The REAL reason why Americans are so SICK (hint – it’s not the seed oils)
- Michelle Adams
- Apr 1
- 9 min read
You can check out the video version of this article here.
This article is a follow up to my previous one about seed oils, which you can read here if you haven’t already. As is the case with all of the articles that I write, there is also a YouTube video to go along with it. In their replies to that YouTube video, several people asked me a very important question:
“If it’s not the seed oils that are making us all sick, then what is it?”
I am going to address this question first by explaining some of the key nutritional factors that contribute to why people are so sick in this country. Then, I will talk about why we end up distracted by misguided health advice. Finally, I will wrap up by covering research on what we actually need to eat (and how much of these foods we need to eat) to live long, healthy lives.
So, if seed oils are not to blame for the bleak American health landscape, then, what is? The answer is that a lot of things are making us sick. Environmental pollutants, a lack of exercise, uncontrolled stress, a lack of community and human connection – all of these are important health factors that can affect a person’s quality of life. Chronic illnesses are more often than not multifactorial. When it comes to nutrition however, it’s not just one thing that is making us sick.
I'll explain why.
Understanding how what we put into our bodies impacts our health requires a broad view of dietary patterns or habits, and human diets don’t consist of single foods. We eat starches, which can be refined or unrefined, proteins, which can be derived from animals or plants, fibers, which can come from fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, and grains, and fats, which come in saturated, unsaturated, cis and trans forms, and you have to look at ALL of those things (and more) to really understand how nutrition and health are intertwined.
So, what does the science say about why our diets are making us sick?
Basically, millions of Americans are succumbing to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, some forms of cancer, and other non-communicable diseases because most Americans do not follow the basic tenets of good nutrition. Now, am I saying that these conditions are caused 100% by poor diet? No. However, nutrition plays a significant role in their etiology, and this is something that has been well-established in the scientific literature.
What are the basic tenets of good nutrition?
I’m going to focus on just 5 of them for the sake of brevity.
Let’s start with the first two - fruit intake, and vegetable intake. Generally speaking, you should be eating about 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day – that’s about 2 cup equivalents of fruit and 3 cup equivalents of vegetables. The exact amount will vary from person to person according to a variety of factors, but that’s the general guideline. Can you guess what percentage of the U.S. adult population actually eats the amount of fruits and vegetables that they should be eating, something that everyone knows is good for them?
Maybe 70%?
No, that’s obviously too high.
But, at least half of the people in this country are eating their fruits and vegetables, right?
I’m sorry to report that no, we are not even at 50%. National survey results show that just 12% of adults meet the recommended threshold for daily fruit intake, and only 10% of adults are eating enough vegetables. So basically, 90% of adults in this country are not eating enough fruits and vegetables. It doesn’t take a ton of scientific reasoning to see how this may have something to do with all of the health problems that people are struggling with. Which do you think is having more of an impact on the health landscape of this country: the fact that 90% of adults are not eating enough fruits and vegetables, which your body needs for reasons that I will explain in a little bit, or the fact that we eat seed oils, which have been shown in most large studies (detailed in previous article) to be linked to better health outcomes than saturated fat?
Published data on people’s intake of other nutrient-rich food groups show the same trend:
Intake of legumes, whole grains, and seafood are all below recommended levels across the nation. These are tenets 3, 4, and 5, by the way. This data is publicly available and is easy to find with a simple Google search. Just type in “USDA Dietary Guidelines 2025” and the first result will be a pdf of the national dietary guidelines, which include not only recommendations for what we should be eating, but also data on what people are actually eating, and how that ideal compares to the reality. If most Americans had their bases covered when it came to these simple basic dietary guidelines, we would see far fewer cases of people suffering from preventable diseases and relying on multiple medications to keep themselves going until they pass on.
Why is there so much confusion about nutrition?
It’s boring to tell people to eat more fruits and vegetables. People are tired of hearing it, and so they take it for granted. Influencers know this, so instead of helping people to work on these basic healthy habits, many of them turn to focusing on single nutrients or even single foods.
How many times have you seen influencers promoting "one simple trick!" or seen ads that say "doctors hate him for solving this complex problem in one simple way!"? They all deserve a side eye.
Unfortunately, this gimmicky approach to nutrition takes the focus away from the real problem. You really can’t blame people for falling for these distractions either, because life is hard, and finding simple ways to make it a little less hard is appealing. It is far easier to buy, for example, a tub of beef tallow and feel a sense of accomplishment than it is to prepare healthy, balanced meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for you and your household, week after week. Eating well takes intentionality, planning, and much more effort than putting one “superfood” into your shopping cart and calling it a day.
Still, if you actually want to take care of your body and have as many years of being healthy and functional in mind and body as possible, you have to operate by the Pareto principle.
The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, states that 80% of the outcomes that you get come from 20% of the inputs that you put in. In other words, to make the most impact on any particular goal that you have, it is vital that you focus on those few elements that will have the greatest effect. When it comes to nutrition, that 20% is the basic stuff that I just talked about – eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and seafood – especially fatty fish. There is, of course, more to a healthy diet, but those basics are going to get you miles down the road on your health journey.
How do we know what people actually need to eat to be healthy?
Something else that I want to point out is that the national dietary guidelines were not pulled from thin air, unlike many of the recommendations that you may come across on social media. They are based on multiple well-designed scientific studies that have thousands of participants in them and are specific enough to give us an idea of what the effective dose is for different food groups. We know how many servings of fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and fish you should eat per day or per week to ward off disease and add years to your life thanks to decades of research by dedicated scientists who put much more effort into understanding what goes into a healthy diet than a random person on the internet who decided that they have a vendetta against seed oils because of one or two studies.
Before I outline the research, I would like to remind you that you should not take anything that I say on this website or on any of my social media pages as personalized nutrition advice. These are just general guidelines.
Alright, here is a summary of what we know:
Eating 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day has been shown to boost longevity and reduce the risk of dying from cancer, heart disease, and respiratory diseases.
Eating 3-4 servings of beans or legumes per week is associated with a lower risk of heart disease. Additionally, a higher intake of beans or legumes in general is associated with longevity; this analysis showed a 6% reduction in mortality for every additional 50 gram serving of legumes per day. By the way, 1 serving is ½ cup of cooked beans (about 1/4 cup uncooked).
Eating 2-7 servings of whole grains per day is associated with a lower risk of heart disease and death from cancer, respiratory diseases, and infectious diseases, and is also associated with longevity.
Eating at least 2 servings of fish per week lowers your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Diets rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes, as well as nuts, lean meats, and healthy plant-derived fats have been shown to be highly effective at helping people to manage their blood sugar (see here, and here) and body weight.
These are the things that we need to be focused on. Again, there are other factors that are essential to a healthy diet, but these factors that I just went over are some of the most important ones, yet they are woefully ignored.
I also must mention that what we are eating in the place of the foods that we are supposed to be eating but are not eating enough of also plays a role in why the U.S. healthcare system is so overwhelmed by preventable diseases. Intake of seed oils has gone up in recent decades, but do you know what else we are also eating way too much of? Ultra-processed foods. In this publication from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers found that in the past couple of decades, the intake of ultra-processed foods in this country has significantly increased. Greater intake of ultra-processed foods is associated with weight gain, high blood pressure, heart disease, and some forms of cancer.
Something else that deserves attention is our intake of added sugars. On a positive note, intake of added sugars among U.S. adults is actually trending down, mainly because people are drinking less sugar-sweetened beverages than they used to back in the day. Nevertheless, average intake of added sugar in this country is still above recommended limits; The recommendation is to limit added sugars to under 10% of the total calories that you consume each day. As a nation, we are consuming about 13% of our daily calories from added sugar. We are making progress, as added sugars used to make up about 16% of our calorie intake 25 years ago, but we still have more work to do.
Conclusion
To conclude, we have to think of our diets the same way that we think about houses. To build a house, you have to start with a solid foundation. Then come the walls, roof, plumbing, electrical wiring, insulation and so forth. Those are the things that you start with, and until those things are done, it doesn’t make sense to worry about what brand of light bulbs you want to put in the living room. The focus ought to be on getting the most important elements of your diet down before you worry about buying powders or supplements or a specific brand of extra virgin olive oil. Build your house before you worry about the accoutrements.
That’s all for today, take care.
References
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U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025. 9th Edition. December 2020
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