I have written an article a couple of months back about the integrity of companies that made me want to dig a little deeper into this topic. It is something that I have been aware of for a long time. To be completely honest I have always tried and persisted to avoid buying products from big international companies. Any type of product whether food, drinks, toiletries, or household products. It’s not that I believe their products to be inferior in quality or design. But I do believe that when you buy a product you support the company that makes them. Your money goes to their pockets. And sometimes the history and selling techniques that some of these, if not all of them, employ leave me shocked, disappointed, and wanting to not be part of that story. Not be part of that support.

So what is it about vegetable oils that made me dig deeper? Is it their marketing? Is it the quality of the products they sell? Is it the story behind their success? Not at all. All companies are established to make money. What bothers me so much about vegetable oils is the fact that the sole name of their product is misleading. The sole purpose of their products is based on mass marketing that is not telling the facts to the consumers. It is a fact that they successfully avoid taking any responsibility or accountability for their manufacturing and selling techniques. And the worst of all is the fact that they keep doing it to this day and they are not showing any signs of stopping. So I have decided to share the truth.

Let us go back to the very beginning

We can say it all started to happen in the mid-1800s. In those times people used animal fats for a variety of uses. Making candles, soaps, and primarily for cooking. The type of animal fats used for cooking was lard and butter. And there was nothing wrong with it. A company under the name Procter & Gamble made a decent living selling candles and soaps also made from the same animal fats that everyone else was using. But near the 1870s the economic situation was getting harder. So they decided to switch from animal fats in their products to cheaper alternatives such as coconut and palm oil. Nothing wrong with that. It was a business decision. They called their new creation Ivory soap. It was marketed as a pure alternative to animal fats-based soaps and it came to become the number one soap used by hundreds of thousands of people.

And as it usually happens in life that wasn’t enough. If a company can make more money from cheaper coconut and palm oil, how much more money they can make if they can find an even cheaper alternative? And they came to the idea of using cottonseed oil. This oil was commercially used as fuel in gas lamps and as an industrial lubricant. Unrefined cottonseed oil contains a toxin called gossypol. Gossypol has been found to have several negative side effects, including infertility and reduced sperm counts, pregnancy problems, including early embryo development. And that would be the end of it, but a company that wants more profits always finds a way.

The hydrogenation process

So how would a company use such a toxic cottonseed oil that was suitable for industrial lubrication as a safe product? All Procter & Gamble had to do was to find a way to remove the toxin gossypol from the oil and figure out how to turn this permanently liquid oil into a solid. Compared to coconut and palm oil cottonseed oil was so much cheaper. They hired a chemist named Edwin Kayser to try to figure out a way to get around the toxicity issue. And he came up with a chemical process called hydrogenation. It successfully turned this highly toxic liquid oil into a solid oil.

Procter & Gamble used this cottonseed oil in all their toiletries. But again that wasn’t enough. If the hydrogenation process makes the cottonseed oil safe to use in toiletries why it wouldn’t be safe to use in food products? And their biggest product was born, Crisco shortening. Crisco was new, fresh and so much cheaper than buying real animal fats. After an extensive marketing campaign where they offered free cookbooks, promoting their product as a better and healthier alternative to bad animal fats in just a few years America became dependent on it. But there was no product label on Crisco. It just said it was a shortening. If anyone asked what it was made from, vegetable oil. Is cottonseed a vegetable? Is cotton a vegetable? It didn’t matter. Money was coming and it was a blast.

The era of vegetable oils

Once again Procter & Gamble started thinking. If they were successful enough in creating a safe cottonseed oil into a solid why just stop on cottonseed oil? There were so many different oils out there. So throughout the years using the same hydrogenation process to turn cottonseed oil into a solid it was also used to create soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil, grapeseed oil, and many other industrial vegetable oils.

By 1980 almost every restaurant in the US switched over to using these cheaper seed oils in their fryers. And by 1993 Americans were consuming an average of 30 grams of seed oils per day compared to just 2 grams in 1909.

After The Second World War Procter & Gamble started experimenting with partial hydrogenation. So instead of turning cottonseed oil into a solid they just stopped halfway and leave it as a liquid while still removing all the toxic chemicals which we are so grateful for. These partially hydrogenated oils could be kept on the shelves for years. So we went from using real animal fats to coconut and palm oil to cottonseed oil to now using soybean oil.

And they didn’t stop at that. They went to all other food manufacturers that needed oils in their products. So vegetable oils became a part of the food industry at large. They put it in chips, cookies, cakes, cheese, spreads, all types of processed foods. It was a cheap alternative to animal fats and it made their products shelf life longer than ever before. Vegetable oils started to rule the world.