Paul Saladino
speaker
961 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Paul Saladino’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The Shawn Ryan Show · #179 Paul Saladino - The FDA Approved Poison You Eat Every Day · 5 Mar 2025
podcast
So in 1900— there were no seed oils, essentially. Maybe the first seed oil was like 1860, but there were no seed oils in the American food chain until 1911, when Procter & Gamble made Crisco, which was partially hydrogenated cotton seed oil. So in 1900, there were no seed oils.
And this is just an association, but I think it's an important thing to note for the whole conversation, because inevitably, when we talk about seed oils, we will talk about saturated fat. So rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, obesity, every chronic illness were a fraction of what they are today in 1900. And we were eating 98, 99% of our fat as beef tallow, butter, ghee, and lard.
There were no seed oils. And olive oil wasn't a big portion of our diet in 1900. There was no such thing as avocado oil. So most of our fat was animal fat in 1900. And the association there is striking to say, okay, we've had periods in recorded history not too long ago when we had almost all of our cooking fat was animal fat. And heart disease wasn't through the roof.
So any hypothesis, any assertion that saturated fat causes heart disease needs to be questioned on historical basis from the get-go. Seed oils came in in 1911. Procter & Gamble made Crisco. They had slow adoption into our food supply, I would say, over the next 40 years.
In 1940s, with World War II, canola oil was produced for the first time, and it was used on ships because the seed oils stay slippery when they're wet. They're used as engine lubricants. Previously, they'd been engine lubricants or lamp oils. So 1940s, canola oil gets produced. Canola is an acronym that stands for Canadian oil low acid. There's no such thing as a canola plant.
It's a rapeseed plant. So that's just a canola oil sidebar. And I'll come back to canola oil. And then since 1940s, we've had the introduction of various oils into our food supply. Soybean oil, corn oil, canola, safflower, sunflower, peanut. These are all seed oils. Anything that comes from a seed is a seed oil in terms of an oil that comes from a seed.
It's important to understand that olive and avocado are fruit oils. And I'll talk about those later. But those are not seeds. We don't make avocado oil from an avocado seed. We make it from the actual avocado pulp from the fruit. And olives are made from the fruit of the olive, not the seed of the olive. So there's a big difference.
When you make an olive or an avocado oil, you just press, you press the fruit, right? If you've seen an olive press, you know, they make, they either do it by centrifuge where they spin it and the oil goes out, or they have a big press and they kind of press the oil out and the oil comes out. How do you get oil out of a cotton seed or a soybean? They're not very oily.
How do you get oil out of a sunflower seed or a kernel of corn? You have to go through this complex industrial process to refine the oil out of those things. This is an interesting thing to consider. Today, in 2025, the average American eats the equivalent of around five tablespoons of seed oils per day. 1900, we had zero.
To get five tablespoons of seed oil from corn, you'd have to eat 70 ears of corn. So you have to use massive amounts, two and a half plus pounds of soybeans to make five tablespoons of soybean oil. Similar figure with sunflower seeds, right? So these are historically inappropriate amounts of consumption of these substances. We never would have been exposed to this historically.
Hunter-gatherers, they eat seeds and nuts sometimes, but mostly when they're starving. I didn't see the Hadza eat a single seed or nut when I was there. So to get oil out of these things, which we've done because of an industrial process that makes oils that are cheap, very profitable, and have very shelf-stable, you have refining, bleaching, deodorizing.
So you have to heat the oil to over 450 degrees Fahrenheit, which essentially damages the oil, oxidizes the oil, makes it rancid. You have to extract it with hexane, which is contaminated with benzene. You have to do sodium hydroxide washing. You have to deodorize and bleach because if they didn't do this industrial process, it wouldn't even be palatable for humans.
So what you end up with on the back end is this, historically inappropriate concoction of something that is now marketed to humans as a healthy oil. Well, how can that possibly be? It's clearly an industrial hyper-processed food. Well, the whole reason that seed oils are told to us as healthy is because of the cholesterol idea.
So we kind of have to talk about cholesterol any time we talk about seed oils. So 1900, no real heart attacks in the population. Most doctors had never even seen a heart attack. Heart attacks became a thing in the zeitgeist in the United States in the 1950s when Eisenhower had his first heart attack. And I think it was 1955 that he had his first heart attack.
And that was around the time of a guy named Ancel Keys, who was very sort of opinionated. And he did this study called the Seven Countries Study, which he published later, that associated saturated fat consumption with higher levels of cholesterol and heart disease. But in retrospect, we know that he cherry picked the data. He excluded countries where that association doesn't actually hold true.
He included countries where it did hold true, but then he excluded places like France, Germany, and Switzerland where they eat a lot of saturated fat, but they don't have higher rates of heart disease.
But nevertheless, this faulty study based on cherry picking because of Ancel Keys' sort of persuasiveness and this obsession with heart disease in the 1950s because Eisenhower had multiple heart attacks, And Eisenhower's cardiologist, Paul Dudley White, was influenced by Ancel Keys.
We suddenly began to believe, as an American people, that saturated fat, which raises cholesterol in many individuals, and we can talk about that, is a cause of heart disease. And then... We'll table the discussion about cholesterol as a cause of heart disease for the moment, but we'll get back to that.
So for years and years now, USDA policy around dietary guidelines has been based on the paradigm that saturated fat causes heart disease. And so if saturated fat causes heart disease, it must be bad. We must eat less butter. We should be eating margarine instead of butter, right? Tallow has gone out of our population. Most people don't even know what tallow is. You never see lard.
What's healthier is Mazzola corn oil. And there are ads from the 1960s and 70s from Miss Ola Korno saying like, Susie polyunsaturated her family tonight. They're just, they're so funny to see.
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