Zoë & Dr Nina Teicholz talk about seed oils

Bio
Nina Teicholz PhD is a science journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet (2014). She’s been a pioneer in challenging the conventional wisdom on saturated fats, vegetable (seed) oils, the health halo around the Mediterranean diet, and the reliability of the U.S. national dietary guidelines.
Her work has been favorably reviewed by top medical journals, including the Lancet, and her own writing has been published in academic journals such as the BMJ, Nutrients and a journal of the National Academy of Sciences as well as media outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic and Economist. Nina has also appeared on most major TV networks and many podcasts, from NPR to Joe Rogan.
She is a graduate of Stanford and Oxford Universities, and in 2024, she received a PhD in nutrition focused on evidence-based nutrition policy. For years, she ran a non-profit called the Nutrition Coalition aimed at updating the US dietary guidelines with the current science. Her work can now be found in a column on Substack called “Unsettled Science” (Ref 8).
Nina has no commercial ties and has never received support from any industry for her work.
Show notes
As a summary of the podcast with Nina…
Nina and I are great friends and we have done most of our academic work in the same area – dietary guidelines, especially dietary fat. This was a cracking hour discussing our shared areas of interest but focusing especially on plant/seed oils.
We covered how Nina, as a journalist, got into this whole dietary fat area – it started with an article she was commissioned to do on trans fats. Interviewing industrial chemists about stuff that was ending up in the food supply, she realised that there was a bigger story. Nina pursued it and the Big Fat Surprise was written after nine years of research. We rattled through:
- What are trans fats? What is hydrogenation?
- How did these fats get into our diets?
- When and how the American Heart Association had a big impact. What evidence existed to support this impact at the time.
- What did we use when trans fats were banned?
- The randomised controlled trials that have been done in this area and what they found (or didn’t find).
- Why the guidelines don’t change when the evidence is so overwhelming that they should.
- Seed oils and oxidisation/inflammation – what’s the story here?
- How bad are plant/seed oils?
- What should we cook with?
- Some people in our field claim they’re responsible for everything – even diabetes and obesity – is there evidence for this?
We hope you enjoy this hour on this much asked about topic.
Show links
A few links were promised during the show. Here they are:
- Link to Nutrition Coalition website (mentioned just after 1 min) (Ref 10).
- Link to EAT Lancet Diet (mentioned just after 26 mins) (Ref 11).
- Link to my plant sterols paper (mentioned at 31 mins) (Ref 12).
- Link to Csallany's work (mentioned around 39 mins) (Ref 13).