Vegetable and Cooking Oils
Vegetable oils were clearly not a component of Stone Age
diets, simply because our hunter-gatherer ancestors did not
have the technology to produce them. Oils made from
walnuts, almonds, olives, sesame seeds, and flax seeds
were initially manufactured using primitive presses about
five to six thousand years ago. Nevertheless, except for
olive oil, most early utilization of plant oils was for non-food
purposes, such as lubrication, lighting, and medication. It
wasn’t until the start of the twentieth century, with the arrival
of mechanically driven steel expellers and hexane
extraction methods, that vegetable oils contributed
noticeable calories to the Western diet.
Today the vegetable oils used in cooking, salad oils,
margarine, shortening, and processed foods supply 17.6
percent of the total daily energy in the U.S. diet. This
massive infusion of vegetable oils into our food supply
starting in the early 1900s is to blame for elevating the
dietary omega 6 to omega 3 ratio to its current and
damaging value of ten to one. In hunter-gatherer diets, the
omega 6 to omega 3 ratio was closer to two to one.
Numerous diseases associated with this imbalance of fatty
acids include heart disease, cancer, autoimmune