Seed oils

The claim is that industrial seed oils — soybean, sunflower, canola — drive inflammation and chronic disease through their omega-6 linoleic acid. Controlled feeding trials generally show replacing saturated fat with these oils lowers LDL cholesterol, and cohort studies mostly associate higher linoleic acid with lower, not higher, cardiovascular risk. The honest gaps are real: much of the trial evidence is old, measures blood markers rather than disease, and the foods these oils arrive in are usually processed ones, which makes the exposure hard to separate from the diet around it.

Reviewed 2026-09-20

Official sources

Reviewed ingredient

This topic is also a reviewed ingredient, with dose context and claim-level evidence.

How this list was built

We searched Europe PMC for English-language papers published since 2010 whose title contains “linoleic acid” or “soybean oil” or “sunflower oil” or “canola oil” or “rapeseed oil” or “seed oils” but not “conjugated linoleic acid” or “lipid emulsion” or “parenteral”, kept meta-analyses, systematic reviews, trials and observational studies, because a diet or exposure like this cannot be randomised for long and its outcome evidence lives in cohorts, then ranked them by study design first, then recency and citations. Retracted papers are removed.

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