by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News

Scientists in California recently published a study investigating the effects of saturated versus unsaturated fat in the diets of mice, as well as fructose, on obesity and diabetes. The unsaturated fat was soybean oil, and the saturated fat was coconut oil, along with a fructose.
Soybean oil came out the clear loser when looking at the dietary effect on obesity and diabetes. The researchers found:

Taken together, our results indicate that in mice a diet high in soybean oil is more detrimental to metabolic health than a diet high in fructose or coconut oil.

The title of the study, published in PLoS One, is Soybean Oil Is More Obesogenic and Diabetogenic than Coconut Oil and Fructose in Mouse: Potential Role for the Liver

 

USDA Dietary Advice Flawed

 

This is bad news for Americans, as soybean oil has most of the market share in the U.S. edible oil industry, and is the most common dietary oil found in processed foods. Most of the U.S. soybean crop is also genetically modified. If you see an ingredient on a package that says “vegetable oil,” chances are pretty good that it is soybean oil. While coconut oil has made great strides in the U.S. market in recent years, it is still only about 4% of the U.S. edible oil market.

We can blame government nutritional policy on deciding which fats and oils are healthy and which ones are not, which historically has been based more on politics than real nutrition science.