dynomight

A friend has spent the last three years hounding me about seed oils. Every time I thought I was safe, he’d wait a couple months and renew his attack: > “When are you going to write about seed oils?” > “Did you know that seed oils are why there’s so much {obesity, heart disease, diabetes, inflammation, cancer, dementia}?” > “Why did you write about {meth, the death penalty, consciousness, nukes, ethylene, abortion, AI, aliens, colonoscopies, Tunnel Man, Bourdieu, Assange} when you could have written about seed oils?” > “Isn’t it time to quit your silly navel-gazing and use your weird obsessive personality to make a dent in the world—by writing about seed oils?” He’d often send screenshots of people reminding each other that Corn Oil is Murder and that it’s critical that we overturn our lives to eliminate soybean/canola/sunflower/peanut oil and replace them with butter/lard/coconut/avocado/palm oil. This confused me, because on my internet, no one cares. Few have heard of these theories and those that have mostly think they’re kooky. When I looked for evidence that seed oils were bad, I’d find people with long lists of papers. Those papers each seemed vaguely concerning, but I couldn’t find any “reputable” sources that said seed oils were bad. This made it hard for me to take the idea seriously. But my friend kept asking. He even brought up the idea of paying me, before recoiling in horror at my suggested rate. But now I appear to be writing about seed oils for free. So I guess that works? On seed oil theory There is no one seed oil theory. I can’t emphasize this enough: There is no clear “best” argument for why seed oils are supposed to be bad. This stuff is coming from internet randos (♡) who differ both in what they think is true, and why they think it. But we can examine some common arguments. We ate seed oil and we got fat. One argument is that for most of human history, nobody dieted and everyone was lean. But some time after the industrial revoluti