Low vegetable oil diet

If your day starts off with some bagel, bowl of cereal, occasional fish and chips for lunch, some salad with light dressings, chocolate for snacks, Tesco meal deal for dinner, and instant noodles to top the night off. Chances is that you’re consuming more vegetable oil than you should.

Vegetable oil is ubiquitous in our modern-day diet and it lurks where you least suspect it. Of all the diet advocating for reduced red meat intake, paleo, vegan, the dukan, ultra-low-fat, I hope you would be convinced by the end of this piece that low vegetable oil diet should be the way forward.

The purpose of this article is not to tell you what you should eat and what not to. It is to raise awareness on the potential adverse effect vegetable oil brings about and how it does so.

Below are two facts. Two facts that appear to be mutually exclusive variables. They are however more interconnected than you thought so.

Fact A:

Vegetable oil make up of about 20% of our daily diet.

Fact B:

1930- prevalence of chronic disease in adults is 7.5%, 2000- prevalence grown to 45%, 2020- prevalence grown to 60%.

Before we get any further down the rabbit hole.

The main themes of the article are

1. Vegetable oil?

2. Chronic diseases?

3. Why not vegetable oil?

Vegetable oil

What is vegetable oil?

Vegetable oil is oil extracted from seeds, most commonly found soybean, grape seed, canola oil.

How did vegetable oil come about?

Oil is extracted through two main processes: mechanical extraction (grinding) or solvent extraction.

Mechanical extraction is more commonly used in developed country with oilseed pressers - more health-conscious consumers.

Solvent extraction alternatively, involves mixing the seeds with petroleum derived hexane. The mixture is heated to about 149 °C. Solvent is separated out from the mixture through evaporating it. This method produces higher yields, quicker and less expensive compared to mechanical extraction.

Mechanical extraction has a yield of 20% while solvent extraction (developed later during World War 2 brought an increased demand for edible oil) has a yield of 90-98%.

Is olive oil the same as vegetable oil?

No. Vegetable oil often refers to a mix blend of different types of oils, not inclusive of olive oil.

(Olive is a fruit and not a vegetable. Is tomato a fruit or vegetable?)

Olive oil is extracted from pressed olives (extra virgin olive oil is the least processed version) while vegetable oil is made after running the seeds through complex industrial processes.

How are we using vegetable oil in our daily living?

Apart from culinary purposes, vegetable oil is used in variety of purposes. They are used to make soaps, skin products, candles, perfumes, insulators in electrical industry, and more fashionably as biodiesel recently.

Now, onto chronic disease quickly and we will draw the link between them both.

Chronic diseases

What are chronic diseases?

Chronic diseases are ongoing, generally incurable illnesses or conditions, such as heart disease, asthma, cancer, and diabetes. These diseases are often preventable.

What causes chronic diseases?

The four main drivers are tobacco use, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, excessive alcohol use.

The chronic disease prevalence rate was a particularly startling figure considering how health conscious our society has become – we exercise more, smoke less, eat better (more organic and food with greater nutritional value), reduced alcohol intake.

Yet, it seems to suggest an alternate trend that we are coursing.

The data illustrates that all four drivers have either gone down or stayed similar to data from previous years.

This begs the question - If we are doing better in all areas, why is the disease rate still going up?

I won’t go into tobacco, exercise, alcohol because they are pretty straightforward – no subgroups. Nutrition however, under a closer examination do suggest a plausible explanation to the rise in rate.

Looking at the trend, food groups and nutrients have stayed largely similar from previous decades. The top 4 groups we are eating significantly more than previously - sugar, meat, grains, vegetable oils. Further examination indicates that sugar, meat, grains have stayed almost identical (slight raise in meat intake).

On the contrary, vegetable oil consumption has increased by 150-fold compared to 1909 levels!

Of all the diet plans proposed, perhaps we should start focusing on vegetable oil. It may very well play a larger role in diseases than we previously thought of.

Why not vegetable oil?

There are three ways to look at it.

i. Historical precedent

ii. Biological requirement for the nutrient

iii. Science and the Natural world

i. Historical precedent

When it comes to seeing the bigger picture on certain issues, I have enjoyed looking through history books, see how our ancestral forebears have lived, whether the issue at hand is a modern spin on some longstanding issues or a completely new problem we have never faced before, for example the Internet.

Hence, let’s have a little stroll back in time.

Chronic diseases were almost non-existent before vegetable oil came along.

One could argue perhaps slightly earlier – non-existent before the Industrial revolution.

‘War is obsolete

You are more likely to commit suicide than be killed in conflict

Famine is disappearing

You are at more risk of obesity than starvation

Death is just a technical problem

Equality is out – but immortality is in

What does our future hold?’

- Yuval Noah Harari

We fall higher risk of obesity than starvation in modern times. At any time in history, we have never been flushed with such large surplus of nutrients and food supply.

Modern day homo sapiens operate under a different modus operandi.

We spend more time than ever on devices of untapped potential that revolutionizes the way we do things

We are no longer nomadic herders – we settle down in communities, grow agriculture products and farm.

We do not hunt for food anymore – we walk into supermarket with aisles and aisles of food with no end.

Industrial revolution is a major reason why we are able to live the way we do. We are able to produce at scale with the help of machineries and processes – we are also able to consume nutrients at scale. If it wasn’t for the revolution, we would not have come close to extracting as much oil per seed. Lacking that, vegetable oil would not have been a viable product for mass consumption - suggesting that our way of vegetable oil consumption has no historical precedent to our hunter gatherer ancestors.

ii. Biological requirement for the nutrient

Surely more is good? Not quite.

Everything in moderation.

Too much sugar – we get diabetes;

Too much caloric intake – we get obesity;

Too much alcohol – we get alcoholic liver disease.

You get the picture.

On average, we consume 5-10 tablespoons of vegetable oil per day. It accounts for 20% of our daily calories.

Putting this into perspective,

5 tablespoons of sunflower oil = 1 Kettle brand potato chips;

5 tablespoons of corn oil = 1 typical Mexican restaurant meal + tortilla chips;

4 tablespoons of soybean oil = 1 typical Thai restaurant curry

If you can’t eat it as real food, you should not eat it at all.

I hope you are seeing how unnatural it is the way we consume vegetable oil now.

iii. Science and the Natural world

Unnatural does not necessarily mean it’s bad, right?

It’s actually bad, really bad!

What is vegetable oil on a molecular level?

Vegetable oil are made up of fatty acid chains, primarily linoleic acid – type of omega 6 fat.

Why do we need omega 6 fat?

Omega 6 fat is needed for human growth and development. Moderation is key. Like sugar, calories, alcohol, too much of a thing is when problems start cropping up. Excessive presence in the body causes general inflammation, and lead to chronic diseases (weight gain, accelerated ageing, Alzheimer disease, diabetes, heart disease, cancer).

Due to the antagonistic nature between the omega 6 and omega 3 molecules, it reduces efficacy of omega 3 fat (anti-inflammatory effects, support infant brain development, prevent dementia, promote bone health, prevent asthma).

Omega 3 fat is that saviour fat that was crowned as the best of all fat – essential for good health.

The ideal diet ratio is 1:1 omega 6 to omega 3. However, our diet today is further from our supposed baseline than ever.

- United States - ratio 10:1 to 20:1

- Other parts of the world (urban India) - ratio 50:1

With today’s level of omega 6 consumption, we would have to eat salmon and sardines every meal to achieve anything close to 1:1 ratio.

That being said, one may wonder if heating vegetable oil has any impact on human body.

Short answer is yes. Not only that, heated polyunsaturated fat accelerates oxidation and increases trans-fat production.

Oxidation is the loss of electron and production of free radicals. Free radicals are molecules that damages fatty tissue, DNA and proteins in your body. This damage contributes to vast number of diseases over time, leading to chronic diseases and ageing.

Naturally, the body produces enough antioxidants to negate the effects of oxidation and free radicals. However, with the amount we are consuming at, our bodies are overwhelmed and have not evolved quick enough over the last 200 years to counteract the effect.

Lasting evolutionary change takes about one million years.

What is trans-fat?

Trans-fat are form of unsaturated fat, artificially created during hydrogenation – the process which converts liquid vegetable oil into semi solid partially hydrogenated oil.

Trans fat raises your LDL ‘bad’ cholesterol, lower your HDL ‘good’ cholesterol – which in time cause cholesterol to build up in arteries, increasing risk of coronary heart disease.

Trans fat bans - Denmark, New York, California

Each time oil is reused for frying, its trans-fat content increases. Now imagine the same vegetable oil reused multiple times for frying before being replaced in restaurants.

Consume oil from naturally oily foods = normal

What about vegetable oil’s footprint on the natural world?

Interesting phenomenon observed in the natural world on - acute effect of omega 6 on lifespan in honeybees.

Researchers suggest that the differences in longevity between queen and worker bees may be explained by the amount of polyunsaturated fat like omega-6 in their cells. Female honeybees can either be long-living queens with a longevity measured in years, or short-lived workers with a lifespan of only weeks, depending on what they are fed in their first week of life in the hive. Bees that are fed more omega-6 rich pollen become short-living worker bees, while bees that are never allowed to consume pollen, and instead eat low diets low in omega-6, become queens. Long-living queens have the lowest levels of omega-6 in their cell membranes, while short-living worker bees have a significantly increased content of omega-6 in their cells.

What about olive oil?

Objectively, peroxidation index exists to serve this purpose. It describes how different fats contribute to oxidative stress.

Olive oil is on the opposite end of the spectrum, it oxidizes very minimally, close to zero compared to vegetable oil.

What now?

Those right there are all the facts on vegetable oil. This piece here is not meant to be a call to action article. From the get-go, it has always been to educate and raise awareness on what actually may be contributing to the increasing rate of chronic disease in our population. We have been told to reduce our red meat intake over the years, you have heard keto diet, we have all heard all sorts of diet. I am not discounting their evidence-based benefits.

What I am suggesting is that perhaps vegetable oil plays a much bigger role in our fight against chronic diseases than we may have thought of.

Having said that, I still fell for the mixed doner kebab and extra chips on the side late last night...

Idea conception of the piece and all graphs are from Jeff Nobbs.