New studies have found that soybean oil might be altering our genes and causing a rise in metabolic health conditions such as diabetes, obesity and insulin resistance, Twistedsifter reported.
To study the use of soybean oil on health, the experiment was conducted on mice which were divided into three groups.
The first group of mice consumed food high in normal soybean oil, the second group was fed in soybean oil from which linoleic acid was removed and the third group was given coconut oil.
It was discovered that the first and the second groups of mice had modified genes. Around 100 different types of hypothalamus genes had been affected. These genes are related to schizophrenia, depression, and Alzheimer’s disease, among others.
“This was a major surprise for us — that soybean oil is causing more obesity and diabetes than fructose — especially when you see headlines everyday about the potential role of sugar consumption in the current obesity epidemic,” said researcher Poonamjot Deol, the paper’s first author, in a UCR statement. She directed the project in Sladek’s lab.
The most affected gene was the oxytocin, which is the happiness hormone. This gene regulates feelings such as euphoria and love, promotes social bonding, and also plays a major role in body weight.
The high-fat diets, which contained 40 percent fat, produced unpleasant effects on the male mice tested. Some effects were more unpleasant than the others.
“C57/BL6 male mice fed a diet moderately high in fat from coconut oil and soybean oil (SO-HFD, 40% kcal total fat) showed statistically significant increases in weight gain, adiposity, diabetes, glucose intolerance and insulin resistance compared to mice on a diet consisting primarily of coconut oil (HFD),” the study stated. “They also had fatty livers with hepatocyte ballooning and very large lipid droplets as well as shorter colonic crypt length.”
“While the high fructose diet (F-HFD) did not cause as much obesity or diabetes as SO-HFD, it did cause rectal prolapse and a very fatty liver, but no balloon injury,” the study stated. “The coconut oil diet (with or without fructose) increased spleen weight while fructose in the presence of soybean oil increased kidney weight.”
