The harms weren't recently discovered, they've still never been discovered. They're not harmful so nothing has changed except the demographic criticizing them flipped from endorsing them. They were never healthier for you either, despite claims by people touted as experts, because those claims were also based on mouse studies and food surveys. It is just the pendulum of money-driven nutrition culture that goes where political winds take them.
By eliminating an oil a whole lot of people will claim they feel better. Even though a recommended substitute, like olive oil, is 80% likely to be a fake version made from...seed oil. That is what a nocebo is. Whereas a placebo, an inert pill, makes up to 29% of people feel better because they did take something, a nocebo is feeling better because they didn't take something. Like seed oils.
It's Non-GMO and Natural and Full of Antioxidants. It is also killing you, if you fall for populist health scares every year.
Supplement and lifestyle influencers need to constantly replenish their Miracle Cures and Scary Chemicals in order to keep the money coming in, so influencers ranting about seed oils can be regarded on this the same way as their claims about microwave ovens, gluten, and trans-fats. Those all wrapped themselves in the same Systemic Conspiracy Beliefs and claimed Emerging Evidence showed Science Was Wrong All Along.(1)
Science was never wrong, it was always just bad epidemiology, like nearly every food claim made in the last 60 years. Sorry if you ate bland food for decades because someone linked salt to heart attacks but that was never real either. Neither was that low-fat diet. Both were just epidemiological correlation.
Sunflower, canola, corn oil, and the rest of "the hateful 8" suddenly being reviled by influencers are called such because they are "processed" and that is somehow a dirty word. While it is fun to imagine a thin urban white food influencer walking into a field of wheat and trying to eat it without "processing" it, the demagoguery shows they don't understand any of the science about food when they suddenly insist that Organic Whole Grain Bread is actually poisonous and causing inflammation.
It is possible that some of the omega-6 polyunsaturated fats in sunflower oil which were called good for us since the 1970s can cause temporary inflammation in really, really high doses, but it doesn't bioaccumulate and you aren't eating 300 pieces of whole-grain bread at lunch.(2)
That's the problem, the consumption of too much everything, not the seed oils. It is as ridiculous as claiming the trans fats in donuts are what makes those unhealthy rather than eating too many calories. Seed oils are in lots and lots of high-calorie foods.
Yet just like with gluten, where some people suddenly swore they had 'sensitivity to bread when it became a fad, some now claim they can feel inflammation eating a piece of bread due to seed oil. Ever since Bobby Kennedy endorsed President Trump. Funny how politics shapes biology that way.
What can you buy instead of seed oils? Food influencers insist olive oil and avocado oil are The New Prius of cooking.(3)
Seed Oils Are Killing You is part of a time-honored war on our food supply that began in the 1950s with cranberries. You read that right, cranberries had a detectable level of a "chemical" that epidemiologists linked to cancer. But back then, America had enough critical thinkers that the federal government was jeered at for wanting to ban cranberries, including both presidential candidates.
It only got worse from there. In the 1980 book "The Amateur" by Robert Littell, the protagonist, who in timely fashion again today had a fiancé murdered by left-wing Palestinian terrorist sympathizers, is an intelligent puzzle-solver for the government, but nonetheless takes "homeopathic aspirin" for his flu. Most people reading it wonder why the novel had a pointless interlude where he gets the flu and friends bring him soup, I wondered if Littell actually believed in that nonsense.
Most likely, he was just reading claims in corporate media like Newsweek. The 1980s also saw an antioxidant craze - found in seed oils! - despite the science consensus that none of the coenzyme Q that companies sell becomes bioavailable in cells and if it did we'd likely be dead.
It was the 1990s where epidemiological scaremongering really took off. Unlike the 1960 presidential campaign, when both presidential candidates ridiculed the War On Cranberries, 44% of the American public elected Woomeister-in-Chief President Bill Clinton. He did what Boomer Environmentalists had always wanted; he gutted nuclear energy, made biofuels a mandate, exempted supplements from FDA oversight, told pharmaceutical companies to advertise their drugs directly to consumers, stole money from science to give to an alternative-to-medicine group inside the National Institutes of Health, and told USDA to create a special group inside government to endorse organic food.(4)
Now, like defending 200,000 new federal employees suddenly hired last year as Vital To The Republic once they were let go during the probation period, the same groups who insisted that sunflower oil was more ethical and saving lives have flipped on it. For political reasons. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former NRDC lawyer whose litigation group touted his beliefs as "mainstream" when the left was against vaccines, cell phones, and meat, finally has the government legitimacy he yearned for, but because he got it from a Republican president they have to change course 180 degrees and declare plant-based foods are bad because they are "ultra-processed."
It's another meaningless claim but sadly common.
Please, Secretary Kennedy, oppose nuclear power and GMOs next. Because actual career government employees are nearly 90% Democrats, and if you oppose those the party will undo President Clinton's Boomer Environmentalism and we'll have affordable energy with reduced emissions plus affordable food with less environmental damage in under five years. And the world will follow.
NOTES:
(1) The reason it rarely goes for "linked to", "suggests", and "correlation" to "causation" is that asking people what they ate and then what diseases they have is is inherently unscientific. It is too easy to create spurious correlations. Trans-fats were endorsed by nutritionists because butter was killing us and vegetable oil was touted by nutritionists and governments because vegetarian groups produced epidemiology that claimed animal fats were killing us. The gluten scare fad was created by a study so small, 13 people, it was ridiculous - but slightly better than the same progressives who insisted vaccines caused autism, a study using 12 kids.
(2) Just because someone overdosed a mouse on omega-6 fats with a tube stuck into its stomach and caused inflammation doesn't mean you're eating enough to matter - or that mouse are tiny people
(3) Since up to 80% of olive oil is fake, this is a funny claim, but like with sunflower oil and gluten, people will insist they feel better once their nocebo is replaced with another nocebo.
(4) Add on unscientific claims about PM2.5 ("virtual" pollution) causing autism and third-hand smoke causing everything except lung cancer and it's a surprise Millennials trust anything government panels claim.
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