What miracle cures should we expect from cutting out seed oils?

Who're you calling idiopathic?!

No more sunburn, no more gum bleeding

One of the crazier things that make me think the whole seed oil thing might have a kernel (heh) of truth to it is when I stopped getting sunburn.

You see, I have always gotten the craziest sunburn. I remember falling asleep at the beach as a kid, and being unable to sleep through the night or turn on my back for 3 days due to the pain.

Last year, I got a massive sunburn from walking around for about an hour on a slightly sunny fall day.

And then, this year, I sat in the July summer sun, shirtless, for 2 hours. No sunscreen.

I turned a very slight pink that evening. The next morning, it was gone. Anything less than 1h of direct noon summer sun doesn’t seem to do anything, not even turn me pink.

Let’s be clear: I still get hot, I still get dehydrated, it’s not that I’m suddenly immune to the rays of the sun. But my skin doesn’t seem to “burn” in that sense much any more.

The crazy seed oil people on Twitter seemed right: after cutting out seed oils for about 8 months at that time, I had become nearly immune to sunburn. This summer, for the first time in my life, I went into the sun on purpose instead of avoiding it. I worked up a very nice tan, probably the best tan of my life.

Then, at my next teeth cleaning, the dentist remarked how for the first time ever, my gums weren’t bleeding. In fact, my gums were so much less inflamed that I hardly noticed the instruments. No amount of flossing had ever made a difference. Yet now, a little over half a year into cutting out seed oils, I had non-inflamed gums for the first time in my adult life?

And, of course, my digestion on ex150, my entirely seed-oil-free diet, was perfect. Originally I attributed this mainly to the absurdly low amount of fiber, as I eat less than around 3g of fiber per day.

But with these other phenomena, and understanding the working mechanism of polyunsaturated fatty acids in the body, I think the seed oils were likely a big part of it.

There are plenty of anecdotes from other seed oilers like Tucker Goodrich, who battled diverticulitis and nearly died from it.

There’s even a clip from the comedian Louis CK where he jokes about always being in a 48h window of diarrhea. This is not normal.

My digestion was never in the dangerous territory, but it certainly wasn’t as picture-perfect as it is now. Just that alone is a reason why I might never give up this sort of diet, or at least not the benefit of perfect digestion. It’s amazing to just feel… amazing all the time.

Insane oxidized in the (cell) membrane

What is this mechanism? Well, turns out that your cells, specifically your cell membranes, are made from fats. Let’s look at this nice image from Wikipedia.

Cell membrane composition and structure, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_membrane

Every cell in your body is surrounded by a membrane. That membrane is made of a double layer of phospholipids, with cholesterol sandwiched between them. Phospholipids of circulating red blood cells, incidentally, is what the OmegaQuant test measures.

One of the dangers of polyunsaturated fatty acids is that they oxidize quite easily, due to the fact that they are polyunsaturated. Especially when heated, they oxidize much more rapidly than monounsaturated or the very stable saturated fats.

That’s why deep frying in seed oils produces some of the worst junk food imaginable: french fries, fried chicken, potato chips. Restaurants fill the fryer up with oil once, and then keep it heated for days, weeks, even months at a time. Brad from Fire in a Bottle did a video about this, and he ought to know - he’s a chef.

He quotes a Spanish study on restaurant policies around the changing of fryer oil, and the results are.. well, see for yourself:

“Monthly", “no defined frequency”, “every 2 weeks”, “monthly”, “monthly”..

It’s safe to say that when you eat deep-fried foods, the oil they were fried in will typically have been heated for weeks to months. Deep fryers usually operate upwards of 300°F, often up to 450°F. Many restaurants don’t shut the fryers off over night, since it would take more time to heat them back up from room temperature in the morning and thus delay operations.

Finally, almost all but the most expensive seed oils are heated to 450°F for about an hour during production already. When you buy them in the store, they’re already pre-oxidized, and then you or the restaurant heat them up - in the case of a deep fryer, again and again.

When you eat these oils, they contain all sorts of nasty toxins. But just as bad, oxidized PUFAs will be incorporated by your unknowing body into all sorts of cell membranes, for any cell that is up for regeneration. And your body is nearly 100°F - constantly exposing the PUFAs in your body to low-level heat.

Is it weird to believe that building a cell from broken materials, in this case oxidized PUFAs, will make this cell malfunction?

You wouldn’t build a house with burned logs.

A skin cell that can’t protect you from UV light (in fact, the UV light is likely just deep-frying the PUFA in your skin cell membranes further). A mucous membrane that leaks and cannot keep separate what it’s supposed to can cause leaky gut, IBS, bloody gums, you name it. And leaky gut, of course, can lead to auto-immune issues, where things from your stomach and intestine make their way into the blood stream, triggering your immune system.

Is this the cause of the epidemic in auto-immune diseases? And why everybody and their mom seems allergic to gluten these days?

There’s even a theory that both type 1 and type 2 diabetes are really caused by dysfunction of (different) cells related to glucose metabolism.

We know type 1 diabetes is caused by the beta-cells in the pancreas ceasing to produce insulin. What’s making these cells malfunction?

And what other random “idiopathic” (=medicine doesn’t know) maladies are caused by damaged cell membranes? The attack surface is pretty much every cell in our body.

Sounds crazy? That’s what I thought before I became nearly immune to sunburn. Oh, did I mention my vision is back to being as good as it was in my 20s?

Time heals all wounds

Specifically, time without consuming PUFAs. If we assume that random cells in our body, whenever they were created, have damaged cell membranes, when could we expect them to be fixed?

Luckily this has been studied. Here’s a very cool table from http://book.bionumbers.org/how-quickly-do-different-cells-in-the-body-replace-themselves/, showing us the turnover time for various cell types.

Funny how they measured these: they realized the nuclear weapon tests during the Cold War irradiated basically everybody and everything, so they picked a radioactive isotope with a known half-life and measured it over time in different tissues. The rate reduction in the isotope told them how fast the cells in the tissue had been regenerated.

Turnover times of different cell types. From: http://book.bionumbers.org/how-quickly-do-different-cells-in-the-body-replace-themselves/

Small intestine: 2-4 days
Stomach: 2-9 days
Gastrointestinal colon crypt cells: 3-4 days

My, it’s almost as if you could expect IBS and other digestion symptoms to improve within a week of removing PUFAs from your diet.

Skin epidermis cells: 10-30 days (sunburn, anybody?)
Pancreas beta cells (albeit in rats): 20-50 days

So should we expect diabetes symptoms to massively improve within 1-2 months of cutting out seed oils?

Red blood cells: 4 months

Ah, yes, these are famously tested in diabetics via the HbA1c, which measures how much glycation damage a red blood cell (RBC) has seen during the course of its life. This tends to roughly correspond to the average level of blood glucose.

But these (or their phospholipid membranes) are also what’s measured via the OmegaQuant test.

This is good to know when looking at OmegaQuant results: what we’re looking at is the area under the curve during the last 3-4 months. It’s a little bit like sitting on the side of the road and counting the cars that drive by.

Fat cells: 8 years.
Cardiomyocytes (heart muscle): 0.5-10% per year
Central nervous system: life time
Skeleton: 10% per year

FML, 8 years for fat cells?! But you’re saying there’s a chance! The fact that we can regenerate cells in the heart, CNS, and skeleton is pretty amazing. Maybe we can even reverse a certain amount of heart damage this way?

By the way, this turnover happens constantly, and obviously not all cells of one type turn over at the same time. It’s rather like birthdays: not all of your friends have their birthday on the same day, even though they all celebrate it once per year. But after 1 year, all your friends will have “turned over” one year.

Early wins, in it for the long run

What’s very cool about this is that it makes the voyage of seed oil denial so much easier. You don’t have to sit there, patiently, for 7 years before you see any benefits.

In fact, a ton of the benefits come right away. Lots of cells in the body have turnover in the days or weeks. Just doing it for a month gets you down nearly half of the above table!

You could be expecting improvement in any mucous membranes first. Think nose, mouth, gums, stomach, intestines. Skin cells come soon after. Lungs, 8 days.

Blood cells are in the weeks to months, and your immune system cells are cells too.

Pancreas beta-cells (although the number given was for rats) should improve by the 1-2 month mark.

One thing that’s been in the back of my mind since I started getting serious about seed oils: what if my Non-24 is caused by malfunctioning cells in the brain, maybe the suprachiasmic nucleus?

If you don’t recall, Non-24 is a circadian rhythm disorder I have. In short, my natural clock shifts forward by about an hour per day, wandering around the clock.

I accidentally fixed it by going on keto, and it’s the biggest reason I’m nearly 8 years into keto.

But what if keto just circumvents the broken cells somehow? If I cut out seed oils long enough, will the cells in my SCN (or wherever else the damage is) be regenerated, and can I go back on a high-carb diet without Non-24?

I haven’t eaten enough carbs since over a year ago to find out, but maybe I should do a test again some time soon..

Most seed oilers agree that it isn’t clear how long “total clearance” of PUFAs will take, but that it’s probably around 4-7 years depending on how much you had to begin with.

Just over 1 year in now, it occurs to me that I should test for my Non-24 at least once a year.