You may have seen some headlines about a new study on soybean oil as a unique contributor to obesity.

But this is really a pretty misleading interpretation.

So today we're going to take a look at what this study actually found, and it was definitely interesting.

But the takeaways are a lot more nuanced than most of the news coverage I've seen.

Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle, and this is the Nutrition Diva podcast, a show where we take a closer look at nutrition news, research, and trends,

so that you can make more informed decisions about what you eat.

If you follow nutrition news, and honestly, even if you don't, you have probably seen some coverage

of a new study that claimed to reveal a biological mechanism

that makes soybean oil more fatning than other types of fat. Now, the study in question does suggest

that the way our bodies process different types of fats might play a role in whether they are

burned for energy or stored as fat. But there is quite a bit more to this story. For a lot of

people, the takeaway seemed to be that we need to avoid seed oils or maybe outlaw processed foods. My takeaways were a bit

different. So let's start with the study itself. It was published recently by researchers at

UC Riverside, and it involved juvenile mice, so the equivalent of toddlers who grew to adulthood over the course of the study,

but the mice grew up eating different diets. So one group ate a diet that was enriched

with soybean oil, and specifically about 10% of their calories came from linoleic acid.

That's the primary fat found in soybean oil.

And the other group ate a diet with the same amount of fat and calories,

but it was enriched with coconut oil instead of soybean oil.

As these mice grew to full size,

the group that was eating the coconut oil diet maintained

a lean adult weight.

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