Gillespie - Toxic oil: why vegetable oil will kill you & how to save yourself

Vegetable oil makes you exceedingly vulnerable to cancer. Every mouthful of vegetable oil you consume takes you one step closer to a deadly (and irreversible) outcome. Every mouthful of vegetable oil you feed to your children is doing the same to them. You are eating vegetable oil because it is much cheaper to make food with oils that are chemically extracted from plant seeds than it is to raise and slaughter an animal or grow a coconut tree. And you are being told to eat it for your health by nutrition advocates who have been successfully and thoroughly hoodwinked by the food industry.

I am not telling you this because I am a greenie, a conspiracy theorist or a herbal jerbal knit-your-own-food purveyor. I am telling you because if you knew this (and could prove it) and didnt tell me and my family, Id be furious with you. I am not a doctor or a nutritionist. I have no formal training in human biochemistry or even chemistry. I am a lawyer and the only relevant skill I bring to the table is an ability to gather, understand and synthesise evidence. Science is based on people making hypotheses about how things might work and then collecting evidence that will prove them right (or wrong). Just like law, science should be all about the evidence. However, when it comes to the river of gold that is the processed food industry, evidence runs smack bang into commercial interest and, unfortunately for us, commercial interest generally wins out.

Two hundred years ago, humans ate approximately what they had been eating for the 10 000 (or in some cases 200 000) years prior to that. Where they lived (and how much money they had) affected the exact mix, but in general the diet was a mixture of vegetables, legumes and nuts, grains, meat, fish and an occasional fruit. Fish didnt have fingers back then and chickens hadnt learnt how to grow nuggets. The only fat you were likely to encounter was in a piece of meat (if you were fortunate) or, if you lived near the equator, in some tropical fruits (such as avocados and coconuts). Sugar was even rarer and could usually only be obtained after a protracted series of negotiations with stinging insects. If you think you still eat like that, then have a quick check of your pantry or fridge. If you find lots of boxes, tins and bottles with pictures of food on them, rather than actual food, then you need to read further. If all you find is cuts of whole meat, whole fruit and vegetables, whole grains (or flours), eggs and milk, then congratulations, you dont need this book. Put it down and continue to lead a healthy (and probably long) life.

Youre still here? Well, lets get down to the purpose of this book. In my first book, Sweet Poison , I looked at what the science says about the sugar that has been added to all of our food in escalating quantities since the invention of commercial sugar production in the early 1800s. I documented the scientific evidence, now well established, which proves convincingly that the fructose half of sugar is a lethal addition to our diet. And I talked briefly about the measures my family had undertaken to find and remove it from our diet. By doing that I lost 40 kilograms and have kept it off effortlessly for the past nine years. In the follow-up book, The Sweet Poison Quit Plan , I set out the evidence behind my claim that fructose (and therefore sugar) is as addictive as nicotine, and provided a plan for how to break that addiction. The easy way to break it is to severely limit your food choices by, say, moving to a desert island where you can eat only coconuts. But most of us are faced with the daily reality of having to feed ourselves in a society where the food makers are not only filling our food with sugar but are actively trying to hide the fact. The Sweet Poison Quit Plan provides a guide to the modern Australian supermarket and a roadmap that helps the reader find sugar-free food in a forest of sugar-filled rubbish.

In Big Fat Lies , I started to examine the evidence on dietary fat. I had seen this evidence from the corner of my eye as I was reading about fructose. I knew that fat was not a dietary bogeyman once appetite control was restored (by removing fructose), but I had noticed that something similar to the sugar story had been happening in the world of fat.

Between 1820 and 1920, the worlds population doubled (from 1 billion to 2 billion). Nothing like this had ever happened before. It took us a quarter of a million years to get to the first billion but the second billion came in just a century. Not surprisingly, our ability to feed everybody was being stretched to breaking point and prices for food and particularly animal-based products began an upward spiral. This in turn provided an incentive to come up with food-like products made from cheaper raw materials.

What is a vegetable oil?

Weve been told that the secret to curing heart disease is to consume unsaturated vegetable oils rather than saturated animal fats. So now all the fats in our processed foods are labelled vegetable oil and the labels are rarely more specific than that.

The irony is that there is no such thing as oil from a vegetable. The products being pushed as vegetable oils are in fact fruit oils (coconut, palm, olive or avocado), nut oils (macadamia, peanut, pecan, and so on) or seed oils (canola, sunflower, soybean, grapeseed or rice bran).

Theres nothing much wrong with fruit oils and some nut oils are okay, too. But seed oils are extraordinarily dangerous. And unfortunately they make up almost all of the vegetable oils in our food.

Humans are endlessly ingenious and when we applied that ingenuity to the problem of expensive animal fat and animal-fat products (like butter), a solution was quickly discovered. It turned out that if enough pressure and heat was applied, fats could be extracted from things that were otherwise going to waste (such as cottonseeds). Treated with the right chemicals, these fats could be made to look and behave just like the animal fats we had consumed for millennia. And just like sugar, these new, cheap fats made their way into our food supply. At first they were cooking fats and margarines, and then shortenings used in baked goods, but eventually they found their way into almost every food on the supermarket shelf, because there are very few foods that dont taste better with a little fat. In commerce, it is rare indeed to both do the cheapest thing and be seen to do the right thing. Dumping industrial waste into rivers is cheaper than disposing of it properly but no one will applaud you for doing it. Burning coal to make power is cheaper than building a solar energy plant but people will accuse you of failing to think about the environment. Using second-hand car parts is cheaper than using new ones but few people will thank you for it if you charge them for new. However, when it comes to edible oils, doing things the cheap way gets you a round of applause from the guardians of our nutritional health. Indeed, the Australian Heart Foundation and the Dietitians Association of Australia, to name two such groups, actively encourage us to consume products that use seed oils instead of animal fats (such as margarine in preference to butter). Their encouragement is based on evidence that could be described as flimsy at best, and there is significant evidence (documented in Big Fat Lies ) which says exactly the opposite, but it does not force them to alter their industry-sponsored position.

In Big Fat Lies , I looked in detail at the insidious danger that lies in those man-made fats. Fructose is dangerous because our bodies are not genetically adapted to a diet that contains it in industrial quantities. And the same can be said for the polyunsaturated fats that dominate the oils extracted from seeds. Our extraordinarily complex biochemistry works on an assumption that we will have a very small quantity of these fats in our diet and that every other fat we consume will come from animals or other sources of saturated or monounsaturated fat (see for an explanation of the different types of fat). And that was a valid assumption before around 1800. But the recent replacement of almost all fats with their cheaper cousins has meant that it is now almost impossible to buy food that is not full of seed oil.