Trump Health Secretary Pick Elevates Seed Oil Controversy to U.S. Cabinet

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the scion of one the most well-known polit­i­cal fam­i­lies in the United States, has been tapped by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

If con­firmed by a Republican-led Senate, Kennedy would have wide-rang­ing author­ity over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which reg­u­lates about 80 per­cent of the coun­try’s food sup­ply.

While he is widely known for his anti-vac­cine views, Kennedy is also a promi­nent and vocal critic of seed oils, bring­ing a long-sim­mer­ing debate about their health impacts into the main­stream.

In an August inter­view with Fox News, Kennedy called seed oils ​“one of the most unhealthy ingre­di­ents” found in food and said they are ​“one of the worst things you can eat” since they are asso­ci­ated with ​“body-wide inflam­ma­tion.”

Instead, Kennedy rec­om­mends replac­ing seed oils with beef tal­low, made from the fatty tis­sue of cow organs. Searching Kennedy’s his­tor­i­cal pub­lic state­ments and social media accounts found no men­tion of olive oil.

Researchers, includ­ing sci­en­tific mem­bers of the American Heart Association, have long argued that plant oils – mostly derived from seeds, espe­cially canola, sun­flower and soy­bean – are a health­ier alter­na­tive to ani­mal fat due to their unsat­u­rated fat con­tent.

“Very con­sis­tently, all the data say but­ter and lard are bad for our hearts,” said Christopher Gardner, a pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine at Stanford University. ​“Studies show swap­ping out sat­u­rated fats and replac­ing them with unsat­u­rated fats low­ers the risk for heart dis­ease.”

While Kennedy is among the most promi­nent crit­ics of seed oils, there is a grow­ing anti-seed oil influ­encer move­ment on social media.

Seed oil crit­ics artic­u­late two main argu­ments. The first is that seed oils are often con­t­a­m­i­nated by hexane, the chem­i­cal sol­vent used in most com­mer­cial seed oil pro­duc­tion.

Hexane is known to be toxic to humans in gaseous form but is used as a liq­uid in seed oil pro­duc­tion. The hexane evap­o­rates dur­ing the heat treat­ment that seed oils undergo when refined.

However, the FDA does not reg­u­late or mon­i­tor hexane residues in seed oils, so it is unclear whether or not trace amounts of hexane remain in com­mer­cially avail­able seed oils.

The more com­mon argu­ment against seed oils is their high con­tent of omega‑6 polyun­sat­u­rated fatty acids, espe­cially linoleic acid, com­pared to olive oil and ani­mal-derived fats.

Linoleic acid con­tent is about 55 per­cent in soy­bean oil, nearly 70 per­cent in sun­flower oil (less than five per­cent in high-oleic sun­flower oil) and more than 20 per­cent in canola oil. By con­trast, olive oil com­prises 2.5 to 21 per­cent linoleic acid, while beef has about one per­cent linoleic acid con­tent.

Seed oil crit­ics argue that omega‑6 fatty acids are con­verted into inflam­ma­tion-pro­mot­ing arachi­donic acids in the body. Indeed, arachi­donic acid is widely acknowl­edged as a build­ing block for com­pounds that cause inflam­ma­tion, but it has also been shown to sup­press pro-inflam­ma­tory com­pounds.

According to a 2017 meta-analy­sis of 30 ran­dom­ized con­trol stud­ies involv­ing 1,377 sub­jects pub­lished, linoleic acid had a min­i­mal impact on blood con­cen­tra­tions of inflam­ma­tory mark­ers. The researchers attrib­uted this to the fact that only 0.2 per­cent of linoleic acid is con­verted into arachi­donic acid.

While it is widely acknowl­edged that humans need dietary sources of omega‑3 and omega‑6 fatty acids to sur­vive, seed oil crit­ics argue that mod­ern Western diets include too many omega‑6 fatty acids and too few omega‑3 fatty acids.

Indeed, the rec­om­mended omega-6-to-omega‑3 ratio is four to one. However, some researchers esti­mate that these pro­por­tions range from ten to one to thirty to one in the U.S.

Seed oil crit­ics also fre­quently high­light the cor­re­la­tion between seed oil con­sump­tion in the U.S. and ris­ing obe­sity, car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease and dia­betes as evi­dence of their neg­a­tive health impact.

However, cor­re­la­tion is not the same as cau­sa­tion. Instead, some experts argue that ris­ing seed oil con­sump­tion is directly linked to the dra­matic increase in ultra-processed foods, which include seed oils as an ingre­di­ent and are widely viewed as respon­si­ble for the afore­men­tioned chronic dis­eases.

Gardner fur­ther argued that ultra-processed foods are unhealthy pri­mar­ily because of other ingre­di­ents, includ­ing high-fruc­tose corn syrup, added sugar and sodium. ​“It’s hard to cast the blame on the seed oils when these foods con­tain so many other things,” he said.

Kennedy has also strongly opposed ultra-processed foods and has said he would pro­hibit their use in school lunches. However, the FDA has no for­mal def­i­n­i­tion for ultra-processed food, which would make any ban dif­fi­cult to imple­ment.

• Massachusetts General Hospital
• American Heart Association