A cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) campaign is ending chronic disease by promoting a healthy American diet.
Surprising to some, however, is that what has been considered “healthy” for decades is now on the chopping block, and the reasons for rethinking the American diet are now being exposed.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and other like-minded researchers, scientists, and physicians are especially speaking out to explain why “seed oils” – an ingredient in most processed foods – are an obstacle to health.
In a Fox News interview in September (clip provided by the X account of A Midwestern Doctor), Kennedy explained that guidelines concerning what should be in the American diet have largely been dictated by government agencies that are now subservient to the industries they are supposed to regulate.
RFK was just invited to Fox to tell the nation about the dangers of Seed Oils, Food Dyes and Pesticides while exposing the immense corruption behind these products.
— A Midwestern Doctor (@MidwesternDoc) September 2, 2024
I never expected to see this in my lifetime and I now believe there's a real window to Make America Healthy Again pic.twitter.com/ACm3x1pXua
“Seed oils are one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods,” Kennedy explained. “The reason they’re in the foods is because they’re heavily subsidized. They’re very, very cheap, but they are associated with all kinds of very, very serious illnesses, including body-wide inflammation … which affects all of our health.”
“It’s one of the worst things you can eat, and it’s almost impossible to avoid. If you eat any processed food, you’re gonna be eating seed oil,” Kennedy declared.
Dr. Richard Amerling, nephrology expert and independent medicine advocate with GoldCare, a medical platform founded by Dr. Simone Gold, agrees with Kennedy and promotes the secretary’s campaign against seed oils.
In an interview with CatholicVote, Amerling cited Nina Teicholz’s 2015 New York Times bestseller “The Big Fat Surprise” as “the best source about the issue of the heavy use of seed oils in American processed food.”
“When you look at the historical base in terms of what diseases were prevalent, let’s say, 100 years ago, you realize that all the diseases that we are dealing with today virtually did not exist in any significant number 100 years ago in this country,” Amerling explained. “They are all new. I call them diseases of modernity, such as diabetes, metabolic syndrome, hypertension. Coronary artery disease is basically a new disease coming up in the last century; cancer was never that common, but now it’s all over the place.”
“All these diseases, and dementia, are, I think, a result of the big modification in our food supply that occurred in the 70s and 80s, based on the [Sen. George] McGovern Commission putting out what became the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which recommended staying away from traditional animal sources of fat and going towards these polyunsaturated vegetable oils that were made industrially,” Amerling said.
He also pointed out that so-called “vegetable oils” are not actually made from vegetables. “They’re made from seeds, which is why we call them seed oils,” he explained. “The chemical process to extract them is brutal, and they are highly toxic. They are full of double bonds, which are inherently unstable because they’re open to be oxidized, and they break down into unstable compounds like aldehydes, which are toxic – they’re precursors of inflammatory substances, various arachidonic acid derivatives that are part of the inflammatory cascade. So, they’re pro-inflammatory.”
In addition to concerns about their toxicity, Amerling says another primary danger of seed oils is that they do not promote an experience of fullness, or satiety, in people who consume them.
“There’s an internal satiety mechanism that is triggered by a saturated fat that these do not provoke,” he said. “So, there’s no brake on the weight gain that occurs with taking in these unsaturated fatty acids.”
Amerling provided some historical background on the seed oil diet, based on Teicholz’s book.
“It was all sold on a lie that saturated fat raises cholesterol and that cholesterol causes heart disease,” he explained.
The “diet-heart hypothesis” was created by researcher Ancel Keys, and “it’s been roundly disproven,” Amerling said. “It was disproven even by Ancel’s own fake studies.”
Amerling observed that it was the introduction of international consumer giant Procter & Gamble into the health market that popularized Keys’ claims.
“Procter & Gamble essentially created the American Heart Association, which hired Keys to be their nutritionist,” he said. “They pushed through these dietary guidelines, through the McGovern commission, and with all these big food interests, because these seed oils were immensely profitable compared to healthier fats like tallow and lard, and even coconut oil, butter – all these things are much more expensive, with less profit margin.”
“The seed oils have a huge profit margin, and they ended up going into every single processed food,” Amerling asserted, challenging anyone who can find a supermarket tortilla chip that is not made with canola oil or some sort of seed oil.
In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, Teicholz explained how Americans have largely caved to the deception that science is always “objective,” “open to challenge,” and “committed to the truth.”
“But what happens when scientists fall in love with their own ideas?” she asked. “Researchers like Ancel Keys and Mark Hegsted became so committed to the diet-heart hypothesis that they stopped questioning it. They cherry-picked data, dismissed contradictory findings, and suppressed opposing views.”
Teicholz reflected on the nine years she spent investigating this story for her book.
“[T]he deeper I looked, the clearer it became: science didn’t fail because the evidence was lacking; it failed because belief got in the way,” she asserted. “When a scientific field stops self-correcting, the public pays the price.”
Relegating the “diet-heart hypothesis” to the dump heap will not be easy for some – even those committed to “science.”
In a recent interview with KCBS Radio, Harvard University nutrition and epidemiology Professor Walter Willett cast significant doubt on the claim that seed oils are unhealthy and that fats such as beef tallow offer many more health benefits.
Willett referred to Kennedy’s campaign as a “very worrisome” development.
“Clearly, if you want to live a long and healthy life, we have a massive amount of evidence from many different sources that loading up on beef tallow and going back to what people were consuming in the 1950s and 1960s would be a very bad idea,” he said. “We’re actually living a lot longer – about 10 years longer than we were back at that time – and the rates of heart attacks and death from heart attacks have gone down, by almost 80%. So, a lot of that is probably due to the switch from beef tallow to seed oils, in fact.”
But Amerling said seed oils have the effect of addicting people to snack foods at the same time they fail to provide a sense of satiety.
“Of course, that will result in your having constantly high insulin levels, which really is the bottom line of metabolic syndrome,” he said. “And hyperinsulinemia drives all of this. And, if your insulin level’s always high, you cannot burn your own body fat. You will be in fat storage mode all the time.”