Name: What to Know About Raw Milk, Seed Oils, and the Food Pyramid | Sally Fallon Morell
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T17:30:44.000Z
Description: “What we’ve got today is too much money riding on seed oils. They can’t produce addictive, empty, junk food, processed food without the seed oils,” says Sally Fallon Morell.

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “What we’ve got today is too much money riding on seed oils. They can’t produce addictive, empty, junk food, processed food without the seed oils,” says Sally Fallon Morell.

For decades, Morell has led a grassroots movement to see healthy foods in every household in America.

“You need to get in the kitchen. [It] doesn’t mean you have to spend hours in the kitchen, but you need to get in the kitchen and learn how to produce healthy food for your family,” she says.

In this episode, she explains what’s wrong with our modern diet and calls for a return to traditional, nutrient-dense foods for better health.

“Animal fats are good for you. They’re not going to give you heart disease. Quite the opposite—they’re very stable, and they support good health. They support heart health,” Morell says. “Our mission is to bring people back to these foods, to get people to eat butter again, whole milk. By the way, egg yolks are a sacred food as well, very rich in nutrients and fat-soluble activators.”

Morell is the President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of, “Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Sally Fallon Morell, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you, Jan. I’m very pleased to be here.

So not too long ago, I had never heard about any issue with seed oils. Today, we’re constantly hearing about seed oils and potential problems with them. And it turns out that you had something to do with this, your work. So what’s going on with seed oils?

Yes, one of our founders was Mary Enig, a lipid scientist who had been beating the drum about the dangers of seed oils ever since she got her Ph.D. And she had done research on them. She did a lot of work on trans fats, which, by the way, led to their being banned from the food supply. But the liquid oils and the sort of thickened liquid oils that we get in spreads, they’re still here.

Why should we be concerned about seed oils?

Animal fats are expensive, and the food industry needs a cheap oil. And this started in the 1890s when they developed the stainless steel press, which allowed them to get oil out of seeds that they couldn’t do before. So the first one was cottonseed oil. And then they could get oil out of corn, which had never been done before. And then canola, which is rapeseed, and soybeans. So they started using these instead of animal fats. And they had a big campaign to make you think that these seed oils were a healthy alternative to animal fats.

But they’re not somehow?

No, they’re not. The problem with the oils is that they’re fragile. Any liquid oil is fragile, and it oxidizes easily, and it breaks down in the body into simple molecules called aldehydes. Not to get too technical, but there is an aldehyde that you know about. It’s called formaldehyde.

And I think it’s very interesting that the undertakers are saying they don’t need as much formaldehyde anymore to cure or preserve these bodies. It’s already there, and this is coming from the seed oils. They have been implicated; they’re carcinogenic. They know that they have been implicated in heart disease and many other conditions, and infertility is another thing that they lead to. These things are ubiquitous. They are everywhere.

Yes, so you don’t, I’d never heard anything about, like, why would you have something that’s known carcinogenic? Like, this doesn’t make a terrible amount of sense to most people, so we have to kind of back up a little bit, right?

Follow the money. I mean, it’s much less expensive to use soybean oil or corn oil than butter. Butter is a very expensive fat, or lard or tallow. Those are the three main ones. And then there’s also what I call the fruit oils: just palm oil, coconut oil, and palm kernel oil. These are much healthier than the seed oils because they’re more saturated. And you know the saturated fats have been demonized, but the saturated fats are the good fats. They’re the stable fats that don’t break down. And the fats that traditional people prized and always made sure they ate with their food.

I mean, I’m thinking back to growing up in the 80s. We were literally taught the exact opposite thing, right? That margarine is better. It’s like as a society, we agreed to believe this.

It was a tremendous marketing campaign, starting with Crisco, which means crystallized cottonseed oil, and it was a partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil. This was pushed relentlessly, starting with a book called The Story of Crisco, in which they said that American housewives, if they used Crisco instead of lard, they were more modern, their houses would smell better, they were cleaner, they had a cleaner house, and their children would have better character if they used Crisco instead of lard. I mean, it was a brilliant advertising campaign. And that book, The Story of Crisco, is still used in classes on advertising today.

What is the evidence that, and we’re saying this kind of broadly, seed oils that have all these problems that you’re talking about? What is the evidence base for that?

There is a lot of evidence. I talk, I give it all in my book, Nourishing Fats. But, for example, in the early days, and this is about the time you were going to school in the 1980s, they gave animals a carcinogen, and one group was fed saturated fat, and one group was fed unsaturated fat, like a seed oil. And the ones who were fed saturated fat did not get cancer, and the ones who were fed the seed oils did get cancer. So there were a lot of studies like that. There were several groups in the country who were doing these studies, but you never hear about them. But they’re there; they’re right in the literature.

What about, you know, actually I think my favorite oil, olive oil, how does that fit into the picture? That’s ancient, right?

Yes, olive oil is a fruit oil, and it’s easy to get out of the olive with a stone press, so you don’t have to heat it to remove it. And as soon as it comes out of the olive, it smells good and tastes good. Olive oil is also very stable. It’s not saturated, but it’s monounsaturated, which is just about as stable as saturated fat.

So really, it all comes down to, just going back to what you said earlier, it’s about the stability of the oil, ultimately.

Exactly. And in the seeds, it’s tightly held in there. When you eat the seed, it hasn’t oxidized. But when you crush these seeds with a stainless steel roller press, you get this polyunsaturated oil. And by the way, what comes out of the seeds is a foul-smelling gunk that has to be further processed, heated very hot several times. And remember, these oils are fragile, and then when you get the oil in the bottle, you’re told it’s okay to cook with it. So you’re heating it again.

Then you would distinguish between what they call extra virgin, which is this cold-pressed olive oil, and the hot-pressed, which is still more common, I think.

Yes. You do want the extra virgin; you want the cold-pressed.

So it’s always the least processed thing. That’s what we’re going for here.

And I would say the most traditional thing. Palm oil is traditional in Africa. Coconut oil is traditional in the tropical regions. And olive oil is traditional in the Mediterranean. Mankind has used these oils for thousands and thousands of years. And they’re still here. So it hasn’t wiped them out, you know.

There’s this huge focus on looking at traditional ways, but give me a sense of where this whole idea came from. This has been around for quite some time. And for full disclosure, I only heard of it for the first time about six months ago when we met at an event.

The Weston A. Price Foundation was set up to honor and disseminate the work of Weston Price, a dentist who had this unique idea back in the 30s and 40s to study isolated people. He called them primitive people, and that was a compliment. He was not trying to put them down. And to see what their health was like and if he could find healthy people, especially people with healthy teeth—he was a dentist—what were they eating?

He found 14 groups throughout the world who had perfect teeth, no cavities, no infection, and very broad faces so their teeth were naturally straight. Nobody needed braces. And along with this, they seemed to be perfectly healthy, no degenerative disease. The other thing that was noticed at the time was how easily the women had their babies.

So he found 14 groups, and then the question was, what were these people eating? Now, the diets were very different. You had Alaska and you had the South Seas. But there were some commonalities. And the real commonality was these diets were very high in minerals and particularly high in what we call the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K.

And where do we get these fat-soluble vitamins? We get them from animal fats. We get them from organ meats. We get them from shellfish and certain seafoods. These are what we call the sacred foods and they were highly prized, especially prized for having healthy babies.

And so our mission is to bring people back to these foods to get people to eat butter again, whole milk. By the way, egg yolks are a sacred food as well, very rich in nutrients and fat-soluble activators. So it’s going back to the type of diet that nourished obviously healthy people.

Did people traditionally really have better health? Right now we have a life expectancy that has been starting to come down in the U.S., but for the longest time it’s been going up.

Two things going on here. First of all, in the 1700s and 1800s, life in the cities was filthy. You had piles of stinking horse manure everywhere. No sewage, no water treatment, no refrigeration. And the lifespan, the death rate of children up to the age of five was 50 percent. So that’s a factor that brought the longevity down.

But if you were raised in the country on real food, raw milk, and ate butter, which all Americans did, that we did have a long lifespan. And among these traditional people, although we don’t know the lifespan, nobody was keeping records, but there were elders in every community and they played a very important role in these communities.

Well, and also you had a higher likelihood of, you know, dying due to accidents or, you know, carnivore attack or something. Carnivore attack,

Yes. It was a dangerous, dangerous lifestyle, especially for the men. They took great care about having children. They spaced their babies so they were three years apart. They had special foods to prepare them for pregnancy. And Price did not observe any infant mortality, actually.

Basically, you’re saying there’s a side effect of civilization, so to speak, or certain ways in which it manifested which became really bad for people, which of course we know is true in these types of scenarios you were describing.

With their introduction to the West—what did the West bring them? They brought alcohol, sugar, white flour, and tea, and all of these things they gobbled up immediately. They tasted so different. And what he observed was in the first generation of eating these foods of commerce, as he called them, the first thing that happened was rampant tooth decay, causing a tremendous amount of suffering because the foods had gotten there, but not the dentists. And then the second generation—it took just one generation—and the children born looked different. They had more narrow faces and less space in the sinus passages.

Because he was watching the teeth very closely, right?

And the teeth were crooked. They were crooked and crowded. And that’s when TB [Tuberculosis] came along. He thought that TB was due to a malformation of the lungs. The lungs hadn’t been formed properly, just like the mouth hadn’t been formed properly.

Fascinating. And so, has there been further work done to look at this?

Nobody really followed Dr. Price. There were a few doctors who did implement his diet. One was Dr. Pottenger in California, who wrote a very interesting book. He did studies with cats, and he noted that in cats, if you give them a diet that’s not the appropriate diet for cats, you get degeneration for three generations, and then the fourth generation, there are no more cats.

So there’s a fertility effect, basically.

By the third generation, and that’s where we are here. And what are we seeing? We’re seeing a decline in fertility. We believe we’re at the 11th hour, and we’re highly motivated to bring our message to prospective parents so they can feed these nutrient-dense foods to themselves to prepare for pregnancy and then to their children as they grow.

And this is really important, actually, because I think I see the argument now. The argument is basically that in earlier civilizations or earlier, you know, what Weston Price called, you know, kind of primitive living groups, so to speak, people ate as well as possible. Then they figured out, given what was available, that would maximize their ability to have children. That was, you know, probably one of the most important things you could actually do.

When they killed an animal, the first thing they did was eat the organ meats. The organ meats are 100, even 1,000 times more nutritious than the muscle meats. And then they ate the muscle meats. They always ate muscle meats with the fat; they never ate lean meat. And we do have a scientific reason for that.

The plant foods were there. In almost every diet, there were plant foods, carbohydrate foods. It’s not like we’re saying don’t eat vegetables or don’t eat sweet potatoes. But the animal foods were primary, and they were the chief source of nutrition.

Fascinating. What about you? What is your backstory here? I mean, how did you get involved in working with the foundation?

I came from an interesting family. I would say my parents were probably the first foodies in the world. They were very interested in food, and they traveled a lot. My mother was a great cook, so she’d come home and make cassoulet or filet of sole meuniere. She always used butter, and I’m very grateful. We grew up on butter.

I had a daughter who was a beautiful little girl, and that’s when this message started to come out. Don’t give your kids whole milk, and don’t give them butter, and don’t give them eggs; give them cereal, not eggs. And I knew that this was wrong. I felt it inside. And it was just around that time I read Dr. Price’s book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. And it just showed me that I was on the right path.

You mentioned raw milk earlier. You know this has become such an amazingly controversial thing, and I’ll tell you something about when I grew up, right? My mother actually had been an agricultural inspector in Poland, and the sanitation was not good. For her, if milk was not pasteurized, that was, you know, a death knell. That’s kind of what I grew up with. Okay, I still remember, I’m going to tell the story.

I was in France. I had made a deal with a woman who lived in Paris to help her out in her summer cottage, and I would get to stay and sort of, you know, check out the countryside. She took me to a farm, and, you know, I tried raw milk, but I almost didn’t because I said, wait, wait, you can’t just drink it straight. You remember what your mother said: you can’t drink it straight from the cow. And she’s like, are you crazy? Anyway, so apparently in the French countryside, it was a perfectly normal thing to do. But why is raw milk so controversial?

We know a lot more about milk today than we did in the 1960s, let’s say, where it was just assumed to be dangerous and full of germs. We now know that there’s a large number of antimicrobial compounds in raw milk that kill pathogens but support the growth of the good guys in the gut. These components protect the gut wall, and we just keep finding these wonderful things in raw milk. And they’re all destroyed by pasteurization.

What happens in pasteurization, we now know, is that the proteins are so warped and distorted that they become allergenic. So more and more people are allergic to milk. It’s the number one allergy. Consumption of pasteurized milk is relentlessly declining in spite of all the publicity campaigns, the milk mustache campaign and everything. Because it makes the kids have a tummy ache or makes them break out in a rash.

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