Preparing food without the use of seed oils makes sense! For several reasons:
- Health 1: Seed oils are fundamentally harmful to our organism. Their seeds are not meant for oil extraction and the oil is not intended for human consumption.¹
- Health 2: The seed oils used in pre-packaged foods are highly processed - from cultivation (crop rotation) with high pesticide pressure², to mechanical harvesting, extraction of the oil from the hard seeds by pressure, friction, heat and often with the help of solvents³, to chemical-physical refining of the extracted oil⁴.
- Sustainability 1: In order to produce seed oils, which are now added to all kinds of foods, farmers have to buy new seeds from multinational seed "manufacturers" every year. The four companies - Syngenta, Bayer, Corteva and BASF - shared around 57 per cent of the global seed market in 2018. And, these are the same companies that also dominate the global market for pesticides; around 70 per cent of the global pesticide market was in the hands of these same companies in 2018.⁵
- Sustainability 2: Seed oils are generally - and depending on the fatty acid ratio - quite unstable to HALT (Heat, Air, Light, Time). If they are used for deep-frying, firstly the frying bath must not be heated to high temperatures and secondly the oil must be changed very frequently, which is not only costly but also inefficient and unsustainable.
- Sustainability 3: Because many seed oils were not sufficiently heat-stable, the market-dominating seed "manufacturers" came up with something clever: they modified the plants by means of unnatural breeding (e.g. sunflower or rapeseed) to produce seeds that were rich in the monounsaturated oleic acid naturally found in large quantities in extra virgin olive oil and at the same time low in the heat-unstable diunsaturated linoleic acid and triply unsaturated alpha-linolenic acid.⁶
The bottom line is that seed oils really are something despicable that have no place on the human table or in the feed trough of animals.
¹https://t.ly/nIBhH
²https://t.ly/o79ss
³https://t.ly/r7iIj
⁴https://t.ly/6fphp
⁵https://t.ly/1p4tN
⁶https://rb.gy/iv6y1p
We are thrilled to announce our partnership with the Seed Oil Free Alliance’s official Scientific & Medical Advisor Dr. Andrew Weil, a Harvard-trained medical doctor, ten-time New York Times bestselling author, and the founder of the True Food Kitchen restaurant group. As the Scientific & Medical Advisor to the Seed Oil Free Alliance, Dr. Weil has played a pivotal role in establishing the Seed Oil Free Certification Standards.
Read the announcement on AP News: https://lnkd.in/eCYRrnpc