Dr. Sarah Berry
speaker
566 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 18 Dec
Dr. Sarah Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
We're more sedentary. We eat loads of these other, these heavily processed foods that got all of these other ingredients in, you know, the sugar, the this, the that. So much else has changed. You know, you can't put it all down to the fact that at that point in time, seed oils were also changing. We also know that about 60% of the seed oil that we eat is
is actually in these heavily processed unhealthy foods. So it's the first argument they say. And you see these beautiful figures that they put out where you see on one axis the intake of CEDAW. You see on the other axis, you know, over time you'll see, for example, like rates of cancer. And you see rates of cancer or rates of cardiovascular disease going up linearly with the intake of CEDAW.
But we have to think what else has changed in that time. The other arguments that they use are theoretical arguments based on biochemical pathways. And I spend an hour teaching this to our undergraduates, and I'm not going to bore you with that biochemical pathway. But they talk about the ratio of a particular fatty acid, which is omega-6, which is found in high levels of seed oils.
And omega-3, which is another fatty acid. And they talk about how having lots of seed oils changes this ratio, makes this pro-inflammatory state because it increases a particular downstream chemicals, etc., etc., etc. What we know from kind of theoretical biochemical pathways and enzymes, et cetera, doesn't actually play out in humans. We're so clever.
We have all of these mechanisms in place to control inflammation, to control oxidative stress, to control downstream impacts of foods. And so this argument that is also used to say that omega-6 fatty acids, so the main fat that's found in many of these seed oils is pro-inflammatory, is not supported by any evidence. It's not supported by tightly controlled clinical trials.
If anything, it's shown to be anti-inflammatory, that levels of inflammatory circulating molecules actually reduce. And yet they use this kind of theoretical argument or what they've seen in a Petri dish, for example, or in a test tube.
I think it's one of those things that snowballed. And I think it does fit in with the whole argument that people are using against all processed food. It does fit in with other narratives that are going on. I think some people can be very clever in cherry picking research. So there's a study called the Sydney Heart Study. And in this study, this was done in the 70s.
And this is a study that's used often to advocate for the toxic effects of seed oils. And in this study, males that had had a heart event or a heart attack of sorts were randomly allocated to either increase their
omega-6 so this particular type of fatty acid that we is in seed oils in their diet by having lots of seed oil or they were asked to just follow their normal diet which is quite high in saturated fat and what they found is those that increased their seed oil intake went on to have worst health outcomes
Now, the problem with that is that in those days, the majority of seed oils underwent an industrial process called partial hydrogenation. And partial hydrogenation produces a very harmful fat called trans fats. You might have heard of trans fats.
And so they were eating this seed oil in the form of a margarine or fat spread that had undergone partial hydrogenation and therefore was full of trans fats. Trans fats increase cholesterol. Trans fats increase inflammation. Trans fats are bad for us. That's why they are not in our food supply anymore.
And so, of course, that seed oil was going to cause worse health outcomes, but it's not how seed oil is consumed now. And so it's that clever cherry picking of evidence that often supports a lot of the nutribollocks that's out there.
So they're meta-analysis. So we do randomised control trials. So these will be trials where there's always a control arm. We'll randomly allocate some people to an intervention like seed oils and some people to a control. Could be saturated fat, could be beef tallow. That's been done. And then we look at different health outcomes. We follow them over a period of time.
Or it could be that I ask you for a month to have seed oils and then next month have beef tallow, for example. And then we'll look at different health outcomes, compare how you responded to one versus the other. And then what we do as scientists is if there's enough of these clinical trials, these randomized control trials, we put them all together into what's called a meta-analysis.
And we look, what does the meta-analysis show? So, for example, for CEDAWs, there's meta-analysis, for example, of about 42.
Randomized control trials where they compare seed oils to other fats showing consistently that there is no harmful benefit, that actually there's a reduction in cardiovascular disease because the particular fat that's in seed oil has a really potent cholesterol lowering effect. So it's actually beneficial for our health. Yet beef tallow is full of saturated fat.
It's full of palmitic acid, which is a particular type of saturated fat that we know is bad for us. There has been studies, and these studies were done many years ago when beef tallow was actually used, comparing seed oils with beef tallow. Seed oils always came out better. Seed oils always reduced cholesterol compared to beef tallow, reduced inflammation, etc., reduced cardiovascular risk factors.
I am, because I've researched. As a research active scientist, where I've run randomised control trials, and I tell you what, you sweat blood and tears. I love my research, but it's blimmin' hard work doing a clinical trial. You know, getting ethical approval, recruiting people, changing people's diet. Running dietary studies is really hard, because it's not a case of giving them a pill.
If I'm going to give you seed oil, I've got to think, well, how am I going to do that? What am I, instead of what, what am I taking out of your diet to give you that? How am I going to make sure the rest of your diet is controlled?
So once you've run studies yourself and you've sweated that blood and tears, and then you see this Nutribolix, this misinformation out there, it's really bloody frustrating.
Showing 241–260 of 566 · page 13 of 29
← Previous
Next →