The Lie Behind Vegetable Oils
Seed Oils are commercially called Vegetable Oils. The irony is that there are absolutely no vegetables in the plastic bottle. Margarine is hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Being a baby boomer I got caught up in the marketing campaign that was thrust upon the world back in the 1960s and beyond that natural saturated fats were bad for us. We were falsely led to believe that these natural fats would contribute to cardiovascular disease. This lie was based on the work of an American scientist named Ansell Keyes. If you have the time and inclination I recommend that you do your own research into the lies that were disseminated by big industry based on the selective and flawed research that he presented.
When I was a kid my mum fed us food cooked in lard, we ate real butter on our bread and generally ate a simple diet of meat and 3 veggies. There weren’t many carbohydrates in our diets and I can’t remember eating a lot of snacks. I think that the general western world obesity percentage back around then was less than 15%.
Another phenomena that appeared in the 1960s was marketing campaigns by food companies although I’m pretty certain these had been going for most of the 20th century. But from my experience this was when we started being indoctrinated that eating certain foods would somehow add to our health. Don’t forget that this was when we were being told that cigarettes were harmless and somehow enhanced our lives.
As a generality this was the beginning of the low fat, high carb diet that is prevalent in society even in the first quarter of the 21st century. The stats speak for themselves. In the USA around 1900 people die each day from cardiovascular disease and another 1600 die from cancer. I’m not certain what the worldwide figures are but you should check this out in your country.
When you consider that at the beginning of the 20th century heart attacks were not at all a common cause of death this should act as a red flag.
Something weird is going on.
I got totally sucked into the marketing. The idea of using animal fats to cook with seemed repulsive and by the 1970s we were eating Nuttelex margarine because we thought it was a healthier alternative to butter. I became a vegetarian in the late 60s thinking that it was not only humane but also healthy. This is when I started eating carbs, cooking with vegetable oil and believing that whole grains were the way to go. I did eat vegetables but I look back now and wonder what percentage of my diet consisted of well cooked healthy veggies!
Looking at a simple history of the evolution and introduction of seed oils into our diet you can trace it back to the late 1800s. Industry had used whale fat to grease machinery but then they killed all of the whales and needed an alternative, Cotton was a huge crop in the US and some smart cookie noticed that the cotton seeds were being wasted and came up with the idea of using the oil created from them as a lubricant and also an ingredient for soap. Waste not, want not!
Proctor and Gamble was started in the US in 1838 by a English candle maker and an Irish soap maker. They basically made cleaning products until 1911 when some smart cookie realized that the solid hydrogenated vegetable oil looked like lard and butter thus was born Crisco, a shortening made of vegetable oils rather than animal fat. With money behind them they were able to market this as a cheap, healthy alternative and before you know it American cookbooks called for Crisco instead of the more natural animal fats. They became sponsors of radio serials and later TV soap operas. Genius way of getting your massage across. In 1996 the FDA approved a P & G product named Olean a lower calorie substitute for putting into snacks and potato chips.
It’s remarkable what marketing can achieve. We were convinced by the 1970s that “vegetable” oils were the way to go and far healthier than saturated fat.
This is now looking like a big fat lie and the health stats worldwide seem to reflect this. I dare you to go to a supermarket and find products that don’t include some sort of “vegetable” oil.
That’s enough from me. Please watch the YouTube presentation which is a montage of parts of several lectures on the dangers of seed oils.
