair themselves normally.
As mentioned earlier, PUFAs such as LA are easily damaged by oxygen in a process called oxidation, which triggers the creation damaging free radicals. These, in turn, give rise to ALEs and in the case of omega-6 fats, OXLAMs.
These ALEs and OXLAMs then go on to cause mitochondrial dysfunction, which is a hallmark of most all chronic disease. In addition to oxidation, inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction, processed seed oils can also:
- Damage the cells lining your blood vessels
- Cause memory impairment and increase your risk of Alzheimer’s disease (canola oil, in particular, has been linked to Alzheimer’s)
- Strip your liver of glutathione thereby lowering your antioxidant defenses
- Inhibit delta-6 desaturase (delta-6), an enzyme involved in the conversion of short-chained omega-3s to longer chained omega-3s in your liver
- Impair your immune function and increase mortality
- Make your fat cells more insulin sensitive, thereby causing insulin resistance
- Inhibit cardiolipin, an important fat in the inner membrane of your mitochondria
LA Contributes to Heart Disease and Cancer
Heart disease and cancer are two of the primary killers in the Western world, and LA is a significant contributor to both of these lethal conditions. One of the first things that happens in atherosclerosis, which is the precursor to heart disease, is that your macrophages (a type of white blood cell) turn into foam cells — essentially a macrophage stuffed with fat and cholesterol.
Atherosclerotic plaque is basically dead macrophages and other types of cells loaded with cholesterol and fat. This is why heart disease is blamed on saturated fat and cholesterol. However, researchers have found that for foam cells to form, the LDL (low density lipoprotein cholesterol) must be oxidized, and that is precisely what seed oils do.
Seed oils cause the LDL to oxidize, thereby forming foam cells. So, LDL in and of itself does not initiate atherosclerosis. LDL’s susceptibility to this oxidative process is controlled by the LA content of your diet. Excess PUFAs also make cell membranes more fragile, allowing them to be easily damaged by oxidation.
Seed oils are also a major contributor to cancer. In fact, a surefire way to induce cancer in many animal models is to feed them seed oils. Animals typically develop cancer once the LA in their diet reaches 4% to 10% of their energy intake.
And, as mentioned, most Americans get approximately 25% of their total daily calories from seed oils, so we’re far over the safety threshold for these fats — at least based on the laboratory work in animals. Remember our ancestors typically got less than 2% of their calories in the form of omega-6.
There’s even evidence showing that eliminating seed oils from your diet will dramatically reduce your risk of sunburn and lower your risk of skin cancer, as susceptibility to UV radiation damage is controlled by how much LA is in your diet.
What Foods to Avoid, and How
Primary sources of LA include seed oils used in cooking, processed foods and restaurant foods made with seed oils, condiments, seeds and nuts, most olive oils and avocado oils (due to the high prevalence of adulteration with cheaper seed oils), and animal foods raised on grains such as conventional chicken and pork.
Ideally, consider cutting LA down to below 7 grams per day, which is close to what our ancestors used to get. If you’re not sure how much you’re eating, enter your food intake into Cronometer — a free online nutrition tracker — and it will provide you with your total LA intake.
Cronometer will tell you how much omega-6 you’re getting from your food down to the 10th of a gram, and you can assume 90% of that is LA. Anything over 10 grams of LA is likely to cause problems. Healthy fat replacements include tallow, butter or ghee, all of which are excellent for cooking.
The table below provides a fairly comprehensive list of the most commonly consumed oils and their approximate LA content. In general, the lowest LA-containing fats — butter and beef tallow — would be the fats of choice. These excellent cooking fats would not only be the lowest in LA, but will also provide the fat-soluble vitamins, A, D, and K2. Coconut oil is also very low in LA but doesn’t provide the important fat-soluble vitamins that tallow and butter contain.
To read full article, go to: https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/07/17/linoleic-acid.aspx