Liquid Inflammation: The Hidden Ingredient Driving Modern Disease

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Issue #16: October 27, 2025

Ever wonder why chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and heart disease have exploded — even as we eat “low-fat,” “heart-healthy,” and “doctor-approved”?

Because somewhere along the line, we stopped cooking with food — and started cooking with chemistry.

Those clear, innocent bottles of “vegetable oil” — canola, soybean, sunflower, corn — didn’t come from a farm. They came from a factory. And they’ve quietly reshaped the health of an entire nation.

🌾 Born in a Factory, Not a Field

Seed oils don’t come from anything you can squeeze by hand. To pull oil from soybeans or rapeseed, you need high heat, petroleum solvents like hexane, bleaching and deodorizing to cover the smell.

That’s not farming — that’s industrial extraction.

Before 1900, humans ate virtually none of this — we cooked with butter, lard, tallow, fats our bodies recognized. Then, in 1911, Procter & Gamble took cottonseed oil (a textile waste product) and turned it into Crisco, marketing it as clean and modern.

That “modernity” became the backbone of processed food. Today, over half of the fat calories Americans eat come from these industrial oils. The shift didn’t just change our recipes — it changed our biology.

🧬 What These Oils Do Inside You

Seed oils are packed with omega-6 polyunsaturated fats, mainly linoleic acid. A little is fine. The problem is the dose: we’re now getting 10-20 times more than humans ever consumed.

These fats are chemically unstable. When exposed to heat, light, or oxygen, they oxidize — creating toxic compounds such as 4-HNE and MDA that damage DNA, mitochondria, and cell membranes.

Your body literally builds its cells out of the fats you eat. If those fats are fragile, your cells become fragile too. It’s like building your house out of wet cardboard — every storm weakens it.

Over time, that instability drives chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and metabolic dysfunction.

⚖️ The Omega Imbalance

Humans evolved eating omega-6 and omega-3 fats in roughly a 1:1 balance.

Today, the average American’s ratio is 20:1.

Omega-6 fats promote inflammation; omega-3s calm it. When the scale tips that far, your system gets stuck in the “on” position — inflamed, tired, unable to repair.

That imbalance — more than any single molecule — is what’s quietly wrecking our metabolic health.

🩺 Why You’ve Been Told They’re Healthy

In the 1960s, nutrition researchers led by Ancel Keys blamed saturated fats for heart disease. The American Heart Association (AHA) adopted the theory and told everyone to swap butter for vegetable oil.

But the studies behind that advice were flawed. They didn’t control for trans fats, oxidation, or ultra-processed foods. When researchers revisited the raw data, the results flipped:

• Minnesota Coronary Experiment (BMJ 2016): people who replaced saturated fats with seed oils lowered cholesterol but died more often.

• Sydney Diet Heart Study: same pattern — cholesterol dropped, mortality rose.

• DiNicolantonio & O’Keefe (Open Heart 2018): excess omega-6 intake drives oxidative stress and coronary heart disease.

And that ‘Heart-Check’ logo on your cereal box? Brands like Kellogg’s and ConAgra pay the AHA tens of thousands of dollars for that certification. The same organization telling you seed oils are healthy is funded by the brands selling them.

🔥 The Real-World Damage

You don’t have to pour these oils into a pan to consume them — they’re everywhere:

• Restaurant fryers and fast food

• Salad dressings, sauces, and condiments

• Oat milk, granola, protein bars

• Chips, crackers, and “baked-not-fried” snacks

Even “clean” brands like Primal Kitchen or Siete sometimes sneak in sunflower or safflower oil.

One drive-through meal can load you with more omega-6 than your grandparents ate in several days.

The result? A nation where roughly 9 in 10 adults show signs of metabolic dysfunction (JAMA Network Open 2022). Inflammation, fatty liver, insulin resistance — all rising in lockstep with seed-oil consumption.

🧪 But What About Nuts, Seeds, or Cold-Pressed Oils?

Whole foods like nuts and seeds come with antioxidants and vitamin E that protect their fats from oxidation. Industrial oils lose those defenses during processing, leaving them unstable and inflammatory.

Cold-pressed seed oils may avoid heat damage, but they still flood the body with omega-6 fats and worsen the imbalance. Less harmful doesn’t mean harmless.

🥑 The Fats That Heal

The fix isn’t avoiding fat — it’s returning to real ones:

• Avocado oil: rich in monounsaturated fats, high smoke point

• Olive oil: loaded with polyphenols for low-heat cooking

• Ghee / butter: natural source of butyrate, supports gut health

• Coconut oil: stable under heat, antimicrobial

• Beef tallow: nutrient-dense, heat-stable

If it takes a factory to make it, skip it.

If it existed before the industrial era, bring it back.

💡 What Happens When You Cut Them Out

People who ditch seed oils often notice subtle but powerful shifts: steadier energy, clearer skin, less joint pain, better focus. That’s what happens when your cells finally stop fighting a constant chemical fire.

⚠️ The Wake-Up Call

Seed oils didn’t just slip into our food — they hijacked it. They’ve turned our cell membranes into tinder for inflammation and rewired how we metabolize energy.

We’ve been running a hundred-year experiment on the human body. The results are in.

You can’t undo a century overnight — but you can stop participating in it.

Ditch the seed oils. Not because it’s trendy — because your cells deserve better than industrial sludge.

Until next week. Stay vital.

-Jordan Slotopolsky

🧾 Sources

• Ramsden CE et al. Re-evaluation of the traditional diet–heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968–73). BMJ 2016.

• Ramsden CE et al. Re-evaluation of the Sydney Diet Heart Study: replacement of saturated fat with linoleic acid increases mortality. BMJ 2013.

• DiNicolantonio JJ, O’Keefe JH. Omega-6 vegetable oils as a driver of coronary heart disease: the oxidized linoleic acid hypothesis. Open Heart 2018.

• Lands WEM. Dietary fat and health: the evidence and the politics of prevention. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 2005.

• Taha AY et al. Linoleic acid—good or bad for the brain? npj Science of Food 2020.

• O’Keefe JH et al. Chronic inflammation and oxidative stress as a unifying theory of chronic disease. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine 2017.

• Prevalence of metabolic dysfunction among U.S. adults. JAMA Network Open 2022.

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