The Dr. Hyman Show
The Industry Secret Keeping You Inflamed, Tired, & Bloated | Nina Teicholz & Max Lugavere
Mon, 03 Feb 2025
Highly processed vegetable oils, derived from seeds and beans, have become a dominant part of modern diets despite significant health concerns. Historical biases in nutrition science, influenced by the vegetable oil industry, have promoted these oils despite evidence from controlled studies showing negative health outcomes. These oils are unstable, prone to oxidation, and can create toxic byproducts, particularly when exposed to heat, contributing to inflammation and chronic diseases. Although they can lower LDL cholesterol, studies have shown that this reduction does not necessarily improve heart health and may increase risks for other conditions like cancer. In contrast, traditional fats like extra virgin olive oil and omega-3-rich foods offer more stability and health benefits, emphasizing the need for a balanced, minimally processed approach to dietary fats. In this episode, I talk with Nina Teicholz and Max Lugavere to explore the health impacts of different types of fats and oils, debunking misconceptions around cooking with extra virgin olive oil and emphasizing the dangers of industrial vegetable oils. Nina Teicholz is a science journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Big Fat Surprise, which upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat—especially saturated fat—and spurred a new conversation about whether these fats in fact cause heart disease. She is also the founder of the Nutrition Coalition, a non-profit working to ensure that government nutrition policy is transparent and evidence-based—work for which she’s been asked to testify before the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Canadian Senate. Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist and the author of the New York Times best-seller Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life, now published in 10 languages around the globe. His sophomore book, also a best-seller, is called The Genius Life: Heal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Become Extraordinary and latest book Genius Kitchen. Max is the host of a #1 iTunes health and wellness podcast, called The Genius Life. Max appears regularly on The Dr. Oz Show, The Rachael Ray Show, and The Doctors. He has contributed to Medscape, Vice, Fast Company, CNN, and The Daily Beast, has been featured on NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and in The New York Times and People Magazine. He is an internationally sought-after speaker and has given talks at South by Southwest, the New York Academy of Sciences, the Biohacker Summit in Stockholm, Sweden, and many others. Full length episodes can be found here: Is Vegetable Oil Good or Bad for You? Nina Teicholz The Best Diet for Your Brain This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%.
Chapter 1: What is the main myth about cooking with olive oil?
For some reason, we've been told that the Mediterranean dietary pattern, as it's lauded in the Western medical literature, involves canola oil and all of these crap oils and that you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil.
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Now, we were all taught when I was a kid that vegetable oil, and by the way, what the hell is vegetable oil? You see vegetable oil in a bottle in a store? What is that, broccoli oil? I mean, that just does not even exist. So we're talking about seed and bean and nut oils, like soybean oil, canola oil, safflower oil, corn oil, canola oil.
These are all these oils that are out there, and by the way, there is something called vegetable oil, which you can buy in the grocery store. I have no idea what that is. Anyway, I wouldn't eat that. We're all trained that they're better for you. And then we should be avoiding butter and saturated fat and animal fats.
And so there's been a big push to shift our diet from consuming more saturated fats to more unsaturated fats. And saturation, unsaturation, it's a chemical classification based on how many of the
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Chapter 2: Why are vegetable oils considered harmful?
When you put them under heat, like any chemical reaction, that speeds up and it creates literally hundreds of degraded oxidation products, some of which are known toxins. Look up the word aldehyde and see what that is, a known toxin that is created.
Deep fryers, they call it acrylamide, which is super toxic.
Acrylamide is another one. And they occur, so without going into too much detail, but when all the big fast food chains like Burger King and McDonald's switched over to trans-free oils, oils without trans fats, they went right back to using just regular old vegetable oils.
I mean, much as we don't like trans fats, what they did is that they stabilized the oil, that process of hardening the oil made it stable. Now we have these totally unstable oils in these fryers, They create hundreds of degraded toxic products.
Those products are now known, experiments have been done to show that they enter into the food and that food enters into your body and that those products go past the blood-brain barrier. And if you eat a lot of those chicken McDungats or French fries or whatever, they are going to build up in your body and cause toxic inflammation in your body.
I used to work when I was 17, I used to work in this mother's sandwich shop. And I, my job was to, you know, deliver the sandwiches and a little Volkswagen. But at night at the end of the shift, I would have to go in the kitchen and clean the oil. So literally it would run the oil through a filter so they could reuse it. And we used the same oil for a month, heated, heated, reheated, reheated.
It was terrible. And, um, You know, I think people don't realize that McDonald's and all those companies used to use beef tallow to fry in. And now they switched to Crisco, basically, trans fats. And now they've gone to vegetable oils, which in some ways may be just as bad, if not worse. So it's pretty frightening.
I think it's definitely worse. And you know, Actually, ironically, it's probably like places like McDonald's and Burger King are probably safer than your mom and pop shop, right?
Because they have all these regulations in the big stores about not reusing their oils too much and then they know about this oxidation product, so they've developed things like nitrogen blankets and silicon beads that they put in the oil to try to absorb all the toxic oxidation products.
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Chapter 4: How did the vegetable oil industry influence nutrition science?
Acrylamide is another one. And they occur, so without going into too much detail, but when all the big fast food chains like Burger King and McDonald's switched over to trans-free oils, oils without trans fats, they went right back to using just regular old vegetable oils.
I mean, much as we don't like trans fats, what they did is that they stabilized the oil, that process of hardening the oil made it stable. Now we have these totally unstable oils in these fryers, They create hundreds of degraded toxic products.
Those products are now known, experiments have been done to show that they enter into the food and that food enters into your body and that those products go past the blood-brain barrier. And if you eat a lot of those chicken McDungats or French fries or whatever, they are going to build up in your body and cause toxic inflammation in your body.
I used to work when I was 17, I used to work in this mother's sandwich shop. And I, my job was to, you know, deliver the sandwiches and a little Volkswagen. But at night at the end of the shift, I would have to go in the kitchen and clean the oil. So literally it would run the oil through a filter so they could reuse it. And we used the same oil for a month, heated, heated, reheated, reheated.
It was terrible. And, um, You know, I think people don't realize that McDonald's and all those companies used to use beef tallow to fry in. And now they switched to Crisco, basically, trans fats. And now they've gone to vegetable oils, which in some ways may be just as bad, if not worse. So it's pretty frightening.
I think it's definitely worse. And you know, Actually, ironically, it's probably like places like McDonald's and Burger King are probably safer than your mom and pop shop, right?
Because they have all these regulations in the big stores about not reusing their oils too much and then they know about this oxidation product, so they've developed things like nitrogen blankets and silicon beads that they put in the oil to try to absorb all the toxic oxidation products.
So they're actually, their oils are probably better than your local Chinese stir fry or whatever, where they're, I mean, that's probably where the real danger is.
But I have to tell you- Go from McDonald's over Chinese takeout, is that it?
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