Just before the November election, future Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr tweeted that seed oils (those extracted from canola, corn, cottonseed, grapeseed, soybean, sunflower, safflower, and rice bran) are driving obesity and poisoning Americans. Defending the place of fast food in American culture, his tweet evokes a golden age when McDonald’s fries were cooked in beef tallow and closes with a reworking of Trump’s ubiquitous MAGA slogan: “It’s time to Make Frying Oil Tallow Again.”
Some fast food chains like Steak ‘n Shake quickly kowtowed to the new beef tallow order. Beyond nostalgia, the health benefits of eliminating seed oils are hard to find, leaving nutritionists baffled and eliciting mostly skeptical articles from just about every media outlet in the US. This confusion stems from the roots of seed oil suspicion, which aren’t located in research, but in some of the darkest, nastiest internet crevices. The problem with seed oils isn’t really (or only) about nutrition. It’s about right-wing identity politics.
The first clue about the origins of seed oil suspicion is its most immediate mouthpieces: alt-health influencers. In 2020, Paul Saladino talked to podcaster and misinformation vehicle Joe Rogan for three hours about the “carnivore diet,” a meat-based diet that excludes vegetables and fruit. Saladino is a doctor of functional medicine, which is a specific type of practitioner of alternative or complementary medicine. Alternative medical practitioners frequently criticise mainstream medicine for addressing only the symptoms and not the root causes of disease, and often focus on diet as a panacea for all health problems. Within alternative medicine inflammation is the commonly attributed cause of many (particularly chronic) health problems. And seed oils have been criticized as a major cause of inflammation.
Physician, writer, influencer, and self-proclaimed “Mother of the No Seed Oil Movement,” Cate Shanahan, coined the term “the hateful eight” (seed oils), which is often repeated in reporting on the subject without attribution. Shanahan claims nature “does not make bad fats… [only] factories do.” Joseph Mercola, a well-known anti-vaxxer who, along with RFK himself, is one of the 12 individuals responsible for the majority of the anti-vaxx disinformation content on social media, claims that seed oils are detrimental. For alt-health influencers, the inflammation that seed oils cause contributes to increasing levels of chronic health conditions, including obesity.
Sacred cows: meat and masculinity
According to nutritionists and health research, these claims make little nutritional sense. Conflicting studies on the health benefits and detriments of seed oils are not conclusive. Among the factors that complicate the picture is that seed oils are used in a lot of ultraprocessed foods. While it’s probably healthier to avoid those foods, that isn’t due to the seed oils. Plus, animal fats, like beef tallow, are also not a healthy choice. What underlies the claims about seed oils is an ideological belief that nature is good and artificial processing is bad. This theme runs through many of the health claims made by Mercola, Shanahan, and others. Tradition is wise and modern medicine is polluting. Life was better when people went to 1940s diners and ate fries cooked in beef tallow.
Similar claims underlie anti-vaccine discourse and permeate alternative health ideas. Nature is claimed to boost immunity, whereas human-made interventions like vaccination and processed foods harm health. But some of the diets proposed to take our bodies “back” to a primordial state of wellness can have other side effects. Saladino, for example, gave up the carnivore diet because it tanked his testosterone levels, caused sleep issues, and led to joint and muscle pain.
And the concern about testosterone levels is significant. Biohacking bros and cryptocurrency aficionados—two of the groups often overly concerned with testosterone levels—enthusiastically took up the anti-seed oils cause. The carnivore diet with its high intake of animal products and refusal of seed oils was supposed to boost these levels which, they believe, have been undermined by modern living and helping to “feminize” men. Meat is seen as healthier because of a perceived link to not just pre-modern but prehistoric diets. They seek to be healthy like Cro-Magnon man was healthy—even though actual evidence of what Paleolithic humans ate or how healthy they were is scant.
This dietary advice doesn’t come from mainstream archaeological research any more than it comes from nutrition research. It derives from 21st century ideology that rejects the food production innovations of the 20th century as unhealthy (like Crisco, the first processed seed oil), a belief they justify with a supposedly ancient pedigree that harks all the way back to prehistoric hunter-gatherers.
This ideology brings together norms about masculinity with testosterone, meat, and muscle. It’s embodied by figures like the bulging-muscled Liver King, Brian Johnson, who claims to only eat raw liver and organ meat (including, of course, testicles) as is required for those who “want to be an alpha organism… strong, robust, and kicking ass.” Of course, a little over a year into his Tik-Tok stardom he was forced to admit that he had “lied and… misled a lot of people” as he’d been consuming large amounts of steroids as well.
It’s also embodied by Bryan Johnson (different person, no relation), a tech billionaire and former Mormon who recently announced he’s starting a new religion called ‘Don’t Die,’ and claims that his million-dollar protocol, which includes infusing himself with his teenage son’s blood, will enable him to live forever. What this ideology expresses through diet recommendations is an identity politics common in the male-dominated tech sector.
Soyboys and lifestyle fascism
Academic Maya Vinokour calls this “lifestyle fascism,” in which men attempt to look good, eat clean, and live forever. Specific body conventions, thinness (for women) and muscled (for men), are elevated as the way to be physically perfected and optimized. Through exercise and diet one can become a superior sort of person. The supremacism in this form of thinking can also be found among Nazis and Hindu Nationalists, associations also found in the overlap between online memes against seed oils and covid vaccines.
Before alt-health influencers took up the anti-seed oil cause, one specific seed oil, soy, already had a potent ironic force in alt-right meme culture. There’s Soyjak, an open mouthed Wojak variation, spread through 4chan and Reddit, that’s often used as a reaction meme in online discourse. The image comes from a photo posted on Twitter in 2016 by the developers of the No Man’s Sky video game, which showed men with their mouths open celebrating the game’s release.
For some, men with their mouths open are weak because smiling is a form of submission in the social darwinist hierarchy of the online right. Open-mouthed men are interpreted as passive aggressive, like women. They’re soy boys—a pejorative term with connotations in online right culture associated with “cuck,” both of which express incel culture’s hatred of being perceived as weak. On the other end of this spectrum is a “chad,” which is a strong, dominant, well-muscled male assumed to be attractive to women.
Soy boys are said to lack normative masculine qualities of competitiveness, aggression, and high libido because they’re affected by supposedly emasculating feminist ideologies. The association with actual soy products like ‘hateful eight’ member, soybean oil, comes from the relatively high levels of phytoestrogen in soy, despite the fact that it has no established effect on testosterone levels. Instead, this is a symbolic association in which men are said to be made more feminine by consuming soy, and more masculine from meat.
Again, it’s a misogynist identity politics discourse, rather than an outcome of rigorous health research. This history and association should lead us to question just what RFK Jr. has in mind when he evokes images of a supposedly healthier past. The symbolic associations of seed oils and how these have evolved from online right discourse suggest that it has more to do with disturbing ideas about gender and identity—ideas with violent undertones—than it does about health. Debunking the junk science, as so many publications have done, is important—but it’s only half the battle.
