So my cherished little M&S salad pots are killing me too, now!

[StrangeAntics]

Just stumbled upon the whole seed oil fiasco, went down a few rabbit holes, came back up feeling somewhat dizzy!

Geez, is there anything left that faddy diets and pseudo scientific book hawkers haven't told us will destroy our hearts, gut biomes and brain tissue? It's like no one appeals to credited sources any more, and even the most intelligent people are listening to some really odd shit on youtube and substituting it for fact.

According to most health authorities, seed oils are ok. Don't go overboard, like with other fats, but chill out about it.
Wiki also states that the anti seed oil sentiment is an alt right political obsession, started by someone called Rogan and taken up by various members of the Trump campaign.

So now we have politics spilling over into food science, it's truly bonkers.
We live in a world ripe for criticism since we have a fairly messed up food industry, and we are aware that a lot of what sells isn't great. But this seems to have opened up endless opportunities for someone to capitalise on our fears and paranoia, creating a barely navigable web of tangled misinformation and potentially harmful trends.

I often buy little grain/salad pots from M&S, so since they contain a bit of seed oil, they're going to destroy me. Well heck, what to do about that?
Every month someone will come up with a new, fresh (and lucrative) food to demonise and blame for the obesity epidemic, and it seems the crowds lap it up and don't care much about credible sources.
No one hardly ever mentions what a correlation is - or else they use it to stiffen their own bias.

There's always someone who will claim an absolute, such as "I quit meat/dairy/whatever and my entire life improved and it cured my cancer!"

There are likely many factors that have led to an obesity crisis, from vehicle dependence, poverty, sedentary work, cheap fast foods, excess portions, to depression, loss and loneliness.
To try to single out a new food group every few months as the cure all for this is surely bonkers.

Channel 4 made a documentary about 10 years ago called "World's Best Diet" where they explored the diets of communities with the healthiest and longest lived populations. They visited places as far flung as Africa and Japan, with Iceland coming top. All very different culturally and culinarily. The only thing they had in common was a short journey from farm to fork. In other words, the less a food has travelled and been processed the better it is for you. Green beans grown in your garden are better for you than green beans imported from Morocco. Cake made by yourself at home is healthier than cake made in Germany and packed in Spain. So, following this theory, heavily processed seed oil probably does have less nutritional value than locally churned butter or pressed olive oil. I don't think a few salad pots are going to kill you, though. And even the healthy Icelandic family in the documentary had cornflakes in their weekly grocery shop alongside their locally sourced meat and dairy products 🙂

I’m no expert and I certainly don’t follow any of these so called experts but I think the problem lies in how the oil is processed in UPFs. Not the oil per se.

but they will have to prise the m&S super green salad out of my cold dead hands.

Yes, but the OP's point, which I agree with, is why should she? Where's the solid scientific evidence that seed oils are harmful?

I still think that the western pattern diet causes physical illness due to overconsumption, lack of activity and meaningful socialisation. Just my opinion of course.

Elements of your post are obviously correct, but since the some of the bluezone material has been debunked, we could easily say it was their environment, sleep levels, happiness, stress free lifestyles, etc.

There was the tribe in the Amazon who never had heart disease. Their arteries were unclogged even at 80 yrs old. They lived on a diet of plantains, a bit of lean fat, and some carbs. This is ALL anyone focused on - let's get me some plantains and i can live forever!
But they were insanely active, never still, hunting, planting, etc. They were well matched to their environment, and untouched by modern life (jobs/stress/internet/).

We really just do not know.
But yeh, seed oils bad.

It's the back to nature fallacy, the idea that everything in the far flung past was ideal. I suppose we ought to bring back infant mortality, too?

Not the Superfood salad pots with the edamame peas and lovely gingery dressing? 😱
That's my favourite.

Agreed. Our health is poor in this country due to those 3 main things
Overeating
Under moving
Poor social systems and social infrastructure

Its not rocket science

People want to fiddle around while Rome burns, looking at this ingredient or that ingredient. The 3 main issues are easily fixed but there is no money in fixing them, no money in writing a book about the theory of those things, so people jump on the bandwagon, books, podcasts, programmes, social media to quibble about something like seed oils.

Article from the Guardian on this subject. Basically the advice is not to worry about seed oils.
www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/29/rfk-jr-says-they-are-poisoning-us-influencers-call-them-unnatural-but-what-is-the-truth-about-seed-oils

Yes I think the worst ingredient in our lifestyle is the computer screen. Sitting at a desk all day is what’s killing us. Maybe closely followed by the car. Not the seed oils.

True, and it gives people who are largely powerless a sense of control over their lives. That's the sad bit.

I read that Colorado is the slimmest US state. I doubt it is due to avoiding various food items. They are generally financially comfortable and have active outdoor lifestyles on the whole.

Active, affluent, fit and happy people live longer. News at ten.
Perhaps the motivation to reveal the latest demon food stuff has links to a growing, disenfranchised population who need something to blame.

Edit to add - the industrialised food complex is deeply problematic and most likely unsustainable. Our relationship to industrialised foods might require a giant overhaul, not to mention tighter regulation, but the anti-science fads are obscuring common sense to everyone's detriment).

I did go down this rabbit hole about three years ago and have pretty much eliminated seed oils from my diet - to the extent of only buying houmous and pesto made with EVOO, not buying shop bought mayo or plant milks etc. Whatever the published science has to say about it, i have no reason to reverse my changes. I know this is n=1 but my levels of inflammation seem to have drastically reduced - bothersome stiff painful joints have completely disappeared for example. It could be that the decision has meant i absolutely minimise my intake of UPF.

I think, often, a change can reboot the body. We don't really know without proof. If something works for you and you are happy, that's all you need!
It's the religious style preaching about it all that bothers me. Everyone looking for a cure-all but only ever scrutinising food above all else.

I do truly believe that if I lived in a place deep in nature, surrounded by wooded hills, with more money, a swimming pool ,glorious weather and had silkier hair my IBS and stress levels would shoot right down!

Sadly the time I avoided bread and pasta for over two years due to some stuff I had read about refined wheat and the microbiome led to nothing of any substance whatsoever.

So these days, I do moderation and try to avoid too much salt.

Ultra processed foods do tend to contain seed oils, as well as lots of other rubbish. There are so many things added to food now that people didn’t eat 20/30 years ago and something is causing increasing cancer rates in young people. I’m not saying it’s seed oils, but people are consuming a lot more chemicals than they used to. I got cancer last year when I was 40, wasn’t overweight, no family history, non smoker, light drinker. Since beating it I’ve tried to avoid UPFs, buy organic, stop cooking in plastic, chucked out non stick pans etc. Maybe I was just ‘unlucky’ but there seem to be many more unlucky ones in their 30s and 40s getting cancer than there were before.

I thought I read bowel cancer is increasing, lack of fibre I think really.

There isnt clarity on what a UPF is for a start and even if people eat UPFs (or waht they would call that), its about balance, if you're overweight and not getting enough nutrients in then thats a problem

If you eat enough other nutrients but have a thing for UPFs but arent overweight, have good exercise and a balanced diet, the seed oils or plastics in those really arent going to do harm

Many cancers are simply genetic I thought?

I agree with you, OP, on not stressing. We're products of our environment and we're currently living in an environment of ultra processed foods. There's not much we can do about it, really, unless we want to return to a life of subsistence farming, where we'd just end up working ourselves to death instead of eating ourselves to death. So, yes, everything in moderation and enjoying the positives of a modern lifestyle, rather than worrying about what are probably very slight risks of raised harm, is definitely the way to go. I gave up smoking many years ago so have already improved my health outlook by a large margin, something avoiding seed oils will never come close to being able to compete with anyway 😉

This was discussed on another thread recently and the point was made that increases in cancer prevalence are partly due to people living longer and better detection of more types of cancer in young people. So it's not necessarily that some unseen factor is driving higher cancer rates. I'd be interested to read more on this and get some actual data.

But why is it always food? Could there not be other elements of our lifestyles that might make us more susceptible to certain diseases?
We can control some more than others of course, seed oils can go in the bin, air pollution is a bit more tricky..

The more the west becomes obsessed with food, the more unwell we seem to become. Whatever it is we are doing, it isn't working. There are definitely some messed up ingredients in industrialised foods, but we have to be careful not to let it suffocate us.

I also think it is easier to believe that a processed food caused our disease than bad luck. Bad luck is very, very difficult to contemplate.

I really don't like our food culture. It has placed profit over health for too long, but so has our housing market, and capitalism in general.

But be careful to try to locate thorough sources for info relating to illness and food. It is difficult enough to deal with illness to start with, but the confusion of misinformation and emotionally manipulative pseudo scientific articles are not going to be helpful. The word 'chemicals' is often employed to get a reaction, it's scary, it's powerful, it grabs our attention.

That said, I hope you are doing well now. That must have been incredibly difficult to process x

Yes, protein is in fashion, it's even screaming at us in bold type on bloody baked beans tins.
And as someone said on here a while back, fiber isn't as sexy! (it makes people think of their bowels instead of their six pack) It needs it's time in the sunshine, too.

@StrangeAntics has managed to sum it all up with one point - the original source appears to be Joe Rogan
With this knowledge you can be satisfied that it’s all bollocks, just drumming up scaremongering and selling supplements

Well I’ve just eaten an M& S Greek salad with a cooked chicken breast and a large tablespoon of Waitrose yoghurt dressed coleslaw - clearly it’s curtains for me

Fat was the enemy then it was sugar then it was sweeteners then it was all carbs. Currently it's UPFs. Wonder what it'll be next?

Well like the guy in Withnail and I said, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

A fool can toss out the odd bit of truth on occasion
I have done my own research and come to the conclusion that the best we can do is remain mindful. I am not a scientist, so I can't say anything with authority. And even scientists differ..

There's some awful stuff in our food, but I do think we are fine to just try to eliminate the ones that are very well known and obvious (no authority on earth outside of corporate interests supports tons of sugar and palm oil - and if they do, don't send me the link, lol).

15 minutes on - are you still with us? I hope so.

I also hope this isn't a thread from an M&S marketing person as I'm now seriously thinking of adding some of those little salad pots to my Ocado order.

Meh. Inflammation is a thing. Different things exacerbates it for different people. If a person suffers with chronic inflammation and the symptoms thereof, I think it's fair enough that they exclude things which may be harmful from their diets.

I did a sort of 'larder-review' a while ago, and replaced things I wasn't sure would bring a positive contribution to my health. I did ditch the sunflower oil, and consequently, despite replacing it with a non-seed alternative, it has encouraged me to eat less fried foods, which is even better.

Home-cooked, unprocessed and locally sourced where possible is always going to be best.

Various scares I can remember include any kind of fats at all, anything containing carbs, red meat, anything processed, all sugars of course, non-oily fish, butter, margarine, tea, coffee, any more milk than a tiny drop of skimmed, any citrus fruits (teeth), any other fruits (sugars), bread, veg grown above ground (pesticides), root veg (run off contaminated soil), tap water....

Every year there's another fad of what's bad for you, and ones of what's good for you. These often contradict the advice from say 5 years ago, which contradicted the advice from 5 years before that.

Nuts are a good example - they have been "good" and "bad" at various times depending on what that decade's demon is.

So I gave up years ago. I remember being told "have a bit of what you fancy, but everything in moderation"

obviously there are things (like lard!) that we should rarely touch but for the rest of the time it’s important to be realistic!

Lard makes the best roast potatoes - stuff goose fat, duck fat, olive oil, get theeselves some good lard and your roasties will be utterly delicious and super crispy.