Dr. Anthony Gustin runs through the math in this twitter thread (reproduced here for readability):
24% of our calories come from seed oils! 😳
— Anthony Gustin (@dranthonygustin) April 13, 2022
My dream? Use regenerative beef tallow to replace all seed oils. In fryers, at restaurants, in sauces, packaged food, everywhere.
This would transform public health and save the planet.
But is it possible? Let's do some math.👇
24% of our calories come from seed oils! 😳My dream? Use regenerative beef tallow to replace all seed oils. In fryers, at restaurants, in sauces, packaged food, everywhere.This would transform public health and save the planet.But is it possible? Let's do some math.👇Context first:Why tallow? It is healthy for humans and the planet. Managed properly, it's the only truly sustainable way to produce fat.Regeneratively raised cattle restore ecosystems, sequester carbon, & support small local farmers while producing healthy fats for humans.
Why no seed oils?They're grown in industrial monocrops and destructive to the environments. 4 of 5 top GHG emitting crops are seed oils.They destroy our health and are connected to obesity, heart disease, cancer, neurodegen, AMD, & more, and only benefit corporations.Alright, math time. 🤓How much seed oil do we consume in North America alone per year?23 million metric tons, or 23 billion kilograms (~51 billion pounds). Per. Year. 🤯This figure is rising rapidly and predicted to be 72.6 billion lbs by 2026.How much tallow could we get if we rendered ALL the fat from EVERY single beef cattle per year into tallow? 🐄
- 30 million cattle harvested per year
- 150 pounds of fat trim per carcass
- 90 pounds of tallow yield rendered from fat
30mm x 90 = ~2.7 billion lbs of tallow possibleUh oh! There's only 2.7 billion lbs of tallow possible per year, to replace 51 billion lbs of seed oils consumed per year.That's only ~5.3% possible seed oil replacement.And this is using ALL cattle, most of which are grain-fed and conventionally raised (I do not support).P.S. The US currently produces only ~100 million pounds of tallow per year. 😬Unfortunately we can't add the ~2.1 billion pounds of butter produced in the USA each year because it's already being consumed.Even if it were additional supply that was replacing seed oil consumption, it would still only be another 4% replacement.Is lard an option? Nope.99% of all pork (even pastured) is fed corn and soy, so lard FA profiles are worse than canola oil. This is terrible for the environment as huge monocrops are needed to support high PUFA lard.We do not have a scalable regen pig option on the table.Alright, well we need more grazing animals to improve ecosystems, provide nutrient dense meat, & build our top soil back anyway, great!But we'd need at minimum ~20x more cattle (with 100% utilization of fat) to be able to match yearly seed oil consumption.Is that possible?Grazing currently takes up 741 million acres in the US. If we 20x'd this, we'd need 14.8 billion acres.But we only have 1.9 billion acres of land in the lower 48!Even if we had an 8x improvement of land use utilizing rotational grazing instead of conventional, it won't work.A fair argument would be that we don't need to be eating all of these seed oils. Over consuming them is why we're fat and sick in the first place, right?But even if we consume 10x less oil, we can still only replace 50% of it with tallow if we used EVERY SINGLE head of cattle.I'm starting to do work on how much high-quality real food can scale to support the food system (regen meat and tallow, eggs, butter, avocado, coconut, etc.) and it is looking pretty similar to the grim calculations above.This is clear: We need as many people as possible buying and consuming regenerative ruminants, and all parts of them (bone broth, organs, tallow, hides, etc), so we can get as much nutrition while improving ecosystems as we can.But it's not enough.We have essentially two options:
- Focus only on the ability to grow regen food and ignore the 95%+ of seed oils and watch billions die from hunger
- Try to find some solution to bridge the gap between maximizing local regen food supply AND provide better alts to seed oils
If we focus on option 1, corporations are going to continue to pump these seed oils into our food system & profit at all costs.I personally have a hard time standing by watching our population be involuntarily poisoned, knowing that real food isn't an option, & doing nothing.So, option 2 it is for me. This is why I'm working mostly now on trying to scale regenerative practices and products as fast as possible AND working on other alternatives that will help replace destructive seed oils.I'll be chatting far more about all of these projects soon.Feel helpless after this math? Don't fret! Here's what you can do:
- Know & support your farmer
- Buy regenerative animal products
- Eat local
- Stop eating seed oils
- Share this information with friends & family
P.S. You can find local farms here:The convergence of health and sustainability issues we face as a species is undeniable. We need as many people working on problems like this as possible.If you have any clear solutions to replace seed oils with regenerative sources that I'm not thinking of, I'd love to hear!If you want to stay tuned on all of the projects I'm working on follow along here @dranthonygustin or subscribe to my newsletter with 130k+ other people here:
Why do we have to use so much oil in our food in the first place? Couldn't we just eat less fried food? There are other ways to cook that don't require fat. Roasting, baking, boiling. Baked potatoes are just as good as french fries. If making processed junk food requires oil, well, no one should be eating it anyway. I don't suppose donuts would be that much less unhealthy if they were made with beef tallow. Educating people so they stop eating junk food would go a long way to reducing the need for seed oil.
ReplyDeleteAgree 100%. But you can't just remove 1/4 of the calories we eat without replacing it with something.
Delete"We" have to make up those calories from something. If 8-20% of our calories come from seed oils (depending on the estimate used), and we remove them, how do we make up that deficit?
ReplyDeleteSomething else has to go up. For billions of people, that is a real problem.
The key phrase here is "billions of people". I get in trouble every time I say this. I'm not advocating mass extermination. It's just that we have an unsustainable number of people on the planet. At least if we want them to have access to a reasonably evolutionarily appropriate diet.
DeleteIf we could only come up with some sort of long-term plan to gradually reduce population via attrition…but then there goes the tax base…
I'm with Unknown above. We don't HAVE TO eat seed oils in America.
ReplyDeleteI thought there was a missing portion of this though. Seed oils turn rancid very quickly, and even faster when they are heated up.
Does beef tallow last any longer than seed oils? What is the life of tallow in a deep fryer versus the "oil change" interval for seed oil?
Saturated fats such as tallow are much more resistant to oxidation. It's the double bonds in polyunsaturated fats that encourage oxidation.
DeleteI believe McDonald's used tallow for their french fries until the Center for Science in the Public Interest forced them to quit in the 90s, as part of the ongoing demonization of saturated fats.
Yes, beef tallow lasts much longer, it's much more stable. For fryers that should be a real benefit.
DeleteCan olive oil help to fill the gap?
ReplyDeleteThere is a wide spectrum of f.a. constituents in the various bulk vegetable oils including high oleic varieties of seed oils. Transitioning to varieties with lower pufa content and high mufa would be a logical path to take.
High linoleic varieties are already not very popular with the makers of such things as potato crisps and other fried snacks since they get rancid very quickly both during the manufacturing stages which makes it expensive to keep replacing them, and during product storage because it makes the products go stale faster. Hence the development of high oleic oil varieties.
Metabolically speaking, monounsaturated fats are kind of neutral. Saturated fats are good, generally; polyunsaturated fats are not. My understanding (limited as it is) of metabolic chemistry is that a certain amount of saturated fat is necessary.
DeleteThat's an overgeneralization of course, because your garden-variety mammoth contained fats along the whole spectrum. But the majority were saturated. And that's what we evolved on.
I wish I could find it now, but once I ran across a video of fat molecules being processed by a mitochondrion. It was snipping off two CH sections at a time—snip, snip, snip. But when it hit a double bond it would toss the rest of the molecule away. (My memory of this might be defective so if anybody can clarify, I'd appreciate it.)
My question is: where do these figures come from? Is this based on food supply numbers, or some metric of what people actually eat? Both of those have their issues, as discussed elsewhere. Either way, I think it's safe to assume we don't actually need to replace all of those calories, given everyone is generally overfed. I think a better way to think about this is how to best decrease linoleic acid intake, which could be accomplished through both increased tallow production (via moving some subsidies from farming to ranching) and creating a mandate for high oleic crops. But, as to my main point, I have a hunch that the current numbers are GIGO with a dash of false premises.
ReplyDeleteThis would probably be a good time to review trans fatty acids. Tucker I don't think you've written much about them here. All I could find was this passing mention
ReplyDeletehttp://yelling-stop.blogspot.com/2013/01/is-tide-turning-on-sugar.html?m=1
I'm not sure that most of the studies relating to trans fatty acids have ' got their heads screwed on right'. Most of them seem overly embedded in the cholesterol theory of heart dusease, in fact several of them don't seem to understand the difference between cholesterol and lipoproteins.
From wikipedia, for convenience, the basics are this :
"
"
Whoops/cont
ReplyDelete"In nature, unsaturated fatty acids generally have cis as opposed to trans configurations.[5] In food production, liquid cis-unsaturated fats such as vegetable oils are hydrogenated to produce saturated fats, which have more desirable physical properties: e.g., they melt at a desirable temperature (30–40 °C; 86–104 °F); and extend the shelf-life of food. Partial hydrogenation of the unsaturated fat converts some of the cis double bonds into trans double bonds by an isomerization reaction with the catalyst used for the hydrogenation, which yields a trans fat.[3][4]"
So trans fats are generated by the incomplete hydrogenation of unsaturated fatty acids and look to be the evil twin of natural pufa in that the unhydrogenated bonds remain unsaturated but the process converts some of them from cis to trans bonds.
The first thing you could consider here is that any harm from a pufa with trans bonds is a proxy for harm from the same pufa in unmodified form with its cis bonds in place? Perhaps the trans is more harmful, perhaps not.
Second point is that there could be (lipoper-)oxidation taking place as a result of the conversion process. But ignoring that for now complete hydrogenation of pufa does not lead to a high trans fat proportion. On the face of it complete hydrogenation of pufa could be another way to increase the saturation levels of fats in the food chain.
These people seem to have eant to have their sponge cake and eat it too by striving to make fats more solid while simultaneously neither making them more saturated nor increasing their trans fat content:
ReplyDelete" Understanding the Complexity of Trans Fatty Acid Reduction in the American Diet
American Heart Association Trans Fat Conference 2006: Report of the Trans Fat Conference Planning Group*"
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circulationaha.106.181947
This is a bit more respectable but dyslipidemia still raises it's ugly head:
"Consumption of Oxidized and Partially Hydrogenated Oils Differentially Induces Trans-Fatty Acids Incorporation in Rats' Heart and Dyslipidemia"
Madiha Dhibi et al. J Am Coll Nutr. 2016.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25794039/
I'm sure there are more nuanced ways of understanding this.
... seem to want to have ...
ReplyDeleteplus other fat fingered typos, ad lib.
Nice, yes, industrial TFAs are clearly not good, but there's such a confounding problem it's kind of hard to know what to make of them.
DeleteThanks for the links!
If you want to trans fat dance with the saturated fat devil you could start with this stuff or your local variety. (Not in The USA evidently. Why?)
ReplyDeletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copha
98% saturated and since coconut oil is very low in pufa, maybe 1.6%, the main constituent being hydrogenated there is the monounsaturate oleic acid. It's enough to turn typically slightly pastey/buttery coconut oil into a hard solid fat at room temperatures.
It seems the only need for this stuff is in industrial crap foods. For Real Food, straight coconut oil is just fine. The emulsifier would make it a no-go for me.
Delete