Inflammatory Vegetable Oils

Inflammation is a big buzz word these days. It has been shown to be the primary driver of the majority of chronic illness. A stressful lifestyle causes inflammation in the body, but so do certain foods.

Some foods irritate the digestive tract, joints, and arteries. Foods that you would have an allergy or sensitivity to are inflammatory to you. Many people notice that when they stop eating gluten, for example, their joints aren’t as stiff and sore.

Industrial vegetable oils don’t cause inflammation due to a person’s allergies or sensitivities, but rather, they are processed in a way that causes them to go rancid, and consuming rancid oils is irritating to the body, causing inflammation.

Have you ever smelled oil that has gone rancid? It is a distinctive smell that is hard to describe, but some say it smells like waxy crayons or wet cardboard.

You may have noticed that old peanut butter or nuts that haven’t been kept in cool conditions can smell or taste rancid. When this happens, we know that the oil has been exposed to its three enemies, oxygen, heat, and light for too long and has “goes bad”.

Therefore, contrary to what we’ve been led to believe, research now shows that industrial vegetable oils such as soybean oil, canola oil, and corn oil are not heart healthy, because they are very susceptible to going rancid in the first place – they are polyunsaturated oils – and their processing itself makes them rancid.

Here’s how those oils go rancid even before they get to the supermarket shelf, but why you won’t actually smell it. The primary reason is that it is a complicated and labor intensive process to extract oil from soybeans, corn, and rapeseed (canola).

The process requires sophisticated machinery to, for example, crack the soybeans, heat them to up to 190 degrees, then use a solvent called hexane to extract the oil from the seed. Hexane is a significant constituent of gasoline.