How Much Seed Oil Is Too Much? Short-term Consequences of Going Off The Wagon

A cold day in Hell's Canyon

Have I mentioned I got married?

So this post is going to be a joint effort with my wife, Jen.

We went to high school together in Connecticut, and reconnected after many years and found ourselves to be a very good fit.

Unbeknownst to me, she had been suffering from a chronic auto-immune disease, fibromyalgia, for decades, since shortly after we graduated high school.

"Fibromyalgia affects about 4 million US adults, about 2% of the adult population."

When we reconnected in 2019, she was a Greger-style near-vegan, running her own organic farm in upstate New York, and producing most of her own food. She was also quite ill, overweight, and on a number of medications.

So at our first dinner together, after negotiating with the waitress about what food I could eat and winding up with a plate of sausages and a hard cider, I mentioned why I eat the way I do, and told her what to eat:

"Avoid seed oils, refined carbohydrates, refined sugars, and make sure to eat animal protein and animal fats."

Just a sentence. While we were friends, I didn't want to get into a diet debate with a vegan.

A few weeks later she let me know that she had fixed her diet, and was down 17 lbs already (for a total of 56 lbs over the next few months, back to beauty-queen weight).

What she didn't mention until much later was the fibromyalgia. What a near-vegan diet, a physician's care, and drugs hadn't accomplished was fixed with a paleo diet in a few months: the pain went away, for the first time in decades.

She had also suffered from cracks in her heels. I first learned about this from the Barefoot Sisters (podcast at the link), who were also vegetarians. I've long had a suspicion that heel cracks were a function of a low animal-fat diet, and along with the fibromyalgia, the heel cracks resolved.

So two years into this process, we went to LA for a few days for the Ancestral Health Symposium 2021, where I spoke. Since we were staying in a (very nice!) hotel where the conference was held, it was unavoidable that we were going to have to eat out in restaurants, something we do very rarely at home.

We are always careful when we eat out, since I am ridiculously gluten-intolerant. I have no choice. But seed oils are much harder to manage when eating in restaurant. We went to an In-N-Out Burger joint, for instance, and ordered burgers without buns or sauce, telling them I had a wheat allergy. But it's not possible to determine in what they are cooking the burgers. What do they use to lubricate the grill? Obviously we skipped the fries!

Same problem with the restaurant at the hotel: what are the vegetables cooked in? Given that they wouldn't put butter on the table even when they served gluten-free toast (what was in the toast?), I doubt they were using butter for the bread or the sautéed vegetables.

My general assumption is that since I don't have an acute reaction to seed oils, a little bit when I rarely eat out isn't going to harm me.

So when we get home, Jen reveals that her fibromyalgia is back. So are the cracks in her heels. She also had a rather severe intestinal distress which she'd rather not detail here! 

All three are improving, but that's a pretty severe reaction to a few days of not rigorously controlling her diet! The intestinal distress required a fast and a period of carnivory to resolve.

When fibromyalgia was full-on she describes it as having a "whole-body sprain", but now it's just in a few locations, like her hips.  Now the connection between fibromyalgia and seed oils is pretty clear (Albrecht et al., 2019; Cordero et al., 2011; Meeus et al., 2013), and I've helped others put it into remission via a low n-6 diet, but I've never heard of it coming back from just a few days of not-so-careless eating!

Luckily she's improving already.

So this raises a number of questions: 

1. What is the amount of n-6 fats that causes these illnesses?
2. What is the  amount stored in adipose tissue, and how does this interact with dietary intake?
3. How long does it take to clear these fats out of the body, until one can tolerate a small intake?

Jen's only been eating this way for 2 years, after years of being on a high n-6 diet. It took me 5 years to really start feeling totally well, and the last odd health improvement happened after 7 years.

Five years is about how long it should take adipose tissue to lose stored n-6, based on the half-life of fats in adipose tissue. Some tissues with a high turnover, like the skin or gut, appear to happen quickly, some, like cartilage, likely take years, if ever.

In celiac it is recognized that a lack of exposure builds tolerance, and that symptoms also may take a while to return. This was my experience, and my tolerance to small, accidental exposures has grown. Not sure if this will directly apply to Jen's auto-immune condition, however.

In talking to Aaron Blaisdell, the founder and director of AHS, he described how he put his 'genetic' porphyria into remission, he said he suspects it was the seed oils that caused it (an update from his previous position.) For a guy who used to blister under the sun and had to wear denim and canvas when outside, he's looking quite tan!

But a lot of the answers to the above conditions are going to have to be addressed individually, since, as in Aaron's case, there are genetic factors driving individual responses to environmental triggers, and they're not always well understood.

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Albrecht, D. S., Forsberg, A., Sandström, A., Bergan, C., Kadetoff, D., Protsenko, E., Lampa, J., Lee, Y. C., Höglund, C. O., Catana, C., Cervenka, S., Akeju, O., Lekander, M., Cohen, G., Halldin, C., Taylor, N., Kim, M., Hooker, J. M., Edwards, R. R., … Loggia, M. L. (2019). Brain glial activation in fibromyalgia – A multi-site positron emission tomography investigation. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 75, 72–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2018.09.018

Cordero, M. D., Alcocer-Gómez, E., Cano-García, F. J., De Miguel, M., Carrión, A. M., Navas, P., & Sánchez Alcázar, J. A. (2011). Clinical Symptoms in Fibromyalgia Are Better Associated to Lipid Peroxidation Levels in Blood Mononuclear Cells Rather than in Plasma. PLoS ONE, 6(10), e26915. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0026915

Meeus, M., Nijs, J., Hermans, L., Goubert, D., & Calders, P. (2013). The role of mitochondrial dysfunctions due to oxidative and nitrosative stress in the chronic pain or chronic fatigue syndromes and fibromyalgia patients: Peripheral and central mechanisms as therapeutic targets? Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Targets, 17(9), 1081–1089. https://doi.org/10.1517/14728222.2013.818657