In 1909, the average American consumed less than 10 grams of soybean oil per year. By 1999, that number was over 11 kilograms. A 2011 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition called it the single most significant modification to the U.S. food supply during the 20th century. How did seed oils go from an industrial byproduct to a staple of the American diet? We traced the history of seed oils in America.
Before Seed Oils: What Americans Actually Cooked With
For most of American history, cooking fat came from animals. Lard rendered from pork. Beef tallow from cattle. Butter churned from cream. Schmaltz from poultry. These fats were natural byproducts of agriculture — abundant, affordable, and understood.
The same was true across cultures. Traditional cuisines around the world built their cooking methods around animal fats and fruit-derived oils like olive oil and coconut oil. The idea of extracting oil from the seeds of cotton, soybeans, or corn at industrial scale didn't exist until the early 1900s.
That's when things started to shift.
1911: Crisco and the Birth of Industrial Cooking Oil
Cottonseed oil was originally a waste product. Cotton was grown for fiber, and the seeds were discarded or fed to livestock. But in the late 1800s, refiners figured out how to process cottonseed into a liquid oil suitable for industrial use — primarily as a cheaper substitute for whale oil in lamps and machinery.
In 1903, German chemist Wilhelm Normann patented a process called hydrogenation — a method of forcing hydrogen gas through liquid oil under pressure, converting it into a solid fat. Procter & Gamble licensed this technology, adapted it for cottonseed oil, and in June 1911 introduced a product called Crisco — short for "crystallized cottonseed oil."
Crisco was the first cooking fat made entirely from vegetable oil. P&G marketed it as modern, clean, and economical — a replacement for "old-fashioned" lard. They distributed free cookbooks where every recipe called for Crisco. They ran ads in the Ladies' Home Journal positioning it as superior to butter. By 1916, sales had reached 60 million pounds per year.
The strategy worked. Not because the product was proven safer, but because the marketing was relentless. P&G's advertising budget hit $400,000 annually by 1912 — enormous for the era. Their message wasn't about science. It was about trust: don't worry about what's in it, trust the brand.
How Seed Oil Consumption Transformed the American Diet
The scale of the shift is difficult to overstate. Blasbalg et al. published a landmark analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2011, using USDA disappearance data to track fatty acid consumption across the entire 20th century.
Here is what the researchers found:
| Measure | 1909 | 1999 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Soybean oil (kg/capita/year) | 0.009 | 11.64 | 1,163-fold increase |
| Linoleic acid (% of energy) | 2.23% | 7.21% | +223% |
| LA:ALA ratio | 6.4 | 10.0 | +56% |
| Estimated Omega-3 Index | 8.28 | 3.84 | −54% |
Soybean oil alone accounted for the majority of this shift. The researchers noted that its rise "was the most striking modification of the U.S. food supply during the 20th century" — a greater-than-1,000-fold increase in per capita consumption over 90 years.
Separately, Simopoulos (2016) published in Nutrients that the dietary ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids had shifted from an estimated 1:1 during human evolution to approximately 20:1 in modern Western diets. The researcher noted that this change paralleled shifts in disease patterns, though the relationship remains an active area of study.
The Science That Rewrote the Menu (1950s–1980)
If Crisco opened the door for seed oils, the mid-century medical establishment pushed America through it.
In the 1950s, physiologist Ancel Keys proposed what became known as the lipid hypothesis — the idea that dietary saturated fat raises blood cholesterol, which in turn causes heart disease. Keys advocated replacing animal fats with polyunsaturated vegetable oils.
In 1956, the American Heart Association introduced the "Prudent Diet" on national television, recommending Americans replace lard, butter, and tallow with corn oil, margarine, and other seed oils. In 1961, Keys was appointed to the AHA's nutrition committee. That same year — despite what the AHA itself had previously called insufficient evidence — the organization officially recommended reducing saturated fat and replacing it with polyunsaturated fat.
The policy cascaded. In 1977, Senator George McGovern's Select Committee on Nutrition published the Dietary Goals for the United States, recommending Americans limit saturated fat to 10% of calories. In 1980, the first Dietary Guidelines for Americans told the public: "Avoid too much fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol."
With that, the institutional infrastructure was in place. Food manufacturers reformulated products. Restaurant chains switched cooking oils. Grocery shelves filled with "heart-healthy" vegetable oil products. And animal fats — lard, butter, tallow — became the villains of American nutrition.
When America's Most Famous French Fry Changed (1990)
No single moment captures the seed oil takeover better than what happened to McDonald's french fries.
From 1949 until 1990, McDonald's cooked its fries in a blend of 93% beef tallow and 7% cottonseed oil. The tallow gave the fries their signature flavor — rich, savory, and distinctive enough that food writers would spend decades trying to explain what made them special.
In 1988, Phil Sokolof — a millionaire who had survived a heart attack at 43 — founded the National Heart Savers Association and took out full-page ads in major newspapers headlined "THE POISONING OF AMERICA!" He targeted McDonald's specifically, demanding they stop frying in beef tallow.
By April 1990, Sokolof ran another ad: "McDONALD'S, YOUR FRENCH FRIES STILL ARE COOKED WITH BEEF TALLOW." On July 23, 1990, McDonald's announced the switch to vegetable oil.
The irony came later. The vegetable oil McDonald's switched to was hydrogenated — the same process Procter & Gamble had used to create Crisco in 1911. Hydrogenation creates trans fats, a class of artificial fats that the FDA ultimately banned in 2018 after research linked them to heart disease. McDonald's didn't remove trans fats from its U.S. fries until 2008.
In 2002, McDonald's paid $10 million to settle lawsuits accusing the chain of mislabeling its fries as vegetarian — the vegetable oil blend still contained "natural beef flavor" derived from animal sources.
The fry that was cooked in actual beef fat for 41 years was replaced by a vegetable oil that turned out to contain trans fats, artificial flavoring, and enough legal ambiguity to generate a multi-million-dollar settlement. That sequence — confident public health messaging followed by unintended consequences — is the history of seed oils in miniature.
What Researchers Found When They Looked Back
In 2016, researcher Christopher Ramsden and colleagues published a study in the BMJ that reexamined data from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment — a large randomized controlled trial conducted from 1968 to 1973 involving 9,423 participants.
The original experiment replaced saturated fat with corn oil and corn oil margarine (rich in linoleic acid) in the diets of participants at state mental hospitals and a nursing home. The intervention group's serum cholesterol dropped significantly — a 13.8% reduction compared to 1.0% in the control group.
But the full mortality data had never been published. When Ramsden's team recovered the original records — found on data tapes in the basement of a deceased researcher's estate — they discovered that the cholesterol reduction did not translate to fewer deaths. The data showed a 22% higher risk of death for each 30 mg/dL reduction in serum cholesterol (hazard ratio 1.22, 95% CI 1.14–1.32).
The researchers concluded that "available evidence from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat in the diet with linoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol but does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes."
This doesn't mean saturated fat is harmless or that seed oils are universally harmful. Nutrition science is complex, and individual studies — even large ones — don't settle debates. But the Ramsden findings illustrate why the original dietary recommendations deserve scrutiny: the full picture wasn't available when the guidelines were written, and some of the data that existed went unpublished for nearly 50 years.
Where Beef Tallow Fits
Beef tallow has a fundamentally different fatty acid profile than seed oils. It is approximately 50% saturated fat, 42% monounsaturated fat, and only about 4% polyunsaturated fat. Seed oils like soybean (55% PUFA), sunflower (62% PUFA), and corn (54% PUFA) have the inverse profile.
This composition matters at frying temperature. We covered the food chemistry of frying with seed oils in detail — polyunsaturated fatty acids are the most vulnerable to oxidative breakdown during heating, generating aldehyde byproducts that transfer into fried food. Saturated fats, with no double bonds to attack, are far more resistant to this process.
That oxidative stability is why tallow was the default frying fat for centuries before the seed oil era — and why we compared it directly to the other popular alternative in our post on tallow chips vs. avocado oil chips.
Why We Cook with Tallow
We read the research. We looked at the data. We chose tallow.
Every bag of TIPS Sea Salt chips is cooked in 100% beef tallow with just three ingredients: potatoes, beef tallow, and sea salt. Our Jalapeño and Salt & Vinegar flavors use the same tallow base with simple seasonings. No canola. No soybean oil. No sunflower. No seed oils at any stage of production.
The history of seed oils in America is a story of industrial convenience, institutional momentum, and marketing that outpaced the science. We don't think that makes seed oils "poison" or "toxic" — those words oversimplify a complicated picture. But we do think the research is worth reading, and we think the traditional fats that fed generations before 1911 deserve another look.
Try the Variety Pack and taste what chips cooked in tallow are like — or browse all TIPS flavors to find your favorite.
Read Next
- What Happens to Seed Oils When You Fry — The Food Chemistry Explained
- Tallow Chips vs. Avocado Oil Chips — What's the Difference?
- Omega-6 to Omega-3: Why the Ratio Matters (And Where Researchers Disagree)
Sources
- Blasbalg TL, Hibbeln JR, Ramsden CE, Majchrzak SF, Rawlings RR. Changes in consumption of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in the United States during the 20th century. Am J Clin Nutr. 2011;93(5):950–962. PubMed
- Simopoulos AP. An increase in the omega-6/omega-3 fatty acid ratio increases the risk for obesity. Nutrients. 2016;8(3):128. PubMed
- Ramsden CE, Zamora D, Majchrzak-Hong S, et al. Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968–73). BMJ. 2016;353:i1246. PubMed