Heather Callaghan
Activist Post
Unfortunately, many Americans simply skim headlines. They might even share information based solely on headlines. And it’s almost like both the media and research communities know this when they choose a headline. Especially when they choose headlines that have a deliberately opposite meaning than the content therein.
When this writer came across headlines that suggested a new genetically engineered soybean oil was healthier to humans than conventional soybean oil – she just had to bite and see what is the newest GMO claim.
“How healthy is genetically modified soybean oil?” one asks innocently. Another says GE soybean oils is slightly healthier than conventional implying that both are a part of a complete breakfast.
Truthfully, the researchers are saying that both soybean oil and a new oil from genetically engineered soybeans are unhealthy. This must be a scientific first – an ounce of truth after years of repetition that soy is healthy- even though it was wrapped in a misleading headline. Still, researchers continue to espouse the virtues of soy even though the natural health consumers have – for the most part – left it behind.
The following researchers, however, went a step beyond by comparing DuPont Pioneer’s new oil to both conventional soybean oil and coconut oil – a first time event.
The Endocrine Society recently presented the following information at their 97th annual meeting in San Diego:
The recently introduced high-oleic soybean oil (Plenish, from DuPont Pioneer) had not been tested for long-term metabolic effects until this study, said the senior investigator, Frances Sladek, PhD, a professor of cell biology at the University of California, Riverside (UCR).
In a previous study, Sladek’s postdoctoral fellow Dr. Poonamjot Deol found that mice fed soybean oil as part of a high-fat diet had higher rates of obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance (an inability to efficiently use the hormone insulin) and fatty liver than did mice on a diet high in saturated fat from coconut oil.
In the new study, the researchers gave four groups of mice (12 mice in each group) different diets for six months. The control group received a low-fat diet, in which 5 percent of daily calories were from fat. The other groups received a diet with 40 percent of daily calories from fat, which Sladek said is an amount common in the American diet. One diet was high in saturated fat from coconut oil, and one had 41 percent of the saturated fat replaced with regular soybean oil. The last group had 41 percent of the saturated fat replaced with the genetically modified high-oleic soybean oil.
Mice fed a diet with either of the soybean oils had worse fatty liver, glucose intolerance and obesity than the group that got all their fat from coconut oil, the investigators reported. However, the mice whose diet included the high-oleic soybean oil had less fat tissue than the animals that ingested regular soybean oil. These mice weighed about 30 percent more than the controls that ate a low-fat diet, while the group on the diet containing regular soybean oil weighed 38 percent more than controls. The mice on the diet that was primarily coconut oil weighed only about 13 percent more than controls. Unlike the diet with regular soybean oil, the diet with the new high-oleic soybean oil did not lead to insulin resistance, according to Sladek.
Although it appears that DuPont’s oil creates less insulin resistance in mice – comparing it to coconut oil is what offers the real perspective needed when it comes to diet. DuPont was trying for something more akin to olive oil and jumping on the 0 transfat bandwagon. Of course, if such extreme ecological and “healthful” interventions hadn’t been unleashed in the first place to create complex problems – the “solutions” wouldn’t be necessary or marketable. But where’s the profit fun in that??
Sladek isn’t sure if this new GM oil could possibly be as beneficial as olive oil but concludes that neither soy product compares to coconut oil. What he isn’t openly saying but presumably wants to – is that soybean oils in any form are no friend to the endocrine system.
Heather Callaghan is a natural health blogger and food freedom activist. You can see her work at NaturalBlaze.com and ActivistPost.com. Like at Facebook.
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For years we’ve been “informed” that coconut oil (outside of fish, a primary source of saturated oil for dozens of cultures in the southern Pacific), was heart-deadly. Yet they didn’t get heart attacks. We’re told that saturated animal oils from the heavy-fat diets of northern Indian cultures would kill us (yet they have been some of the healthiest people on earth, till modern science showed up and told them they should eat soy, canola, corn oils, and margarine, instead).
Human bodies need oils and fats in our diets. Natural oils and fats. Not chemically or genetically modified oils and fats, natural ones. Shall we start a heated debate over whether margarine or GMO butter or GMO corn oil, soy oil or canola or fake “virgin” olive oil are best for us? We don’t have to, millions of year of evolution dictate the need for natural oils.
So far Monsanto and the rest have focused on short-term crops, leaving coconut and olive trees out of their financial loop (these sources take too long to grow). Fortunately for anyone seeking natural sources of oil and fat: organic olive and coconut, and grass-fed dairy and meat will supply us what we need, for now. Till they get around to totally ruining these sources, too.
Note that they’re now feeding GMO alfalfa to “free-range” bison, so that’s a leg up for them. But certainly not for us.