Now that Donald Trump and RFK Jr. have launched a national discussion about the role of seed oils in health, and now that Kennedy has been hazed into the presidential cool kids club by eating seed oil fries on Trump Force One, it's time to talk about seed oils. Is RFK right that we should make frying oil tallow again? If you have an X account, please repost this there where it will have the most influence: Repost on X Seed oils are high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which have two or more double bonds, and are uniquely vulnerable to a process called lipid peroxidation, during which they are broken down into small, toxic byproducts that cause cellular damage. I explained the chemistry behind this unique aspect of PUFAs here. I also covered it in my Antioxidant Course. Lipid peroxidation plays a role in most chronic diseases. It damages DNA, which contributes to cancer. It damages lipoproteins, which contributes to heart disease and inflammatory liver disease. It damages proteins in whatever tissue it occurs, contributing to neurodegenerative disease, or Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Lipid peroxidation in pancreas can contribute to diabetes and in the hypothalamus it can contribute to obesity. Lipid peroxidation is not deterministically driven by seed oil intake. Rather, the PUFAs in seed oils are uniquely vulnerable to it, and many other factors determine the production and clearance of oxidants that could cause damage to them. Eating seed oils increases the whole-body burden of PUFAs and thus the vulnerability to lipid peroxidation. Seed oils tend to be high in vitamin E because plants need vitamin E to protect themselves against lipid peroxidation. In the short-term, seed oils will increase vitamin E status. However, vitamin E follows PUFAs wherever they go in the body, and it has a shorter half-life than those PUFAs. As tissue burden of PUFAs increase, the vitamin E requirement goes up, and eventually seed oils can increase the demand for vitamin E…