Seed Oil vs. Sugar: Which is Worse?
Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast
Dr. Eric Berg
4.7 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2023
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today we’re going to discuss which is worse: sugar or seed oils packed with omega-6 fatty acids.
Common seed oils are:
• Soy oil
• Corn oil
• Canola oil
• Cottonseed oil
• Safflower oil
• Sunflower oil
On average, we’re consuming way too many foods high in omega-6 fats. Ideally, a person should consume a 1:1 ratio of omega-3 fatty acids to omega-6 fatty acids.
However, the average ratio is 15:1. This imbalance can lead to all kinds of health problems, especially in the cell membranes.
Refined sugar also leads to health issues and is converted to fat, but the extra sugar doesn’t accumulate in the body like omega-6 fatty acids do.
Omega-6 fatty acids (seed oils) lodge into your cells and accumulate in your tissues for 600 days. They are not water-soluble like sugar is and can't be burned off like sugar can.
Both refined oils and refined sugar can deplete important nutrients. While certain whole foods, like fruit, have sugar, they also have nutrients and phytonutrients to help replenish what was lost and provide protection. But seed oils are a highly refined, over-processed part of a seed that doesn’t have any protective factors.
To make seed oils they also use a solvent called hexane to extract the oil from the seed—is it possible some of this solvent could end up in the oil?
Overall, while sugar isn't good for you, omega-6 fatty acids are worse for your health than sugar is.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I was at the grocery store the other day. |
| 0:02.0 | Trying to find some food, right? |
| 0:05.0 | Sometimes it's hard to find actual real food at the grocery store. |
| 0:09.0 | So I'm going through and I just had this thought of my mind. |
| 0:13.0 | If we were to look at this grocery store from the viewpoint of what percent of all these foods have sugar? Okay, pretty high. Is sugar really the bad thing? |
| 0:24.6 | Or is it maybe the refined carbs or the starches? Or maybe it's the seed oils, right? High in omega-6. |
| 0:31.6 | So today I'm going to kind of discuss different types of foods in relationship to how bad they are. Because a lot of times you are in certain environments like grocery stores |
| 0:41.3 | and you have to eat something. So what would be better than others, right? |
| 0:45.3 | Kind of focus more on differentiating sugar versus these omega-6 seed oils. So before I begin, I just want to have you comment down in the |
| 0:58.1 | section below. What do you think is worse? Consuming sugar or seed oils? And I'm talking about the |
| 1:03.7 | soy oil, the corn oil, the canola, the cottonseed oil, the safflower, the sunflower oil. |
| 1:10.1 | I've done a ton of videos on sugar and how bad it is and it creates diabetes, etc., etc. |
| 1:15.6 | And I've also done quite a few videos on omega-6 fatty acids. |
| 1:19.6 | And the importance of getting your ratios of omega-6 to omega-3, |
| 1:22.6 | ideally, I mean, like one-to-one would be awesome if you can go for that. On average, we're |
| 1:28.7 | consuming way too much omega-6, omega-3 fatty acids. I think it's like we're consuming like |
| 1:34.1 | 25 times more omega-6 than we should in our diets. Yes, people will say that we need them. |
| 1:41.7 | They're essential, but we don't need as many. |
| 1:45.1 | And we definitely don't need the type of omega-6 that we are being fed. |
| 1:48.8 | But an average person, as far as looking at the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, like a 15-1 ratio. |
| 1:57.3 | That's the average person in the U.S. |
| 1:59.4 | Now, that's very, very conservative. |
... |
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