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I make sure to stay away from ultra-controversial
topics in my videos, but when the culture war
00:00:04
battle lines advance to the point at which
cooking fats are discussed with the same
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fervor as bathroom bills, it’s time to step
in. I don’t want to make a snarky dunk-fest
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in which I jab at seed oil haters, partially
because I don’t think they’re all crazy, and
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partially because that behavior just exacerbates
the culture-war element of what should just be a
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food conversation. I’m gonna speak as objectively,
literally, and normal-guy-edly as I can for the
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first half of this video. A portion at the end
will contain own perspective, but I want to start
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off with some objectively true, uncontroversial
cornerstones on which we can all first agree.
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1. A person can get
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sick on any diet. A person can get healthy on
any diet. It’s fun to share headlines about
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a 100-year old who attributes her longevity
to cigarettes and fat back. It’s vindicating
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to see someone who consumes the foods you hate
has been met with bad health outcomes. You see
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vegans share stories of carnivores who suffered
from early heart attacks, and you see keto folks
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share stories of vegetarians who are wasting
away. Let us start by acknowledging that if there
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was one ideal diet for every human, we would
all just eat that. Instead, we’re all little
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snowflakes with different dietary needs. That
should be neither surprising nor controversial.
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2. I, the guy on your screen, am not a fit person.
Viewers may use this as an opportunity to write
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off what I have to say, as if good advice can
only come from those with an ideal physique. I’m
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prepared for that, I’m acknowledging it, and it’s
valuable to be upfront about my shortcomings. I
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am not a doctor. I am not a scientist. I do think
that works in my favor today, because of how many
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people hold an outright distrust of authority
figures. A ripped handsome guy in a white coat
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saying “chill everyone, seed oils are good for
you”, stands to have the opposite effect on a
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certain demographic who’d call him a paid shill.
3. Fad diets have always existed and always will.
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Remember, this is still the objective truth
portion, so I’m not calling seed oil aversion
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a fad diet. I just want to establish that fad
diets are not a new phenomenon. Whether we look to
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the Atkins diet or that time where suddenly tons
of people insisted they were gluten intolerant,
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it starts off with legitimate reasons for
specific people to avoid certain ingredients,
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but sometimes develops into a widespread
craze that blows up beyond reason.
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4. There is no universal consensus on what seed
oils are. Many folks seem to disagree around the
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edges. Is a peanut a seed? How about coconuts?
When we say “avocado oil is fine” do we mean a
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hypothetical real avocado oil or the stuff you
get in America where most of it is fake anyway?
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In this way the term “seed oil” suffers from
the same branding issue as “processed”. When
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I cut a carrot into matchsticks, I am processing
it. I even have my very own “food processor” at
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home. When people say they’re avoiding processed
foods, they probably mean what’s been labeled
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as “ultra-processed”. Unfortunately, when words
like “processed food” or “seed oil” develop buzz,
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the conversation becomes muddy and ineffective.
Should you be able to call any food item
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“preservative-free” if it contains salt? Salt is
a preservative. This is annoying for everyone.
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I’ll say “i’m trying to avoid chemicals in my
food”, and some brain genius gets to dunk on me
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with “everything’s made of chemicals, checkmate
bazinga” like ok bro I think you know what I
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meant”. The food world is so bad at maintaining
defined terms, and companies will continue to
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try and take advantage of that as much as
possible, with phrases like “free of added
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sugar” or “100% juice". Cage-free barely means
anything, grass-fed doesn’t mean grass finished,
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so for the purposes of avoiding conclusion, let us
move forward assuming that by “seed oils”, we’re
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discussing the cheap, highly refined oils from
rapeseeds, grapeseeds, sunflowers, and soybeans.
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Okay, here are the reasons to avoid seed
oils, in descending order of rationality.
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1. My health professional told me to take it easy
on them. This is the easiest, most reasonable
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reason to avoid a certain ingredient in your
diet. Your doctor knows your body, your ailments,
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your goals, and your medical history. The key
word here is “my” health professional. Not “a”
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health professional. Look at this goober doctor
giving medical advice to strangers in the YouTube
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comments. That’s not how a well-educated medical
professional acts. That’s how a weirdo acts.
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2. They do not taste good. Another valid reason
to avoid eating something. If you don’t like the
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taste of soy oil, why eat it? These fats
are chosen for their high smoke point and
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neutral (ie non-existent) flavor. If I had the
choice between brussels sprouts pan fried in
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flavorless canola oil or brussels sprouts fried
in yummy yummy beef fat, I’m picking the latter.
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3. They’re too cheap. There’s something to be
said about buying stuff for a price so low it
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makes you uncomfortable. This bag of donuts was
two bucks. Kinda freaky. The uncomfortable feeling
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that certain foods for regular people
are too cheap to be any good will keep
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Erewhon in business for a hundred years.
4. They’re too expensive. This might not
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apply to you, since vegetable oil is usually the
cheapest fats US dollars can buy, but depending on
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their cooking habits, home cooks get “free”
animal fat any time they render pork fat or
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trim a brisket. When I cook bacon, I save the
bacon grease and fry eggs in it or make flour
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tortillas with it. When I buy a whole chicken, I
render the fat down and use it to cook potatoes.
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5. Seed oils give me the heebie jeebies. You can
say this about certain types of fats, just like
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I can say it about blue cheese. Everyone’s
allowed to decide what types of foods squick
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them out too much to deem worthy for consumption.
Well-adjusted adults also understand that one can
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expect a certain level of social ribbing from
folks who are like “what do you mean you don’t
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like olives you weirdo?” I grew up an extremely
picky eater, and even though I grew out of it,
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certain foods still trigger that unreasonable
illogical i-don’t-wanna-try-it reaction within
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me. So whether it’s bottled oil or chicken
feet, it’s your mouth and whatever you
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don’t wanna eat is ultimately up to you.
6. Seed oils are in virtually every type
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of nasty awful junk food, and avoiding them is an
important act of resistance. This is where things
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get a little hairy. I think we can all agree—
heavily salted, ultra-processed pre-made junk
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food is not good for you. The act of breading
factory-farmed antibiotic-laden chicken nuggets
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in bleached flour and cheap oil, then deep
frying it, freezing it, and selling it for a
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dollar a pound at a big box grocery store SHOULD
incur some karmic debt upon the soul. Billions of
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people can agree that these chicken nuggets are
deeply unhealthy, but those billions of people
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might group up into different sects that blame one
aspect of the dino-nugget’s god-forsaken existence
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above all the others. A vegan may say “of course,
meat is murder, and it’s unhealthy.” Someone with
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celiac may say “the gluten in those types of foods
cause inflammation, which lead to a whole host of
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health issues”. And naturally, the seed oil haters
will wish for an option coated in lard or tallow
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instead. In the same way that some people might
say “have you noticed that 90% of shark attacks
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take place when ice cream sales are up?” some see
the correlation between cheap oils and junk foods
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and think “gee whiz, we gotta get these particular
oils out of all these products”. I believe this
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is the part of my list where disordered thinking
starts to creep in, because there’s no one thing
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that makes a box of sugar cookies bad. They’ve
got tons of sugar, attractive dyes, cheap fats,
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cheap grains, they’re made in a factory full of
underpaid workers and shipped from location to
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location by diesel truck in a plastic box, only
for half of them to become stale and get thrown
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in the trash. That being said, this is still
somewhat of a reasonable mindset because vegetable
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oil spends way too much time masquerading as
more expensive dairy products, like it does
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in Cool Whip, which isn’t whipped cream, Coffee
mate, which isn’t milk, or shelf-stable pre-made
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buffalo sauce, which is no longer made of butter.
7. Someone on the internet told me I have to avoid
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them. This one might be impossible to counter.
1 in 5 adults get their news from influencers.
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There’s no reason for you to trust what I’m
saying now over a doctor influencer with a
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six pack. I know I’m not a seed oil shill because
my bank statements don’t show any deposits from
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Crisco or Mazola, but there’s no reason for you to
believe me when I say that, and I respect anyone’s
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choice to doubt me. If my aim is to list all
the reasons why some people avoid seed oils,
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“someone online said I should ”is irrefutably
one of the top reasons. I’m an influencer now.
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I know we stand to make significantly more money
when they post inflammatory content. I know this
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video is not gonna be a viral sensation,
because I’m not telling you who to be mad
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at and how angry you should be. In the event that
you did want to hear my own personal preferences,
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I’ll stick them at the end of this video.
8. They used to be industrial lubricants.
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This is kind of a weird reason to avoid anything,
since viagra was originally a heart medicine and
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lobster used to be cat food. Are the health
nuts avoiding quinoa because it used to be
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peasant food? Pizza Hut used to be one of
the top Kale buyers in the country because
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it looked good as decoration next to the pizza
buffet. Kale is now seen as food. health food,
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even. By the way, beef tallow is still used as
machine lubricant, so what’s the point of this
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argument? Surely it’s one only employed by folks
who’ve never gone home with someone who keeps a
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jar of coconut oil on their bedside table.
9. I am a culture warrior. Eating animal
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fat is strong and smart, and cooking in vegetable
oil is for sissies. Again, you are free to think
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that if you want. I don’t understand why random
strangers on the internet ride so hard against
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canola oil like it’s a valuable personality
trait, just like I don’t understand why the
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New York Times rides FOR them like “well actually
American Froot Loops aren’t that bad they just
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contain Butylated hydroxytoluene for freshness”
like okay folks what are we doing here because
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it feels like it’s more about winning a war than
being helpful. I have this reason this far down
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on the list is because it’s hard for me to regard
certain culture war takes as earnestly-held values
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when the lines that separate them get redrawn
even more frequently than those around fad diets.
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Michelle Obama was a tyrant for messing with our
fast food, telling us what we can and can’t have,
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and now RFK is the weirdo for trying to get
seed oils and dyes off shelves. Sometimes a
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group of ideologues will think freedom to
do as they please is priority number one,
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and a couple years later, it could become noble
to ban the activities they find abhorrent.
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10. I’m a mentally unwell psycho. I would love
to leave this part out. I started this channel
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to talk about sandwiches I like to make. But some
people earnestly believe that seed oils aka sneed
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oils or goy oils are pushed onto the populace
by Jews in a covert plot to poison the gentiles.
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Some Christians find it imperative to avoid fats
that weren’t mentioned in the Bible. Even though
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I don’t believe these to be majority-held beliefs,
they do need to be acknowledged. It’s not enough,
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apparently, to believe in the power of Big Food
and Big Pharma working hand in hand to grease
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up a never-ending pipeline from hungry kids to
sick geezers. I put this last reason on the list,
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not to lump all the seed-oil-avoiders into
this category, but because it is… a reason.
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That’s my list. I understand the response
I’m inviting by covering a hot topic
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online to a big audience, but I think most
well-adjusted adults can hear that list,
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process what’s going on in this big noisy
debate, and start to seek out their own
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conclusions. For the avoidance of doubt, I
would like to provide the conclusions that
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I’ve come to on my own so far. Again,
I don’t think you should be compelled
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to think the same way as me, but I do think
it’s important to lay my biases bare.
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Use of the term “seed oil” sends out warning
signs to me that the person I’m talking to might
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be someone I don’t wanna talk to for much longer,
because it’s a term that’s rooted moreso in mania
00:11:07
than health. If someone told me they were gonna
try the Whole30 diet, I’d say right on. That’s so
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cool that you’re on a journey to see how you feel
after a month of eating nothing but whole foods,
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limited sugars, and less refined fats. However,
if someone told me they’re eliminating seed oils
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from their diet I’d say hmmmm okay but why?
There’s something about the language itself
00:11:27
that raises “might be online in a harmful way”
flags. Look at this guy who’s freaking out about
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seed oils being poison. Hasn’t he ever heard of
the phrase “the dose is the poison”? Oh… no… I
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accidentally got invested in the wellbeing
of someone who’s never heard the phrase
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“the dose is the poison”. Time to log off.
Do I think seed oils are bad for me? Yes,
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duh of course. Who thinks deep frying tater
tots in a vat of canola oil is healthy? Am I
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worried that seed oil may be poison? No. I love
poison. Hennessy is my favorite one of all. The
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most compelling detail I’ve heard so far is
that these types of fats contain more Omega
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6 fatty acids than we need, but caring about
the acid profile of your food’s cooking fat is
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olympian-level health consciousness, and yet it’s
everyday people complaining online about what kind
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of oil chick fil a or mcdonalds uses like get
real you’re never getting healthy McNuggets.
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I do personally avoid seed oils. I do avoid
ultra-processed foods. I avoid artificial
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prservatives and extreme sodium content. Not
because I ask for nutritional info when I
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eat when I go to restaurants, but because I don’t
go out to restaurants that much. Every time I cook
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at home, I’m happily and thoughtlessly avoiding
massive inclusions of stabilizers and cheap fats
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that I’d find in pre-made meals, even if I keep
a bottle of canola in my cupboard. Eating at home
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is such a massive leg up in this arena that it’s
extremely annoying when I see braingeniuses in the
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comments being like hmm cool recipe but you really
shouldn’t be cooking with peanut oil like brother
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are you being a net positive or a net negative on
this effort to make people healthier if you bring
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analysis paralysis to stir fried veggies and
scaring people off making food at home? Glass
00:12:58
cutting boards dull your knives, wood cutting
boards harbor bacteria, and plastic cutting
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boards put microplastics in your food. Better
to go out to eat where the choice can be made
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for you. When the options presented are calcifying
your pineal gland with fluoride-laden tap water or
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storing a credit card’s worth of polyethelyne in
your testicles with bottled water, nobody wins.
00:13:19
I feel the same way about nonstick pans. Is
cooking on teflon toxic? I don’t know… I sure
00:13:24
wouldn’t wanna eat chips of nonstick coating that
might flake off into my food. But I avoid that by
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following the manufacturer’s instructions. I don’t
scrape my nonstick with metal utensils. I don’t
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crank it over high heat til it smokes. The food
world has no shortage of hucksters, but I’m not
00:13:39
totally miffed by stainless steel brands who use
customer fear to position themselves as non-toxic,
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because you know what maybe it would be a net
positive if all the people who don’t know how to
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cook stopped accidentally horking down forever
chemicals. It’s not something I worry about,
00:13:52
because I cook my meals at home, and I’m pretty
good at cooking. The goal on this channel is to
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get you to that same place, so you also don’t
have to freak out about teflon and seed oils.
00:14:03
I don’t blame anyone for feeling helpless in the
wild world of modern food. But taking control does
00:14:08
a lot to reduce that helplessness. I stopped
drinking fake sugars this year. Not because
00:14:13
a TikTok told me they’re poison, but because
when I took a months-long diary of everything
00:14:17
I ate and drank, fake sugar correlated with
days on which my tummy hurted. I feel better
00:14:22
without them and I feel even better knowing
I settled the debate internally with no need
00:14:26
to crusade against strangers who disagree with
me. I am pleased with the control I’ve gained.
00:14:32
Look at these pre-made shelf stable cookies.
Hachi wawa that’s a lot of ingredients. They
00:14:37
might all be safe, they might all be poison. My
point is there’s a lot of them. And that makes
00:14:41
certain people feel uneasy. I’d encourage them to
gain control. Look at this refrigerated pre-made
00:14:48
cookie dough that, although I did not make from
scratch, I do still have to bake at home. A
00:14:53
noticeably shorter list of ingredients. It’s got
palm oil instead of butter (I don’t like that),
00:14:57
but hey it’s an improvement. And compare that to
the top sugar cookie recipe from allrecipes.com.
00:15:02
A normal website for regular people. A massive
reduction in scary foreign ingredients, even if
00:15:07
the baker uses vegetable oil instead of lard. What
I’m trying to make clear here is that instead of
00:15:12
pretending like sugar cookies will ever be health
food, we need to let cooking at home be the goal.
00:15:18
A home cook can avoid whichever ingredients they
want. Try making a carrot cake out of kale. See
00:15:23
what happens. I respect your right to never
cook with corn oil ever again. It is not the
00:15:29
seed oil avoiders I despise. It’s the seed oil
freaks. You have no idea how much I hate doing
00:15:34
discourse online. If I could snap my fingers and
have my way, everyone would chill out and just be
00:15:39
normal. That goes for the Diet Coke addicts and
the aspartame apologia accounts. Have opinions
00:15:44
without demanding that others hold the same ones.
It wasn’t fun in the early oughts when we roasted
00:15:49
vegans and crossfitters like “don’t worry, they’ll
let you know” and it’s not fun now when it’s the
00:15:54
same answer to “how do you know someone’s avoiding
seed oils”. As far as this channel is concerned…
00:15:59
You can eat nothing but corn mush or caviar every
day. As long as you’re compelled to eat at home,
00:16:05
I’m doing my job.
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