May 23rd, 2025

Those of us who closely scrutinize nutrition facts and ingredients lists may have noticed on recent visits to Cid’s Food Market that the prepared foods in the grab-and-go section have begun substituting avocado oil for safflower oil. While such a minor detail may at first seem innocuous, this simple shift in ingredients represents a much deeper story tying together the chronic disease epidemic with maleficent corporate influence in the food industry. Furthermore, this easily-overlooked decision highlights the commitment of Cid’s Food Market to supporting the health of the Taos community in direct opposition to cheap industrial food products that have been economically incentivized by unscrupulous corporate interests.

In order to properly frame this discussion, we must cast ourselves back in time to the dawn of the modern food industry. Prior to the industrial revolution, ancestral human diets typically contained up to ten times as much fat as a modernized Western diet, primarily in the form of saturated animal fats and monounsaturated fruit oils (e.g. olive, avocado, and palm oils). Contrary to conventional wisdom, these fats are highly stable and serve critical functions for human health. Lest we forget, Homo sapiens evolved throughout Earth’s most recent glacial period, or Ice Age, and thus relied heavily on animal fats as a source of calories and nutrients during the exceedingly harsh conditions of that time in our planet’s history. In fact, our consumption of saturated animal fat is at least partially responsible for the biologically-unprecedented explosion in brain growth and neurological complexity that occurred in our evolutionary history throughout this time. After all, the brain itself is essentially composed of fat.

A broad variety of foods that are common in present-day post-industrial diets were virtually absent from the diets of paleolithic and pre-industrial humanity throughout most of our evolutionary history, including most grains, legumes, and dairy products. Among these late additions to the human diet are the oils of hard seeds such as rapeseed (the source of canola oil), cottonseed, and safflower seed, as well as oils pressed from grains and legumes such as corn and soybeans. The seeds these oils are sourced from are prohibitively difficult to process and digest, rendering them inedible to humans and precluding them from viability as a source of nutrition for pre-technological societies. In order to extrude anything resembling nutrition from these highly-inedible plant sources, the modern food industry must heat the seeds to extremely high temperatures (thus oxidizing the delicate unsaturated fatty acids therein) and process them with petroleum-based solvents such as hexane to maximize oil extraction; furthermore, the processed and oxidized seeds are then chemically deodorized to neutralize their powerful odor (thus producing trans fats, which have been associated with a myriad of exhaustively-documented health risks).

One would be justified in questioning how on Earth such an objectionable source of anti-nutrients became so commonplace in American kitchens. That story begins in Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1870s, when William Proctor and James Gamble began using cottonseed oil in their soap-making business; at the time, cottonseed oil was considered a toxic byproduct of the lamp oil industry, which had recently been supplanted by the widespread use of petroleum. Being enterprising young entrepeneurs, Proctor and Gamble discovered that cottonseed oil could be further rendered into a “solid cooking fat resembling lard” through a chemical process called hydrogenation, thus leading to the introduction of Crisco to American markets at the turn of the twentieth century. Over the course of the following several decades, following Proctor and Gamble’s lead, a variety of seed oils that were originally industrial byproducts were re-branded as sources of cheap cooking oil due to their exceptionally low cost of production. Clever marketing strategies were employed by the industrial manufacturers producing these oils in order to promote their use in American homes, in order to overcome the reality that these industrial seeds are alien to the human diet and were hitherto-unprecedented in culinary use.

In the 1940s, Proctor & Gamble (by this time a multi-million dollar corporation) proffered a generous $1.5 million donation to the fledgling American Heart Association, thus funding the rapid expansion of the AHA’s profile in American public health while ensuring the nascent organization would remain beholden to the economic interests of its most generous benefactor by promoting the use of seed oils with carefully-designed scientific research claiming benefits for cardiovascular health. This development coincided with the publication of Ancel Keys’ dietary lipid hypothesis in the medical literature, claiming a correlation between saturated fat and cholesterol consumption and the rising incidence of heart disease in America at that time. Keys’ conclusions have since been thoroughly refuted and his research methods heavily criticized by fellow cardiologists; regardless, his debunked dietary lipid hypothesis has enjoyed widespread circulation among politicized medical-industrial circles to the present day, in spite of the fact that no controlled double-blind clinical trial designed in the intervening seven decades since its publication has succeeded in confirming the correlation between cholesterol and heart disease.

The fundamental metabolic problem with the consumption of industrial seed oils primarily concerns the human body’s requirement of a delicately-balanced ratio of essential omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, polyunsaturated fats that the human body does not produce on its own and must necessarily source through diet. As Chris Kresser, internationally-recognized authority on functional medicine and ancestral nutrition, succinctly summarizes, “Upon consumption, omega-6 fatty acids give rise to arachidonic acid and potent metabolites that are primarily pro-inflammatory in nature, including prostaglandin E2 and leukotriene B4. Omega-3 fatty acids like ALA, EPA, and DHA, on the other hand, give rise to anti-inflammatory derivatives.” Ancestral human diets typically maintained a balanced one-to-one ratio between omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids, thereby sustaining an optimal cellular homeostasis; however in modern post-industrial diets that ratio is often grotesquely disproportionate, in some cases to a factor of ten or even twenty-to-one. Such a severely skewed fatty acid ratio triggers a pro-inflammatory cascade in human tissues that contributes to a dizzying variety of chronic inflammatory conditions from heart disease to multiple sclerosis.

In modern Western diets, the most concentrated sources of high-dose omega-6 fatty acids are the industrial seed oils. These oils are used ubiquitously throughout the food industry, in practically all restaurants and a vast majority of packaged foods, and thus are among the primary contributors to the chronic inflammatory and autoimmune disease epidemic that is silently exploding throughout the world. Furthermore, the highly-unstable molecular structure of industrial seed oils renders them extremely sensitive to heat and light and prone to degradation when exposed to these environmental influences, in the process producing trans fats and lipid peroxides. Chris Kresser once more explains, “Trans fats are well known for their role in the development of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes; in fact, for every 2 percent increase in calories from trans fats, your risk from heart disease is nearly doubled! Lipid peroxides, on the other hand, are toxic byproducts that damage DNA, proteins, and membrane lipids throughout the body. The accumulation of lipid peroxides in the body promotes aging and the development of chronic diseases.”

Needless to say, industrial seed oils have no place in a biologically-optimal, evolutionarily-oriented human diet, and their over-representation in modern Western culinary use has not occurred organically, but rather been dishonestly manufactured by profit-driven agribusinesses and marketed by a captured medical industry. The sad truth is that many food producers and restaurant owners are persuaded to make use of these industrial byproducts-turned-staple crops through cost-benefit analysis, motivated by profit over a genuine desire to provide healthful food that is aligned with our evolutionary development. However, in the words of a close friend and mentor, when it comes to food, “You either pay now, or pay later.” Cid’s Food Market is demonstrating itself to be one of the rare businesses that prioritizes the wellbeing of its community over the proffered path of least resistance provided by the profit-mongers of the corporate food conglomerates. In this critical period of reflection and shifting paradigms in food and medicine, this is a principled choice that will be counted on the right side of history.

SOURCES

1) Kresser, C., 2019, How Industrial Seed Oils Are Making Us Sick, https://chriskresser.com/how-industrial-seed-oils-are-making-us-sick/

2) Gedgaudas, N., 2012, Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and a Longer Life

3) Fallon, S., 2023, Wise Traditions Podcast #406 – Avoid Seed Oils, https://www.westonaprice.org/podcast/avoid-seed-oils/#gsc.tab=0

4) Enig, M., 2000, Know Your Fats: The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils, and Cholesterol