How Industrial Seed Oils can be Harmful – Serenity Kids

How Industrial Seed Oils can be Harmful

Estimated time to read 9 minutes

If you follow the nutrition world in any capacity, you know that fat is our friend once again. You probably hear a lot about the benefits of “good fats” for all of us, from babies and toddlers to breastfeeding mamas and health-conscious fathers.

But you don’t hear nearly as much about the “bad fats.” I’m not just talking about fried foods and trans fats, I’m talking about industrial seed oils that have worked their way into just about every restaurant kitchen, food manufacturer, and kitchen cupboard in America.

Since these oils are now so prevalent in our food system, you might not give them a second thought. Sure, maybe they aren’t the best of the best, but are they really the worst for your health? That’s up for debate. Here’s what we know.

What are Industrial Seed Oils?
Industrial seed oils are highly processed oils extracted from the seeds of various plants like soybeans, corn, rapeseed (the source of canola oil), cottonseed, and safflower seeds.

Industrial seed oils are primarily polyunsaturated fats, which means that their chemical structure has many unsaturated or double bonds (poly = many). The reason this matters is that double bonds are a source of vulnerability in a fat.

The more double bonds a fat has, the more unstable it is and the more opportunities it has to be damaged (to oxidize or become rancid) by elements like light, heat, and air. Rancid industrial seed oils also tend to be high in omega-6 fatty acids and have an imbalanced omega-6:3 ratio (more on why that matters here).

What Qualifies as an Industrial Seed Oil?
When we refer to industrial seed oils, we’re talking about the following types of oils. Dr. Cate Shanahan refers to these as the “hateful eight”:

  1. Canola
  2. Sunflower
  3. Safflower
  4. Corn
  5. Soybean
  6. Cotton seed
  7. Grapeseed
  8. Rice bran

Where Did They Come From?
In the grand scheme of our nutritional history, industrial seed oils are actually a relatively new invention. Seed oils weren’t introduced into our food supply until the early 1900s. Interestingly, they got their start when businessmen Proctor & Gamble wanted to find a cheaper alternative to animal fats for their new bar soap. They started mass producing cottonseed oil, a waste product of cotton farming.

So how did this oil go from soap to food? Well, of course Proctor and Gamble were looking for more ways to use this new product they invested in. Edwin Kayser, a German chemist, caught wind and wrote to them on October 18, 1907 about a new chemical process that could create a solid fat from a liquid. This piqued the interest of Proctor and Gamble who had been interested in producing a solid form of cottonseed oil for years. So, the company purchased US rights to the patents and created a lab on the Procter & Gamble campus to experiment.

Proctor & Gamble scientists quickly found that they could produce a creamy, pearly white substance out of cottonseed oil. They were delighted to see that it looked a lot like the most popular cooking fat of the day: lard. And thus, the first industrial seed oil, a hydrogenated oil made from the waste of cotton production, was brought to market under the name Crisco.

How Are Industrial Seed Oils Made?
A little background on how industrial seed oils are made can start to frame why they can be so damaging. Because these foods themselves aren’t exactly naturally rich in oil that is easily pressed (like an olive or coconut), their oils must be refined, bleached, and deodorized before they are suitable for human consumption. Here’s how that works:

  1. Step 1: Seeds are gathered from their plants.
  2. Step 2: The seeds are heated to extremely high temperatures for sterilization purposes, which causes the unsaturated fatty acids in the seeds to oxidize, creating free radicals that can be harmful to health.
  3. Step 3: The seeds are generally processed with a petroleum-based solvent, such as hexane, to maximize the amount of oil extracted from them.
  4. Step 4: Chemicals are used to deodorize the oils, which have an undesirable smell once extracted. The deodorization process can produce trans fats, which are widely recognized to be potentially harmful to human health.
  5. Step 5: More chemicals are added to make the color of the industrial seed oils more neutral and appealing.

The Risks of Consuming Industrial Seed Oils
If it isn’t already clear, industrial seed oils are not “heart healthy” or otherwise beneficial for our bodies and brains. In fact, there is quite a bit of research that suggests that they’re just the opposite, contributing to chronic inflammation and disease. Here’s why:

What Oils Are Better?
Opt for oils that are minimally processed since they are naturally-occurring, and/or more chemically stable so that they remain undamaged by elements like light, heat, and air:

The Serenity Kids Approach
What we know about industrial seed oils is clear - we don’t want them in our bodies, and we certainly don’t want to feed them to our little ones.

If you start to look at labels, you’ll see that just about every formula on the market includes industrial seed oils. Even worse, most toddler formulas start with nonfat milk, which strips all natural fat from the milk, and then add industrial seed oils as a source of (unhealthy) fat. What results is a formula that is high in inflammatory oils and omega-6 fatty acids, and devoid of the complex fatty acid profile needed for brain development.

In developing this formula, Serenity Kids extensively studied the fatty acid profile of breastmilk and has chosen healthy, quality fats to balance out the fatty acid profile of their formula.

About The Author
Hillary Bennetts is a nutritionist and business consultant focusing on health for mamas and babies through the prenatal, postpartum, and infant/toddler stages. In addition to nutrition consulting she provides business consulting and content creation for companies in the health and wellness industry. Hillary holds a Bachelors in Economics from Washington and Jefferson College, an MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, and is certified as a Holistic Nutritionist through Bauman College. She lives in Colorado with her husband and toddler son, with another baby boy on the way in September 2021.