Modern nutrition advice has failed spectacularly. For years, people were told to ditch butter and animal fat in favor of “heart-healthy” vegetable oils. But emerging research has flipped that message upside down. The same seed oils marketed as healthy may actually be doing more damage to your body than smoking or drinking. Once hailed as progress, they’ve turned out to be one of the greatest dietary disasters in modern history.
Shocking Study Finds Seed Oil Consumption Increases Death Risk More Than Smoking or Drinking
The numbers don’t lie. Recent analyses comparing lifestyle factors found that consuming large amounts of seed oils—especially those rich in linoleic acid like soybean, canola, and sunflower oil—can raise your risk of death even more than being a heavy drinker or a moderate smoker. That might sound dramatic, but the data comes straight from long-term epidemiological and clinical research. Chronic seed oil intake floods your body with unstable omega-6 fatty acids that oxidize easily, triggering inflammation, mitochondrial damage, and cellular stress. It’s a slow, silent burn that compounds over time.
The Data Speaks for Itself
Increased seed oil consumption is strongly associated with a 62 percent higher risk of death—surpassing the dangers of moderate smoking or heavy alcohol use. Obesity remains the leading risk, but vegetable oil intake sits shockingly high on the list. What makes seed oils so insidious is that they’re hidden in nearly every packaged food, restaurant meal, and fast-food item. They’re used to fry, flavor, and preserve—making avoidance nearly impossible without intentional effort. When you consider that these oils didn’t even exist in the human diet until about a century ago, the health fallout starts to make sense.
The Sydney Diet Heart Study: The Truth That Was Buried
The infamous Sydney Diet Heart Study—and later analyses published in the BMJ—revealed a dark secret buried in the heart-health narrative. Participants who replaced animal fats with linoleic acid-rich vegetable oils saw a higher rate of death from all causes, including heart disease. The increase wasn’t small—it was catastrophic. A 12 percent rise in calories from seed oils correlated with a death risk greater than drinking over fourteen alcoholic beverages per week or smoking up to ten cigarettes daily. This wasn’t just correlation—it was metabolic chaos triggered by polyunsaturated fat oxidation.
My Face When Someone Says They Avoid Butter for Soybean Oil
Every health-conscious person has met someone who proudly says they swapped butter for vegetable oil to protect their heart. That belief persists despite decades of data showing the opposite. Saturated fats like those in butter or tallow are stable under heat and play vital roles in hormone production, brain health, and immune regulation. Seed oils, on the other hand, oxidize at cooking temperatures, creating lipid peroxides that damage arteries and DNA. Anyone still clinging to the “butter is bad” narrative has been trapped by outdated cholesterol mythology pushed by the processed food industry.
Soybean Oil May Actually Rewire Your Brain
The dangers of seed oils go beyond the heart. A groundbreaking 2020 study from the University of California, Riverside found that soybean oil alters gene expression in the brain—over 100 genes in the hypothalamus, to be exact. These genetic changes affect metabolism, mood, and social behavior, increasing anxiety, weight gain, and stress reactivity. In other words, soybean oil doesn’t just make you inflamed—it may make you irritable, overweight, and disconnected. It’s hard to believe one of the world’s most consumed “cooking oils” can alter brain chemistry, yet that’s exactly what the evidence suggests.
Where Seed Oils Come From vs. Where Carnivore Bars Come From
It’s almost poetic. Seed oils come from industrial plants, chemical extraction facilities, and high-heat solvent baths that would make an oil refinery blush. Carnivore Bars come from American regenerative farms—grass-finished cattle, tallow, and salt. One is stripped, bleached, and deodorized before landing in your salad dressing. The other is pure, nutrient-dense, and shelf-stable the way food was meant to be. Every bite of a Carnivore Bar delivers the healthy fats your ancestors thrived on, not the inflammatory ones that wreck modern metabolism.
Closing Thoughts
Seed oils represent the greatest nutritional fraud of the last century. They were marketed as modern and scientific, yet they’ve quietly contributed to today’s epidemic of obesity, infertility, anxiety, and heart disease. The truth is simple: our biology was never designed to metabolize these fragile, industrial fats. The body recognizes tallow, butter, and animal fat as real fuel—it sees seed oils as a foreign toxin. The solution isn’t another “superfood” or supplement. It’s returning to the foods that sustained humanity for millennia—foods like those found in the Carnivore Bar.
References
- Ramsden, Christopher E., et al. “Use of Dietary Linoleic Acid for Secondary Prevention of Coronary Heart Disease and Death: Evaluation of Recovered Data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study and Updated Meta-Analysis.” BMJ, vol. 346, 2013, e8707.
- Micha, Renata, et al. “Association Between Dietary Factors and Mortality From Heart Disease, Stroke, and Type 2 Diabetes in the United States.” JAMA, vol. 317, no. 9, 2017, pp. 912–924.
- Deol, Poonam, et al. “Soybean Oil Is More Obesogenic and Diabetogenic Than Coconut Oil and Fructose in Mouse Models.” PLOS ONE, vol. 10, no. 7, 2015, e0132672.
- Deol, Poonam, et al. “Soybean Oil Causes Metabolic and Neurological Changes in Mice.” Endocrinology, vol. 161, no. 2, 2020, bqz044.
- Teicholz, Nina. The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. Simon & Schuster, 2014.
- Lands, William E.M. “Dietary Fat and Health: The Evidence and the Politics of Prevention.” Nutrition & Health, vol. 19, no. 1–2, 2008, pp. 85–108.