The Grease Trap: How Seed Oil Fuelled a Culture War

I make a lot of short videos about wellness grifters. The ones who promise the world and treat regulation as a speed bump. The ones who talk about the infinite, unresolved complexity of the human body like it's something they picked up on their lunch break, between the protein shake and the ring light.

And somewhere in the last few weeks, doing exactly that, I noticed something I wasn't looking for.

It didn't matter which corner of the grift I was filming. The yoga-mat flat-earthers. The libertarian anti-vaxxers with their supplement codes and their distrust of anyone with a stethoscope. The manosphere strength coaches selling ancestral masculinity in capsule form. Different aesthetics, different audiences, different products entirely. But scratch any of them and, sooner or later, the same villain crawled out. Seed oils.

Yes. Seed oils. If that sounds like an odd thing to build a moral universe around, that's because it is. "Seed oil" isn't even really a category - it's a term someone invented to bundle together a shelf of oils used to cook things, preserve things, emulsify things, stabilise things. Sunflower. Rapeseed. Canola. The unglamorous backbone of everything from salad dressing to the fryer at your local chippy.

Now, the boring, adult version of this story is genuinely boring: too much of almost anything isn't great for you, seed oils included, and most of us would do well to eat less ultra-processed food generally. That's not a controversial sentence. It's also not the sentence anyone is shouting about.

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Because somewhere along the way, dozens of influencers took a vendetta against something as dull as vegetable oil and turned it into a crusade - not just against an ingredient, but against modern medicine, feminism, government regulation, the entire architecture of institutional trust. What started as a kitchen-cupboard complaint has become a crusade.

What I've been watching, over these last few weeks of scripts and reels, is a pipeline. It starts out looking purely nutritional - a TikTok, a "did you know," a slightly smug carousel post. And it ends somewhere far stranger: a worldview where anyone with an official-sounding title is presumed to be lying to you, and the only real salvation on offer is whatever the person on your screen happens to be selling that week.

I want to give this a name, because once you see the shape of it, you'll start noticing it everywhere else too: Nutritional Grievance - the process by which an ordinary food item gets stripped of its actual nutritional context and reloaded as a symbol for everything a movement already believed was wrong with the world. The oil was never really the target. It's the container.

This is the seed oil-to-conspiracy pipeline - one of the strangest corners of Griftonomics I've found yet. What follows is where it started, how it spread, and where it's currently taking its followers. And, whether you've ever thought about cooking oil in your life or not - the rest of us too.

How a Cooking Oil Found Its Congregation

Every conspiracy needs an origin story it doesn't quite admit to, and this one has a surprisingly clean paper trail.

It starts, of all places, in 2009, with a former triathlete named Mark Sisson and a book called The Primal Blueprint. Sisson's pitch was simple: eat like a caveman, avoid anything a caveman wouldn't recognise, and - buried in the list of modern poisons - "industrial seed oils." At the time it was a footnote in a fairly niche paleo movement that was starting to attract mainstream celebrity attention. Nobody was building a worldview on it yet.

The ignition point came eleven years later, in 2020, when a functional medicine doctor named Paul Saladino sat down with Joe Rogan for three hours to talk about the carnivore diet - meat only, nothing else - and, somewhere in the middle of it, described seed oils as the root cause of most diseases of affluence.

Heart disease. Cancer. Diabetes. Even, memorably, liver spots. It was an enormous claim, made with total confidence, to an audience of millions. Almost every account of how this idea went mainstream starts with this episode. From there it moved fast, and it moved through very specific rooms.

By 2021, a Twitter account called Carnivore Aurelius was fusing anti-seed-oil posts directly with content about "traditional family values" and, tellingly, the failures of feminism. This is the moment the story stops being purely nutritional. The oil is doing double duty now: bad for your arteries, and a symptom of a culture that's gone soft.

Then came Liver King. Real name Brian Michael Johnson, built a nine-figure supplement business on the promise that modern life, and specifically seed oils, had severed men from their evolutionary birthright - capsules of raw organ meat sold at up to $65 a bottle, part of a "primal rhetorical network" researchers have since studied for its overlap with white nationalist and cis-heterosexist ideology.

Today this isn't a fringe belief at all. Last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr - now the sitting US Health Secretary told Americans they were being "unknowingly poisoned" by the same oils Sisson had flagged as a footnote fifteen years earlier. 

Steak 'n Shake switched its fryers to beef tallow to public applause. The FDA Commissioner started raising seed oils in the same breath as heavy metals in baby formula. Louisiana passed a law requiring restaurants to disclose their use of them.

Fifteen years from paleo footnote to federal talking point. Four years from a podcast studio to a Cabinet secretary. That's not how nutrition science normally travels. That's how a grievance travels.

The Part They're Not Entirely Wrong About

The uncomfortable truth is that the people shouting about seed oils are standing next to a real problem. They've just misidentified which part of it is doing the damage.

Seed oils are, overwhelmingly, consumed not from home cooking but from ultra-processed food - the crisps, the ready meals, the drive-thru fries, the entire shelf-stable architecture of modern eating. And ultra-processed food, independent of any single ingredient inside it, is consistently linked to poor health outcomes - obesity, cardiovascular disease, the whole grim list.

So when someone points at a bag of crisps and says "this is making people sick," they're not hallucinating. They're just pointing at the wrong ingredient on the label.

There's also a genuine, defensible instinct underneath all of this: a distrust of a food system that spent decades telling people margarine was healthier than butter, that trans fats were a modern miracle, that the food pyramid was science rather than lobbying.

People who are sceptical of institutional nutrition advice are not being paranoid. They're pattern-matching to a real, documented history of institutions getting it wrong and refusing to say so clearly.

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The sugar industry bought and captured the blame-fat narrative. In 1965, the Sugar Research Foundation secretly funded a New England Journal of Medicine review that downplayed sugar's role in heart disease and pointed at fat instead - funding undisclosed, conclusions shaped by the industry that paid for it. A follow-up study they commissioned themselves found early signs of a sucrose-cancer link. They shelved it.

The trans fat ban took thirteen years longer than the science did to prove it. Regulators knew by the early '90s. The FDA didn't act until 2003, and didn't finish the job until 2018 - a quarter-century after the mechanism was understood.

High fructose corn syrup tried to rename its way out of a health panic. By 2010, it had such a bad reputation that the Corn Refiners Association petitioned the FDA to legally rename it "corn sugar" - a rebrand internal industry emails privately called "dishonest and sneaky" even as executives publicly insisted "sugar is sugar." The FDA rejected the name change in 2012. The industry had already spent millions funding researchers to make the same claim in journals instead.

None of that makes seed oils secretly dangerous. It means the distrust didn't come from nowhere. Get burned three times, you start looking for the next lie.

And the oils themselves are, admittedly, industrial in a way that unsettles people for reasons that aren't purely nutritional. Getting oil out of a rapeseed or a corn kernel efficiently requires heat, pressure, and a solvent called hexane - removed in processing, present only in trace amounts, but "trace amounts of an industrial solvent" is not a phrase that inspires confidence over dinner, however sound the chemistry.

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And to be fair, this genre of food-science jump-scare isn't unique to seed oils. Parmesan cheese often contains "wood pulp" - or, more accurately, cellulose, a plant fibre that also happens to be used as an anti-caking agent in grated cheese, and which the FDA classifies as "generally recognised as safe." 

Iron-fortified breakfast cereal contains actual metallic iron filings - small enough that you'd never notice, but literal enough that you can drag them out of a bowl of cereal mush with a fridge magnet, and it's exactly how your body is meant to absorb the mineral. 

Sand is a food additive, technically - silicon dioxide, the same compound found in beach sand and glass, is added to powdered and grated foods to stop them clumping, and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic rate it safe within its usage limits.

None of these facts are dangerous. They're just badly named for a modern audience raised to distrust anything that sounds like it belongs in a lab rather than a garden. Seed oils have the same problem - a genuinely industrial-sounding processing step, describing a product that, at the doses people actually consume, the evidence doesn't support being harmful. The chemistry is sound. The vocabulary just isn't built for reassurance.

So no - this isn't a story about people being stupid. It's a story about a real, reasonable anxiety about modern food being picked up, sharpened, and pointed somewhere it doesn't actually belong. Which is, if you've spent any time in a therapy room, a very familiar pattern indeed. We are, most of us, quite good at identifying that something is wrong. We are much less reliable narrators of what, exactly, that something is. That's the gap the next part of this story walks straight into.

Who's Actually Getting Paid

If there's one thing social media is better at than anything else, it's monetising a grievance. And for people who spent decades cutting out fat while quietly ingesting high-fructose corn syrup, and watched their bodies pay the price anyway - tens of millions of people are primed and waiting for someone willing to help them point the finger. Someone willing to name the villain, hand them a solution, and make a great deal of money in the process.

The data on this is unusually precise. A 2025 report by the Rooted Research Collective and Freedom Food Alliance identified 53 "super-spreader" accounts driving the bulk of nutrition misinformation on Instagram, reaching a combined 24 million followers.

Carnivore and meat-based content was the single largest category: some 96% of those accounts had a direct financial stake in what they were posting - a supplement line, an affiliate link, a coaching programme. Nearly one in five presented themselves as doctors without the credentials to back it up.

Liver King is the purest version of this, but he wasn't operating alone - and this is the part that matters. His supplement company, Ancestral Supplements, sat alongside a second business called Heart & Soil, co-owned with a man who lent the whole operation something Liver King couldn't manufacture himself: legitimacy.

Remember Paul Saladino from earlier in this story? Yeah, the two men were business partners in an organ-supplement company for years, one supplying the theatre, the other supplying the credentials, before Saladino quietly distanced himself once the steroid story broke. The partnership had already done its job by then.

And underneath both of them sat the ideological plumbing. Carnivore Aurelius - an anonymous account, no medical claims, no supplement line to speak of (well now they do) - did something arguably more important than either of them: it built the audience before there was anything to sell it.

Today, the account has more than a million followers and it feeds its followers a steady diet of "before seed oils, everybody was hot and healthy" posts, sitting in the same feed as content about feminism's failures and the collapse of traditional family life.

Why It's Really About Men

While the seed oil narrative turns up in lots of women led content, I want to focus on the side that speaks to men specifically. Seed oil was never really the target. It was the container for something else - a stand-in for a broader anxiety about masculinity, feminisation, and a modern world these men believe has been engineered against them. A piece in Religion Dispatches put the sharpest possible label on it: this was never really junk science. It's misogynist identity politics, wearing a lab coat.

You can see the mechanism if you look at where the claims actually live. Carnivore Aurelius didn't post about seed oils in isolation - the account built its following on a steady rotation of anti-seed-oil content sitting alongside posts about "traditional family values" and feminism's failures, the two feeding the same feed, the same audience, the same sense of grievance. 

Researchers studying the "primal rhetorical network" around Liver King and adjacent figures like the Raw Egg Nationalist found the same fusion under a different name - an ideology built on raced and gendered ideas about masculinity, laundered through the language of ancestral health.

Seed oils are industrial, processed, modern - soft. Tallow (beef dripping if you're old and British like me) is ancestral, animal, real. Eat the wrong oil and, in this logic, you're not risking your cholesterol. You're accepting a feminised version of manhood the modern world forced on you without your consent.

And this isn't a fringe corner of the internet anymore. It's the media diet. A 2025 Movember survey found 63% of young men now watch masculinity influencers, and 43% of them find that content motivating.

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A separate study of men's media habits found 86% of men use YouTube weekly, with long-form podcast hosts increasingly acting as informal life mentors - and Joe Rogan, the man who gave Saladino his three-hour platform in the first place, ranking among the most trusted voices men name.

This is the specific audience carrying the seed oil panic forward: not internet extremists, but a genuinely large slice of ordinary young men, absorbing a health claim and a masculinity narrative from the same fifteen-minute clip, with no reason to separate the two.

Which is why changing the oil never actually settles anything for the people who believe it. The grievance was never nutritional. It just needed groceries to attach itself to - and once it had a face and a body count, it was ready to travel a lot further than YouTube.

From the Feed to the Federal Register

By 2025, the grievance had a government address.The White House's own MAHA Report - commissioned by Robert F. Kennedy Jr as Health Secretary - states as near-fact that dietary fats shifted over the twentieth century "from minimally processed animal-based sources like butter and lard... to industrial fats from refined seed oils," and flags their omega-6 content as a driver of inflammation.

Kennedy himself has gone further in public, claiming Americans eating fries are being "unknowingly poisoned" by seed oils and pushing beef tallow as the fix. That's not a wellness influencer talking. That's the man overseeing the FDA.

Which brings us to the FDA. Commissioner Marty Makary - the actual regulator responsible for the safety of America's food supply - told Fox & Friends in June 2025 that seed oils were "believed to be pro-inflammatory," and later grouped them with heavy metals, arsenic, and lead when describing what "moms want" removed from baby formula.

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FactCheck.org's review of the underlying research found no evidence to support any of it - infant formula requires the linoleic acid in seed oils by regulation, precisely because babies need it. Makary said it anyway, on television, in his official capacity.

Then it moved off screens entirely. In June 2025, Louisiana signed Act 463 into law - restaurants must now disclose seed oil use to customers, and public schools must phase them out by 2028, over the objections of one state senator who pointed out, not unreasonably, "we like to fry stuff in Louisiana." Steak 'n Shake had already made the switch to beef tallow the year before, to a wave of MAHA-aligned applause.

Five years ago this was a claim on a podcast. Now it's a line item in federal health policy and a compliance requirement on a Baton Rouge menu. The grievance didn't stay online. It got a signature.

What It Actually Costs

Here's the thing nobody selling tallow capsules wants to say out loud: the fear underneath all of this is real. Chronic disease rates are climbing. The food system genuinely has been shaped by decades of industry money masquerading as science. Institutions genuinely have lied, quietly, and taken years to admit it. None of that is manufactured. What's manufactured is the target.

I think about the people actually buying into this - not the influencers, the followers. The dad switching his family's cooking oil because a health secretary told him to. The twenty-two-year-old on his third supplement subscription, still waiting to feel like the man in the videos. They're not gullible.

They're reacting, reasonably, to a system that has genuinely failed them, and someone showed up with an answer that felt like the truth finally being said out loud. That's not stupidity. In a therapy room, that's called finding a container for a feeling you can't otherwise locate.

The trouble is what happens next, because a container that's the wrong shape doesn't resolve the feeling it was supposed to hold. Swap the oil and the inflammation anxiety doesn't go away - it just needs somewhere new to live.

Cut the seed oils and the sense that modern life has stolen something from you doesn't lift - you just need the next villain, and someone is always ready to sell you one. That's the actual business model here. Not curing the grievance. Renewing it. So what does getting off the pipeline actually look like - not as a slogan, but as a practice?

It starts with a question that has nothing to do with nutrition: who benefits if I believe this? Not "is this true" - the seed oil crowd will happily hand you a study, real or misread, for anything you want to believe.

Ask instead who's standing behind the claim, and what they're selling once you've accepted it. Nearly every voice in this story fails that test. The ones who don't - the researchers, the dietitians without a supplement line - are, tellingly, the ones saying the least dramatic thing: eat less processed food, in general, from any source, and move on with your life.

It also means being honest about what the oil was never going to fix. If the real ache is about purpose, or provision, or feeling like the world has no use for a certain kind of man anymore - no fatty acid ratio touches that. That's not a diet problem. That's a life one, and it deserves a real answer instead of a capsule.

And it means institutions doing the boring, unglamorous work of admitting they were wrong faster than once a decade, with less hedging and more plain language - because every quiet correction they bury is another five years of runway for the next person selling certainty for $65 a bottle.

None of that is as satisfying as a villain. But it's the only version of this that actually ends.