Seed oils: the real cause of cellulite?

The scourge of perfect skin

No one likes cellulite. It affects “80-90% of post-adolescent females”, and they try very hard to get rid of it.

But the expensive lotions and potions are never going to work, and the collective efforts of women so far have been for naught.

This difficulty has driven some to claim that cellulite is normal and “harmless”, yet you don’t have to accept this scourge of perfect skin.

You can fix it once you understand the true cause of cellulite: dietary poly-unsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which come primarily from seed oils, and secondarily from fish oil.

Disclaimer: no single study has isolated the cause of cellulite. You have to read between the lines. Doctors will say I’m wrong, but some theory is better than no theory, and they don’t have an alternative. My theory also happens to be right:

PUFAs, whether from seed or fish oil, cause cellulite.

Seed oils are modern; so is cellulite

Your grandma did not have cellulite when she was 20 and hanging out on Martha’s Vineyard during spring break. And it was not because she used the latest and greatest in skincare technology from L’Oreal.

If expensive chemicals were required to prevent cellulite, then everyone would have had it prior to 1970. They didn’t:

cellulite was virtually unheard of prior to the 1970s

brazil in the ‘70s. no cellulite to be found

Recall that cellulite affects 80-90% of women. It does not discriminate, afflicting skinny and obese women alike. Clearly, that was not always true.

The proliferation of cellulite coincides perfectly with with rise of seed oils in the 70s:

the cellulite graph is almost the same as the seed oil one

And before the redditors get mad, yes the correlation doesn’t prove my case. Fortunately, there is a physiological explanation too…

Drying Oils

When PUFAs (from seed or fish oils) oxidize, one of the things that happens is that they “polymerize”, which “results in stable films that, while somewhat elastic, do not flow or deform readily” (this means they turn into plastic, which is a hard polymer).

Some unsaturated oils, like flaxseed and fish oil, are so unstable that this process occurs spontaneously. These are called drying oils (because they “dry” or harden) and are used in oil-based paint, as I explained in my article on omega-3s

Omega 3s are worse than seed oils

When you squeeze healthy body fat, it deforms smoothly with your skin. Cellulite notably does not— it’s hard and lumpy, and doesn’t form to the pattern of your skin as it’s compressed. Almost as if there are hardened bits of plastic-y material in there.

Sounds an awful lot like polymerized unsaturated fats, doesn’t it?

cellulite is most noticeable when your body fat is flexed or deformed in some way.

I’ve scoured google scholar for “cellulite biopsy” studies, but no one has analyzed the lipid profile of cellulite tissue. I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that it contains an unusually high concentration of PUFAs.

Summary

The pathway is simple: PUFAs get into your body fat, and oxidize into plastic chunks which form the hard lumps that are called cellulite.

Hence the increase of cellulite starting from the 1970s, right around the time seed oils became the primary fat in the western diet.

Fixing it

Now we understand the mechanism for cellulite formation, we can identify targeted strategies to solve it.

0. Eat a low-PUFA diet

You need to stop consuming PUFAs.

Avoid seed oils, fish oil, and omega-3 supplements like the plague, and also eat fewer whole foods high in unsaturated fat as well (cold water fish, nuts and seeds, especially flax and chia).

1. Lose body fat (up to a point)

Once you’ve stopped eating them, the PUFAs still won’t disappear overnight. They can stay in your body fat for up to 7 years once consumed.

Losing body fat will decrease the total amount of PUFAs in your system, but even if you’re “skinny” at 20% body fat, a significant portion of your fat will still be PUFA-plastic.

losing body fat still won’t get rid of all the PUFAs in your fat tissue

So while you should get to a healthy weight, being ultra-skinny won’t actually help.

This should come as a relief to many women, who are conditioned to the idea that they have to be thin as a rail to not have cellulite. Unable to attain such an unreasonable body composition, they thus give up hope of ever fixing cellulite.