September 12, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy.” This executive order makes biotechnology a national priority across agencies and branches of government. Similar legislation has been introduced in the U.K.
In late March 2023, Biden expanded on this premise in a “Bold Goals for U.S. Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing” report. According to this plan, the food industry is now to be led by biotech, and the “improvements” we can look forward to are more lab-grown meats and bioengineered plant foods
Rather than investing taxpayer dollars in regenerative agriculture, which is what could really solve our problems, government is instead backing a whole new industry of fake foods, from lab-grown meats to large-scale insect production
Two cell-based lab-grown meat companies have now received the green light to produce and sell fake chicken in the U.S.
Meanwhile, a Food Hazards Identification report by the British Food standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland, published in March 2023, warns there are “considerable gaps in knowledge” when it comes to cell-based meat production, and many potential hazards
September 12, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy.”1
This executive order makes biotechnology a national priority across agencies and branches of government. As noted in this order, biotechnology will also be used to “improve” food security, sustainability, and agricultural innovation in the U.S.:
“The Secretary of Agriculture, in consultation with the heads of appropriate agencies as determined by the Secretary, shall submit a report assessing how to use biotechnology and biomanufacturing for food and agriculture innovation, including by improving sustainability and land conservation; increasing food quality and nutrition; increasing and protecting agricultural yields; protecting against plant and animal pests and diseases; and cultivating alternative food sources.”
Support of Bioengineered Fake Food Is Now White House Policy
In late March 2023, Biden expanded on this premise in a “Bold Goals for U.S. Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing” report.2 According to this plan, the food industry is now to be led by biotech, and the “improvements” we can look forward to are more lab-grown meats and bioengineered plant foods.
In the featured video above, I discuss this rapidly advancing trend, and the true geopolitical incentives behind it, because the U.S. is not alone in moving in this direction. A similar plan is detailed in the U.K.’s Genetic Technology and Precision Breeding Act of 2023.3 Specific goals highlighted in Biden’s “Bold Goals” report include:4
•Increasing agricultural productivity by 28% in the next decade
•Reducing food waste by 50% by 2030
•Reducing methane emissions from agriculture by 30% by 2030 by:
1.Capturing biogases from manure management systems
2.Reducing methane emissions from ruminant livestock
3.Reducing methane emissions from food waste in landfills
As reported by Food Dive:5
“While advocates and some companies have been working to reduce methane emissions from food, cut down on food waste, increase capacity for producing alternative proteins and use bioengineering to make healthier and hardier crops and animals, goals like these have never before come from the White House …
The federal government is providing more evidence that it intends to do more than just talk about big goals. A day before the report came out, FDA gave its second tacit approval to a company using biotechnology to grow meat from cells in bioreactors.
While neither … is creating meat for consumers yet, this action shows that the federal government is moving toward making cultivated meat a reality.”
The idea that pathogens will jump species and kill humans is a useful scare tactic, and it’s now being pushed like never before under One Health — a global agenda that will allow unelected bureaucrats at the World Health Organization to centralize power and make decisions relating to diet, agriculture and livestock farming, environmental pollution, movement of populations, health care and much more, for the entire world
A report from Harvard Law School and New York University predicts the next pandemic is likely to emerge from the U.S. meat supply — or the fur trade, or a petting zoo, or from pets. It reviews all the different areas of life and commerce that involve animal and human contact and the subsequent hypothetical zoonotic transmission chains. One Health documents are repeatedly referenced in this report
Incontrovertible evidence has emerged showing that the scientists who wrote “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” intentionally misled the public. In “Proximal Origin,” the authors insisted natural evolution was the most likely scenario, but in private, they thought a lab leak was the most likely origin
Correspondence shows the conspiracy to misdirect the public was driven by obedience to higher-ups within the U.S. and UK governments, including, potentially, the intelligence community
Based on the evidence now in the public domain showing that the authors of “Proximal Origin” did not believe their published conclusions, Biosafety Now! has launched a petition calling on Nature Medicine to retract the paper
The same people who went out of their way to convince us that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through natural evolution in the wild were privately saying they were convinced it came from a lab.
Now, were SARS-CoV-2 to be publicly acknowledged to be a genetically engineered lab-escape, the obvious conclusion would be that we need to shut down much of the gain-of-function research that led to its creation. Needless to say, that would be a significant setback for the biosecurity agenda, which needs pandemics to justify the centralization of power and decision-making.
Zoonotic Transmission Is Not the Threat It’s Made Out To Be
The fact of the matter is, zoonotic transmission is extremely rare, and most if not all global pandemics with lethal outcomes can be traced back to lab experiments. As just one example, USA Today1 recently reiterated the debunked claim that the 2013 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was caused by infected bush meat. (Another widely circulated hypothesis is that it emerged from infected bats.)
However, as detailed in “Turns Out, Ebola Likely Leaked From a Lab as Well,” there’s compelling evidence linking that outbreak to a U.S.-run research laboratory in Kenema, Sierra Leone. And, curiously, many of the same individuals, companies and organizations involved in the Ebola epidemic have also been linked to the alleged creation of SARS-CoV-2.
The idea that pathogens will jump species and kill humans is a useful scare tactic, however, and it’s now being pushed like never before under One Health — a global agenda that will allow unelected bureaucrats at the World Health Organization to centralize power and make decisions relating to diet, agriculture and livestock farming, environmental pollution, movement of populations, health care and much more, for the entire world.
Report Predicts Next Pandemic May Come From Meat
To that end, a report2 from the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School and the Center for Environmental & Animal Protection at New York University now predicts that the next pandemic is likely to emerge from the U.S. meat supply — or the fur trade, or a petting zoo, or from pets.
It basically reviews all the different areas of life and commerce that involve animal and human contact, however brief or rare, and the subsequent hypothetical zoonotic transmission chains. Not surprisingly, One Health documents are repeatedly referenced in this report.
Overall, the One Health agenda calls for minimizing or eliminating certain animal-human contact, sterilizing areas where animals are kept or butchered, and/or increasing the use of antibiotics and vaccines in animals across the board. It also calls for massively increased biosurveillance and testing.
In contrast, the report in question primarily focuses on legislative and regulatory actions to curtail zoonotic disease, including the potential banning of certain animal practices that “present great risk but relatively little value, economic or otherwise.”
Will the warnings in this report be used to justify the transition to fake meat? It certainly wouldn’t surprise me. The fake meat industry wants you to believe that their cell-based lab-concoctions are the answer to today’s environmental woes, and that includes the threat of zoonotic disease transmission, as lab-grown meat is grown in highly hygienic and sterile (supposedly) conditions.3
Basically, the One Health narrative is that the natural environment poses countless risks to human health and must therefore be controlled. Meanwhile, it’s mankind’s efforts to control and replace nature in the first place that is causing most of the problems.
While the One Health narrative is that pandemics are caused by animals, there’s little doubt that the next pandemic will come from a lab, just like most previous pandemics, including COVID-19. Over the past several months, more and more evidence has emerged showing that the scientists who wrote “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”4 intentionally misled the public.
“Proximal Origin,” which became the most-cited paper (a Letter to the Editor mischaracterized everywhere as a serious scientific review), claimed SARS-CoV-2 emerged through natural evolution and spread via a wet market in Wuhan, China, and that there was no evidence to suggest genetic engineering or a lab origin.
Private communications, however, reveal they suspected the virus had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and had been genetically engineered to infect humans.
Mounting evidence also suggests this act of misdirection (to put it diplomatically) was done at the behest of Dr. Anthony Fauci (then-director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIAID), Dr. Francis Collins (then-director of the National Institutes of Health, NIH) and Sir. Jeremy Farrar (then-head of the Wellcome Trust).
Correspondence shows the conspiracy to misdirect the public was driven by obedience to higher-ups within the U.S. and UK governments, including, potentially, the intelligence community.
As noted in a July 20, 2023, Public Substack article by independent journalists Alex Gutentag, Leighton Woodhouse and Michael Shellenberger:5
“The documents … show [Kristian] Andersen and his co-authors, Andrew Rambaut, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry, conspiring — by which we mean they made secret plans to engage in deceptive and unethical behavior and — to spread disinformation.
Their conspiracy included coordinating with their ‘higher-ups’ in the U.S. and UK governments to deceive journalists … We … today … release the full cache of Slack messages and emails covering the discussions between Andersen et al. as they wrote their influential ‘Proximal Origin’ paper, which Anthony Fauci and others in the U.S. government used to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.”
While Fauci’s role in the creation of this paper has garnered the most attention, a more central culprit in this coverup may actually be Farrar — and he’s now the chief scientist for the WHO, a fact that hardly inspires confidence in the WHO’s future adherence to scientific truth and fact. The email exchange below between Andersen and Farrar (with other authors cc’d) suggests Farrar was a key decision-maker.
Proof of a Conspiracy
A 140-page PDF containing the “Proximal Origin” author’s Slack messages and a 163-page PDF of emails can be downloaded from the Public article,6 in which Gutentag, Woodhouse and Shellenberger go on to highlight some of the takeaways from this correspondence.
For starters, in “Proximal Origin,” the authors insisted natural evolution was the most likely scenario, but in private, they thought a lab leak was the most likely origin.
In “Proximal Origin” they claimed “the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus” and that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Behind the scenes, however, Andersen wrote:
“I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
Andersen also stated that “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely — it’s not some fringe theory.” Farrar and the other authors expressed similar views:7
February 2, 2020, Dr. Robert Garry wrote, “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario … I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature … Of course, in the lab it would be easy …”
February 2, 2020, Dr. Michael Farzan wrote he was “bothered by the furin site” and had “a hard time explain[ing] that as an event outside the lab … I am 70:30 or 60:40 [lab].”
February 2, 2020, Dr. Andrew Rambaut wrote, “From a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site.”
February 4, 2020, Dr. Edward Holmes indicated that he was “60-40 lab,” and Farrar wrote, “I am 50-50 [lab].”
Holmes also commented: “No way selection could occur in the market. Too low a density of mammals: just small groups of 3-4 in cases,” and Garry wrote:8
“Transmitting a bat virus-like RatG13 in HeLa cells and then asking your graduate student to insert a furin site … would get you there. It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the Gain of Function research we know is happening …
I’m thinking mostly about the PRRA to generate the furin site. Relatively easy to drop 12 bases in. The proline is the hang-up — why add that? Makes me think the cell culture passage scenario is possible/probably assuming this has in fact been observed before by Farzan and Fouchier.”
The following graphic, created by @RAEMKA1 and reposted by KanekoaTheGreat on Twitter summarizes the scientific consensus among the “Proximal Origin” authors:
Indeed, Andersen called Fauci February 1, 2020, specifically because he was concerned that the virus showed signs of being engineered. Immediately after that phone call, Fauci contacted Farrar and raised the possibility of taking the concern to the FBI in the U.S. and MI5 in the UK.
Instead, Farrar organized a conference call that led to the creation of “Proximal Origin.”9 From the emails, we know that the genetic engineering aspect of SARS-CoV-2 was discussed. However, concerns about harm to science apparently weighed heavier. After the call, Ron Fouchier wrote:10
“An accusation that nCoV-2019 might have been engineered and released into the environment by humans (accidental or intentional) would need to be supported by strong data, beyond reasonable doubt.
It is good that this possibility was discussed in detail with a team of experts. However, further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”
In a February 9, 2020, email, Christian Drosten also confirmed that the group had been “convened to challenge a certain theory,” and if possible, “drop” or eliminate that theory (i.e., the lab leak theory) from the public and scientific conversation. As recently as the day before, February 8, Andersen had made a case for keeping the possibility of a lab leak open, stating:11
“Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered.”
Authors Never Believed in the Pangolin Theory
In “Proximal Origin,” the authors went on to blame pangolins as an intermediate host between bats and humans, but in private, they remained unconvinced. The conclusion in “Proximal Origin” reads:12
“The presence in pangolins of an RBD [receptor binding domain] very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 means that we can infer this was also probably in the virus that jumped to humans.”
However, shortly before the “Proximal Origin” pre-print was published, Andersen wrote: “For all I know, people could have infected the pangolin, not the other way,” and the day after the pre-print, he commented: “Clearly none of these pangolin sequences was the source though.”
Authors Thought Lab Leak Was Likely Months After Publication
The authors also clearly thought a lab leak was possible months after publishing the “Proximal Origin” paper. In mid-April 2020, a month after the paper was officially published and two months after the preprint was posted, Andersen wrote to his coauthors:
“I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved … are we absolutely certain that no culture could have been involved? What concerns me here are some of the comments by Shi in the SciAm article (‘I had to check the lab’ etc) and the fact that the furin site is being messed with in vitro …
Finally, the paper that was shared with us showing a very similar phenomenon (exactly 12 bp insertion) in other CoV’s has me concerned … We also can’t fully rule out engineering (for basic research).”
In fact, the authors — like so many other independent scientists, researchers and journalists — suspected Shi Zhengli’s work at the WIV could have produced SARS-CoV-2. As reported by Public:13
“Andersen discussed some of her papers in early February and noted his concerns about gain-of-function experiments on MERS and SARS viruses. In mid-April he noted that Shi’s work was ‘the main reason I have been so concerned about the ‘culture’ scenario.’
Cell culturing is a method through which viruses can be passed multiple times through cells in order to render them more infectious and is exactly the kind of ‘laboratory-based scenario’ the authors ruled out in their paper.”
Conspiracy Driven by Obedience to Higher-Ups
Finally, the correspondence shows that the conspiracy to misdirect, if not outright deceive, the public was driven by obedience to higher-ups within the U.S. and UK governments, including Farrar, Fauci and Collins, but also, potentially, other unnamed individuals within various government agencies and/or the intelligence community.
While Andersen has publicly denied that Fauci had any involvement in the publication, in an email to the journal Nature, Andersen specified that the paper had been “prompted” by Fauci, Collins and Farrar.14 If you want to take a deeper dive into how the “Proximal Origin” paper was created, check out U.S. Right to Know’s timeline.15
Scientists Call for Retraction of ‘Proximal Origin’
Based on all the evidence now in the public domain showing that the authors of “Proximal Origin” did not believe their published conclusions, Biosafety Now! has launched a petition16 calling on Nature Medicine to retract the paper. As noted by Biosafety Now!:
“Email messages and direct messages via the messaging program Slack among authors of the paper obtained under FOIA or by the U.S. Congress and publicly released in full in July 2023 … show, incontrovertibly, that the authors did not believe the conclusions of the paper at the time the paper was written, at the time the paper was submitted for publication, and at the time the paper was published.
They thus show that the paper was, and is, the product of scientific fraud and scientific misconduct. It is imperative that this clearly fraudulent and clearly damaging paper be removed from the scientific literature.”
Among the many problems with this plan is the fact that taxpayers will now be paying for government’s funding of private corporations involved in the fake food industry. The end result is predictable. What we’ll have is a repeat of what happened with farm subsidies.
Rather than subsidizing the most nutritious foods, government farm subsidies go almost exclusively to large monoculture farms growing genetically engineered corn, soy and other basic ingredients used in processed foods. As a result, the processed food industry has grown on our dime while public health has deteriorated.
The same thing will happen here. Instead of investing in regenerative agriculture, which is what could really solve our problems, government is backing a whole new industry of fake foods, from lab-grown meats to large-scale insect production.
At present, two cell-based lab-grown meat companies have received the green light to produce and sell fake chicken in the U.S. The first, Upside Foods (previously Memphis Meats), received FDA approval for its cell-based lab-grown chicken in November 2022.6 According to the FDA’s November 14, 2022, memo:7
“We have no questions at this time about UPSIDE’s conclusion that foods comprised of or containing cultured chicken cell material resulting from the production process … are as safe as comparable foods produced by other methods.”
Dr. Uma Valeti, CEO and founder of Upside Foods, called the approval “a watershed moment in the history of food” and a “major step toward a new era in meat production.” The company has a 53,000-square-foot facility in the San Francisco Bay Area capable of producing 400,000 pounds of fake meat per year.
In March 2023, Eat Just — which has been selling its lab-grown chicken in Singapore since 2020 — also received FDA approval. The company is currently building a commercial-scale facility in the U.S. that will house 10 250,000-liter bioreactors.8 Vítor Espírito Santo, senior director of Eat Just’s cellular agriculture division, told Food Dive:9
“The Singapore approval was a big, big deal. But it’s undeniable that the U.S., the FDA approval, is something that we were looking forward [to] for many years, and I think it’s a big game changer for the industry.
We have two countries now. Hopefully now this keeps happening in more and more jurisdictions, and cultivated meat can become a reality worldwide.”
Safety Data Is Sorely Lacking
While the U.S. government is moving full speed ahead with approvals for lab-grown meats, a Food Hazards Identification report10 by the British Food standards Agency (FSA) and Food Standards Scotland, published in March 2023, warns there are “considerable gaps in knowledge” when it comes to cell-based meat production. As reported by Food Safety News March 24, 2023:11
“The purpose of the report was to identify hazards in the cultivated meat production process to help inform the FSA risk assessment process for authorization. It was also important that products do not pose any microbiological or chemical concerns. The research was based on a review of scientific literature in 2020.
There was little or no data on the final analytical composition of products, key toxicology data, nutrition profiles, product stability, allergy risk, and any recorded adverse effects when consumed by animals or humans …
The FSA report found there are several stages of development for producing cultured meat and at each one, different chemicals, biologics, media formulations, additives, and supplements are used. The contamination risk of each input needs to be assessed, as any undesirable components that remain in the final product need to be at an acceptable exposure level or be food-grade and safe.”
Potential problem areas identified by the FSA include:12,13
Contaminated reagents, air or water baths
Poorly cleaned or maintained equipment
Failing to follow cleaning protocols when culturing cells
Failing to follow good laboratory practices (GLP) and/or good manufacturing practices (GMP)
Use of antibiotics, fungicides and/or chemicals that are toxic to humans in the production
Consumption of viruses used in the manufacturing process
Cross-contamination of one cell line into another due to concomitant use of multiple cell lines
Other cross-contamination risks, such as “poor maintenance of equipment, poor cleaning regimes, incorrect storage of cells, working with multiple cell lines in one area, using the wrong cells and incorrect labeling”
New diseases and/or allergic reactions to new proteins due to using cell lines of animals not common in the local diet
Nutritional deficiencies, “as the nutrition profile could be different from what it is replacing”
As noted in the report:14
“There are many stages of development for producing cultured meat … from taking a cell line from a small vial or biopsy and increasing the culture volume stepwise in stages (proliferation), until a commercial sized bioreactor can be seeded, to differentiating the cells to final desired cell type.
Then [they are] maturing them, usually on a scaffold, to increase the protein content, and then detaching/grinding the cells with/from their scaffold to produce a final product that can be used to make meat like cells. At each stage, different chemicals, biologics, media formulations, additives and supplements are used to ensure a successful culture.”
Contamination can occur at any of these steps. Each additive also poses potential risks, both known and unknown, as various byproducts are created in the process. In the video above, I review some of the many potential dangers associated with fake meats.
Considering the multistep processing cultivated meats undergo, it’s simply not possible for it to be as safe as conventional meat, where the primary contamination risks are limited to slaughter, processing, packaging, distribution and storage. With fake meats, hazardous contamination can occur at any point during manufacturing, in addition to these conventional “weak points.”
Fake Meat Is Ultraprocessed Greenwashed Junk Food
Synthetic meat is the epitome of ultraprocessed food,15 and it seems naïve to think it won’t have health effects similar to other ultraprocessed junk foods. Obesity,16 Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and depression are but a few examples of conditions known to be promoted and exacerbated by a processed food diet.17,18,19,20,21
Ultraprocessed foods already account for up to one-third of total diet-related greenhouse gas emissions. So, how is expanding the manufacturing and consumption of even more ultraprocessed foods going to lower greenhouse gas emissions?
Synthetic foods will likely be an even bigger driver or chronic ill health and early death. Ultraprocessed foods are also completely counterproductive to environmentally “green” and sustainable goals.
For example, ultraprocessed foods already account for 17% to 39% of total diet-related energy use, 36% to 45% of total diet-related biodiversity loss and up to one-third of total diet-related greenhouse gas emissions.22 So, how is expanding the manufacturing and consumption of even more ultraprocessed foods going to lower greenhouse gas emissions? As noted in a September 2022 Journal of Cleaner Production paper:23
“Ultraprocessed foods are fundamentally unsustainable products; they have been associated with poor health and social outcomes and require finite environmental resources for their production … are responsible for significant diet-related energy, [and] greenhouse gas emissions.”
And, for all the lip service paid to “equity,” increasing consumption of processed foods will actually worsen economic inequalities, as it redirects money away from small farmers and independent homesteaders to transnational corporations that rely on underpaid workers.
Ultimately, the answer to food safety and food security lies not in a biotech-centered food system that is controlled from the top down, but rather in a decentralized system that connects communities with farmers who grow real food in sustainable ways and distribute that food locally.
Strategies that can get us there were covered in the Children’s Health Defense’s March 4, 2023, Attack on Food symposium (video above). Food Sovereignty was primarily covered in Session 3, which begins at three hours and 45 minutes.
For example, Dr. John Day and Beverly Johannson shared tips on how to grow your own food and preserve the food you grow. Other helpful strategies include buying food from local farmers and farmers markets, and creating independent food hubs that cut out the middlemen.
The final session of the symposium dealt with larger societal solutions to fight back against the war on food. U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie highlighted core vulnerabilities in the U.S. food supply, which fell apart during the pandemic when farmers had to euthanize animals because they couldn’t get them processed.
Four meatpackers control 85% of the meat that’s processed in the U.S. One of them is owned by China, one by Brazil and the other two are multinational corporations. Food prices are going up while farmers are going broke. In 2017, Massie introduced the Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption (PRIME) Act,24 but the bill hasn’t moved since its introduction in the House.
The PRIME Act would allow farmers to sell meat processed at smaller slaughtering facilities and allow states to set their own meat processing standards, because small slaughterhouses do not have an inspector on staff — a requirement that only large facilities can easily fulfill — they’re banned from selling their meat. The PRIME Act would lift this regulation without sacrificing safety, as random USDA inspections could still occur.
“If a farmer wants to sell pork, beef or lamb to a consumer, as long as that consumer and that farmer and that processor are all in the same state, they’re not crossing state lines, they keep the federal government out of that transaction,” he said.
Massey has also introduced legislation to protect access to raw milk (HR 4835, the Interstate Milk Freedom Act of 202125).26 The bill was introduced at the end of July 2021, as an amendment to the 2018 Farm bill. Contact your representatives and urge them to support these bills.
Flax Is Not a Health Food — Stop Consuming It and Use It to Paint Instead
Flax, historically used in paints and industrial applications, is often marketed as a health food despite its potential negative effects on metabolism and long-term health
The principal use of flax oil in the past has been for industrial purposes, such as paint, due to its high polyunsaturated fat (PUFA) content, which makes it prone to oxidation
Consuming flaxseed oil, synonymous with linseed oil, can be harmful because PUFAs are unstable and oxidize easily
Flaxseeds also contain lignans, a type of phytoestrogen, which can mimic estrogen and contribute to hormonal imbalances, increasing the risk of conditions like breast cancer
Excess PUFA consumption lowers thyroid and metabolism, as thyroid hormone (the master metabolic regulator) is blocked at the production, transport, and cellular action steps by PUFA
When evaluating something as a ‘health food’ — we have to put our ‘metabolism lenses’ on. Does this improve metabolism and thus long-term health? Or, are there potentially some minute short-term benefits that come with long-term consequences and a down-regulation of metabolism? (Which will negatively impact health.)
There is really good marketing out there trying to convince us that ingredients historically used as paint are now a superfood. (Because it is extremely profitable!) One example is flaxseed and flaxseed oil — you should not be consuming these! And to better understand why, let’s briefly review why it works really well for paint!
The principal use of the oil in flax in the past has been in paints, coating and other industrial uses — the fibers were used to make fishing nets, ropes, and sailcloths and the linseed oil obtained from the flax plant has been one of the most important binders for oil paint for more than 500 years.
Flax is rich in an omega-3 polyunsaturated fat (PUFA) alpha-linoleic, C18:3. PUFAs contain 2 or more double bonds (shown in green, below), and each double bond in the fat makes it more unstable and prone to oxidation.
The structures of a saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fat. Note the differences in points of unsaturation (C=C double bonds) on some of the fatty acids. From Nutrition: Science and Everyday Application, v. 1.0.
The longer the chains of these PUFA get (such as ALA), the more unsaturated and unstable they become.
How Flaxseed Went From Paint to ‘Health Food’
Flaxseed oil or flax oil is technically synonymous with the term ‘linseed oil,’ as both refer to the oil obtained from the dried, ripened seeds of the flax plant. The oil is obtained by pressing, sometimes involving a lot of chemicals for more industrial uses. Some refer to the ‘edible’ oil as flaxseed oil, and the industrial use as linseed oil. But the fatty acid composition of flaxseed oil or linseed oil (used interchangeably) are both PUFA rich.
Linseed oil works well as a paint due to its high level of PUFAs — all of those double bonds make them extremely prone to oxidation. In fact, linseed oil is classified as a “drying oil,” meaning it transitions from a liquid to a solid film through oxidative reactions.
“When this flax oil is exposed to air, the double bonds of ALA react with oxygen and result in relatively soft, durable film. This property is known as ‘drying’ quality of linseed oil.”1
However, newer petroleum products started to enter the market in place of linseed oil since they could be made cheaper, and this led to the reduced reliance on flax.2 So, the flax industry needed to find another market for it — enter the health food market and lots of marketing!
“50 years ago, paints and varnishes were made of soy oil, safflower oil, and linseed (flax seed) oil. Then chemists learned how to make paint from petroleum, which was much cheaper. As a result, the huge seed oil industry found its crop increasingly hard to sell.
Around the same time, farmers were experimenting with poisons to make their pigs get fatter with less food, and they discovered that corn and soy beans served the purpose, in a legal way.
The crops that had been grown for the paint industry came to be used for animal food. Then these foods that made animals get fat cheaply came to be promoted as foods for humans, but they had to direct attention away from the fact that they are very fattening. The ‘cholesterol’ focus was just one of the marketing tools used by the oil industry.
Unfortunately it [the false claims about cholesterol & saturated fat] is the one that has lasted the longest, even after the unsaturated oils were proven to cause heart disease as well as cancer.” ~ Dr. Ray Peat
Flax Is High in Estrogenic Compounds Too
Have you ever noticed that flax oils can only be purchased in dark containers, and must be stored in the fridge? (They oxidize in the presence of heat and oxygen). Can you imagine what happens when you consume this and put it in your warm, oxygen-rich body? (The inside of our body should be 98.6 deg F.) And yes, flax contains some fiber but still has a lot of PUFAs.
•Per 100 grams:
◦The oil extracted out of flax contains 100 grams of fat with 14.3 grams of linoleic acid and 53.4 grams of ALA.
◦Whole flax contains less fat (42.4 grams) since there is fiber, but still 5.9 grams linoleic acid and 22.8 grams ALA.
You can get these fibers in from other foods without all this PUFA. But there are other negative health consequences outside of the high susceptibility to oxidation. Flaxseeds contain a type of phytoestrogen called lignans. Phytoestrogens act like estrogen in the body (and we do not need more estrogen in modern times). “[L]ignans that are structurally similar to known estrogenic compounds.”3
Another example of a well-known phytoestrogen is isoflavones in soy. Well, flax is 20 times stronger than soy when it comes to the estrogenic impact!
Dr. Hobbins is a former surgeon who pioneered breast cancer detection through mammography and thermography. Dr. Hobbins and Wendy Sellers have hundreds of thermogram images showing striking visual evidence that estrogenic foods (including flax) promote vascularization and angiogenesis in the breast tissue, increasing the risk of breast cancer.4
Misinformed health care workers and manipulated studies are promoting these phytoestrogenic foods as cancer-preventing — when instead they could be making matters worse!
Add on top of this that the accumulation of PUFAs in tissues promotes the action of estrogen by activating aromatase AND people with lower metabolic rates are pooping less and less (pooping isn’t just to get rid of food waste, it is also a way to get rid of used hormones and other toxins in the body! So not pooping every day will cause some estrogen re-absorption).
In this estrogenic and PUFA rich world — no wonder hormonal imbalances are rampant, and testosterone is plummeting in men! Many people believe that they are LOW in estrogen due to bloodwork. Unfortunately, serum estrogen levels are NOT representative of estrogen that has been stored in tissues. Estrogen can be low in plasma, but high in tissues.5
And when stored estrogen is assessed, most people are estrogen dominant due to high PUFA diets and exposure to environmental estrogens from pesticides and plastics. And for women, add on many years of birth control loading up on exogenous estrogen! So you likely do not need more estrogenic foods (like flax).
A simple way to gauge estrogen storage in fat and tissues is a simple prolactin blood test, as prolactin blood tests can be used as a proxy for stored estrogen since estrogen promotes the production of prolactin. Ideally prolactin is less than 10 ng/mL.
Excess PUFA Lowers Thyroid Function
Another reason to not eat flax — excess PUFA consumption lowers thyroid and metabolism — as thyroid hormone (the master metabolic regulator) is blocked at the production,6 transport,7 and cellular action8 steps by PUFA.
“Fatty acids inhibited the binding of T3 to both receptor proteins (TR-alpha and TR-beta) … The effectiveness of inhibition depends on the chain length and degree of saturation of the fatty acids.”9
Further, PUFAs block proper carb metabolism more so than saturated fats10 by inhibiting the function of the PDH enzyme11,12 and cytochrome C oxidase13 — two vital components in glucose metabolism. And the negative effect on glucose metabolism increases with chain length and degree of unsaturation of the fatty acids.14 In fact, flax consumption has been shown to make you more insulin resistant and hinder carb utilization.15,16
Flax Inhibits Cholesterol Production
Another undesirable trait of flax is that it lowers endogenous production of cholesterol — which may sound good initially. But cholesterol is the building block of steroid hormones, and lowering cholesterol through estrogenic foods like flax will lower testosterone in males and progesterone in females. Plus, anything that suppresses your cholesterol synthesis increases the risk of cancer (like statins).
The best way to lower elevated cholesterol levels is to improve thyroid (which will still allow the body to make adequate androgens). Hormones are a downstream effect and should not try to be manipulated through estrogenic-rich foods. Fix metabolism and thyroid health, and hormonal balance will come easier! Instead of flax, try:
Reducing PUFA consumption and instead prioritize saturated fats
Lowering plastic exposure
Consuming carbohydrates to boost thyroid and metabolism (adequate thyroid is essential for both the production of progesterone and the detoxification of estrogen by the liver)
Supplementing with bio identical progesterone, as needed (adequate progesterone levels help keep estrogen in check)
Ensuring adequate Vitamin B6 consumption (serves as a prolactin inhibitor)
Transform Your Health — One Step at a Time
Ashley and her sister Sarah have put together a truly groundbreaking step-by-step course called “Rooted in Resilience.” They have compiled what clearly is the best application of Dr. Ray Peat’s work on Bioenergetic Medicine that I have ever seen.
It is so good that I am using the core of their program to teach the many Health Coaches that I am in the process of training for the new Mercola Health Clinics I am opening this fall. It took these women working nearly full-time on this project for a year to create it.
This has to be one of the absolute best values for health education I have ever seen. If you want to understand why you struggle with health problems and then have a clear program on how to reverse those challenges, then this is the course for you.
It is precisely the type of program I wish I would have had access to when I got out of medical school. I fumbled around for decades before I reached the conclusion they discuss in the course and share with you so you can restore your cellular energy production and recover your health.
Select and eat the right foods to heal your metabolism and improve glucose utilization
Balance your hormones to help reduce anxiety, weight gain and sleep disturbances
Use reverse dieting to increase your calories without gaining weight and tanking your metabolism, all while improving your energy levels
Heal your gut for proper immune function, mood and weight management
Tweak your diet and lifestyle habits to improve your mindset and mental health
Crush your fitness goals with ease and get your life back on track
Master the most essential habits for health with bonus guides, including over 100 meal plans to take the stress out of meal time planning and shopping, and so much more!
Learn more about Rooted in Resilience here.
About the Author
Ashley Armstrong is the cofounder of Angel Acres Egg Co., which specializes in low-PUFA (polyunsaturated fat) eggs that are shipped to all 50 states (join waitlist here), and Nourish Cooperative, which ships low-PUFA pork, beef, cheese, A2 dairy and traditional sourdough to all 50 states. Waitlists will reopen shortly.
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