The Seed Oil Scam: How Corporate Greed Hijacked America’s Health — And Why We’re Paying for It
By The Craig Bushon Show Media Team
America’s kitchen used to run on butter, lard, and beef tallow — fats our grandparents relied on to raise strong, healthy families. But a century of relentless corporate manipulation flipped our diets upside down. Today, seed oils like soybean, corn, canola, sunflower, and cottonseed saturate our pantries, restaurant fryers, and processed foods. The tragic irony? We were sold this transformation as “heart healthy.” It was anything but.
Start with Procter & Gamble. In 1911, they launched Crisco, a hydrogenated shortening made from cottonseed oil — an industrial waste product at the time. To sell it, they waged a marketing war against natural animal fats, painting them as old-fashioned and even dangerous. By the 1940s, P&G was funneling serious money into the American Heart Association, which soon emerged as a national powerhouse, pushing guidelines that turned America’s collective palate from butter to Crisco. That clever investment exploded P&G’s profits and forever altered the American diet.
Meanwhile, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), two of the biggest agribusiness giants on the planet, scaled up crushing facilities to process soybeans and corn into oil, animal feed, and fuel. They didn’t just profit on the oil you fry with — they built entire global empires on cheap, subsidized commodity crops. Every snack aisle in America is stacked with chips, cookies, and packaged foods engineered around cheap seed oils, designed for a long shelf life and maximum corporate return.
Nestlé and PepsiCo jumped in by reformulating countless products to rely on soybean and corn oil blends. It slashed their production costs and padded profits, all while marketing them as “light” and “cholesterol-free.” Even cereal and granola bar makers like General Mills and Kellogg’s reworked recipes to swap out butter and coconut oil for vegetable oils, leveraging heart-health slogans that distracted consumers from skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes.
Fast-food giants also cashed in. McDonald’s might be the most famous example, ditching beef tallow in 1990 to appease activist pressure. But they weren’t alone. Burger King, Wendy’s, KFC, and virtually every major chain jumped on the seed oil bandwagon, cutting costs dramatically while still charging premium prices for what they pitched as better-for-you meals.
Because here’s the kicker: The very trans fats created by hydrogenating these seed oils turned out to be far worse than the saturated fats they replaced. Linked to heart disease, systemic inflammation, and metabolic disorders, they finally triggered an FDA ban in 2015. By then, how many millions had suffered — and how many billions did these corporations rake in selling Americans on a health myth?
Now, the Make America Healthy Again initiative is shining a harsh spotlight on this mess. Its recent report underscores how seed oils continue to fuel inflammation and chronic disease, especially in kids. It calls for real, independent research, free of the industry’s long shadow over government committees and university labs. Predictably, the backlash was instant. Soybean and corn associations slammed MAHA for endangering farmers. Over two hundred fifty ag groups demanded corrections. Congress members, awash in agribusiness donations, are scrambling to shield the status quo.
Yet across the country, something’s shifting. Restaurants from New York to Nashville are quietly ditching seed oils, returning to tallow, butter, and even avocado oil. Shoppers are reading labels again, wary of slick “heart healthy” slogans. The same companies that sold us this lie for a century are now scrambling to rebrand, hoping we won’t notice.
Here’s the hard truth: Every time a “new study” proclaims what we should eat, we have to follow the money. Because for over a hundred years, it wasn’t about your health. It was about their bottom line. And America’s children have paid the price.
It’s time to reclaim our kitchens and our health from the corporations and lobbyists who never deserved our trust. Let them keep their seed oil profits. We’ll take the butter, the lard, and our future back.
