Seed Oils The “Scam” Is Oxidation — Not the Seed

Our latest discussion highlights the critical role of seed oils in cancer progression, using a stage three colon cancer patient as a case study.

Despite standard cancer treatment, her cancer showed recurrence, prompting a deeper look into her metabolic health and gut health. We explore how factors like inflammation in the body and a dysbiotic gut microbiome can significantly influence patient outcomes, emphasizing the need for a holistic approach to nutrition and healthy eating.

🎯 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• The difference between seed oils and oxidized fats
• What lipid peroxidation means
• How cooking methods affect oil stability
• Why heat, light, and storage matter
• The connection between gut health and immunity
• How inflammation impacts the body
• Which fats are more stable for cooking
• Practical ways to reduce oxidative stress in your diet

📍 Envita Medical Centers – Scottsdale, AZ
🌐 Learn more: www.envita.com
📞 Speak with a care coordinator: 866-830-4576

“It’s not just what you eat — it’s how it’s processed, stored, and cooked.”

Disclaimer
This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your licensed healthcare provider before making any medical decisions. Individual results will vary, and Envita Medical Centers does not guarantee outcomes. Some treatments discussed may not be FDA-approved or available in all locations. Testimonials are shared with patient consent and may not reflect typical results. Do not delay or disregard professional medical care based on the podcast's content. Certain treatments may be available only at Envita’s international clinic in Hermosillo, Mexico. No specific outcomes are promised or implied.
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Outcomes Disclaimer
The results referenced from Envita's Precision Cancer Care: 35-Fold Improvement in Response Rates are from a retrospective analysis of 199 late-stage cancer patients treated at Envita Medical Centers between 2021 and 2023, as published in the Journal of Cancer Therapy. These outcomes are not guaranteed and will vary based on individual factors such as cancer type, stage, genetics, immunity and prior treatments. Any comparisons to standard care or clinical trials are based on published data and internal analysis, not head-to-head studies. Individual results will vary.

You can read the full peer-reviewed study at: 

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=132493

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

So here's why seed oils matter in cancer. Here's an example of a stage 3 colon cancer patient. She did everything her oncologist told her: the standard regimens of chemotherapy, finished the protocol, had surgery, clean margins, and she came to see us because eventually the cancer came back. But here's what I want you to focus on. Her inflammation markers were high. And when you looked at her gut microbiome, which we tested and did an analysis, her gut lining looked like major dysbiosis, lots of inflammation. So we asked her this question as we do with all patients what are you eating? What's in your diet? She was cooking with all your standard vegetable oils and canola oils, all GMO in plastic bottles, not well maintained. Heat affected them, oxidizing, but all labeled heart healthy. And see, that's where people get stuck on these labels. Even these online bodybuilders telling you it doesn't matter which oil you eat, and they might be right on their macros. Where they're wrong has to do with lipid peroxidation and inflammation. A lot of people have been given oversimplified information when it comes to nutrition. And the real problem is getting missed. So in this episode, I'm going to break down seed oil controversy so you can understand it, keep it simple and powerful because my goal is for you to get information that can help you. Because the argument isn't really about the seed oils. Are they evil? Are they good? The argument has to do with oxidized fats that create danger signals, lipid peroxidation, stress to our cell membranes, inflammatory noise. And for cancer patients, these things really matter. That noise does matter to their immunity. And I'll give you information that hopefully will help you make some decisions when it comes to the kinds of fats that you should include in your diet. I'm Dr. Dino Prado, founder of Invita Medical Center. So for the last 25 years, my team and I have helped thousands of patients that have filled all the top cancer hospitals across the United States. They've been to the top hospitals, did medical care there, testing, and it didn't work for them, partly because they didn't get precision care. They were working on a few markers, not a thousand plus markers that we test and custom-built medications and target for our patients. So they were missing that. And because of that, we use precision care and it includes diet and lifestyle changes. So make sure you're working with a doctor before you change anything. Let's get started in this episode. Here's what most people aren't told at the grocery store. The bottle of vegetable oil that you have has been sitting in a truck in high temperatures, plastic, exposed to light and heat and oxygen for weeks to months. And then by the time you buy it, it may already be rancid. And then you take it home and you heat it up at high temperatures, maybe on a pan or in a soup or a broth, and you pour it into your family's food. And what happens next isn't just bad nutrition, it can become a biochemical stress, especially on your gut, your gastrointestinal lining. And that's really the bottom line because 70% of your immune system comes from your gut lining. We want to keep the bad stuff out. And so when you repeatedly eat oxidized fats, especially oils that were old, stored in poor temperatures and overheated, and then maybe fried and cooked with, that gut barrier gets stressed. And when that barrier weakens, bacteria fragments can leak across that lining. And one famous one is called LPS, lipopolysaccharide. LPS is like, think of it like a piece of the part of the bacteria, the outer coating. Your immune system treats it like a fire alarm. It hits the receptors called a TLR4 receptor and it triggers an inflammatory spike. And these inflammatory spikes that are triggered are TNF alpha, cytokines like IL6 and other cytokines. So now your body's fighting a fire. That's what we're talking about today. That's why it's so important to understand oils and how what we're cooking with. And so when that happens repeatedly over and over, that little inflammation becomes a distraction to your body's immune system, which it really needs to focus on getting rid of the cancer or getting rebalanced if you have autoimmune disease. That's why these seed oils in part matter, along with obviously a healthy diet and getting rid of infections, chemical toxins, heavy metals, fixing the gut microbiome, all of these things. So why are these oils everywhere? Well, because they're cheap, they're industrial, they're common oils like soybean, canola oil, corn oil. Big food uses this because they're cheap and they're shelf stable, so to speak, and easy to scale. So they can make them in mass quantities, sell them to restaurants, which use them in their fryers, because replacing it costs more money. And here's the key the more the oil is heated and reused, the more oxidation can build. That's the toxin part of this. I want you to pay attention to that. The more it's heated and the more it's reused. The more it's sitting on a truck in a plastic bottle exposed to light, or it's put in a pan and refried, this is where it becomes harmful. So the problem isn't just are you eating an oil that's unhealthy or a seed oil? It's the fact that they can oxidize so easily and it's being processed and stored in high temperatures. For all intents and purposes, if you had a sunflower oil that was organic and stored correctly in the right temperature and you used it, or a grapeseed oil, you have the benefits of those oils. But when they go and get exposed to heat and temperature, they oxidize and they can become harmful. So now let's connect that to what's really killing Americans. And I want to touch a little bit on heart disease because I think it's really important. With a lot of cancer patients still have cardiovascular disease risk factors and how these oils play into that. For decades, the conversation was simply oh, cholesterol is the villain. It's really not the case. It's the size of the particle, large versus small. It has to do with whether it's oxidized or not. But what matters has to do with your vasculature. So oxidation and inflammation, which are one of the major players in oxidized LDL. That's the key here. LDL is like a delivery truck for cholesterol. But when the LDL gets oxidized, it becomes the kind of particle your immune system reacts to more aggressively. That can contribute to inflammatory processes in the blood vessels. It's not just fat, it's the oxidized fat. That's the core idea I want you to get from this episode. Oxidized fats can add fuel to the system that's already inflamed, meaning it just makes it more inflamed. It's running this vicious cycle. That's why it's important what we cook with. Now let's connect this to cancer and inflammation. Cancer isn't just a lump of cells. As I've talked about before, everybody's cancer, even the same type and stage, it has heterogenicity, meaning they're unique. If we test like we do for a thousand plus markers in precision oncology, everybody's cancer is different, meaning different markers for treatment, different growth factors, different things that are impacting that cancer patient. And one of those is a relationship to the immune system, because the first and last offense to fighting cancer is your immune system. So when we have chronic inflammation, we cause an immune system problem. And this is huge for cancer patients. So your immune system is supposed to be able to detect these abnormal cancer cells, which it does over 10,000 times a day when you're healthy and deletes them. When your immune system is drowning and chronic inflammation, and obviously it's not just seed oils, it can be infections, chemical toxins, heavy metals, a lot of different causative factors that are bringing about that inflammation. This affects the gut barrier and these LPSs that I talked about, lipopolysaccharides and the cytokines or these inflammatory markers that the wrong kinds are constantly rising. These little things add up to losing the battle of your immune system. So when we do precision oncology testing, yes, we look at DNA, next generation sequencing, RNA, transcriptomics, immune profiling, and immune spatial biology, but we also look at gut microbiome and what people can and can't eat. So the immune system is so important because your gut microbiome is like 70% of your immune system. And so these oxidized oils are just noise. That's why we want to get them out of the diet. So cancer patients already are dealing with a lot of stressors. Chemotherapy is a stressor. They're dealing with issues in their immune system. They might be on antibiotics for certain things or on treatments, and their metabolic terrain is off. And like I've mentioned, they can have heavy metals, chemical toxins, infections, all disrupting their body, along with their gut microbiome already being disrupted. So why stack an extra oxidative stress? You don't want to. You don't want to put another stress on top of what you might be already dealing with. And we don't have to. So we can remove these oils. And this isn't a cure to cancer. I mean, just getting rid of seed oils isn't going to eliminate the cancer. It's reducing all that noise so we don't have as much friction in our immune system. Think of it like this there's a bucket, and the more things you put on that bucket, eventually it starts to spill over. It can be infections, chemical toxins, chemotherapy itself, things that brought the cancer on. And now you've added more toxicity, more inflammation, oxidized fats, just add to that. And we don't want to do that. We want to actually clean that out, detoxify, help the body eliminate. Many cancer patients already have a hard time taking out the trash. But we want to look at these oxidized fat as a way of eliminating this particular stress. So now here's where we stop guessing. In the clinic, we have practical ways for testing for oxidative damage. In functional medicine tests, there they exist where we can look at oxidative stress panels. We can look at metabolomics, we can look at lipid peroxides in the urine. This is where the membrane damage signal is like a smoking gun that the fats are oxidizing and stressing the cell membranes. And if oxidative stress is high enough, you can see DNA damage. And that's why that's important. Things like glutathione, coQ10, those are all helpful, but they get depleted in this process. So part of the game here is reducing the oxidative stress. So you don't have to do these expensive tests. You can just change the diet and start improving with some of these nutrients, and you're going to see help in this area. So you can eat like, for example, walnuts have glutathione. There's other foods, but glutathione, liposomal, and coQ10 are good to help fight against this oxidative stress and get rid of the seed oils out of the diet and start bringing in healthy oils, which I'll talk about here in a minute. So think about this. The body has its antioxidant system, which gets neutralized by oxidative stress. So your antioxidant system gets under stress. And so now your oxidative stress is too strong. Then we have things like high omega-6 versus omega-3 balances, which is pushing inflammation. And that's the signal we want to stop. And most of these seed oils are loaded with omega-6. So this is how we solve it. And here's the questions we want to ask. Will I be heating up the oil? If yes, I want to use a stable fat. Real simple ghee, butter, tallow, coconut oil, and even some olive oil because it's a little bit stable, you're going to be okay. How are your fats stored that you're cooking with? Are they away from light and heat and oxygen, meaning they're sealed and kept at the good temperatures? Best in a glass container that doesn't have exposure to light, and even in the refrigerator, it'll stay even fresher. So choose oils in these darker bottles and you can store them in cooler places and you're going to protect the oxidation. How's the oil processed? Are you eating something that's deep fried? Restaurant oils that are using like canola oil or vegetable oils over and over again with you know French fries. These are going to be toxic. And that's why using these stable oils that you want to cook with ghee, tallow, butter, coconut oil, they are much more stable at higher temperatures. Then the other oil that I like to use all the time is extra virgin olive oils, organic, very high in polyphenols, get a good quality, add that to your salads, to your food directly. Avoid heat exposure and soybean, canola, corn, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed. If it's rancid, there are some unique scenarios where they can be stored in cold temperatures and processed freshly. I'm less concerned about them. But this is the important part of understanding oils. So let's go back to this patient. You know, we're talking about 47 years old, stage three colon cancer. Obviously, the colon cancer was not caused by the seed oils alone, but the inflammatory markers were high. We will change diet, lifestyle, obviously, target the treatment, bring the patient into remission, but we supported her gut microbiome. And the key to reducing the inflammation was changing the diet. And I really recommend a high quality, ancient Mediterranean diet so you get the diversity to get the health of the gut microbiome, but we removed all of these unhealthy fats. And you'll see obviously in the Mediterranean diet, people will cook with olive oil, but also with butter. And there's nothing wrong with tallow and ghee. Tallow has been around and also used in those cultures for a long time because these stay stable under high temperatures and they don't oxidize. That doesn't mean you know getting rid of the oils is a cure to cancer, but it's another way we can protect our blood vessels, our immune system, and help us win the overall fight of getting our immune system back in the game. I just want to get rid of the controversy and talk about the oxidation, which I think is really important, particularly for gut health, inflammation, gut microbiome, and immunity. Now I know 90% of you watching have not joined. Please support the channel and help us get the information out there on precision oncology. I don't believe people need to be stuck in a one size fits all. I think they need a model that's custom built for them so it gives them the advantage like we've seen with our patients, where they can live longer, have a better response, and a better quality of life. I hope you found this episode helpful and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.