Avoiding Seed Oils? Here, the Best Alternatives to Buy
America loves a dietary villain: saturated fat, salt, carbs, sugar and now, seed oils. That's right: The seemingly innocuous vegetable, canola, sunflower, safflower and grapeseed oils that have long stocked our pantries are moving up the list of public-health enemies.
According to consumer insight firm Tastewise, 62% of consumers say they are avoiding canola and vegetable oils. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called seed oils 'one of the worst things you can eat.' Many nutritionists disagree, but that has not stopped restaurants and food companies from offering alternatives.
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Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
US supreme court ruling sets stage for more politicized science under RFK Jr
A US supreme court decision affirming the constitutionality of Obamacare sets the stage for more politicized science in the future, health law experts said about the court's decision. The court's majority opinion in Kennedy v Braidwood Management found that an expert panel – the preventive services taskforce – convened under the Affordable Care Act is under the direct oversight of the health secretary. 'This is your classic good news, bad news,' said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown Law. 'In a sane world, with a secretary of health that believes in science and doesn't bring in conspiracy theories and agendas, you would applaud this decision.' With health policy now in the hands of the Trump administration, 'it gives Secretary [Robert F Kennedy Jr] complete power about what to recommend and what not to recommend,' Gostin said. The court issued the opinion only hours after an expert vaccine advisory panel (ACIP) handpicked by Kennedy subverted the scientific consensus by recommending against vaccines containing thimerosal, a preservative overwhelmingly considered safe. Thimerosal has been a subject of misinformation and anti-vaccine advocacy for decades. Much like the expert panel in question in the Braidwood case, the recommendations of the vaccine advisory committee are a key link in the treatment distribution pipeline. Recommendations from both panels are typically affirmed by the leadership of the health department, and then become the basis on which insurers base coverage decisions. In the case of the ACIP, those recommendations typically concern vaccines. In the preventive taskforce context, they include a wide range of treatments – from statins to cancer screenings to HIV prevention. It was widely recognized that Kennedy had the authority to hire and fire people for the vaccine panel – but legal controversy existed about whether health secretaries have the same power over the preventive services taskforce. 'The president and the Senate are accountable 'for both the making of a bad appointment and the rejection of a good one',' wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the six-vote majority. In other words, the court said, if you don't like it, go to the ballot box. MaryBeth Musumeci, an associate professor of health law management at the George Washington University Milken Institute of Public Health, told the Guardian: 'We have that structure in place – and that is a really great structure if the folks in charge are actually deferring to the experts and the science and what the evidence says.' She added: 'To the extent that we are going to make decisions based on bad science – that has really serious public health implications.' The panel at the center of the vaccine decision is the ACIP vaccine panel. Until June, the advisory panel was made up of 17 experts vetted by CDC career scientists. Their recommendations, while not binding, were almost always approved by CDC leadership. Kennedy fired all 17 members unilaterally in June and stocked the panel with eight ideological allies – including vaccine skeptics and medical professionals with little experience in vaccines. One panelist withdrew after a government financial review, and after it was widely publicized that the secretary's claims about the panelist's affiliation with two universities was false. Wayne Turner, a senior attorney for the National Health Law Program, which advocates for the medically underserved, said that he and others were 'certainly breathing a sigh of relief with the court's decision today' because a key provision of Obamacare was found to be constitutional. 'But that sigh of relief is really short-lived,' Turner said. 'We have long anticipated with the appointment of RFK Jr, and certainly with his actions with the ACIP, that we can fully expect the preventive services taskforce to be the next battleground in the ideological war this administration seems to be waging. And the war is against science.' The subject of the Braidwood case provides a salient example. Plaintiffs were suing the government to claim that the taskforce was wrongly appointed. Although their legal argument was thorny, one treatment they specifically cited as wrong was insurance coverage of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), an HIV prevention drug. Although the plaintiffs' claim that the taskforce was unconstitutional was swatted down, it provides activists with a roadmap to get what they want – if they can convince Kennedy to appoint more ideological allies to the taskforce. The preventive services taskforce may have one protective mechanism: a requirement that they be guided by evidence written into Obamacare, the legislation that impaneled them. Gearing up for another fight, Turner said: 'That's going to be an important thing for us to point to in the weeks and months ahead, and years, quite frankly.'
Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
RFK Jr. is bringing psychedelics to the Republican Party
Driven by a desire to help ex-servicemembers with mental illness, GOP lawmakers led a failed campaign last year to persuade the Biden administration to approve psychedelic drugs. Now they may have found the ally they need in President Donald Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A longtime believer in psychedelics' potential to help people with illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, despite the lack of supportive evidence Biden officials found, Kennedy is ramping up government-run clinical studies and telling the disappointed lawmakers doctors will be prescribing the drugs soon. 'These are people who badly need some kind of therapy, nothing else is working for them,' Kennedy said at a House hearing Tuesday. 'This line of therapeutics has tremendous advantage if given in a clinical setting. And we are working very hard to make sure that that happens within 12 months.' The GOP's embrace of psychedelics is another, and perhaps one of the more jarring, examples of cultural transformation that Trump's populist politics have brought. Veterans seeking cures for mental illnesses associated with combat, combined with the Kennedy-backed Make America Healthy Again movement's enthusiasm for natural medicine, have strengthened a libertarian strain on the right in favor of drug experimentation. Meanwhile, the left, where hippies are giving way to technocrats, has become more skeptical. When Joe Biden was president, for example, agencies studied the drugs' medical potential, but an air of doubt prevailed. The head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Nora Volkow, compared the hype for psychedelics as a cure for mental illness to belief in 'fairy tales' in Senate testimony last year. Then in August, the Food and Drug Administration rejected drugmaker Lykos Therapeutics' application to offer ecstasy, alongside therapy, as a treatment for PTSD. FDA advisers worried the company's researchers were more evangelists than scientists and determined that they'd failed to prove their regimen was either safe or effective. Republicans complained the loudest. 'These technocrats think they know better,' Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who lost an eye in Afghanistan, wrote on X after FDA advisers recommended Lykos' application be rejected. 'Their job is to say NO and support the status quo.' But Crenshaw, who's helped secure funding for psychedelic research at the Defense Department, got the response he wanted from Kennedy at Tuesday's budget hearing. Kennedy said results from early government studies at the Department of Veterans Affairs and FDA were 'very, very encouraging.' He added that his FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, sees it the same way. 'Marty has told me that we don't want to wait two years to get this done,' he said. Crenshaw was pleased. 'I've spent years supporting clinical trials to study the use of psychedelics to treat PTSD,' he told POLITICO. 'It's been a long fight, and it's taken a lot of grit. I'm grateful Secretary Kennedy is taking this seriously — helping to mainstream what could be a groundbreaking shift in mental health.' Kennedy's comments have revived hope among psychedelics' advocates that the Lykos decision was more hiccup than death knell. 'It's important for the entire community and the entire value chain around psychedelic therapy to hear that he wants to responsibly explore the benefits and risks of these therapies," said Dr. Shereef Elnahal, a health official at the VA under Biden who sees promise in the drugs. The VA, under Trump's secretary, Doug Collins, is working directly with Kennedy on clinical research. Collins has referenced psychedelics on a podcast appearance, on X and at a cabinet meeting this spring when Trump pressed him on what he's doing to drive down the high suicide rate among veterans. 'I talk with Collins about it all the time,' Kennedy said Tuesday. 'It's something that both of us are deeply interested in.' Earlier this month, Texas' Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed a law to put $50 million into clinical trials of the psychedelic ibogaine, as a mental health treatment. "That culture shift is underway," W. Bryan Hubbard, who spearheaded the Texas bill and is executive director of the American Ibogaine Initiative, told POLITICO. As Hubbard sees it, the narrative around psychedelics has evolved from counterculture recreation to a promising medical treatment for the "deaths of despair" from alcohol, drug overdoses and suicides the United States has grappled with in recent decades. Kennedy was happy to see it. 'It's super positive. It is really notable that the Republicans have become the party of some of these issues you wouldn't have expected before," Calley Means, a top Kennedy adviser, told POLITICO. "States pushing the envelope is certainly aligned with what Secretary Kennedy is trying to do. It gives him leverage to push bolder reforms." The Texas effort involved a six-month sprint by Hubbard and former GOP Gov. Rick Perry to convince state lawmakers to pass the bill. Rep. Morgan Luttrell, another Lone Star Republican who credits ibogaine he took in Mexico with helping him overcome trauma he incurred during military service, also lobbied for it. Hubbard attributes their success partly to Texas' independent pioneer culture and a red-state philosophy that was receptive to his pitch for a medicalized psychedelics model. It didn't hurt that Abbott had signed a bill to study ecstasy, psilocybin and ketamine as treatments for veterans with PTSD with Baylor College of Medicine. And since Texans are no stranger to religion, conversations about the spiritual aspect of ibogaine treatment seemed to resonate with lawmakers. "We had a message that was tailor-made for the Lone Star State," he said. Veterans turned out at public hearings to describe traveling out of the country, often to Mexico, where ibogaine is unregulated, to receive treatment they couldn't access in the U.S. "These heroes have gone to war to defend the land of the free, only to come home and be faced with inflexible, bureaucratic systems that offer ineffectual solutions, paired with the Controlled Substances Act that has forced them to flee the country that they have defended in order to access treatment in a foreign country," Hubbard said. But the biggest momentum push was likely the boost Hubbard and Perry got from conservative kingmaker Joe Rogan when the two went on Rogan's podcast in January. "That really put a tremendous amount of wind in our sails," Hubbard said. Still, last year's FDA decision to reject Lykos Therapeutics' application underscores the concerns raised by many scientists that the utility of the drugs is oversold. FDA advisers raised ecstasy's potential to damage the heart and liver; a suspicion that trial researchers were more advocates than scientists; and a worry that results had been skewed by the psychedelics' pronounced effects, since participants could figure out if they got the drug. Ibogaine also poses heart risks. The Drug Enforcement Administration lists both it and ecstasy on its schedule of drugs with no currently acceptable medical use and high risk of abuse. That would have once been enough to make law-and-order Republicans say no. Kennedy's adviser Means says things are changing for the better. "Ten years ago, nobody expected the Republican Party as the party of healthy food, as the party of exercise, as the party of questioning pharmaceutical companies, as the party of psychedelic research — but that's where we are," Means said. "The Democratic Party has become the party of blindly trusting experts," he concluded. "The Republican Party has become the countercultural party that's asking common-sense questions."
Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Who is in charge at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?
Who is in charge at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)? The answer is more complicated than it may seem. With no confirmed or acting CDC director, Robert F Kennedy Jr has direct control over the agency, allowing him to sign off – or not – on vaccine recommendations, according to legal experts. Yet Kennedy, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), testified before a Senate committee in May that someone else is running the agency – creating confusion that could lead to legal challenges. 'There's not a CDC director or acting director. Essentially, RFK Jr is the director of the CDC,' said Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Kennedy now has 'a lot more opportunity to actually influence the outcome of these decisions and to take actions in the absence of a Senate-confirmed director', said Renée Landers, professor and director of the health law program at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. The dismissal of 17 independent vaccine advisers and their replacement with less experienced advisers, some of whom have histories of anti-vaccine activism, is 'very concerning', especially given Kennedy's rejection of germ theory and his own anti-vaccine activism, Landers said. On Thursday, the independent vaccine advisers appointed by Kennedy voted to ban thimerosal, a preservative (also known as thiomersal) with a demonstrated safety record, from 4% of flu vaccines in the US. The remaining 96% of flu vaccines, as well as all other childhood vaccines, were already free of thimerosal out of an abundance of caution, despite decades of research indicating the preservative's safety. The move will make it harder for some people to access the flu vaccine. The recommendation would normally be taken up by the CDC director, either to reject, or to implement as official, guidance from the agency. But for now, those decisions go directly to Kennedy, who has already exercised these capabilities before. On 13 May, 'with pending confirmation of a new CDC Director', the health secretary adopted the recommendations for Chikungunya vaccines to be officially recommended by the CDC, according to the agency's website. Kennedy did not sign off on the committee's votes for two other vaccines against RSV and meningitis. Those vaccines, recommended in April by the independent advisers whom Kennedy dismissed this month, still have not gotten official CDC recommendations; it's not clear whether or when they will. Kennedy also recently directed the CDC to change its Covid vaccine recommendations, softening the recommendation for children and ending it for pregnant people entirely, despite strong evidence that pregnancy is a major risk factor for severe illness and death. 'It is concerning that the power vacuum leaves open his ability to make these decisions that are inconsistent with scientific consensus,' Landers said. Congress introduced a new law in 2023 that directors of the CDC must now undergo Senate confirmation. This appointment is the first time the CDC director has gone through the process. 'It is a little bit of uncharted waters,' Landers said. David Weldon was first nominated and then withdrawn hours before his Senate confirmation hearing in March. Susan Monarez served as acting director from 23 January until she was nominated on 24 March, at which point she stepped down. Once someone has been nominated for director, they cannot serve as acting director. Monarez testified in her Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, but it's not clear when lawmakers will vote on the nomination, In the absence of an acting director, the head of HHS has control of the agency, according to the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998. Signing off – or not – on CDC recommendations cannot be 'delegated down' to other officials under the vacancies act, said Anne Joseph O'Connell, a professor at Stanford Law School; 'it can only go up' to the HHS secretary. 'What's unusual about this situation is that we generally think having exclusive duties go 'up' to the agency head when there is a lower-level vacancy is a good thing. But here many don't trust the secretary on these matters,' O'Connell said. Kennedy put forth a different name for who is in charge of the CDC in May testimony before the Senate's health, education, labor and pensions committee. 'Who is the acting CDC director?' Lisa Blunt Rochester, the Democratic senator from Delaware, asked. 'The acting director was Susan Monarez, but she is now up for permanent director, so she's been replaced by Matt Buzzelli,' Kennedy said, describing Buzzelli as 'a public health expert'. But there's no indication that Buzzelli, a lawyer who is listed as chief of staff in the office of the CDC director, is acting director, nor is he qualified for the position. 'Buzzelli cannot be the acting CDC head,' O'Connell said. He's not the first assistant to the CDC director, he's not Senate-confirmed, and he did not serve 90 days in the year before the last director of the CDC left, O'Connell said: 'There is no wiggle room.' The lack of clarity is compounded by the Trump administration's non-compliance with information requirements, experts said. The CDC, along with other agencies, is required to update each year an office of personnel management site about who holds which jobs, a deadline the agencies missed in March. Related: US supreme court ruling sets stage for more politicized science under RFK Jr Buzzelli 'has been carrying out some of the duties of the CDC Director as the Senior Official, as necessary, and is surrounded by highly qualified medical professionals and advisors to help fulfill these duties as appropriate', Andrew Nixon, HHS director of communications, told Stat News in May. (HHS did not respond to the Guardian's media inquiry.) Such actions could open the officials up to legal challenges. Without official documentation naming Buzzelli and other decision-makers to official positions, they would not have the designated authority to make certain decisions, which means their actions could be challenged. For instance, they may not be authorized to enter into new contracts or end prior agreements early with state, local, tribal and territorial governments – potentially opening up any such actions to lawsuits. 'The person who takes the action has to be someone lawfully appointed to the position. To the extent that agencies try to skirt that kind of requirement, it does leave the decisions vulnerable to legal challenge,' Landers said.
