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Are Seed Oils Causing the Obesity Epidemic?

Nov 14, 2024
46 min read

Updated: Sep 22

EconBuff #53 with Tyler Ransom




Dr. Tyler Ransom talks with me about seed oils and their potential role in the American obesity epidemic. Dr. Ransom describes what seed oils are and how they are made. Dr. Ransom presents a hypothesis that increased consumption of these oils has been a major, yet often overlooked, factor driving obesity rates in the U.S. since the 1960s. We explore the trends of the traditional explanations for obesity. Dr. Ransom argues that the trends in sugar consumption, calorie consumption, and exercise do not explain the trends in obesity since the 1960s. Dr. Ransom explains how seed oils have altered metabolism, fat storage, and other biochemical processes, supporting his points with findings from both biochemistry and economics research. We discuss the concept of "imperfect information" and how it has contributed to the overconsumption of seed oils, influenced by interactions among food and drug companies, scientists, government regulators, and healthcare providers. Dr. Ransom details how these groups shape dietary information and impact the food supply. Finally, we consider the broader policy implications of our discussion, highlighting the need for a coordinated approach to address these issues effectively.


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Show Notes:


Books mentioned during our conversation:


Transcript:

LEE STITZEL: Hello and welcome to the EconBuff Podcast. I'm your host, Lee Stitzel. With me today is Dr. Tyler Ransom. Dr. Ransom is associate professor of economics at the University of Oklahoma. He's a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor and a fellow at the Global Labor Organization. His research has had a significant policy impact and has been featured in major outlets such as The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. Tyler, welcome.

TYLER RANSOM: Thank you so much for having me, Lee. It's a pleasure to be here.

LEE STITZEL: So, our topic today is a working paper that you've got out that's about seed oils. I don't have the title in front of me, embarrassing for me, but it's basically about the idea of seed oils and their link to obesity. So I just want to start with a simple question for those that might not know: what even are seed oils?

TYLER RANSOM: Great question. It depends on who you ask, but most people agree on the following eight seed oils: corn, canola, cottonseed, soybean, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, and rice bran oils. And then some people think that peanut oil might also be bad.

LEE STITZEL: So, is seed oil a byproduct of those things, or how does that work?

TYLER RANSOM: Basically, the factory gets, say, some soybeans in and they press them down really hard. Some oil comes out, and they use other processes to extract the oil. Then it gets further processed, and then it gets bottled and shows up in the supermarket as soybean oil or whatever the raw product is.

LEE STITZEL: So you have these raw products, and then they're going into the food supply. Can you talk a little bit about how that works?

TYLER RANSOM: Sure. These products didn't exist 150 or 200 years ago. The only seed oils that were available were ones that were readily derived, so basically just sesame seed, and maybe another one that I'm forgetting. Some of these oils, if you had walnuts or almonds, you can press those down at your house and some oil will come out and you could use that for cooking or whatever.

Where the innovation kind of came in was that these things could be chemically extracted and deodorized in a way that made them more palatable to humans. Then they could be used to substitute for animal-based fats or other saturated fats. Nowadays they're used a lot in basically any kind of processed food, any kind of frying oil, those types of uses.

LEE STITZEL: I know you're an economist, so I may be venturing too far afield, so I apologize in advance. Is this discovery an intentional thing, or was it kind of an accidental byproduct?

TYLER RANSOM: I haven't read all the history books on this, but my understanding, roughly, is that people noticed that cottonseeds in the mid-19th century were just kind of being thrown out, and they're like, well, we can get something out of this. So they tried to use it as a substitute for fuel that's used to heat houses or provide light. They used it to treat leather, so a lot of non-food uses. But then they also started to become used, sort of hidden in olive oil, to dilute the product but still sell it at the top price. Anyone who's familiar with economics of information or product labeling can see where those forces would collide.

Then the big kind of kicker was a guy named Wesson, which is what the oil company is named after. He discovered how to deodorize it so that it wasn't as obvious of a taste. Then, in the early 1900s, they figured out how to solidify these things. It's called hydrogenation, which is where you turn a liquid oil into a solid fat. Those two things paved the way for more broad-based use in the food supply.

In 1911, Crisco was launched. It was meant to be a lard substitute, and it literally comes from the words "crystallized cottonseed oil." Once there was a solid version, it could be used for a lot broader food usage, and things kind of took off from there.

LEE STITZEL: Is cottonseed oil used in food products still today?

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. I don't think it's the most popular one, but it was the backbone of Crisco back in the original, you know, 100-plus years ago.

LEE STITZEL: I don't want to lose track of the information element that you were talking about. That's actually a big part of what you're doing in the paper, and I think something the audience would be really interested in. Cottonseed oil doesn't sound that appetizing as a food product. I guess I'm not immediately opposed to peanut oil, or whatever you said. So how is it that cottonseed oil can be in a food product after doing, what did you say, leather tanning and heating houses?

TYLER RANSOM: You can use any sort of oil or fat for a lot of different uses. These things can be used for lotions and lip balm and stuff, and you could use a solid fat like a beef tallow or a pork lard for that. You could also use one of these hydrogenated oils that has the same consistency. I'm not an expert on food chemistry, but there are a lot of ways you can use these products in foods that would improve their texture or their flavor or the mouthfeel, whatever the attribute is that you're trying to refine.

LEE STITZEL: Can you lay out your basic, I hesitate to call it an argument, but can you kind of lay out your basic idea here? Now we can see there are these seed oils being used in food preparation, and then you're going to argue that that's related to obesity. Can you lay out the general broad strokes of the argument?

TYLER RANSOM: Of course. There's plenty of scientific evidence showing that seed oils are bad for your health. There's also plenty of scientific evidence showing that they're not bad for your health, which is a point of confusion and ambiguity to the typical person.

To get back to your original question, where seed oils come into play is they've just been increasingly used in all the processed foods in our food supply. As the level of seed-oil consumption has gone up, so has the obesity rate, pretty much in tandem. There are other books out there that have been written that show that the omega balance of the diet is a really important determinant of health.

The deal with seed oils is they're high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fats, whereas something like a fish oil or some other plant-based product would have a higher ratio of omega-3 polyunsaturated fats. What started seed oils becoming more common was something called the diet-heart hypothesis, which was proposed in 1952 by Ancel Keys. I think it was centered a lot around President Eisenhower at the time having suffered a heart attack. The salience of this heart-disease topic became really concentrated, and people wanted to know, well, how do I avoid having a heart attack? Then Ancel Keys came up with this idea, or this hypothesis, that saturated fat accumulates in your arteries and causes blockages, and then that's why people have heart attacks. That's still the main working theory today.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah, I would say that viewpoint continues to persist to this day. Persist, or would it dominate, would you say?

TYLER RANSOM: I think it would dominate. If you look at The New York Times, we're taping this on November 12th, and three days earlier there was a New York Times piece talking about how seed oils are not bad for you. This stuff is still happening today because there are powerful forces that have vested interests in making sure that the status quo is maintained. That kind of gets into the conceptual theory in my paper about the political economy surrounding this, where there are information asymmetries and people have vested interests in certain outcomes. Then the information that eventually makes its way to the consumer in the form of dietary advice or recommendations gets shaded by the interaction of all the other incentives in the system.

LEE STITZEL: So is it kind of mixed evidence about the potential health impacts, whether good or bad, of seed oils, and that's what you're sort of exploring here? We're talking about the economics of that, or I'm trying to establish how the audience ought to think about the health fundamentals, if you will, of seed oils.

TYLER RANSOM: I wrote this paper with the idea that economists are not paying attention at all to dietary fat as a determinant of health. This is just trying to bring that idea into economics, because I think there's a lot of good that economists can do with the knowledge that they have to try to remedy the problem.

LEE STITZEL: So someone might say, what do economists have to say about this? This seems like a health issue. Obviously you've already laid the groundwork a little bit for why the information and the different incentives that are in play in production and consumption and all of those things matter. Could you briefly walk us through what some people might have found related to how seed oils might be bad for your health and how they might be good for your health?

TYLER RANSOM: Sure. I'll start with the good side. The good side is that they unambiguously reduce blood cholesterol levels, and that's been replicated time and again, in particular LDL cholesterol levels. That was kind of at the center of the diet-heart hypothesis. That's why saturated fat became demonized, because if you eat more saturated fat in your diet, you're going to have higher LDL cholesterol levels. Actually, at the time of the diet-heart hypothesis it was not even known that there were subtypes of cholesterol. They were just looking at total cholesterol.

As time has gone on, people have realized that there are even different subtypes of LDL cholesterol. The negative side of the seed oils is that, yes, they reduce the total LDL count, but they increase, or fail to decrease, a particular type of LDL which oxidizes easily and which can cause inflammation of the blood vessels and from there can cause the blockages that promote heart disease. That's kind of the essence of it, that these omega-6 polyunsaturated fats are pro-inflammatory and so they're going to cause issues.

There are other people who have, I don't know how strong the evidence is on this avenue, but there are also people arguing that these omega-6 seed oils are promoting insulin resistance. That has more to do with how the body's metabolism works. I can get into that some more, or if you want to go to a different question we can.

LEE STITZEL: No, I've walked us away a little bit from the obesity angle because I was interested in some of the good and bad health implications there. So in what you're doing, you're not really wanting to say much about that. That's kind of a background, how did we get here, why?

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. I would say it's just context for people who aren't familiar with this type of stuff, which I wasn't until about six months ago.

LEE STITZEL: Right. So why obesity? What role do you think seed oils are playing in obesity?

TYLER RANSOM: For that, according to the books that I've read, which seem to be reputable, the main book that I'm thinking of is called Omega Balance by Anthony Hulbert. He's an Australian zoologist and has done a lot of stuff at the cellular level. There's a lot of cell biology that, if you understand a little bit about it, can be helpful for understanding this whole line of argument. I forgot the rest of your question. I'm sorry.

LEE STITZEL: No, I was just asking the role that you think seed oils play in obesity.

TYLER RANSOM: Okay. Tony Hulbert has written this book, and it talks about the different ways that seed oils could promote obesity. For one, I think key here with the inflammation angle is oxidation. We hear about how antioxidants are good for you because they're anti-inflammatory. If these seed oils are causing greater amounts of oxidation in your cells, then that can cause problems, particularly with fat cells. It can cause the fat cells to grow in size, which would be directly related to obesity. It can also, my understanding is, for younger children and youth, cause the number of fat cells to increase.

The first thing I said is called hypertrophy, where the cell grows in size, and then the second, the number of cells growing, is called hyperplasia. Those two together can explain why there might be more body fat if you're ingesting a lot of these seed oils.

Obviously there's going to be individual differences in how your particular body is going to react to these things. A lot of the experiments that have been done, we do a lot of experiments on animals to try to understand these biochemical pathways, but then there's limited ability to actually deploy them onto humans for the various reasons that we're all familiar with.

LEE STITZEL: Right. You can't always run an experiment.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. Not that there haven't been experiments done that have supported this, but that's kind of where things stand on the obesity angle.

LEE STITZEL: So you have a mechanism by which you think this would translate seed oils into obesity. If you ask most people, they would say people are eating too much, they're not exercising, lots of people like to attack sugar, stuff like that. Where's there room for seed oils to fit in the explanation, given those three or four favorite explanations for obesity?

TYLER RANSOM: I think I would say the most mainstream argument now is that it's processed foods, right? But that's not particularly helpful because you don't know what the particular pathway is.

LEE STITZEL: So if I advise somebody, just avoid processed foods, that's okay, like they'll lose weight, but that doesn't explain why they would lose weight because we'd be cutting out all types of things. I might just eat less food. I might eat less sugar. There might be something fundamental about the food and the way it's processed, which I think is part of where seed oils fit in, if I'm understanding.

TYLER RANSOM: Exactly. I don't think it's sugar per se, just by itself, because you see that consumption of sugar by Americans has actually plummeted over the last 25 years.

LEE STITZEL: Do we have an idea why?

TYLER RANSOM: I think people understood that high-fructose corn syrup was bad and they tried to stay away from it. Maybe there have been some incentives for the food producers to switch to artificial sweeteners or whatever, to make low-calorie versions of a lot of products, but that would just be responding to the consumer incentives not to have them. Maybe people's doctors have been telling them, you're diabetic, you need to stop eating sugar, and so people have responded. But they're not saying, you're diabetic, you need to stop eating seed oils. So seed-oil consumption has just continued to increase basically linearly, right hand in hand with obesity rates. Sugar has plummeted, so that makes it really difficult for me to make some kind of case that sugar is principally driving obesity.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah. It's always hard just looking at this time-series data because you could say, well, maybe the real model is sugar consumption above some minimal level interacted with seed-oil consumption, and you wouldn't be able to reject that hypothesis.

TYLER RANSOM: Right. Even I'm reticent to say that it's definitely seed oils and can only be seed oils. But at the same time, I see a huge blind spot in the literature in economics that's ignoring dietary fat. Basically, the state of the art, as far as I understand it, in health economics right now is just that it's all about calories, which is not particularly helpful.

LEE STITZEL: Could it be I'm eating less sugar but I'm just eating more food? What about the calorie angle?

TYLER RANSOM: As far as I can tell from the data available, calorie consumption is basically flat over the last 25 years.

LEE STITZEL: Really?

TYLER RANSOM: Possibly it's because sugar's gone down, and so maybe we're eating less sugar but eating more mass of food. I don't really know. There are lots of theories out there about how the brain perceives satiety. You've got these GLP-1 drugs that are on the market now.

LEE STITZEL: Ozempic, is that what you're talking about?

TYLER RANSOM: Exactly, or Wegovy, or, you know, there's probably like ten of them on the market. They're going to inhibit some of that appetite and make people feel less hungry. They're not going to eat as much. They're going to lose weight.

LEE STITZEL: So is that principally what those are, just appetite suppression?

TYLER RANSOM: I think people are still trying to understand what exactly they are. But for sure, a commonly reported experience is that you take these drugs and then you don't feel as hungry. You feel full more quickly. Maybe you used to clear your whole plate at a meal, and now you can only eat half of it. That has something to do with satiety and appetite signaling.

LEE STITZEL: That rings true to me. You're a pretty fit guy. I don't know what your fitness of choice is, but I've gone through different phases of intentionally gaining weight to try to put on muscle because I like lifting and whatnot, and then you've got to offset that by cutting weight sometimes. My appetite changes dramatically. It takes me a while. Okay, I've got to go through a phase where I'm losing weight, and it takes a while for my appetite to adjust that, no, we're not eating that amount of food. It comes down and gets more bearable.

Then I get the reverse. Right now I want to lift heavy and I want to try to gain some muscle, so I'm going to bulk a little bit. Being able to just eat as much food as I need to get in the protein targets that I want to get to can literally become a challenge for a little while until my appetite adjusts. That makes a lot of intuitive sense to me.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. And then there is other evidence that seed oils mess with that appetite-signaling mechanism as well.

LEE STITZEL: Okay. So the seed oils are doing what then? They're messing with my satiety, like how full I feel?

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. There's something called the endocannabinoid system that your body produces, and it's from the same root word as cannabis. Basically, the argument is that if you eat seed oils you'll feel hungrier later, for the same reason that if you take marijuana, then you're going to feel hungrier later.

LEE STITZEL: Interesting. Most of the time I would expect I eat food and that quenches my appetite, and then I'm good until my body uses all that fuel. You're saying one potential mechanism is that seed oils mess with that, and then I get hungrier sooner, or when I get hungry I get more hungry than I might otherwise have been.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. Kind of the main study on that was done on mice, basically feeding them the amount of seed oils that the typical American has now versus the amount that they had in 1900 and then seeing what happened to the mice. They were able to track the different receptors of this endocannabinoid system to see what was being activated, and so they found evidence for this pathway. Obviously, that was just one study, and this is a burgeoning theory, I would say, from what I've read.

LEE STITZEL: While we're on the animal thing, can you discuss some of the ways, you had some interesting evidence in there, about the way that we see seed oils being used with animals?

TYLER RANSOM: Sure. I think another data point in favor of the argument that I'm laying out in this paper is the way that you fatten up livestock to sell at a higher price at market is you feed them seed oils, basically, or husks from soybean-oil production.

The way the production of these oils works is that you get the plants in, you process them, and there are different byproducts that can be used for different purposes, very similar to petroleum processing, where at one level I have my natural gas, at another level I have my jet fuel, my automobile fuel, et cetera. It's a similar thing where you can have an ethanol plant for converting corn into ethanol for automobiles, and at the same time they can be producing corn oil for consumers and sending the corn, the nibs of the corn kernels, out to feed pigs.

It really is a testament to capitalist incentives for preserving food and trying to make use of every bit of the plant. There's no fault there. It's just, I think, a general lack of knowledge about the consequences or the potential consequences.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah. There's an Econ 101 efficiency discussion to be had, right? I could use this as an example in day one micro about efficiency. If I talk to a rancher or somebody who was running a feedlot or something, and I said, okay, tell me about what you're feeding these animals to try to maximize how big they can get so that you're getting the most for each animal, they would just say, yeah, we feed them the seed oil, or seed oil, I don't know that they would call it seed oils, but whatever, grain feed. They would be like, this fattens them up the best.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. I think it's also cheaper because you don't have to have them grazing on the field. You don't have to round them up.

LEE STITZEL: Well, I can't do a feedlot without that kind of thing, right?

TYLER RANSOM: Exactly. Maybe you can take grass in and just dump it in front of them, but I don't know what the shelf stability is on that relative to the grain feed, and I'm not an agricultural scientist.

LEE STITZEL: So, at the risk of getting too far afield, I'm not feeding them seed oils. I'm feeding them grains.

TYLER RANSOM: But you're feeding the seeds. It is, okay. Tony Hulbert's book Omega Balance, which I recommend everyone read who wants to really learn about this, and we'll put a link in the show description, basically gives you this rule of thumb that omega-3s come from plants, omega-6s come from seeds. There are some exceptions to that. Flaxseed and chia seed are very high in omega-3, but then basically every other seed is high in omega-6.

Typically we think of fish oils as being omega-3, but that's because the fish are eating the plankton, which are like a plant. Basically a lot of the omega-3 is just coming from photosynthesis in the chlorophyll of plants, and it plays some important roles in our body's functioning.

The whole idea of that book is that you want to be in balance. You want to have like a 50-50 ratio of omega-3 to omega-6, whereas the current diet in the U.S. is like 90% omega-6 to 10% omega-3, or even worse.

LEE STITZEL: So this is not an argument for me to avoid grains altogether or something like this?

TYLER RANSOM: I mean, you should eat what you like to eat. I would say if you're looking for a rank order of this is the worst thing to eat versus not as bad, definitely deep-fried foods in seed oils, I would say, is number one. And then any sort of just pure drinking of the seed oils, which you might think sounds funny, but they're basically the base of a lot of salad dressing. If you get a salad at a restaurant and you pour the ranch dressing on, or whatever, that's going to basically be soybean oil that you're pouring on the salad. I think those are kind of the two big ones.

But then if I want to have some pistachios or almonds for a snack, you're going to be getting some of these omega-6s, but maybe they're not as bad because they're in a format that humans have been consuming for a while. To get the same amount of seed oil out of pistachios, you have to eat a lot of them, probably a lot more than you would actually eat.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah. Whereas a tablespoon of corn oil is like eating the equivalent of 40 corn cobs or something. I don't know the exact ratio, but it's way out of balance.

So let me return. I think you made a very compelling case for why you don't think sugar can be causing the trend that we see in obesity. Then you talked about why a blanket condemnation of processed foods probably falls short. I detoured you a little too much when we were doing the calories thing, because if I just showed a graph and it was just calories and obesity hand in hand, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. People just eat too much. You started to say calories are just kind of flat, and we discussed some of the reasons for that. Talk about that a little bit as your motivation for why seed oils.

TYLER RANSOM: Basically, my understanding of human metabolism is that our body doesn't consume calories. We have mitochondria in our cells that are converting energy in the food to ATP, which is the energy currency of the body. I don't know how informative it is to say, okay, well, I just ate 500 calories. The body doesn't consume calories directly. You'd want to be consuming ATP units, but there's a conversion process. The efficiency of that conversion process is going to result in a different amount of energy utilization for the same amount of food depending on how efficient your mitochondria are. That's kind of where calories in, calories out is oversimplified, in my opinion.

LEE STITZEL: I see. So if I eat two different compositions that both give me 500 calories, that doesn't necessarily result in the same amount of energy available to my system?

TYLER RANSOM: That's my understanding, yeah.

LEE STITZEL: Okay. That's actually one of the questions I was going to ask you, because if you follow, let me say, popular advice, people that are in the spheres giving people advice on how to lose weight, they love to boil it down to just calorie in, calorie out. They get people on their podcast or their YouTube show and they say, I just can't lose weight, and they're like, well, you're either eating too much or you're not working out enough. You're saying that's just too simplistic.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. The whole quandary with obesity is that someone who's got a lot of fat on their body, that's a source of energy for the body, but it's choosing not to use it for its energy and instead use energy from the food. We call that metabolic flexibility, when the body can easily toggle between different energy sources for its energy needs. The problem with obesity, quite clearly, is that there's some malfunction of that metabolic flexibility. The question is, well, why is it, and how do we fix it?

If you want another interesting read, I would recommend Catherine Shanahan's Dark Calories, which came out about three or four months ago. She kind of lays out how the seed oils can cause problems for the mitochondria, and then that can lead the body to thinking that it shouldn't be using the body fat as the fuel source and instead prefer sugar as the fuel source. Then that can cause someone to feel more hungry even though they have excess fat to burn, and then that can sort of spiral and create a spiral of what we call type 2 diabetes, where the body's calling for more sugar and then it just keeps rising.

LEE STITZEL: So somebody who wants to challenge you on the calorie in, calorie out thing is going to say, you know, it's just basic energy expenditure. You're saying it's related to what's happening with the metabolism, and so I could be eating in a relatively healthy range of calories, but I could have this, what do you call it, metabolic flexibility, I could have that messed up to a point where I would still get bad outcomes in terms of obesity.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah, I think so. I think the people who are really obese, who have a lot of extra fat to burn, would even find it hard to do an intermittent-fasting thing because the body has such a dependency on the sugar. It's like, if I don't eat every two hours, I'm going to have a blood-sugar crash, I'm going to start feeling woozy, and they can't just power through that. That's my understanding. I've never been in that situation personally, but that's my understanding from what the Dark Calories book is arguing.

I should say that some of the stuff in that book is not entirely correct, in my opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. But I think it's a compelling argument for how seed oils could be behind both obesity and diabetes.

LEE STITZEL: Obesity and diabetes. Okay. So let me level you one more challenge. If I were the calorie in, calorie out defender and said, well, okay, maybe you have some good points on the nutrition side, but there are two elements. There's also calorie out. People are just more sedentary now, and they don't work out, and they sit and watch Netflix. How would you respond to that kind of challenge?

TYLER RANSOM: I would just point them to Herman Pontzer's work. He wrote a book called Burn that came out three or four years ago, where he went and tracked hunter-gatherers in Tanzania named the Hadza and measured their energy output very meticulously with something called doubly labeled water. Then he did the same thing with typical Western people in either the U.K. or the U.S. and basically found that, adjusted for body-weight differences, they're basically burning the same amount of calories.

The question is, well, how can a hunter-gatherer who's walking nine miles a day be burning the same number of calories as someone who's sitting on their couch playing video games? The answer is that it seems that the body regulates energy out as a coping mechanism so that it doesn't starve to death. To me that's a pretty compelling piece of evidence that there's more going on than what we think.

LEE STITZEL: So this kind of translates to the fitness people that you follow on social media, because they're like, well, I just ate this much fish and rice or whatever, now I'm going to go pound out a two-hour workout and that's going to be 500 calories that I'm going to burn off. And actually the case is that it's not linear like that. You can't just add on, like, okay, I ran a half marathon, now if I go lift some weights that'll be another 200 calories off. That doesn't seem to be how it works.

Is this related to a metabolism-type thing, or is this related to how much people move around for non-exercise? The exercise-science literature calls it non-exercise activity thermogenesis, right? Like I just tap my fingers or bounce my knee, that kind of thing. Once I read about that I saw it everywhere, including in myself. If I'm trying to lose weight, all of a sudden I find that when I'm sitting down I'm just much more still. Is that the kind of thing you have in mind, or are you talking about something more, what would you say, at the molecular level?

TYLER RANSOM: I think, again, it's been a little while since I read that book, but my understanding is that basically the body has these background processes that it can increase or decrease in response to whatever exercise is happening. Basal metabolism, I think, is pretty much fixed. It's what's it doing outside of basal metabolism. If I have a habit of walking five miles a day, then it's going to downregulate some other process that would be using energy as a way to conserve energy. On the flip side, if I'm just sitting on my couch all day, then it's going to upregulate some things that aren't as important because there's nothing else to work on.

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LEE STITZEL: So there are some, I don't want to call it mixed evidence, but there are some different potential mechanisms for seed oils having good or bad health effects. Several of which you've highlighted as potential negatives: inflammation, metabolism disruption, the endocannabinoid system messing with our appetite, literally causing us to have more and bigger fat cells. So we could see all these plausible negative things.

I think if you've been convincing to the audience, which I find all of these arguments compelling, of course as an economist an argument that goes, well, calories are flat, physical activity is up, gym memberships are up if you want to use that as a measure, but seed oil and obesity are the two things that we've listed here that are moving together, I find that pretty compelling.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah, in spite of all the other changes.

LEE STITZEL: Right, exactly. So I think the next thing comes to, well, if all this is true, how can it be that these things are being used in food products? You've hinted at this information and economic-incentives angle. Can you talk us through what the broad categories of that are so we can get into that?

TYLER RANSOM: Sure. I think it starts with scientists like Ancel Keys. They're the researchers that are providing the initial information. Food producers are going to be basically responding to consumer demand, and so they're going to have a vested interest in the information that the consumer gets. Pharmaceutical companies are also going to indirectly influence what consumers are given as dietary advice, because they might have incentives for consumers to take a particular pharmaceutical substance to remedy a symptom when maybe it could be solved through some non-pharmaceutical means.

I would say the big players are food and drug companies and government. Government is sort of taking its cues from the scientific literature and scientists who are on prominent government advisory boards. If you want to read an interesting history of how we got the food guidelines that have been in the U.S. for the last 40 or 50 years, you could look at Nina Teicholz's The Big Fat Surprise. That kind of walks through a lot of the science history to get us to where we were.

The government's using its information from the scientists and the food- and drug-company lobbying to give consumers advice on dietary recommendations. The government's also choosing which research projects to fund. If the government doesn't think that seed oils are a big deal, then it's not going to fund, you know, they're not going to use NIH or NSF grants on those projects. The food and drug companies are also directly funding scientific research to suit their own means. So you've got this complex interaction of political-economy incentives.

Then on the consumer side, there's going to be preferences for cheaper food. There's going to be preferences for food that is more palatable, as they say, which is I can eat more of it, I get some instantaneous pleasure from consuming this food. Broccoli that's been steamed maybe doesn't have that property.

LEE STITZEL: This is a good argument. I want to interject here a little bit because, to be honest, a personal thing: do seed-oil foods taste better?

TYLER RANSOM: I don't think so.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah. Okay, so you're on the same page with me. I'm married to the farmer's daughter, and she recently got into making her own tallow, as farmers' daughters are wont to do. She made for our family fries and fried chicken from this, and literally our desire to go out to eat at fried-chicken restaurants went to zero overnight because it's not the same product.

TYLER RANSOM: Yep.

LEE STITZEL: On one hand, potato chips are probably a classic example of seed oils. Okay, I can just sit and eat potato chips, so I get it. But what did you say, they're not the monounsaturated, but the saturated come from animal products, right?

TYLER RANSOM: Well, every fat that you see, like butter for example, is going to have some mixture of all three types of fat: saturated, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated. But it's sort of what's the dominant component. In animal products, it's going to be saturated fat.

LEE STITZEL: So what's happening there? It's not obvious to me that seed-oil-based foods are more tasty. In fact, I think that might be the opposite.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. I think it comes back to this idea I was about to get to, about consumption path dependence or developing a taste for a particular food. Maybe the food that you ate as a kid is particularly reminiscent, and so whatever you eat as a kid is going to kind of stick with you and be habit-forming.

I think that's where the angle comes in with the food. Also, if you've never had tallow fries, you don't know that there's anything different out there. But you do know that going to McDonald's and getting their fries with your Happy Meal is something that's easier than having mom cook it yourself or whatever.

LEE STITZEL: I'm asking you to speculate a little. It seems to me the convenience thing is a huge factor. The price is lower, and then it's just, I can't just go order a thing of tallow fries. If any fries are available to me in the next 10 minutes, those are seed-oil fried.

TYLER RANSOM: Yep.

LEE STITZEL: In your estimation, is that a consumption-incentive side, or is that really rooted more in production?

TYLER RANSOM: You know very well these things are determined in equilibrium, of course, so it's hard to suss out what's what. Obviously Procter & Gamble, when they made Crisco, wanted to aggressively advertise it to try to turn it into this path-dependence situation. They gave out cookbooks where the recipes were all in there with substituted lard for Crisco, so that people would start cooking with it. That was for sure a premeditated marketing campaign, though I don't know that they thought this might be harmful to human health. They're just trying to sell it.

And to the economists in the audience, there's a production possibilities frontier for every economy. If we spend more resources on animal-based fats, then we're giving something else up. So it does seem to be that there is a trade-off here between economic production writ large and consuming these products that are animal-based that seem to be better for us. I shouldn't say animal-based. I should say saturated fats, because you can get it from coconut or palm as well.

LEE STITZEL: Right. So if I go out and start my own fried-chicken company that's doing everything in tallow, I might have success on the front of people might taste that and then prefer that, but I'm going to face trouble from the other direction where people are going to say, you're eating things made in tallow or lard, and that's bad for your health.

You've talked about that a couple of times, this sort of information on people's dietary choices. I remember growing up thinking lard and these things were bad for you.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah, because that's what we were taught.

LEE STITZEL: I assume you're a similar age to me.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah, I must be almost the exact same age, I would guess.

LEE STITZEL: Can you discuss that a little bit and how you view that? How much is government? How much is drug companies? How much is, I mean, it could even be the restaurants and the food production, right?

TYLER RANSOM: I think probably the best way to think about this is in terms of the trans-fat phenomenon. We're cruising along, we're using Crisco, we're still eating stuff in tallow. This is pre-World War II. Then the 1950s come along. Heart disease is rising, and saturated fat becomes the bad guy because of the cholesterol effect that I already mentioned.

So then food companies are like, well, how do we still make delicious food that we were using saturated fat to produce now that we can't use it because it's being demonized? It's like, okay, well, we have to figure out a way to get that same sort of solid form without actually using a saturated fat. Then they use partial hydrogenation. It turns out that partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are really versatile in different food production. There's a massive uptake in it in the 1960s. There's a huge, like, tripling in the consumption of soybean oil, and it just takes off from there.

Basically from the early '60s to, I don't know, the late '90s, it's basically trans-fat central for all these processed foods. Not only are the consumers aware, but there are also consumer advocacy groups. There's a guy named Phil Sokolof who was a millionaire who took out full-page ads telling McDonald's to stop using beef tallow in its fries. McDonald's had to relent, and so they basically changed from tallow to a trans-fat-based blend.

Eventually the evidence piles up that trans fats aren't great, and then we have the same process again. Now there's even more incentive to use these vegetable oils in different forms, because now you've taken away saturated fat and trans fats. So you've got to come up with some other way to get that same texture or same properties for the food manufacturers. That's going to be coming in the form of, now we've got to mix, we've got to kind of Frankenstein a bunch of different vegetable oils and palm or coconut oil, something that's saturated, to try to get back to what we had before.

That kind of shows the evolution of how these things evolved. I think the food manufacturers, I don't see any twirling-mustache villainy. I think they're just sort of trying to sell product and following the guidelines that the medical and scientific literature is telling them.

LEE STITZEL: That's too bad. It'd make a better story.

TYLER RANSOM: There are people out there that are portraying such, but I don't agree with it.

LEE STITZEL: So you mentioned the trend in heart disease is motivating this. Do you know what it's done since we moved toward these seed oils? You mentioned a potential benefit for LDL cholesterol and seed oils. Have we stemmed the tide on heart disease doing this?

TYLER RANSOM: I don't think so. With heart disease it's hard because there have been so many medical innovations to cope with it, whereas there haven't been as many with obesity. But now the GLP-1 drugs are out. All bets are off with what that's going to do. So we could see declines in obesity in the next decade, but we're still not solving the problem, regardless of what happens with dietary choices.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah. I think most economists would say let's actually solve the ultimate cause, not the proximate cause, at an additional $10 trillion price point, right?

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah.

LEE STITZEL: You don't have to go down this path with me, but I am exceedingly suspicious of the cholesterol-heart-disease narrative for the types of reasons that we've discussed today. So I guess I'm not all the way out on the limb, but I'm pretty far out there.

TYLER RANSOM: The American Heart Association is still, as of today, recommending that you consume a lot of these omega-6 oils for heart health.

LEE STITZEL: Goes without saying, neither of us are doctors and none of this is medical advice. We're just having a discussion about economics. I'm kind of interested in turning toward counterarguments and alternative explanations, unless there's something in the incentives discussion that I overlooked that you want to add.

TYLER RANSOM: No, I think we pretty well covered it.

LEE STITZEL: So let's take a look at maybe some alternative explanations. I already tried my best with calorie in, calorie out, and you seem to have defeated me. What are some interesting potential alternative explanations that you would consider?

TYLER RANSOM: A book I read this summer is called Good Energy by Casey and Calley Means. They basically talk about a lot of other stuff in addition to vegetable oils, things like phthalates. Basically there's a lot of substances that are in our food and packaging and that we interact with on a day-to-day basis that are known to disrupt hormone regulation and such.

LEE STITZEL: Is this like endocrine disruptors?

TYLER RANSOM: Exactly. The only one that's coming to mind right now is BPA. When we were younger there was the Nalgene-bottle craze, and then that had BPA in it, and now it's like everything's BPA-free. There's PFAS, which is like some other bad things.

There's kind of another group of people who are promoting this hypothesis that it's coming from some environmental contaminant or food additive, so food dyes, for example. To me, it's not clear what the relative contribution might be of those things relative to seed oils.

LEE STITZEL: So these are not causing our health problems, you're saying these are alternative explanations as opposed to complementary ones?

TYLER RANSOM: They could be complementary as well. I just don't know enough, and I don't think there's really good enough data to show convincingly. There's certainly not the figure that I have in the paper where it's charting obesity next to the seed-oil supply, where it's clearly this one-to-one thing. These things are harder to measure, and the dose makes the poison. You don't always know what the dose is because you're not required to label it because of FDA regulation.

LEE STITZEL: So that goes back to your information idea, right? Like I said, this is a thing that I've sort of, been into is kind of a strong word, but I have to flip around the nutrition label and see which things have soybean oil in them, which is all of them. You've kind of got to know what you're looking for. Sometimes things have multiple names. You mentioned linoleic acid, right?

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. Linoleic acid is kind of the main problematic fatty acid that is causing the problems that we talked about.

LEE STITZEL: It takes a lot of, I don't know what the word I want is, but I've kind of got to have some knowledge to even know what I'm looking at. I could look at these things and not know what is BPA and what's not. BPA is not a good example because there's kind of been a little movement to be BPA-free, and they advertise that and show those kinds of things. You mentioned something else. What did you call it, phthalates?

TYLER RANSOM: Phthalates, and also PFAS. I'm not an expert on these particular things. I just know that they have been shown to inhibit metabolism. So if the argument is, well, we're becoming more obese, we're gaining more weight because of some failure of metabolism, then the question is, well, what exact substance is causing that? It could be seed oils. It could be other stuff. But it seems to me that the increase over time in seed oils makes it a top contender. I'm not discounting the potential role of these other ones.

LEE STITZEL: Interesting. And does this include the stuff in the water?

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah, exactly. That'd be another example of some contaminant in the water. If anyone's interested, there's an anonymous or pseudonymous blog called Slime Mold Time Mold that has a whole series on obesity, and their favorite hypothesis is that there's lithium in the food supply that's sort of unmeasured and in trace amounts. If you get that exposure over a long period of time, then it can cause you to gain weight.

LEE STITZEL: So the lithium hypothesis might be better than the seed-oil or the other-contaminants argument if it explains why different geographies would have different obesity rates.

TYLER RANSOM: Exactly. There's some geographic variation in obesity, and so that would point more to an environmental than a food-supply-at-the-aggregate-level issue. But then my argument would be, well, every state in the U.S. has gotten quite a bit heavier over the past 20 years, so it's probably a mix of both.

LEE STITZEL: Right. Now we're back to things happening on the margin versus interaction effects, et cetera. That's very interesting.

I'd be remiss if I didn't ask this. We're a week removed from the election. People talk about fluoride in the water as related to this. That's not an obesity thing.

TYLER RANSOM: I haven't read much about that, so I don't really have an opinion. I know some of the discussion about RFK Jr. potentially getting a cabinet position has brought up the fluoride stuff.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah.

TYLER RANSOM: From what I've seen, the people who are not in favor of the incoming administration are worried about a lot of wholesale changes being made by RFK Jr. I don't know what to say about that other than I want to wait and see.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah. There's nothing to be said there. We've talked about the geographic variation. We've talked about the different contaminants. Those are at least interesting. For maybe the nonprofessional economists in our audience, could you explain why the geographic variation across the country might be a problem for your theory?

TYLER RANSOM: Sure. Basically, if you think about Colorado, the state with the lowest obesity rate, versus West Virginia, the state with the highest obesity rate as of the numbers that are in my paper, the question is: are people really eating fewer seed oils in Colorado than in West Virginia? Especially when, if you actually walk into a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's, you're going to find a lot of seed oils in the products there.

That's something that we actually don't really have great data on, period, at least not yet. It's hard to know what else would be explaining the differences. It could be that healthy people move to Colorado away from West Virginia, so there could be selective migration explaining things. David Cutler and his co-authors have a recent paper about place-based health effects that kind of talks about how there are persistent differences in smoking and obesity across different areas of the U.S., and that translates into differences in mortality. They call it health capital or human capital. That would kind of be the argument there.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah, exactly. We could take it to the tobacco thing. If I'm a person in West Virginia, I might just culturally be more attached to smoking a cigarette than the person who wants to go out and hike every Saturday in Colorado.

TYLER RANSOM: Right.

LEE STITZEL: It's interesting, you mentioned this earlier and I almost said this because you were talking about the salad and the salad dressing. I'm born and raised Texan. I don't eat salads unless they have ranch dressing on them, right? So maybe this goes part of the way to explaining your geographic variation, because your seed-oil data that you show in the paper is national.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah.

LEE STITZEL: You see this trend overall, but that doesn't explain how much it's consumed or not being consumed. It's pretty ubiquitous, so if we had to guess, probably just not that much variation in how many seed oils are being taken in.

TYLER RANSOM: That's what my guess would be. Obviously, there are papers in the Quarterly Journal of Economics talking about food deserts that actually show that even at the ZIP-code level there are quite different purchasing decisions in the healthfulness of the grocery basket. But then the issue there is that what's defined as healthy is actually by government fiat.

The FDA or the USDA is saying, okay, in NHANES, which is the main survey for health economists to monitor people's health in the U.S., in that data set they created a variable called the Healthy Eating Index. It's based on the foods that the respondent reports eating in the last 24 hours or the last week. That Healthy Eating Index basically says you should limit your saturated fat and increase your PUFA. But then it also just doesn't really make a difference between mono- or polyunsaturated, or omega-3 or omega-6.

LEE STITZEL: So for your purpose, it's useless then.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. I would want to actually get the actual ingredient list of the products that were purchased and reported. I don't know if in NHANES you can get the exact foods that they reported. They just sort of tell you what's the dietary index. But then these other economists that have looked at food deserts actually get basically the grocery-store receipts. Then they can map what was the exact barcode of every item you purchased, and then you could map that to a food-ingredient database, at least to some extent, and figure out what's the actual seed-oil content of these things.

LEE STITZEL: So I get some measurement from this survey, and it's based on what, like the food pyramid or something like that?

TYLER RANSOM: Something like that, whatever the recommendations are.

LEE STITZEL: And the food pyramid likes us to eat lots of grains, which you've already discussed as a potential issue.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. Even processed grains go hand in hand with seed oils as well. If you go down an aisle in the supermarket, the only bread that you could buy that doesn't have seed oils in it is a sourdough bread.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah.

TYLER RANSOM: What I've learned is that the bread that has seed oils in it is going to have a lot longer shelf life than the bread that doesn't. But then I don't really like the taste of the seed-oil bread, because even if it's not moldy, it's not tasting great.

That's just saying that a lot of these products, refined carbohydrates plus seed oils plus sugar, are kind of the backbone of all processed foods.

LEE STITZEL: So in your survey it's not going to differentiate between you eat sourdough and I eat the other type of bread.

TYLER RANSOM: I've actually not dug into that particular data source to that extent to know the answer. My sense is that they report the food logs to the people that are collecting the data, and then the data collectors aggregate it into some score of health from zero to 100, or whatever the scale is. To get higher points on this healthy index, you have to eat fewer saturated fats.

LEE STITZEL: Which ties all the way back into the stuff you were talking about with the dietary information and exactly where government plays a role. So how are people getting this information? People don't go look on some website, I'm sure these websites exist. How are people getting it?

TYLER RANSOM: I mean, you can go to Reddit, for sure.

LEE STITZEL: Right. I'm getting stuff from social media, from what's being posted on my Facebook by my friends, my carefully curated Instagram feed, which maybe yours and mine looks different than the average person. People literally go to Reddit and ask advice about all kinds of stuff.

TYLER RANSOM: Yep.

LEE STITZEL: And you can probably get two entirely different sets of advice. I can go to Moms Against Red 40 and get a totally different set of nutritional advice than I would against whatever mainstream, government-approved nutritional-advice Reddit. I don't know what that one would be called.

TYLER RANSOM: I think at the end of the day people need to experiment on themselves.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah, but that takes a lot of discipline and a lot of effort to actually do a controlled experiment on yourself. And the informational stuff you're talking about makes it really, really hard.

Like, if I want to, like you said, self-experiment, which is just an obvious thing, that should be a thing that people do. See how I, you know, let's take something less controversial, more or less dairy in my diet and see how I feel, or more or less breads that have gluten in them and see how I feel. Those kinds of straightforward things. The stuff you're talking about today might be really difficult, one, difficult to avoid, two, difficult to do.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. Any kind of group meal that you're going to want to participate in is going to have seed oils in it, and so that can make it hard to stick to your regimen for the purposes of the experiment. I think the internet's mature to the point where you can find subcommunities that talk about this stuff if you're looking to make a change. They're willing to give you advice, and you can just see for yourself, how do you feel after you eat this or that?

LEE STITZEL: There might be an obvious problem with that, though. How I feel in the short term might not relate very well to how obese I get ten years from now.

TYLER RANSOM: It gets a little bit back to what you were saying about how your appetite changes based on the mode that you're in. A lot of the hunger signals that we get are sort of programmed by circadian rhythm. Every day around noon or one o'clock my body's like, okay, it's time to eat. Transitioning to a new regimen is the hard part, but then once you're in that new regimen it sort of adapts to it.

LEE STITZEL: You mentioned before this could be something that might be really difficult. You mentioned intermittent fasting or something like that, and so I might be able to change my rhythm. Almost everybody listening to this will have had some kind of experience similar to this where something in my life changed, and now I go through a period of time where I don't eat lunch, or I eat dinner two hours later than I used to eat dinner. I start taking the kids to soccer practice, and now we don't get home until seven when we used to eat at five. It'll be rough for a minute, and then you'll adjust to it. But if we're talking about obesity, you're saying that adds layers of difficulty for that kind of experiment.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. It's hard to run a controlled randomized controlled trial that would reveal this when the effect is taking so long. That gets back to the fundamental issue with assessing the oil. If you eat more of this linoleic acid, it's going to end up in your stored body fat, and your fat cells turn over so infrequently that it's kind of going to be trapped in there until you burn it off. Then, when you burn it off, it's going to possibly cause damage in the form of oxidation because it's actually trying to be used for energy.

To actually properly do a trial that would show what's happening, you'd have to take years, and you'd have to make sure that everyone's fully compliant. Back in the '60s, when the diet-heart-hypothesis stuff was really coming out, there were actually a number of different RCTs on prisoners or other sort of institutionalized populations where they could actually control the diet. They were like, okay, this group is taking sunflower-oil capsules to the tune of 20 grams a day, or whatever, and we're going to see what happens.

That stuff wasn't as well controlled from what we understand now with regard to the biochemical mechanisms, but at least they were trying to do this. But then sort of once the '60s was over, the NIH isn't interested in funding that type of stuff anymore.

The most recent RCT was done by Kevin Hall and co-authors in 2019, and they basically randomized ultra-processed food versus natural food. They matched up all the macros and the calories per weight unit. Then they basically said, just eat as much as you want. If you're in the treatment group, you're getting a lot of junk food. If you're in the control group, you're getting a lot of non-processed foods. We're going to see how much you eat, how much energy you're expending, all this stuff. But they were only able to do that for 30 days because it cost a lot of money and they had to be in a hospital at the NIH headquarters. That's kind of the most recent version of one of these, but they easily spent $2 million on that.

LEE STITZEL: Does that have any useful findings?

TYLER RANSOM: You can look it up. I would say that the findings are definitely consistent with the seed-oil hypothesis, though the authors wouldn't want to have it be interpreted that way.

LEE STITZEL: They would want it to be interpreted in the light of processed versus not processed.

TYLER RANSOM: Exactly.

LEE STITZEL: But that doesn't really do anything for policy to know what about the processing is harmful.

TYLER RANSOM: Yes. To me, I think you just think back to what was food like in 1850, or what were people eating in 1850? Then we know that there was basically no obesity back then, or heart disease, or any of this stuff. At the basic level you can make the seed-oils argument by just saying, well, there's this new substance that's in the food supply that wasn't in there in the past, so that has to at least be doing something. Now, maybe we are eating a lot more sugar now than we were then.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah.

TYLER RANSOM: But I still don't necessarily, depending on if you're talking about carbs or sugar, the other kind of quandary is that there are lots of indigenous peoples throughout the world that have vastly different diets but all have very good health relative to the standard Western diet. That also brings up questions about what should be the dietary advice, because there are some people that only eat sweet potatoes, and then there are other people that only eat seal meat, or whatever.

LEE STITZEL: So let's talk about the cross-country stuff. What's the relationship between seed-oil consumption and obesity in different areas of the world? Is that something we can even look at?

TYLER RANSOM: There's data from the WHO on obesity rates, and then there's data from the United Nations on seed-oil supply in the food supply of each country. In my paper I have a graph with that correlation. It's quite low. It's about 0.2, which is a much lower correlation than the time-series correlations earlier in the paper.

Anecdotally, East Asian cuisine has a lot of frying and seed-oil-type stuff, but Japan and Korea have pretty low obesity rates compared to the U.K. or the U.S. or Canada. Europe and the U.S. and Canada all have similar trends. France and Italy and Spain are going to have lower levels than the U.K.

LEE STITZEL: Lower obesity levels and lower seed oil as well?

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. This just goes back to the question of the U.S. state differences, and then is there some cultural aspect? That's just this dark matter that is going to be really hard to measure, hard to tease out. In Japan maybe they eat a lot of these oils, but then they also eat a lot of fresh vegetables and they're eating tons of vegetables at every meal, so maybe they're getting a better omega balance even if they're still eating omega-6.

These are questions that are valid for the question at hand, but they're going to be hard to resolve without some well-designed experiment.

LEE STITZEL: Given where you're at with your work on this, are there even policy implications at this point?

TYLER RANSOM: Definitely we should be taking this hypothesis more seriously. I would say the last thing I would want is to turn this into the diet-heart hypothesis 2.0, where we make a bunch of wholesale changes on stuff that is not as well understood.

The diet-heart hypothesis, it wasn't bad that there was some potentially incorrect science being published and promoted. It was bad that everyone bought into it hook, line, and sinker, and then it became a dogma that couldn't be challenged.

LEE STITZEL: Yes.

TYLER RANSOM: I definitely think that providing more information to consumers is a relatively benign policy. Expanding the food label to list polyunsaturated fat by omega-6 and omega-3, I don't see that as being a huge deal, but of course the FDA is not going to go for that.

LEE STITZEL: Why not?

TYLER RANSOM: The food companies are going to be livid, because every part of that food label is the result of bargaining between the food companies and the FDA. And you have to make a case that this information is actually salient, that consumers are going to pay attention to it. You can't overload the consumers. So it's going to be tough.

Some of this stuff has been studied in other countries. I don't know if you're aware, but in Chile they have a lot more detailed food labels, and they have even some front-end packaging that looks kind of like cigarette packaging about health impacts if you consume this food.

LEE STITZEL: Yes. "Known to the State of California to cause cancer" kind of thing.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah, that type of thing. A team of economists, the last names are Barahona, Otero, and Otero, have a very recent Econometrica paper showing how the food companies adjust to the new food regulations. Basically, once you get this ominous-looking label on your packaging, people are not going to want to buy the food. So you're going to want to reformulate to get just below whatever the cutoff is to determine eligibility for having the ominous logo.

Then from there, consumers are going to substitute. If I wanted to buy a pack of ramen noodles and one of them had a black, scary-looking label and the other one didn't, I'd buy the one that didn't. But it's really not that different of a health impact in the end. So you have to also think about the political-economy ramifications of any potential policy change and the idea that food manufacturers are going to try to get around it as much as they can.

LEE STITZEL: Yes. Now you're producing very specific incentives for the producers.

TYLER RANSOM: Exactly.

LEE STITZEL: But you're really not advocating for scorched earth, just ban all seed oils from all production processes, so you're forced into making some kind of trade-off.

TYLER RANSOM: Yeah. I don't think that's a good idea, strictly because of the adjustment costs to such a regime change.

LEE STITZEL: Can you discuss that a little bit for people who might not be familiar with an adjustment cost?

TYLER RANSOM: Sure. I have a bunch of farmers who are growing soybeans right now with the expectation that they'll sell them on the market for a particular profit. Those soybeans are going to be used by different manufacturers for different purposes. They're going to end up in our food. If we just said today, all right, no more soybeans allowed to be grown in the U.S., then those farmers suddenly have to figure out in two months what they're going to start planting.

Basically, it's going to be very disruptive because they've got equipment that's designed to be used with soybeans. They've got the know-how, and they're going to have to change to a different crop. At the end of the day, you would want that sort of thing to be gradual. The way that you would make that gradual is just by informing consumers that these things are not great, and then demand would eventually shift inward. On the margin you might have some farmer who's sort of got one foot in soybeans, got one foot in some other commodity, and they're like, okay, well, if the soybeans aren't there this year I'll switch over. That's the gradual process by which you'd rearrange affairs.

LEE STITZEL: Yeah, that's interesting. You've been really generous with your time. We're almost to an hour and a half now, so I do want to bring this in for a landing. Given how comprehensive this discussion has been, the question that I really would like to ask is this: I saw this paper, and it really became kind of a thing that I'm thinking about, a thing that's happening a little bit in my personal life. I see your paper and I think, wow, this is a much more mainstream conversation than I really thought it was. I sort of thought, you know, I'm at risk of being a conspiracy-theorist kind of person.

I'd like you to discuss a little bit, to bring us in for a landing, where you see this potentially going just as a discussion, as economists weighing in, as government policy potentially being up for discussion.

TYLER RANSOM: I think economists have so much to contribute to obesity because they understand the trade-offs, they understand the incentives, they understand thinking at the margin. They understand that if the government is proposing a certain policy, then people are going to respond in a particular way.

The notion of, I think it's Goodhart's law, which is like once a target becomes known, then the behavior adjusts to meet the target. Having all this knowledge and being able to model these sorts of incentives and trade-offs is going to result in better-informed policies.

An example is there's been a lot of analysis of the tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. You might say, well, hey, seed oils are bad for health. Let's tax them in the same way we would tax tobacco because tobacco is bad for health. We call that a Pigouvian tax. Economists could then put their know-how to work and figure out, okay, what's the exact welfare implication of this tax that's being proposed? Who's going to be made better off? Who's going to be made worse off? At the end of the day, it's going to come down to politics, unfortunately, but that's how our world works.

In the meantime, if you're wondering about this stuff, I just encourage you to read up more about it. I think the reason this is becoming more mainstream is because the evidence is piling up. Once you see the graph of obesity versus seed oils versus sugar, it's hard not to find that compelling, even if it might be driven by something else.

I would just encourage people to become informed. You be the judge. There are plenty of good books out there that can explain these things. I think I've probably read a dozen books on this topic broadly speaking. If you want recommendations for reading, you can just email me. I'm happy to correspond. But I think information at the personal level is really key. Once enough people feel that way, then that's when change can actually be made, because that's when people will vote en masse at the polls for particular policies or particular candidates. But it has to come from the grassroots.

LEE STITZEL: My guest today has been Tyler Ransom. Tyler, thanks for joining us on the EconBuff.

TYLER RANSOM: It's been an absolute pleasure, Lee. Thank you.

LEE STITZEL: Thank you for listening to this episode of the EconBuff, where we find applications of economic thought in a variety of topics and fields. If you enjoyed today's discussion, be sure to check out our previous episodes on YouTube, Spotify, and Amazon Podcast under the title EconBuff Podcast, and be sure to like and subscribe. For updates and information, visit our website at econbuffpodcast.wixsite.com. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, we'd love to hear from you. Drop us an email at econbuffpodcast@yahoo.com.

 
 
 

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