I owe my current health good to one especially shady anti-seed oil theorist on twitter.
Tl;dr: For me, one key problem with seed oils is their likelihood of being contaminated with glyphosate, commonly known as the weedkiller Round-Up and increasingly used as a pre-harvest dessicant (also widely recognized as a microbiome disruptor).
As an n=1 case study, I don’t claim that glyphosate is the cause of Western disease, only that glyphosate and other microbiome-disruptors seem more likely to be a primary causes of western disease than any other reason discussed in this article and that I have compelling evidence that glyphosate was almost surely the direct cause of my problems.
What follows is my own experience attempting to troubleshoot my health problems. - After moving to the UK, I adapted my diet based on local availability. I mostly cook my own food, sticking better than most people around me to the principles of healthy eating listed towards the end of this article. I had no history of gut issues, no problems eating out. - I started getting an acid reflux feeling after meals. - Over about 6 months, this increased in severity and neither readily google-able tips nor advice from my NHS doctor helped. During this time, the severity of post-meal symptoms drastically increased—very bad acid reflux, brain fog, sluggishness, a weird tingling in my shoulders. - At this point, literally anything I ate or drank, except water, would trigger these symptoms. The only way I could still hold my life together and be productive for some part of the day was to eat a small breakfast, be zonked for a ~2 hours, skip all food until eating one big dinner and accept being zonked for ~4 hours. - I tried a multi-week elimination diet several times with several permutations, with no luck. - I was prescribed a PPI for a month, which resolved my symptoms for a month, after stopping the PPI, my symptoms gradually returned to the same severity over the following month. - During a covid-lockdown twitter doomscroll, I came across a shady anti-seed oil campaigner. Despite trusting exactly none of the words he had written, I realized I had never tried eliminating seed oils. The timing even kinda lined up, since I had switched to using rapeseed oil (aka canola oil, for the US audience) about 6 months before. - So, I tried cutting out rapeseed oil and, voila, not even 2 days later I was 80% better. A week later and I was back to near normal. - This could easily have been the end of the story, but now that the main source was removed, I began to notice sporadic instances of a milder version of my previous symptoms returning (I called this “pre-flux”). - I started a list of foods that reliably brought on the pre-flux symptoms. There was initially no rhyme or reason to this list, for every candidate food I could find a near-equivalent that caused no problems (oatmeal A but not oatmeal B, bread C but not bread D, olive oil E but not olive oil F, the list goes on...). Most restaurant meals caused pre-flux, and one week when family visited I ate out most days and symptoms escalated to proper acid reflux and the other accompanying symptoms. I also visited the US once for a week and had a similar experience while eating out most of the time. The only frustratingly vague trend I got out of this was that foods that were branded to have healthier “vibes” were somewhat more likely to be fine. - Then one day, someone told me that glyphosate is used as a dessicant and commonly contaminates crops. That evening I cross-checked my list and, lo and behold, this explanation cleanly and exactly separated my list. (e.g. oatmeal A was regular and oatmeal B was organic, bread A was made in the UK and bread B was imported from France which has more stringent glyphosate rules, etc...)
Based on this experience, I’m confident that I’m now intolerant to both glyphosate and to rapeseed oil. These are separate things. My glyphosate intolerance seems to be aggravated proportional to consumption. On the other hand, I react to the tinest amount of rapeseed oil—I can’t count the number of times I had a pre-flux feeling, reviewed what I’d eaten recently, and found rapeseed oil buried in the ingredients list. I suspect that I had too much rapeseed oil and my body somehow connected two and two and made me specifically allergic to this. This strong response made me fairly sure that most cheap olive oils in both the US and the UK are (probably illegally) cut with rapeseed oil. It’s been ~2 years now since I pinpointed the issue and the longer I avoid these, the fewer issues I come across when I accidentally eat either glyphosate or rapeseed oil. There are at least two plausible mechanisms I’m aware of for this—one, my microbiome is changing in response to the new selection pressures I’m applying (glyphosate is a known microbiome disruptor) and two, the immune system is in some sense forgetting or relaxing it’s response as a result of not being further provoked.
As a result of this, I have new rules of thumb for healthy eating: - If it can be harvested dry, opt for organic (almost every grain and seed) - For olive oil, prefer single origin or just buy the “nicest looking” one that is not a major brand.
For those more research inclined, the search terms “glyphosate as a dessicant” will turn up charts produced by farmers for farmers advising on the use of glyphosate sprayed on crops immediately before harvest in order to dry crops faster and also boost yields. It should also turn up charts of glyphosate use over time. I don’t think chemical would explain stuff much older than the 1970s, but I think it’s a reasonable contender for the acceleration of the trend around this time.
This is shockingly similar to what I’m going through. And the fries that fucked me up the other night are indeed fried in canola oil. I’m cautiously optimistic but I know how complicated these things can be -_-. Will report back!
Coming from the other direction, in terms of a “solid safe cheap supply”… I can find reports of Extra Virgin Olive Oil being sold by Costco under their Kirkland brand that is particularly well sourced and tested, and my priors say that this stuff is likely to be weirdly high quality for a weirdly low price (because, in general, “kirklandization” is a thing that food producers with a solid product and huge margins worry about). I’m kinda curious if you have access to Kirkland EVOO and if it gives you “preflux”?
Really any extra data here (where your sensitive palate gives insight into the current structure of the food economy) would be fascinating :-)
Next time I have a chance to pick up Kirkland olive oil I’ll give it a try and report back.
I made a decision around this time of dietary changes to stop trying to cut so many corners wtih food. As a calorie dense food, even paying an “outrageous” double or triple the cost of cheap olive oil barely dents the budget on a cost per calorie basis. And speaking of budgeting, I had mental resistance to spending more on food so now I guesstimate what percent of my food budget I spend over the “cheapest equivalent alternative” part and I label as “preventative healthcare”.
(And regarding “food cost psychology” this is an area where I think Neo Stoic objectivity is helpful. Rich people can pick up a lot of hedons just from noticing how good their food is, and formerly poor people have a valuable opportunity to re-calibrate. There are large differences in diet between socio-economic classes still, and until all such differences are expressions of voluntary preference, and “dietary price sensitivity has basically evaporated”, I won’t consider the world to be post-scarcity. Each time I eat steak, I can’t help but remember being asked in Summer Camp as a little kid, after someone ask “if my family was rich” and I didn’t know, about this… like the very first “objective calibrating response” accessible to us as children was the rate of my family’s steak consumption. Having grown up in some amount of poverty, I often see “newly rich people” eating as if their health is not the price of slightly more expensive food, or their health is “not worth avoiding the terrible terrible sin of throwing food in the garbage (which my aunt who lived through the Great Depression in Germany yelled at me, once, with great feeling, for doing, when I was child and had eaten less than ALL the birthday cake that had been put on my plate)”. Cultural norms around food are fascinating and, in my opinion, are often rewarding to think about.)
I owe my current health good to one especially shady anti-seed oil theorist on twitter.
Tl;dr: For me, one key problem with seed oils is their likelihood of being contaminated with glyphosate, commonly known as the weedkiller Round-Up and increasingly used as a pre-harvest dessicant (also widely recognized as a microbiome disruptor).
As an n=1 case study, I don’t claim that glyphosate is the cause of Western disease, only that glyphosate and other microbiome-disruptors seem more likely to be a primary causes of western disease than any other reason discussed in this article and that I have compelling evidence that glyphosate was almost surely the direct cause of my problems.
What follows is my own experience attempting to troubleshoot my health problems.
- After moving to the UK, I adapted my diet based on local availability. I mostly cook my own food, sticking better than most people around me to the principles of healthy eating listed towards the end of this article. I had no history of gut issues, no problems eating out.
- I started getting an acid reflux feeling after meals.
- Over about 6 months, this increased in severity and neither readily google-able tips nor advice from my NHS doctor helped. During this time, the severity of post-meal symptoms drastically increased—very bad acid reflux, brain fog, sluggishness, a weird tingling in my shoulders.
- At this point, literally anything I ate or drank, except water, would trigger these symptoms. The only way I could still hold my life together and be productive for some part of the day was to eat a small breakfast, be zonked for a ~2 hours, skip all food until eating one big dinner and accept being zonked for ~4 hours.
- I tried a multi-week elimination diet several times with several permutations, with no luck.
- I was prescribed a PPI for a month, which resolved my symptoms for a month, after stopping the PPI, my symptoms gradually returned to the same severity over the following month.
- During a covid-lockdown twitter doomscroll, I came across a shady anti-seed oil campaigner. Despite trusting exactly none of the words he had written, I realized I had never tried eliminating seed oils. The timing even kinda lined up, since I had switched to using rapeseed oil (aka canola oil, for the US audience) about 6 months before.
- So, I tried cutting out rapeseed oil and, voila, not even 2 days later I was 80% better. A week later and I was back to near normal.
- This could easily have been the end of the story, but now that the main source was removed, I began to notice sporadic instances of a milder version of my previous symptoms returning (I called this “pre-flux”).
- I started a list of foods that reliably brought on the pre-flux symptoms. There was initially no rhyme or reason to this list, for every candidate food I could find a near-equivalent that caused no problems (oatmeal A but not oatmeal B, bread C but not bread D, olive oil E but not olive oil F, the list goes on...). Most restaurant meals caused pre-flux, and one week when family visited I ate out most days and symptoms escalated to proper acid reflux and the other accompanying symptoms. I also visited the US once for a week and had a similar experience while eating out most of the time. The only frustratingly vague trend I got out of this was that foods that were branded to have healthier “vibes” were somewhat more likely to be fine.
- Then one day, someone told me that glyphosate is used as a dessicant and commonly contaminates crops. That evening I cross-checked my list and, lo and behold, this explanation cleanly and exactly separated my list. (e.g. oatmeal A was regular and oatmeal B was organic, bread A was made in the UK and bread B was imported from France which has more stringent glyphosate rules, etc...)
Based on this experience, I’m confident that I’m now intolerant to both glyphosate and to rapeseed oil. These are separate things. My glyphosate intolerance seems to be aggravated proportional to consumption. On the other hand, I react to the tinest amount of rapeseed oil—I can’t count the number of times I had a pre-flux feeling, reviewed what I’d eaten recently, and found rapeseed oil buried in the ingredients list. I suspect that I had too much rapeseed oil and my body somehow connected two and two and made me specifically allergic to this. This strong response made me fairly sure that most cheap olive oils in both the US and the UK are (probably illegally) cut with rapeseed oil. It’s been ~2 years now since I pinpointed the issue and the longer I avoid these, the fewer issues I come across when I accidentally eat either glyphosate or rapeseed oil. There are at least two plausible mechanisms I’m aware of for this—one, my microbiome is changing in response to the new selection pressures I’m applying (glyphosate is a known microbiome disruptor) and two, the immune system is in some sense forgetting or relaxing it’s response as a result of not being further provoked.
As a result of this, I have new rules of thumb for healthy eating:
- If it can be harvested dry, opt for organic (almost every grain and seed)
- For olive oil, prefer single origin or just buy the “nicest looking” one that is not a major brand.
For those more research inclined, the search terms “glyphosate as a dessicant” will turn up charts produced by farmers for farmers advising on the use of glyphosate sprayed on crops immediately before harvest in order to dry crops faster and also boost yields. It should also turn up charts of glyphosate use over time. I don’t think chemical would explain stuff much older than the 1970s, but I think it’s a reasonable contender for the acceleration of the trend around this time.
This is shockingly similar to what I’m going through. And the fries that fucked me up the other night are indeed fried in canola oil. I’m cautiously optimistic but I know how complicated these things can be -_-. Will report back!
I wish you the best and look forward to hearing how it goes.
This bit caught my eye:
I searched for [is olive oil cut with canola oil] and found that in the twenty teens organized crime was flooding the market with fake olive oil, but in 2022 an EU report suggested that uplabeling to “extra virgin” was the main problem they caught (still?).
Coming from the other direction, in terms of a “solid safe cheap supply”… I can find reports of Extra Virgin Olive Oil being sold by Costco under their Kirkland brand that is particularly well sourced and tested, and my priors say that this stuff is likely to be weirdly high quality for a weirdly low price (because, in general, “kirklandization” is a thing that food producers with a solid product and huge margins worry about). I’m kinda curious if you have access to Kirkland EVOO and if it gives you “preflux”?
Really any extra data here (where your sensitive palate gives insight into the current structure of the food economy) would be fascinating :-)
Next time I have a chance to pick up Kirkland olive oil I’ll give it a try and report back.
I made a decision around this time of dietary changes to stop trying to cut so many corners wtih food. As a calorie dense food, even paying an “outrageous” double or triple the cost of cheap olive oil barely dents the budget on a cost per calorie basis. And speaking of budgeting, I had mental resistance to spending more on food so now I guesstimate what percent of my food budget I spend over the “cheapest equivalent alternative” part and I label as “preventative healthcare”.
I look forward to your reply!
(And regarding “food cost psychology” this is an area where I think Neo Stoic objectivity is helpful. Rich people can pick up a lot of hedons just from noticing how good their food is, and formerly poor people have a valuable opportunity to re-calibrate. There are large differences in diet between socio-economic classes still, and until all such differences are expressions of voluntary preference, and “dietary price sensitivity has basically evaporated”, I won’t consider the world to be post-scarcity. Each time I eat steak, I can’t help but remember being asked in Summer Camp as a little kid, after someone ask “if my family was rich” and I didn’t know, about this… like the very first “objective calibrating response” accessible to us as children was the rate of my family’s steak consumption. Having grown up in some amount of poverty, I often see “newly rich people” eating as if their health is not the price of slightly more expensive food, or their health is “not worth avoiding the terrible terrible sin of throwing food in the garbage (which my aunt who lived through the Great Depression in Germany yelled at me, once, with great feeling, for doing, when I was child and had eaten less than ALL the birthday cake that had been put on my plate)”. Cultural norms around food are fascinating and, in my opinion, are often rewarding to think about.)