Are seed oils actually bad for your health? Here's the science behind the controversy

Are seed oils actually bad for your health? Here's the science behind the controversy

toggle caption Beck Harlan/NPR

By now, you might have heard that seed oils are bad for you — if not from social media wellness influencers, then from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself.

Kennedy has said these vegetable oils — extracted from the seeds of plants, like canola, soybean and safflower — are poisoning Americans and driving the obesity epidemic. Part of the evidence he points to is that obesity rates started to rise as seed oils began to dominate the American diet.

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Many nutrition and health researchers say that while seed oils might not be as good for you as olive oil, claims that they're harmful to health have been stretched too far.

"This is one of the more studied topics in nutrition. So it's sort of extra bewildering to quite a few of us in the field that this is coming up," says Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist and professor of medicine at Stanford University.

He says studies have consistently shown that replacing saturated fats, such as lard or beef tallow, with fats from plant oils leads to better health outcomes.

Still, Kennedy celebrated when the fast-food chain Steak 'n Shake announced earlier this year that it would stop making its french fries with seed oils and use tallow — rendered beef fat — instead.

When we reached out to Secretar