Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're talking about seed oils. From Instagram Reels to viral tweets, seed oils have become one of the latest nutrition villains.

And the theme is getting real. People are emptying their cupboards.

Terrified these everyday oils are silently wreaking havoc on their health.

So is this panic justified?

Or does the science require further scrutiny?

Well, scrutiny is Professor Sarah Berry's middle name.

She's going to cut through the confusion, dig into the data,

and tell you whether it's time to rethink your next stir fry.

What is a seed oil, and how is that different from some other sort of oil?

So we get many different sources of dietary fat in our diet.

So you have animal fats and oils that come from animal products.

And dairy is a great example, dairy fat.

You have other vegetable oils.

So, for example, you have olive oil.

But the largest source of oil in our diet comes

from seed oils. And these are very simply put oil that's extracted from a seed, whether it's

sunflower or safflower or corn. The seeds of these plants can be crushed and the oil can be extracted.

That sounds pretty straightforward. And you're saying that actually most of the oils that I would find in like the grocery store have been extracted from these seeds?

Yeah, so the largest contributor of fat in our diet comes from palm oil.

Now that isn't a seed oil, but then nearly all of the rest of the oils that we consume

come from these seed oils. So one of the most common is soybean oil, which is very, very common

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