The Truth About Seed Oils and the Disgusting Way Canola Oil is Made, with Dr. Casey Means
What this video covers
This nine-minute clip from The Megyn Kelly Show (excerpted from the full episode with Dr. Casey Means) focuses on two of her signature topics: seed oils and environmental toxin exposure from food packaging. Means walks Kelly through which cooking oils she argues people should avoid and which she considers healthy sources of fat, then describes the industrial processing behind canola oil.
The conversation extends to packaging: Means argues that seed oils stored in thin clear plastic bottles can have microplastics leaching into them and that light getting through the plastic oxidizes the oils, making them more damaging. She closes with practical swaps, suggesting silicone baggies or butcher paper instead of plastic, and urges listeners not to get discouraged, arguing the problem developed in roughly half a century and can be reversed.
- Means names what she calls the “hateful eight” (a term she attributes to Dr. Kate Shanahan): canola, soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, rice bran, and cottonseed oils — and good fats as avocado, coconut, and olive oils plus ghee, beef tallow, and duck fat.
- She claims seed oils are the predominant calorie source in the American diet and says many were created in the wake of Rockefeller’s oil refining as a use for its byproducts — “in a sense we’re kind of eating like engine lubricant.”
- She argues they are rich in pro-inflammatory omega-6 fats that incorporate into cell membranes, outcompeting healthier fats and changing “the structural integrity of our body.”
- She claims plastic bottles leach microplastics into oils and let light in that oxidizes them; Kelly notes seed oils come in clear plastic while olive and avocado oils come in glass.
- The segment runs a factory video of canola oil processing (solvent wash, bleach, steam injection deodorizing), which Kelly likens to “putting it through a car engine.”
- On hormone disruption, Means claims early-onset puberty is now “epidemic,” with American girls starting puberty “years earlier than any other continent” and onset down about six years over the past century; she points to pesticides as xenoestrogens and says atrazine — “illegal overseas” — is used at about 70 million pounds a year in the US and “can actually convert testosterone to estrogen.”
- She closes with practical swaps, suggesting silicone baggies or butcher paper instead of plastic, and argues the situation can be reversed since it developed in about fifty years.