What the anti-seed oil movement gets wrong — and right

She came in wanting to do right by her husband.

He’d been losing weight — the kind of weight loss that says something’s wrong — and she’d spent weeks trying to reverse it. Cream in his coffee, butter in his soups, all the gristle he could handle. She’d read somewhere that fat was the most calorie-dense food she could give him, and she was right.

She’d also read that seed oils were toxic, that the real enemy was vegetable oil, that we were supposed to be eating traditional animal fats all along.

By the time she was admitted herself — heart procedure, blood pressure that had been climbing for months, both of them now taking turns as patients — she told me she suspected the diet hadn’t helped. In the quiet space between us, there wasn’t room left to argue.

This is happening constantly now, and it’s only going to accelerate.

The seed oil panic has achieved full institutional legitimacy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called canola, corn, soybean, sunflower, cottonseed, and grapeseed oils the most unhealthy aspect of the American diet. The January 2026 dietary guidelines — which discarded 421 pages of scientific recommendations from the advisory committee — now list butter and beef tallow alongside olive oil as acceptable cooking fats. Then came the food companies: Steak ’n Shake “RFK’d” its fries, PepsiCo announced it would phase canola and soybean oils out of Lay’s and Tostitos, with Kraft Heinz, General Mills, and Nestlé following with their own reformulation pledges. The food industry is responding, at great speed, to a story that is running well ahead of the evidence.

As a clinical dietitian who works with cardiac patients every day, I want to offer something the panic doesn’t have: something slower and less influencer friendly. Let’s talk about what the evidence actually shows.

First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category. What we’re actually talking about are vegetable oils high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats — the kinds of fats that, in decades of research, are associated with lower rates of cardiovascular disease when they replace saturated fat in the diet. A 2020 Cochrane meta-analysis of roughly 59,000 participants across 15 randomized controlled trials found that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced combined cardiovascular events by 21%. Cardiologists note that the risk reduction from this dietary substitution is comparable to the benefits of statin medications. We don’t make a habit of telling statin patients to stop their medication because of something they heard on a podcast.

The core claim of the seed oil panic is that linoleic acid — an omega-6 fatty acid in these oils — drives systemic inflammation, which drives chronic disease. It sounds plausible. But “sounds plausible” and “is demonstrated in humans at dietary exposure levels” are different things. Randomized controlled trial evidence does not support this claim.

There’s a secondary argument about oxidation — seed oils go rancid at high heat, producing potentially harmful compounds. This idea is chemically real and worth being thoughtful about (don’t reuse frying oil repeatedly). But the evidence that oxidation at home-cooking levels causes measurable harm in humans isn’t there.

Some of what’s driving the seed oil panic isn’t wrong — it’s just misattributed. Ultra-processed food really is a problem. The National Institutes of Health published the first randomized controlled trial on ultra-processed food in 2019 (a landmark study by Kevin Hall’s team) showing that people randomized to an ultra-processed diet consumed about 500 more calories per day and gained weight, even when macronutrients were matched precisely. The food was engineered to override satiety — proven, not suggested.

But seed oils are not why ultra-processed food behaves that way. They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.

There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. They’re naturally occurring, present in all beef fat, and according to cardiologists, present in tallow at levels far above what’s considered safe. A full Steak ’n Shake meal — their 7×7 Steakburger and a large order of their celebrated “RFK’d” tallow fries — clocks in at more than 90 grams of saturated fat and nearly 10 grams of trans fats combined. The administration that declared it is “ending the war on saturated fat” has found a cooking fat that delivers more of the exact compounds most associated with cardiovascular mortality. MAHA is road paved with artery-clogging cholesterol, and they’re calling it a health revolution.

There’s a second irony buried in the dietary guidelines themselves. The document urges Americans to “prioritize oils with essential fatty acids.” In nutrition, “essential” has a precise meaning: fatty acids the body cannot synthesize and must obtain from diet — linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid, the omega-6 and omega-3s. The oils richest in these essential fatty acids are canola, soybean, sunflower — the very oils the guidelines are steering people away from. Olive oil, butter, and tallow, the fats offered as examples, are not primary sources of essential fatty acids. The guidelines used the right scientific language and then pointed it at the wrong foods.

The panic isn’t landing randomly, and neither is the enthusiasm.

The seed oil panic is extraordinarily convenient for the beef and dairy industries. Rehabilitating saturated fat — or casting public doubt on the evidence against it — is something those industries have spent decades and enormous lobbying dollars trying to accomplish. The Meat Institute celebrated the new dietary guidelines. Soybean growers sounded the alarm.

The food industry reformation underway isn’t making chips healthier; it’s swapping one fat for another inside the same ultra-processed product while everything else stays the same. The fries are still served with a 700-calorie shake. The chips are still engineered to be hyperpalatable. The only thing that changed is which fat is in them.

MAHA styles itself as a populist revolt against corporate food. A movement that threw out 421 pages of scientific recommendations and handed the beef industry its best marketing cycle in decades isn’t a revolt.  It’s a rebrand with a body count it’ll take years to measure.

Back in the hospital, my patients are replacing olive oil with beef tallow, even if they don’t tell me during cardiac rehab. One told me they are avoiding beans because “seed oils” appeared on the label of a steamer veggie bag. They are loading up on saturated fat in the sincere belief that they are protecting their hearts.

The right answer here doesn’t make good content.  It is less dramatic than a dietary revolution. It doesn’t have a podcast.

The boring answer — eat more vegetables and legumes, less ultra-processed food, default to olive oil, and yes, the source of fat matters less than the overall dietary pattern — is boring because it has been substantially right for a long time and doesn’t sell anything. Nutrition science will always lose the attention war to something that offers community and tells you who to blame.

Cole Hanson, M.P.H., R.D.N., L.D., is a registered dietitian and clinical inpatient dietitian in Minneapolis, where he works in cardiac health, mental health, and critical care.