There was no polyunsaturated cooking fats

In the early 1900s, there was no such thing as a consumable seed oil or polyunsaturated oil that would be used for cooking (even olive oil didn’t have much a role in this she says).

Existing seed oils, like cotton seed oil, was used for lubricating machinery, and they were liquid at room temperature.

All cooking was done in animal derived fats, like butter, lard, suet, and tallow that started as solids at room temperature.

Proctor and Gamble (P&G) were first to market with a consumable seed oil that was solid at room temperature (a factor was stopping the public from giving up their traditional fats).

Hydrogenation leads to shelf stable seed oils that can compete with traditional fats

P&G scientists added hydrogens (hydrogenation) to long-single chain fatty acids of cotton seed oil in a process that created a gray clumpy solid that was then cleaned and deodorized and called Crisco/Shortening around 1911.

They were originally trying to refine their ability to make soap, and made Crisco.

Hydrogenation did more than just make seed oils solids at room temperature; other seed oils would go rancid quickly, but now these oils could be partially hydrogenated and become shelf-stable for a very long time which means they were a prime ingredient for the birth of boxed food products.

This process led to the creation of margarine.

Heart disease was a marketing opportunity for seed oil to become a health food

Crisco and seed oils as health-food product only took off in the early 1960s, when in 1961 and American Medical Association threw support behind the idea that polyunsaturated fats were better for you than saturated fats from animal sources, especially when it came heart disease.

Heart Disease came to the forefront of the public mind with the congestive heart failure of the American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The AMA and eventually the full weight of the Federal government’s many agencies were thrown behind the Ancel Key’s theory that high dietary cholesterol could lead to heart disease (over and above other factors) and “vegetable” oils were born as a health food.

These changes were made without yet having long term clinical trials showing a strong association between a diet with saturated fats and heart disease.*

Center for Science in the Public Interest supported the notion that vegetable oils were a heart-healthy alternative to animal derived fats.

Trans-fats prove seed oils aren’t pure, and the seed oil wars begin

A little bit of confusion come into the industry when it was discovered that hydrogenation created trans-fats (perhaps more dangerous than dreaded animal fats), and partially hydrogenated oils became more common.

In the last several decades we’ve seen the rise of the seed oil wars, as soybean oil industry, attacked the palm and palm kernel oil industry, and everyone attacked coconut oil, and now alternative to polyunsaturated fats are now on the market, like avocado oil.