January 7, 2025
By Adam Rabiner
For some time, my daughter Ana has been interested in diet, health and nutrition, and I noticed her influence when she joined my wife and me on shopping trips to the Coop. No longer could we buy Oatly, our favorite brand of oat milk. Similarly, certain brands of crackers and cookies were suddenly verboten and our family now had an affinity for ghee, avocado and coconut oil. What was going on? Unlike her parents, Ana, perhaps subject to influencers on TikTok, was tuned into the anti-seed oil movement, the theme of film Fed a Lie.
Fed a Lie’s central contention is that highly polyunsaturated Omega-6, seed and vegetable oils are manufactured processed foods harmful to human beings. They cause linoleic acid (LA) to build up in our bodies and cells; a pro-oxidative, inflammatory, toxic and nutrient-deficient process that drives cell stress and death. Oils pressed from corn, soybeans, sesame seeds, peanuts, cotton and grapeseed must be heated, refined, bleached, deodorized and oxidized. Cotton seed oil was originally a replacement for whale oil used strictly as a lubricant for machinery. In 1911, Procter & Gamble (P&G) wanted to sell it as a food and created a fake lard they branded as Crisco. This was the first instance of a vegetable oil marketed to be consumed by humans as a replacement for butter, lard and tallow. Margarine was cheaper than butter, so consumers were happy. In 1948, P&G donated $1.7 million to the American Heart Association, a small and sleepy organization, after which consumers were led to believe that vegetable oils were healthier than animal fats.
Fed a Lie relies heavily on certain statistics to make its case against seed oils. Several graphs are displayed throughout the film. One shows that the total calories consumed per person per day between 1999 and 2018 remained steady at 2,500 but during the same period, obesity climbed from 30% to 42%. Other charts show similar growth in various chronic diseases, which were exceedingly rare in 1900 but grew steadily thereafter, after the introduction of seed oils into the American diet. Notably, during the 20th century, when all these bad health results were trending, the consumption of saturated fats remained steady. The consumption of vegetable fat surpassed animal fat for the first time in the mid-1960s.
Today, an American consumes an average of three to five tablespoons of seed oil per day through a cornucopia of products: salad dressings, cakes, fried foods, and bread. These concentrations are equivalent to consuming 60 to 70 ears of corn or two pounds of soybeans, which is humanly impossible and evolutionarily inconsistent. Fed a Lie posits that seed oil consumption is the greatest change in history to man’s diet. Certain populations like the Maasai warriors of Kenya and Tanzania, whose diet still consists largely of milk, meat and blood, and the Tokelauans, whose South Pacific diet consists largely of coconut, fish, tuber and fruit, have virtually no heart disease, diabetes or obesity.
Fed a Lie concedes that replacing saturated fat with seed oils lowers LDL—or “bad”—cholesterol but argues that this has not diminished death rates due to heart or other diseases. The film bolsters its case by claiming that Ancel Keys’ influential 1958 Seven Countries Study, which purportedly showed lower rates of heart disease among populations that consumed less saturated fat, was flawed due to cherry-picking certain countries over others. The film argues that scientists and clinicians need to zoom in and look at the quality of every individual study on this topic rather than zoom out and take the averages.
One can argue that correlation is not the same as causation and therefore dispute the central message and warning of Fed a Lie. Yet the film is not preachy, and it’s difficult to argue with its suggestion to shop the supermarket’s periphery for whole, natural “ancestral foods” such as meat, fish, nuts, fruits, tubers, and vegetables rather than its middle aisles to avoid the hidden seed oils in the many “food-like substances” that are boxed, canned, labeled, and packaged.
Shortly after watching, I visited my pantry for corn tortilla chips bought during my last shopping trip to the Coop two weeks earlier. Mysteriously, even after all this time, the bag remained unopened. I noticed it contained safflower and/or sunflower oils. Though I had not read the label until then, Ana surely had. Time to try another brand.
Fed a Lie: Tuesday, January 14, 2025 @ 7:00 p.m.
Screening link: https://plowtoplatefilms.weebly.com/upcoming-events.html
To be added to our mailing list for future screening announcements, please email a request to plowtoplate@gmail.com.
Adam Rabiner lives in Ditmas Park with his wife, Dina, and child Ana.