Conventional health sources tell us that people become fat when they eat too much and don’t exercise. While this might seem a superficially-reasonable explanation for the obesity epidemic, it is simplistic and entirely wrong.
The massive number of people who are overweight/fat/obese today were made that way by big business’ industrialization of the food supply. Wall Street couldn’t scale the family farm, so the food industry now sells us imitation foods in place of humanity’s evolutionarily-appropriate cuisine.
The most obesogenic of Wall Street’s products is anything made with ‘Vegetable Oil’. Before the 20th century, vegetable oils like linseed oil and safflower oil were prized by humanity for their ability to preserve wood and add color to artists’ canvases. These thin oils were also useful as biodiesel.
The proximal cause of the obesity epidemic is Wall Street’s replacement of humanity’s traditional fats – Butter, Tallow and Lard – with deodorized vegetable oil.
In 1940’s the paint industry figured out how to use petroleum to make paint. The big seed oil producers quickly lost their main customers. Biodiesel was not a viable business, so these very large companies were faced with extinction. Instead of going quietly into the night, Big Seed Oil re-branded their seed oils as “vegetable oil”, and told us that hydrogenated vegetable oil – ‘margarine’ – was far better for our health than the butter we’ve consumed for thousands of years.
The key technical innovation that made the obesity epidemic possible was figuring out how to remove the smell from rancid seed oil. This process is called ‘deodorization’.
The obesity epidemic dramatically accelerated when a prominent science advocacy organization was compromised in the mid-to-late 1980’s. This organization was vicious in its campaign against humanity’s evolutionarily-appropriate fats, and succeeded in getting our restaurants to replace “beef tallow, palm oil and coconut oil” with partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil. Perhaps the fast food restaurants only feigned their objections to “having” to replace their relatively-expensive frying fats with cheaper substitutes.
Scientific Confusion
The mistaken classification of the polyunsaturated oils as “essential” has added to our confusion about the true nature of the ‘vegetable’ oils. The research that led to omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated oils being called “essential” was incomplete.
Polyunsaturated oils are actually unstable at human-temperature, wreck our metabolism and energy levels, divert dietary carbohydrates from human-fuel to fat production, and accelerate the aging process at all levels.
If the human body does indeed require any amount of polyunsaturated oil, we should certainly only require a very small amount. Little effort has been made to figure out the body’s true requirement for the omega-6 and omega-3 oils. These oils are indisputably toxic when consumed in excess.
How To End Your Own Obesity Epidemic
If your weight is currently more than you’d like, the best place to start is to eliminate all “vegetable oil” from your diet. The most-appropriate fats for human consumption are naturally-saturated (butter, tallow, lard, and coconut oil), because saturated fat is what our warm-blooded bodies make for ourselves. “Vegetable” Oils from soybeans, cottonseed, corn, safflowers, sunflowers, rapeseed (‘canola’), grapeseed and flaxseed should be regarded as toxic.
Fighting Society’s Obesity Epidemic
While the public is increasingly aware of the hazards of partially-hydrogenated seed oil, there is still mass-ignorance of the hazard of non-hydrogenated polyunsaturated oils.
A special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate the influence of the food industry’s profiteers, and the probable capture of the government’s regulatory agencies. This prosecutor can determine which of Wall Street’s companies should be held accountable for the obesity epidemic, and suggest how to apportion responsibility for the theft of our health.
If no companies can be held accountable for the profiteering that makes us fat, our Prosecutor should suggest appropriate changes to the laws to make the profiteering we are victims of prosecutable.
Points for people who insist on supporting the status quo:
Confirmation Bias dictates that some people will argue in favor of the status quo, no matter the evidence. Here are some points which must be addressed, if one is to dismiss the crimes raised on this page:
- Polyunsaturated oils have a high iodine value, and are known as drying oils because they spontaneously combine with oxygen to form a hard film. This property is why humans have traditionally used these oils for preserving wood. How can “staining up our insides” with the drying oils be justified as health-promoting, or as ‘essential’?
- Lipofuscin – the age pigment – “appears to be the product of the oxidation of unsaturated fatty acids”. Is age pigment not a result of excess polyunsaturated oil consumption? Is there a better protection from age pigment accumulation than avoiding the polyunsaturated oils? (Millions of women want to know!)
- Lipid Peroxidation is the “chain reaction” where polyunsaturated oils spontaneously degrade in a warm, oxygen-rich body. Saturated fats are stable at human-temperature, and are easily burned for energy in our cells’ mitochondria. Polyunsaturated oils are like cluster bomblets in our bodies’ molecular machinery. Is the spontaneous, uncontrolled breakdown of dietary polyunsaturated oils of no concern to those who are interested in optimizing the longevity of their body?
Perhaps these Wikipedia entries need to be fixed.
(This document offers a partial history of Wall Street’s crime: The Perfect Solution: How Trans Fats Became the Healthy Replacement for Saturated Fats)
