Maintenance Phase

Seed Oils

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[Maintenance Phase theme]


Aubrey: Dude, it took me so long to figure out that your work day is the record. 


Michael: You're like one of those influencers who's like, “Do you know how hard it is to be an influencer? Do you know how hard my job is?”


Aubrey: Look, I am going to show you my morning routine featuring [Michael laughs] Saratoga water.


[laughter] 


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


Michael: Dude, are you familiar with the weird TikTok where they debunk the morning routines?


Aubrey: No. What? 


Michael: They'll have titles on the screen. They'll be like 05:37 waking up. And then people will stitch in and they'll be like, “Actually in Dallas at 05:30, the sun is not in that position. It's actually more like 7:30. [laughs]


Aubrey: 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? 


Michael: No.


Aubrey: But like, man, if we didn't, I would do such a fucking episode on that goddamn morning. [laughs] 


Michael: Just like, what's on TikTok?


[laughter] 


Who sucks on TikTok today? 


Aubrey: I would do that. So, there's so many people on Tik Tok who suck. 


Michael: All right, tag it, tag it. 


Aubrey: Tag it. 


Michael: What do you have? What are you going to rhyme with seed oils? 


Aubrey: I was going to come up with I don't know what weed boils? I don't know. 


[laughter] 


Michael: What? Do you want me to sit in silence and let you workshop that? [Michael laughs] Creed’s oils. Creed’s oil, start singing a Creed song. 


Aubrey: Hi everybody and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast where they tried to bury us, but they didn't know we were Seed Oils. 


Michael: [laughs] That's terrible. What's that even from? 


Aubrey: You try to bury us and then we grow and then [onomatopoeia]


Michael:  We're here. We're seeds. Get used to it. [Michael laughs] Is this from your political organizing days? 


Aubrey: I'm Aubrey Gordon. 


Michael: I'm Michael Hobbs. 


Aubrey: 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, Michael.


Michael: Same stuff. Aubrey, what are we talking about today? 


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


Michael: I was going to say, we have never done such an Avengers: Endgame ass episode. 


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


Michael: 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 one-quarter of my friends are like, “What do you mean, seed oils?” [Aubrey laughs] Just for the people who are blessedly offline, we should give a little overview of this panic.


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


[laughter] 


Michael: Fuck you for knowing that I would know that. 


Aubrey: I love that you do, Kendra. 


Michael: Oh, God. So, if you go sort of on manosphere, TikTok and Substack, etc., I pulled a couple 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 is “This is how Canada convinced you to eat engine lubricant.” I love that we can blame Canada. 


Aubrey: Wow. 


Michael: So, I am sending you a tweet from this one of the first Avengers: Endgame appearances. 


Aubrey: You have sent me a tweet. Fuck you, first of all. 


Michael: Thank you.


Aubrey: 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.” 


Michael: Driving causes. 


Aubrey: “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. 


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


Aubrey: “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 oil poison. It's time to make frying oil tallow again.” 


Michael: It's so bad.


Aubrey: It's very sweaty. Yeah, if anyone knows sweaty. I know sweaty.


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


Aubrey: Its approaching Maintenance Phase. 


Michael: [crosstalk] frozen tagline levels of bad. 


Aubrey: [laughs] 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.” [laughs]


Michael: This whole kind of craze is becoming slowly more mainstream. So, earlier this year, Steak n Shake, announced that they're not going to have any seed oils on their menu.


Aubrey: Oh, come on.


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


Aubrey: Wake me up when it's Burgerville. You know what I'm saying? 


Michael: There's also something called The Seed Oil Scout app that lists-


Aubrey: Oh no.


Michael: -restaurants that use seed oils. And there's 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.


Aubrey: I heard about this. I heard about this. 


Michael: This is like, “Ooh, got them.” Like cancelling [laughs] 


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


Michael: 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. 


Aubrey: Okay.


Michael: You're going to love this. 


Aubrey: This is a tweet from Andrew Tate. 


Michael: Friend of the show Andrew Tate. 


Aubrey: 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.” [laughs]


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


Aubrey: [laughs] You legit won't shut up about it. Such uninteresting lives, total losers. 


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


[laughter] 


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


Aubrey: You know this from knowing me for five plus years. I have a little soundboard in my brain and one of the sounds that gets played very often is the Christian Bale on set meltdown of like, “Oh, good. Good for you.”


[laughter]


Michael: You have done that on the show numerous times. 


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


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Michael: Yelling at, like, a teamster.


Aubrey: [laughs] And I think there's something really funny about this clear and present danger to society. That is Andrew Tate going, “You're afraid of sunflowers.”


Michael: I know. You have no enemies. It's so good. 


Aubrey: It is funny.


Michael: Unfortunately. Unfortunately, it's good.


Aubrey: Okay.


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


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


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


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


[laughter] 


Michael We're going to do this for two more hours, and then I'll tell you the interesting part of this episode. 


Aubrey: Next up, Dr. Phil. 


Michael: Aubrey, can you name all Hateful Eight of the seed oils? 


Aubrey: Oh, I can't. 


Michael: This is what they call them. 


Aubrey: I mean, it's got to be like, canola/rapeseed oil, right? 


Michael: Yes. 


Aubrey: Canola, I recently learned, stands for, Canadian something oil. [laughs] 


Michael: 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 Can-oil. [Aubrey laughs] But yes, it's a specific breed of rape, which is the name of the crop. Like rapeseed. The name of the crop is rape. It has a Latin root that is actually different from the crime. The crime is from rapere, which means to steal or to snatch, to take. Rapeseed is based on rapum, which is Latin for turnip. Convergent evolution, they both just evolved into rape over time. And so, if you read, back when I did human rights stuff, we did a couple projects with agricultural companies, and so I read trade publications, and they'll just talk about, “Oh, yeah, it's been a good year for winter rape.” 


We're really optimistic about Central Asian rape this year. [laughs] It's just the name of the crop. So, makes sense, obviously, why people in the field were like, “Oh, man, we really got to get another fucking name for it.” 


Aubrey: Yeah, we've got a branding issue on our head. 


Michael: Yeah. 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.” That's what canola oil is. 


Aubrey: So. Okay, so rapeseed oil, soybean oil is going to be in there. 


Michael: 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. 


Aubrey: Cottonseed oil? 


Michael: That's three. 


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


Michael: There's also corn oil. 


Aubrey: Oh, geez, of course. 


Michael: Grapeseed oil, which is not the same as rapeseed oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, rice bran oil, and peanut oil. 


Aubrey: Fascinating that peanut oil counts as a seed oil. 


Michael: I know, right?


Aubrey: I get it. But also, soybean oil seems like another one where I'm like, “Huh?”


Michael: And also, Avocados have seeds, but avocado oil is not a seed oil because it comes from the flesh. 


Aubrey: Sure. Olive oil. Similar possible thing going on there. 


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


Aubrey: No.


Michael: But I didn't want to say PUFA all episode because that's what they call gay people in Britain, and I didn't want to confuse our UK listeners. 


Aubrey: Well, it's also so close to FUPA. 


Michael: It's very close to FUPA, I know. 


Aubrey: So close to FUPA.


Michael: And I'm going to misspeak and say FUPA like, 15 times if we say PUFA the whole episode. So, I'm just going to say seed oils, even though, academically they don't really say that in the literature. So, obviously, we're not going to get too deep into this. But seed oils are one of the first forms of food processing. Like, you squeeze an olive and oil comes out. This is, like a thing that you can use in cooking. So, this is something that has been in food for 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 SnackWell’s episode. 


There was this diet-heart 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.” This was like, the explanation for things like heart disease and strokes. 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 first in shortening, which is like things like Crisco. But eventually that 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. 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 way more unsaturated fats.” And like all of this is happening, 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 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. 


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


Aubrey: It says, “Seed oil, seed oil, so many seed oil. 


[laughter] 


Michael: You have no real enemies: 


[laughter] 


So, this is from 1976. It says “Spiral strips of rabbit thoracic aorta were superfused with Krebs CG solution at 37 degrees centigrade containing a mixture of antagonist and indomethacin. These indicate the contractile response produced by testing 50 mcg of the incubation mixture of sheep seminal vesicle microsomes in a tube containing 50 mcg of phosphate. The contractile response of superfused rabbit thoracic aorta strips increased in a parallel linear fashion with increasing concentration of the endoperoxides PG1, 2 and 3. This is gibberish to us. This is most laypeople would look at this and be like, “What the hell is 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 research, people also start going back through old data sets and being like, “Well, did 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 PUFA they're eating and, how they feel.” There's basically just like a huge amount of just like stuff being produced. 


Aubrey: You haven't been saying PUFA. So, I was not ready for it. 


Michael: I know what I can [unintelligible 00:14:30].


Aubrey: I was not ready for it. 


Michael: I'm going to do one every 20 minutes. Just for you.


Aubrey: Keep me awake. Keep me on my toes. 


Michael: 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 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 means it's poison.” 


Aubrey: 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.” 


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


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


Michael: We might need to do a full episode. 


Aubrey: Yeah. 


Michael: I'm sending you an excerpt from the Weston A. Price Foundation in 2002 in an article called the Great Con-ola, [laughs] 


Aubrey: Wonderful.


Michael: Doesn't work but-- [crosstalk] 


Aubrey: Wonderful. 


Michael: But I see where they were going with this. 


Aubrey: It says, “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 source of fat. 


Michael: Boom. 


Aubrey: I'm just going to bookmark and say in that sentence alone. There are bigger problems than canola oil. [Michael laughs] The results of a later study suggested that the culprit was the sterol compounds in the oil, which “make the cell membrane more rigid and contribute to the shortened lifespan of the animals.”


Michael: 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 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. They're pulling out one study. 


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


Michael: Again, they do use footnotes and 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. 


Aubrey: 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. So, I didn't know if we’re dealing with that or if we’re dealing with the Dave Asprey type where someone is footnoting you to death, sort of counting on you not checking on the footnotes and also counting on you not checking on, like, what is the broader scientific consensus here? 


Michael: 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.


Aubrey: “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.” [Michael laughs] Dude.


Michael: I love the idea of someone reaching for the salad dressing and being like, “No, it shortens the lifespan of stroke-prone rats. 


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


Michael: [laughs] The rats didn't know about beef tallow. 


Aubrey: They don’t even have a morning routine. 


[laughter] 


They're not even doing crunches or reading Bible verses. 


Michael: Even by the standards of like left wing antivaxxers, this is pretty fringe. 


Aubrey: Yeah. 


Michael: 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 references to this in, 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 control F for seed oils and this is the first mention of it. I'm just going to send you the full paragraph. 


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


Michael: She has this whole weird thing about how your diet shows up in the structure of your face. She has a chapter called the sibling strategy where she looks at Matt Dillon, the actor, and then he has a brother named Kevin Dillon, and she shows both of their faces and she's like, “Look how ugly his brother is-


Aubrey: Jesus.


Michael: -and look how aggressive Matt Dillon is.” That's because he's the older sibling and older siblings get better nutrition. 


Aubrey: As a younger sibling, this is older sibling propaganda [crosstalk]


Michael: I mean, I don't know that's fucking true. But it's like the literal thesis of the book is like, beautiful people ate better. And the way that you eat is expressed through your physical beauty. 


Aubrey: Dude, I guarantee you this is going to be the one episode that my brother listens to of our show ever. [Michael laughs] And he's like, that part sounded true. [laughs]


Michael: So, the main thing that I want to convey here is that seed oils is kind of like a crank thing now. It mostly goes around the crank, right? But this has always been a crank thing. I then found a couple of 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 Steven Makari, who's like a woo-woo, life coach kind of guy. 


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


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


Aubrey: Yeah, totally. No, I get you.


Michael: Just like, not a credible article. I'll send you the nut graph of that. 


Aubrey: 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 the substance was used in numerous “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 healthy? 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. 


Michael: When he talks about supplements here, he's talking about fish oil supplements. So, he's merging together Omega 3s and Omega 6s, which we'll get into later. And then also he has this accelerated aging. None of the literature was about that. Even, the technical literature was not about that. But it's like you can see this stuff bouncing around the crankosphere, and then everyone else just doing improv on it. They're like, what if it also affects your aging? 


Aubrey: Yes and-


Michael: Yes, exactly. 


Aubrey: -Alzheimer's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Michael: So, in an effort to try to understand 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, 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 remarkable how little there is. There really isn't very much from before 2019. The authors of the Harper's BAZAAR article, there's also a random Forbes article that author is tweeting about it, but no one is really talking about seed oils. But then starting in 2018, you start seeing it bubble up as a B plot to the Carnivore diet. Joe Rogan has the Jordan Peterson Carnivore special thing. 


Aubrey: God. Of course, we're at Rogan. 


Michael: That is July 2018. And afterwards, you start seeing random Carnivore diet accounts talking about it. So, there is someone named Woke Carnivore [laughs] on-[crosstalk] 


Aubrey: Great, great.


Michael:  -Twitter. Not particularly Woke. I was very disappointed. 


Aubrey: I was going to say we're in full Internet mad libs. 


Michael: 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 is so many bangers in this episode, Aubrey. Here's one of the bangers. So, this is from someone named seizure salad. 


Aubrey: 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.


Michael: These people latch on to things as, like, good or bad with no actual biological basis for what that is doing. So, it's like you cut out seed oils and 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 everything about your life gets better. You also don't sunburn. 


Aubrey: 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. 


Michael: [laughs] That's like those people that would be like, “Why isn't the edible kicking in?” And then 90 minutes later they'll just tweet potatoes. [laughs] 


Aubrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Michael: Okay, here's another one from 2018. 


Aubrey: There is a picture that has three spoonfuls or pats of different 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.” If you are smart. [laughs] No, I just started reading this in my head in Jeff Foxworthy voice. If you are smarter than ant. [Michael laughs] If you are smarter than ant, say no to fake seed oil-based meats and #YesToMeat.


Michael: #YesToMeat is what, I was like, “I'm sending it to Aubrey.” 


Aubrey: [laughs] Oh, no.


Michael: It's good. 


Aubrey: Michael.


Michael: #YesToMeat. 


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


[laughter] 


#YesToMeat. 


Michael: Too meat. Too curious, yes. 


Aubrey: [laughs] The number two and then meat. Oh, God. 


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


Aubrey: Is this one of the ones where they're high on camera or they get high first and then get on camera? [laughs] 


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


Aubrey: You listened to a full episode.


Michael: Aubrey. They talk about bow hunting for 25 minutes. 


Aubrey: Jesus, hells bells. 


Michael: I'm like, not kidding. Joe Rogan’s like, I was at an MMA fight and I was thinking about bow hunting and I'm like, well, I'm thinking about hunting myself with a fucking bow right now. 


Aubrey: You know this. I was at kindergarten classroom assistant for a while. This is how the five-year-olds preoccupied with masculinity would talk, [Michael laughs] weapons and martial arts and like, “I'm really tough. Don't mess with me.” 


Michael: I know. 


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


[laughter] 


Michael: So, this is a Joe Rogan episode. That is an interview with Paul Saladino. So, Paul Saladino had asthma and eczema growing up. 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 comes roaring back even more. He gets sepsis at one point. It appears hospitalized, at least according to him. Apparently, the eczema was so bad that he had to go on steroids. 


Aubrey: Oh wow. 


Michael: 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 an excerpt from the introduction where he talks about how he discovered the Carnivore diet. 


Aubrey: 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.


Aubrey: The plants great. It's definitely the plant's fault. 


Michael: There is a couple 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-


Aubrey: -by Joe Rogan. 


Michael: Joe Rogan is creating grifters and then having the grifters on. 


Aubrey: Thank you so much Joe Rogan for inspiring my grift.


Michael: 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. 


Aubrey: Right? He heard that interview, and he was like, “People must know my story of this thing I'm about to try”


Michael: This thing that I've done for a little while. He later says he was only on the Carnivore Diet for “A year, a year and half.” 


Aubrey: So, he basically is just immediately fucking giving people advice. And then his road to becoming an influencer and how he gets from 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 spreading medical misinformation. But he becomes a very popular influencer relatively quickly. But it's not totally clear financially, how he did this. He starts writing the book. He starts again, of course, he starts a supplement company. 


Aubrey: Step one, monetize it. 


Michael: It's called Heart and Soil. 


Aubrey: Absolutely not. 


Michael: 3.5/5. Do you want to know who his business partner is, Aubrey? 


Aubrey: Oh, God. Joe Rogan, The Liver King. You really are getting the band back together. 


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


Aubrey: Sorry, to this man. 


Michael: This is a video of him. We'll watch it together. 


Aubrey: 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. And I reached for the pause button, and I was two seconds in, which means that I am now paused on a screen full of organ meat-- untrimmed organ meat, and just the caption phrase is raw meat smoothie. 


Michael: You might puke. I got sick to my stomach watching this the first time. So gross.


Aubrey: I have almost puked on our show before. 


Michael: Yeah, that's true, actually. 


Aubrey: Okay, ready? 


Michael: Yeah, count us down. 


[video starts here]


Male Speaker: Let me show you guys how to make my morning raw meat smoothie. This is definitely going to trigger some people. Buckle up. All right, first thing, going to throw in some raw sheep's milk. 100% grass fed. Get all that cream in there. Going to 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. 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, liver and blood in it. It's really hard to find fresh stuff--[crosstalk]


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


Male Speaker: You want to travel it is a life saver. I'll just empty those into the smoothie because that's the secret sauce for making taste amazing. 


Michael: Testicle powder, testicle powder. 


Male Speaker: Blend it up. All right, you guys ready for the money shot? Look at this. 


Aubrey: No, I'm not. 


Michael: No. 


Male Speake: Cheers. How good is that. Lets go.


Aubrey: Why is it, oh blueberries? 


Michael: Blueberries.


Aubrey: Good. 


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


[video ends here]


Michael: So, I don't like it. 


Aubrey: So, there are 123 comments on this video that I am not logged into Twitter, so I can't read them. But I guaran-fucking-tee you that there are carnivore diet purists being like, “This isn't the carnivore diet. What are those blueberries doing in there? What is that honey doing in there?”


Michael: 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.” 


Aubrey: Yeah. You soak them like beans for hummus. 


Michael: All of the comments are like. But then you rinse it with tap water. You're putting poison on him. Like, everyone is roasting him for using fucking tap water. It is a funniest shit.


Aubrey: Fucking, now there’s fluoride in those fucking berries. 


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


Aubrey: Yeah. 


Michael: To sell a fucking organ smoothie to people. 


Aubrey: Yes. 


Michael: So, I found an LA Times article about it. These are the ingredients. It says, it's a concoction of kefir, beef organs, raw honey, blueberries, bananas, lucuma fruit sweetener, coconut cream, sea salt, maple syrup and so called Immunomilk-


Aubrey: Oh no. 


Michael: I know. 


Aubrey: Oh no. 


Michael: 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-- [crosstalk]


Aubrey: Sure famously. 


Michael: Patreon bonus episode know that it's actually womb juice. 


Aubrey: Only Michael Hobbes knows what colostrum really is. 


Michael: I want everyone to know I'm doubling down. 


Aubrey: Boy, Immunomilk has a real mystery meat vibe to it. 


Michael: This movie cost $19. People are paying $19 to eat beef organs and all of this other shit. 


Aubrey: Honestly, given beef prices $19 is nice.


Michael: I don't know what anything should cost anymore. 


Aubrey: Could be worse. Beef at Erewhon. 


Michael: Are you aware, Aubrey, of these wired headphones thing? 


Aubrey: I know people who believe this. 


Michael: Wait, do you really? 


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


Michael: Do you mean your husband? 


Aubrey: Yeah, yeah. Yes. 


Michael: [unintelligible [00:35:23] the husband. The straight man that you're dating? Yep. 


Aubrey: Surprise. I'm heterosexual and married. 


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


Aubrey: My husband knows the truth about 5G and chemtrails. 


Michael: Paul Saladino's 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’s made kind of like latex or rubber. Like it's not like paper, paper. 


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


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


Aubrey: 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.


Michael: But trust me, a shirtless man in Whole Foods. [laughs] 


Aubrey: It's very wake up sheeple.


Michael: 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 going to be my first time watching it at normal speed. 


[video starts here]


Male Speaker: And the real driver here, I suspect expect, is the last one. Jamie. 10.18.09--[crosstalk] 


Michael: A citation.


Male Speaker: You look at the consumption of vegetable oil by Americans since 1910 and that is a staggering amount. You don't want to skateboard that ramp? That's Tony Hawk worthy, man. Yeah, that's Tony Hawk. 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 and consistent. This is completely dyssynchronous with our evolution. We would never have been grinding soybeans up into oil. We didn't have the ability to do this. And then you can get into all of the reasons this might be doing this, but, 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.


Aubrey: Jesus.


Male Speaker: 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 this excess linoleic acid is driving our fat cells to get really big, but isn't allowing them to divide the way they are supposed to. 


[video ends here]


Michael: His stock in trade is throwing a bunch of large vocabulary words at you. 


Aubrey: Sciency words. 


Michael: 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 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.”


Aubrey: We are talking earlier about clues to what he's doing and who his audience might be. We're finding out here that his audience is specifically Joe Rogan. 


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Aubrey: Just like, big words were and like, I brought a visual aid, and Joe Rogan's like, “Whoa. All right.” 


Michael: The other 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. 


Aubrey: Oh, my God. 


Michael: He says he was only on it for a year, year and a half. In 2022, he makes a video of, why I'm not on the Carnivore diet anymore. And 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. 


Aubrey: Yeah, a hypnic jerk. 


Michael: He says, like, 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 The Carnivore Code. Later on, you're like, “Oh, yeah, I felt like shit when I was on the carnivore diet.” Oh, 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, just like these fucking guys always do, the minute he goes off the carnivore diet, he then gives an interview to some other podcaster where he's like, “Oh, yeah, being in ketosis, didn't work for me.” And I think it's not good for other people either. 


[00:40:16] So he immediately starts giving advice, and he's like, well, the carnivore diet, a lot of that ketosis research that's based on animals and you really just can't extrapolate from animal studies. And you were talking about studies on fucking Joe Rogan. That's half of what you talked about was the fat cells and fucking rats. 


Aubrey: Yeah. Again, this is part of the challenge with the I experimented on myself N of 1 kind of stuff?


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 


Aubrey: 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 laundering your personal experience as some form of scientific knowledge that has been tested.


Michael: Yeah. That's all he's doing. 


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


Michael: So, basically, right after the Joe Rogan-- God, I was about to say experience, [Aubrey laughs] right after the Joe Rogan episode, this does explode. 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 Oil.


Aubrey: Friend of the no one Breitbart.


Michael: So, over the next couple 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. 


Aubrey: Oh, man. Can I make some guesses? 


Michael: You know what it's going to be? It's like different flavors. It's like a little Neapolitan of the worst people in America. 


Aubrey: It's a list of Moon Juice locations. 


[laughter] 


Yeah, it's going to be like Jim Bros and a bunch of these fucking jokers are going to get caught selling beef tallow as an alternative. 


Michael: So, I am sending you a tweet. This is the first group that starts latching onto this. 


Aubrey: This is someone named Andrew Torba, whose username @basedtorba. 


[laughter]


That's the first thing I'll tell you. That's how I know I don't know this guy because if I had ever seen that before, I would have really made a meal out of it. 


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


Aubrey: What are you afraid of sunflower?


Michael: BasedHobbs. 


Aubrey: The profile picture is just you with a katana sword. 


Michael: Mine is @riptpodcaster[?]. [Aubrey laughs] Wait, did I tell you? I got a random text from this guy I met on the Internet who I haven't seen in like six months, randomly he texted me at like 9 in the morning. He's like, “I don't know if I should be telling you this, but someone took your Grindr 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 @hobbesmasculine. 


Aubrey: This is going to go right to his head. 


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


Aubrey: Tune in next week when I show up on Ladylike Women. 


Michael: [laughs] Every time we record, I text you afterwards. I'm like, “Was I masc enough on the show?” 


Aubrey: Totally.


Michael: “Do I seem super masc.” 


Aubrey: And you also text me, I'm so glad you crossed your legs at the ankle for the--crosstalk]


[laughter] 


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


[laughter] 


Aubrey: Yeah, the woman named Michael is talking a lot. [laughs] 


Michael: All right, read this extremely problematic tweet. 


Aubrey: Sorry, from Based Torba. 


Michael: Yeah, read the Based Torba tweet. 


Aubrey: 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. 


Michael: About raising birth rates by eating less salad dressing. 


Aubrey: One might call it Based Mike. 


[laughter]


One might call this Take Based. 


Michael: 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 dog whistles. These are people that are just whistling, like, walking down the street whistling.


Aubrey: Do the space lasers take part? 


Michael: Yeah, exactly.


Aubrey: In the castration. 


Michael: So, basically this is like one of the transmitters of seed oil misinformation. Starting after the Joe Rogan episode. It's just like, straightforward far right people. In 2021 and 2022, this also becomes a big thing among crypto people. 


Aubrey: Fucking, of course.


Michael: I'm sending you again a good tweet from a guy that runs a Bitcoin exchange or something. 


Aubrey: Almost every one of these false “Milks, oat, potato, pea,” whatever contains inflammatory seed oils, typically sunflower or canola. Is fleeting smugness really worth developing metabolic syndrome, fuck off. 


Michael: I sent this to every vegetarian I know. [Aubrey laughs] Is fleeting smugness really worth developing metabolic syndrome? 


[laughter]


Speaking of being a terrible person. Read his own reply to this. 


Aubrey: Wow.


Michael: Yes, the way these guys talk is so weird. 


Aubrey: Oh, no.


Michael: They're have this weird Cormac McCarthy way of doing like sick burns. 


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


Michael: You can tell he had thesaurus open in the other window. 


Aubrey: If you think I'm not making myself a bumper sticker that says mad, metabolically impaired and torpid-- [crosstalk] 


Michael: And torpid.


Aubrey: You got another thing coming. 


Michael: 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 called these people Granola Nazis. You know what they mean, right? The people who are, they're far right, but it's this almost left-wing messaging about, we need to go back to the land. We need to have a less corporately dominated public sphere. 


Aubrey: Right.


Michael: But it's also fundamentally very right wing. 


Aubrey: Yeah, this is Liver King and all of his “Ancestral” way of living stuff. 


Michael: Exactly. 


Aubrey: Very trad wife adjacent. 


Michael: This whole seed oils thing, it's kind of perfect, right? Because 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 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 an avatar of the Granola Nazi ideology. And so, I spent a long time scrolling through this guy's feed. 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 think there's like this tendency to launder these people or to think like, “Oh, all they want is for us to have better diets, or all they want is for Americans to be healthier.” But this seed oiled thing is 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. 


Aubrey: 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. 


[laughter] 


Michael: Aubrey, we're done. We can star recording that’s it. We reached peak Granola Nazi of  Bitcoin milk? Sure, why not? Someone probably fucking has, for fuck sake. We live in hell. 


[laughter] 


Aubrey: It really delighted me. So, you can understand why I was- [crosstalk] 


Michael: Perfection.


Aubrey: -that tab without closing that loop first. 


Michael: So, another thing, the Granola Nazis are really into is ball sunning. 


Aubrey: Sure. 


Michael: This from Carnivore Aurelius considering throwing a dating festival for carnivore singles. Steak eating, galas, good music, cow milking, bread baking, fighting, workouts, ball sunning. This is the vision of the Granola Nazis. This is what we should all be doing on weekends. I love fighting. [laughs] 


Aubrey: Don't forget we're also going to be fighting. 


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


Aubrey: Michael?


Michael: So, I love there's now sunglasses truthers as well as the sunscreen truthers. He also responded to the Andrew Tate tweet where Andrew Tate was like, you people have never had real enemies. 


Aubrey: My new favorite tweet. 


[laughter] 


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


Aubrey: Oh, I can't wait. 


Michael: Here is him responding to Andrew Tate. 


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


[laughter] 


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


Aubrey: God. Cis dudes accusing other cis dudes of PMS-ing is so funny.


Michael: Is so funny. [Aubrey laughs] And also, the balding that like you have high tea but it is turning into estrogen due to seed oils. 


Aubrey: Everything about this is so funny. [laughs]


Michael: And because it's like little-- I keep thinking of the Vine where that like little 6-year-old kid is like, “You're messing with a future US Army soldier.” 


[laughter] 


Like dumb little losers like play acting as 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. 


Aubrey: Estrogen causes balding, anger and this PMS-like behavior.


[laughter] 


You know how women are always walking around bald and angry. 


[laughter] 


Michael: 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.


Aubrey: And that's the only reason we have women because of seed oils. 


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


Aubrey: Yeah, women caused the obesity epidemic, famously. 


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


Aubrey: 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.


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


Aubrey: I think it's interesting that he focuses on bleaching it and deodorizing it and not actually going, the purpose of those things is this. 


Michael: Well, also, what's so interesting to me is, like, these people are obsessed with this idea that there's trace elements in our food that are harming us, which, again, might actually be true. I'm actually open to that discussion as long as it's, like, evidence based. But 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 heavy metals, things that we don't actually want in our food supply. And it's like, you don't want these things. You're always talking about 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? 


If you just squeeze a, I don't want to say rapeseed because it sounds so bad, but if you just squeeze a cottonseed, and you get oil out of it. You don't want to just be using that immediately. And also, it would go rancid on the shelf relatively quickly, which also poses food safety issues. So, what do you actually want? People say processing, and he uses the term bleaching here, and everybody always says, “Oh, they're bleached,” which seems to imply that, 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. It's like, why people put charcoal on their face. 


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


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


Michael: And, like, you add phosphoric acid or oftentimes it's citric acid, and then you centrifuge it out. You're basically separating out the components of the oil, but you're centrifuging it and then filtering it. So, you're 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 requires actual science to show that these things are in the vegetable oils, and they've been tested a million times. And we just don't see large amounts. 


Aubrey: In much of our life, much of culture, much of the world. When there is new science, we greet that or new technology. We greet that as an advancement and exciting evidence that we're doing more of the right thing. And when it comes to food, we take that as a harbinger of bad things. 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 so lots of people can use it and it's pretty inexpensive.” 


Michael: And fewer people get sick from eating rancid oil. 


Aubrey: And it's like, not actually proven to be bad for you. But if you describe it in this kind of way, then it will get people more to the point of being even before you get to presenting any evidence about it one way or the other.


Michael: So, the only part of this ultra-processed food sub narrative of seed oils that actually gave me pause was there's two ways of getting oil out of seeds. One way is to just like press them. 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 leeches out all of the oils. This is like super industrial. It's like, 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 straightforwardly toxic. 


So, when people in these facilities are putting hexane on the crops, like, they have to wear, like, hazmat suits. If you breathe in hexane, it's actually really bad for you. Again, this sounds terrible. 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. 


Aubrey: That 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. The person paying the biggest price is the person doing the work to make that process happen. 


Michael: So, when I first read about this in one of these 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 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 the next batch. You can just 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, academics are not concerned about or that the FDA is not concerned about. This is like, “Oh, yeah, we should actually check how much there is.” So, this is an excerpt from a government report that was produced on this. 


Aubrey: 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 2 parts per million. If the standard assumption of 80 g of fat consumed per person per day is made, such residual levels would be the equivalent of no more than 2.29 mcg/kg/day, which is a toxicologically insignificant amount. 


Michael: The most important phrase there is toxicologically significant. 


Aubrey: That's me too. I'm also toxicologically insignificant. 


Michael: [laughs] 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. 


Aubrey: Wow. 


Michael: According to this government report, the biggest risk of hexane exposure is actually 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 seed oils are poison. 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 people have been looking at this for decades. We just don't find large risks to the US population. 


Aubrey: 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. 


Michael: Now that the seed oils thing, and it's been folded into the ultra-processed food issue, you find articles about how bad seed oils are in 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. 


Aubrey: 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. “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. 


Michael: 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 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 premature babies often have a problem with absorbing fats. If you have Crohn's disease, you can have it. 


If you have problems with your liver or kidney function, basically, if you have an underlying, pretty serious condition that affects your ability to absorb fat, 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 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. 


Aubrey: Yeah. 


Michael: It's the same with the antioxidant thing. The antioxidants that are present in seed oils are present in lots of stuff. Even people who are eating at the high end of seed oils, it's not that much of their consumption. It's like, maybe a couple tablespoons a day. It is true that all of this processing that they do to oils does reduce the antioxidant count and does reduce other nutrients, but they were never that high to begin with. You're not eating that much of them, and it just isn't really a meaningful contributor to your nutrient mix. 


Aubrey: There's been a similar freakout over the last couple of years in weight loss media spaces and particularly social media spaces about the idea of cortisol face or cortisol belly or whatever. 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, you know, if you have 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 a medical condition.


And it just feels like, especially in a media landscape that includes things like the Everlywell home food intolerance tests and that kind of thing, that we are constantly muddying the water between personal practices that make you feel a little better and health conditions that are known and treatable. Everyone is reaching for this way of legitimizing whatever their dietary stuff is or health stuff is by reaching for clinical language, which ends up further blurring the line.


Michael: So, we're sort of moving toward better and better argument against seed oils. Like, we started with seed oils are destroying our birth rates from the super far right. That's just bananas. We then get to the stuff of they're putting chemicals in it and maybe it leeches out nutrients. That's roughly true, but 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-6s versus omega-3s. So, I am going to send you an excerpt from a guy named Mark Hyman. This is a doctor who-- Do you know him? 


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


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


Aubrey: He's also, I believe, the founder of what he calls “The Pegan diet.” 


Michael: What is that? 


Aubrey: Paleo and vegan. 


Michael: Wait, so does that mean if you're paleo and raw, it's the paw diet? [Aubrey laughs] Let's keep going. 


Aubrey: Let's do this for the rest of the episode. 


Michael: [laughs] We both have the same yes and.


Aubrey: We've been talking about which puns are too sweaty and which are not sweaty enough. 


Michael: Let’s do it.


Aubrey: So, just like really hone in.


Michael: So here is Mark Hyman on seed oils. 


Aubrey: 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? 


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


Aubrey: In prehistoric times, our ancestors consumed omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids in the healthy ratio 1:1. 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 20:1 for people who eat a lot of processed foods. 


Michael: 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. Is like, what is making us sick. 


Aubrey: The implication here is that foods, as they are naturally produced, already reflect a 1:1 ratio of omega 6s and omega 3s. And I don't know that that's true. 


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


Aubrey: That's funny. 


Michael: 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. 


Aubrey: Yeah. 


Michael: However, did our Paleolithic ancestors eat a 1:1 ratio? 


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


Michael: [laughs] So, this claim that our ancestors ate a 1:1 ratio of Omega 3s to Omega 6s appears to have originated with one lady. So, there's a researcher named Artemis Simopoulos who is a nutrition researcher. She writes the Omega Diet in 1999. She's early on the train of 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 3s and omega 6s.” And then it's like footnote 14. And you go to footnote 14 and it's like, Simopoulos 1999. 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 this. 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. And omega-3s and omega-6s 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-3s. Therefore, if they're eating a lot of animal foods, then they're going to be getting more omega 3s 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 hunter-gatherer societies that are eating 70% of their calories from various, meats and dairy kinds of products, but there's also some that are eating like 10%. 


Aubrey: Sure. 


Michael: It's just really facile to say like, “Well, our ancestors ate a 1:1 ratio.” 


Aubrey: You know, we were talking earlier about we have these filters around political misinformation and disinformation, but less so we don't exercise those in the same way when it comes to health and wellness stuff. When a political figure hearkens back to some 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. [laughs]


Michael: Right, right. 


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


Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 


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


Michael: 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 is out of whack. It used to be 1:1, now it's 20:1. 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 Harris.” So, in this review, he basically notes that among researchers, this thing about the omega 6:omega 3 ratio, that debate has been settled. This is a thing that happened in the 1990s and 2000s and this ratio isn't really something that scientists refer to anymore. 


So, we publicly are reenacting a debate that scientists had 20 years ago and 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. 


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


Michael: Aubrey, welcome to the next hour of your life. Welcome to what we will be discussing. 


Aubrey: She's one big segue. 


Michael: This was such a revelation to me and so fun to read the literature on this because this whole field is asking the question, like, what does it mean for something to be bad for you? You hear this all the time. You're like, “A brownie is bad for you.” But 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 the original theory of why they're bad for you. Omega 6s contain something called linoleic acid. When you eat 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. 


Aubrey: And you're talking about ‘contributing to but not being the sole cause of’ that set of processes. 


Michael: This is also one of the funny things about this. This because there are countries and they're like subnational 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 they don't have twice or three times or four times the amount of heart disease. So, if we're talking about something that's 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 if you stop eating seed oils, you'll never have a heart attack like that. That just isn't really on the table as an option, essentially. 


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


Michael: Exactly. 


Aubrey: Is like leaving people with that with not really ever saying it out loud, but leaving people with the distinct impression that this is one of the only, if not the biggest contributors to heart health issues.


Michael: So basically, we originally had this model that was like, okay, Omega 6s had linoleic and 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 “bad acid.” So, very little of it is being converted. And also, they've done studies where they massively increase people's linoleic acid consumption and their arachidonic acid levels don't change at all. 


The other step of this is the question of, is arachidonic acid bad? So, they've also done studies where they just give people arachidonic acid. Again, this is the acid that is allegedly bad. This is the 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. 


Aubrey: Okay. [laughs] 


Michael: 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 marks of Inflammation. 


Aubrey: This is really eroding my confidence in the media literacy skills of the audience of the Founder of Gab. 


[laughter] 


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


Aubrey: They're not going straight to primary sources and reading for comprehension. 


Michael: The other kind of work that they were doing over the last couple decades was just like, looking at, do people with high levels of linoleic acid and arachidonic acid have worse outcomes? And they don't. There's a huge study in Europe where 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 there's no relationship between linoleic or arachidonic acid and outcomes. 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. 


Aubrey: 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. 


Michael: Great. 


Aubrey: So, it's maybe making you healthier. 


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


Aubrey: So, we're just careening toward a bunch of Joe Rogan listeners having worse heart health. 


Michael: Yeah, I mean, I don't want to 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 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 all of a sudden say that those studies are good” just because I want to own Joe Rogan. I'm not going to, like, endorse these things. But I think what it shows is not necessarily seed oils are good for you. I'm not going to make a claim like that. But what it does show is there's no affirmative evidence that seed oils are bad for you. 


Aubrey: Sure. 


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


Aubrey: Which I also just think about like as a person who's had an eating disorder, and as a person who continues to have pre-profound anxiety, I also just think about 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 a legitimating force for those folks 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? 


Michael: Exactly. 


Aubrey: I also think about-- 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, “ooh,”


Michael: What?


Aubrey: You know how some sinks are divided and there's a separate area where the garbage disposal is and then a separate one where the drain is? And he was like, “A friend of mine is a chef and so 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. That is, like, we all know that we got bigger fish to fry. You 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 it's much bigger, more present issues than what kind of oil am I cooking with when I cook my food at home?” 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. 


Michael: And here you are afraid of sunflowers. [Aubrey laughs] This is PMS, like, behavior. 


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Aubrey Gordon

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Michael Hobbes

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