Seed Oils, Cholesterol, and Heart Health – The Lies We Have Believed with Dr. Cate Shanahan
Are Seed Oils Really Wrecking Your Health?
What if the oils you’ve been told are “heart-healthy” are actually sabotaging your health? Dr. Cate Shanahan has been shouting this from the rooftops long before seed oils became a hot topic.
But could these oils be the hidden reason behind premature aging, fine lines, and wrinkles? What kind of damage are they doing to your body at a cellular level? And why are they still lurking in so many “healthy” foods?
We’re digging into the shocking history behind seed oils, the damage they can do to your body at a cellular level, and why they might be the hidden culprit behind those constant food cravings.
Curious how to cut them out—and if it’s even possible in today’s world? Plus, there’s a surprising twist about cholesterol and heart health that could flip everything you thought you knew.
Like many of us in midlife, growing up, Dr. Cate heard that saturated fats were the “bad” fats for us. This fad (and misinformation) led us all to reach for the “heart healthy” vegetable oils without saturated fats. Come to find out, these alternatives were/are actually NOT healthy for us. Polyunsaturated fats, the “heart healthy” vegetable oils, behave in a way that makes them very dangerous to our cellular health and every bodily function we have. Seed oils make our midlife health and experience way more miserable than nature ever intended it to be.
Why Did Seed Oils Become So Popular?
The reason Ancel Keys was so influential is that in the 1940s and 1950s there was a new health problem that hadn’t existed prior: men were dying of heart attacks. This at the time was a new phenomenon and no one understood what was happening. Ancel Keys was in the headlines for making a “connection” (though it was very vague) between fat and heart attacks. In 1948, Proctor and Gamble (a company selling vegetable oils at the time) donated 1.75 MILLION dollars (1948 dollars mind you) to an organization called the American Heart Association.
At the time, this organization was on a mission to find the cause of the heart attacks. Unfortunately, Ancel Keys was able to persuade them into conforming to his personal narrative. By the time the 1960s rolled around, the broad idea of “fat” had evolved to “saturated fat” being the bad guy and suddenly butter was bad. This led the industry to boom in marketing toward “heart health”. We have been bombarded with ultimate gaslighting on seed oil. The modern day truth is, seed oils are actually what are causing a lot of the heart attacks and other cardiovascular events.
The Hateful 8 Seed Oils and Where Seed Oils Come From
The average American gets 80% of their fat calories from a combination of these eight seed oils that are catastrophic to our health:
- Corn
- Canola
- Cottonseed
- Soy
- Sunflower
- Safflower
- Rice Bran
- Grapseed
Seed oils come from massive, complicated processes that take place in factories of mass scale, from seeds that were never bred to be FOOD. The extraction (even organic, expeller pressed) and the refining of these crude seed oils cause many problems in our bodies by generating toxicities and removing important nutrients, ultimately leaving polyunsaturated fatty acids vulnerable to oxidation SO BAD that eating ONE french fry is equal to smoking an entire cigarette in terms of toxicity.
Seed Oils and Skin Cancer Connection
This has to do with the real cause of cancer: cancer comes from mitochondrial damage. The fact of the matter is, UV light can damage your mitochondria. Fortunately though, our skin is designed to “tan”, where we produce melanin, to trap UV light and protect our mitochondria. In a perfect world, almost all of us (few exceptions) would be able to tan when exposed to UV light. What happens is that when we consume seed oils, the sun ignites reactions in our fat under our skin. These reactions are the “burning” that we see in the sun, and when this is happening and we are not tanning, we ARE exposing ourself to the mitochondrial damage. If you were to take away seed oils, you could probably take away most skin cancer (of course there ARE other ways to damage mitochondria, but Seed Oils are the most common).
Do Seed Oils Cause Weight Gain?
Yes. Dr. Cate’s hypothesis based on her studies shows that the connection between seed oils and weight gain has to do with how our cells produce energy. Our cells produce energy in mitochondria and when our mitochondria have to fight off the toxins and polyunsaturated fatty acids, our mitochondrial health is destroyed, and immediately stop producing energy.
The only way to get more energy at this point in the cycle, is to use the sugar from your blood, which then causes a drop in blood sugar, and causes you to feel hungry (or HANGRY). Seed oils actually create uncontrollable hunger, and therefore, overeating and snacking every few hours (aka insulin resistance).
Cutting Our Seed Oils to Heal Your Body
Seed oils are THE worst thing that has happened to our food supply since the beginning of time – ever! Consuming seed oils will inevitably create disease in our bodies. Dr. Cate has found that all of our chronic disease epidemics (heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, strokes, kidney problems, hypertension, inflammatory diseases, thyroid diseases, mental illness, hormonal imbalance, gut issues, etc.) stem from consuming seed oils.
Once Dr. Cate started diving deep into studying how seed oils destroy our cellular health and started realizing how they destroy any capacity for any normal cellular, hormone, organ, brain, etc. functions, she realized it was one of the BIGGEST root causes of so many of our illnesses.
After trying it on herself with recovery success, Dr. Cate began implementing her healing practices on patients who had otherwise incurable issues like fatty liver, inflammatory skin conditions, elevated triglycerides, etc. By avoiding these seed oils, she began seeing major success in healing with her patients.
This and SOOO MUCH more extremely valuable information in this episode!
👉 Highly highly recommend you check out Dr. Cate’s new book ‘Dark Calories’ and visit her website HERE to sign up for her newsletter!
✅ Try ONEskin HERE and get 15% off by using the code ‘NATALIEJILL’ at check out
🎙️ Want to listen in on a LIVE recording of Midlife Conversations? You can listen in, hear the episode unedited prior to launch AND stay on and ask your questions to the guest! (Don’t worry! We won’t air your questions so you can stay anonymous!) Go to Join.Midlifeconversations.com to learn more
