When you think about vegetable oils what comes to your mind? I loved to eat margarine when I was little. And when I would see the ingredients list it just said vegetable oils and a bunch of words I was too little to understand. I imagined it was made from real vegetables like broccoli or carrots.

It is not exactly vegetable oil. A better name would be seed oil. But seed oil doesn’t really sell as well as vegetables, right? Vegetables are supposed to be good for you. So it’s just a marketing technique. They didn’t really lie. They just used a different name. And all vegetables really do come from seeds. Companies use marketing and research to inform the public about the benefits of their products. But the vegetable oils industry did more than that. They paid organizations to tell us what they wanted not taking any responsibility for the product they have created. Just for the sacred cause of making more money.

American Heart Association

Since Crisco was marketed as a healthier alternative to animal fats from the very beginning scientists were curious about it. And they started experimenting with it and doing studies on people who were using it. And after getting their results they slowly started telling people and the public just how bad these hydrogenated oils were for your body.

One group of scientists found out that although replacing animal fats with vegetable oils did lower cholesterol by 13% it also made you twice as likely to die from cancer. Another group replaced animal fats with vegetable oils in the diets of the men who had a history of heart disease and discovered that the ones who ate vegetable oil had a higher chance of dying. And they were telling the world all about it.

But by that time Procter & Gamble formed a secret alliance with the one organization that mattered most. You see in the 40s and 50s the American Heart Association wasn’t the huge non-profit it is today. Back then heart disease wasn’t exactly a big deal for most Americans. But in the 1949 American Heart Association was selected to receive a 1.5 million dollar prize from a national radio competition whose main sponsor was, yes Procter & Gamble. And 1.5 million dollars in 1949 would be the equivalent of 19 million dollars today. A huge boost for a relatively unknown organization at the time. And it helped them go national overnight.

The American Heart Association now had all the resources and power it would need to influence the public. They started recommending polyunsaturated vegetable oils to replace saturated animal fats. Giving the seed oil industry a tremendous boost. And that’s not all that they did. In 1961 the same American Heart Association gave the seed oil industry what they were actually paid for. And they forever changed the way Americans thought about vegetable oils. A study was released that same year by the Association and it was done by a famous physiologist named Ancel Keys. In the study, he claimed that animal fats like butter actually raised cholesterol. High cholesterol causes heart attacks. His solution was to replace all animal fats with vegetable oils because of their proven ability to lower cholesterol by 13%.

Health issues with vegetable oils

In the process of hydrogenation as I mentioned earlier toxic permanently liquid seed oils are turned into solids safe to consume oils. But during the process a new type of fat was created, trans fats. And now it is considered the worst fat for anyone to eat because it’s not made in nature. Higher consumption of trans fats is associated with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and they worsen memory function even in the young and healthy.

In 1990 two Dutch scientists released a study revealing that artificial trans fats actually raise your cholesterol, even more than animal fats do. Causing a huge risk for coronary heart disease. But this wasn’t enough for the seed oil industry to change its marketing. They did not accept the study or its results.

So in 1994, a group of edible oil manufacturers funded Joseph Judd, a scientist from the US Department of Agriculture to try and prove that trans fats didn’t cause heart disease. But he ended up with the same results as the Dutch scientists. And this finally caused the US Food and Drug Administration to pressure the seed oil industry to at least label how much trans fats are in their products. Crisco shortening alone contained up to 50% trans fats.

According to the studies if just 2% of your daily fat intake comes from trans fats your risk of heart disease goes up by 23%.

Are we really trans fat free?

Seed oil manufacturers and especially Procter & Gamble didn’t want to admit defeat. So instead of getting Crisco trans fat free by maybe using better and safer oils for their products, they made a different decision. The company went to Monsanto and asked them to create a genetically modified soybean that doesn’t produce artificial trans fats in the hydrogenation process.

And soon all their products sported a big red stamp saying 0 trans fats. When the Food and Drugs Administration finally announced in 2003 to put trans fats content on the labels they were still allowed to say 0 trans fats on their products as long as the product didn’t contain more than 0.5 grams per serving.

So if on average in 1993 Americans were consuming 30 grams of seed oils per day with the 0 trans fats label on they actually consumed 30 grams of seed oils with 0.5 grams of trans fats in them. But the important thing is that the label said it was trans fat-free.

In 2015 the Food and Drug Administration announced again to officially ban artificial trans fats from all foods giving everyone until 2018 to get them completely out of their products (except the 0.5 grams again). And that is why you can see Crisco still on the shelves in your grocery stores available to buy. It may not be as popular as it was before but it’s still out there.