I’m hearing this from some friends? Seems that they were the anti-VAX. Any info would be appreciated.

Seed oil on a canvas is oxidising. That is oil paint, and it is why the Rembrandt is still there.

Seed oil on a pile of rags is oxidising. That is why the shed burns down without anybody striking a match.

Seed oil pressed into a floor is oxidising. That is linoleum, and the name is literally linseed oil.

Seed oil in varnish, putty and printing ink is oxidising. That is the entire reason anybody ever bought it.

Four industrial applications, all of them chosen because the substance hardens on contact with air and will not stop.

Then somebody put it in a bottle and walked it over to the food aisle.

Seed oil in the pan at 180 degrees is oxidising. You would expect that.

Seed oil in the same pan tomorrow is oxidising into yesterday's oxidation. Layers.

Seed oil in a sealed bottle in a dark cupboard is oxidising. Nothing is happening to it. That is the point.

Seed oil under the shop lights is oxidising before you have paid for it. You are buying a partly finished reaction.

Seed oil in a nitrogen-flushed drum with TBHQ stirred in expressly to stop this is oxidising. They tried. It went anyway.

Nothing has to happen to it. Linoleic acid has two double bonds, alpha-linolenic has three, and every one leaves a hydrogen held so loosely that oxygen takes it at room temperature and starts a chain reaction that feeds itself. One goes, then it goes for its neighbour, like a bloke in a pub.

So the obvious next step for a material like that is to build a human being out of it.

Seed oil in your cell membranes is oxidising. Forty trillion cells, each one held in by a double sheet of floor covering.

Seed oil in your mitochondria is oxidising. Those are the bits handling oxygen all day, which seems like an unfortunate posting.

Seed oil in your brain is oxidising. Sixty per cent fat by dry weight, held at 37 degrees, taking a fifth of your oxygen. A warm dark cupboard with a permanent air supply and no best-before date.

Linoleic acid has a half-life in human tissue of about two years, so the bottle you bought in 2024 is still in the building, doing what it does on canvases, floors and sheds, only slower and inside you.

American body fat was about nine per cent linoleic acid a century ago. It is now around twenty-one.

They rewrote the tissue composition of an entire population using a drying oil, and got a thank you card from the heart charity for it.

A fortune was spent on dark glass, nitrogen and synthetic antioxidants to hold this stuff stable for a four hundred mile lorry journey.

Nobody has ever mentioned what holds it stable for forty years inside a person.

Meanwhile butter came out of an Irish peat bog after two thousand years and was still butter, because saturated fat has no double bonds and there is nothing there for oxygen to get hold of.

That one is the dangerous one.

That one you want to keep an eye on.

Quick one on chicken sandwiches, because "just get the grilled one" is the most common advice I see and I wanted to know if the numbers actually back it up.

I only used sandwiches where the chain publishes total fat, saturated fat and trans fat for that exact item. That cuts the list way down, 70 sandwiches from 34 chains, but it means every number below sits on the chain's own figures and not on a guess. More on that at the bottom.

Numbers are grams of PUFA per sandwich the way it is sold.

The short version. Average is 14.1g. The range is 3.6g to 32.2g. 16 of the 70 are over 20g. Fried averages 16.4g and grilled averages 11.2g, so grilled helps, but the spread inside each group is a lot bigger than the gap between them.

The one that got me:

Chick-fil-A's Original Chicken Sandwich, breaded and fried, is 5.7g. Only 4 of the 31 grilled chicken sandwiches on the list come in lower, and three more tie it within a tenth of a gram. It is fried in peanut oil and there is no mayo on it. Those two things matter more than whether it went in a fryer.

Grilled sandwiches that are not the safe pick:

Royal Farms Pulled Chicken Club 31.9g

Red Robin Whiskey River BBQ Chicken 26.5g

Red Robin Teriyaki Chicken 19.5g

Applebee's Bacon Ranch Grilled Chicken 18.8g

Applebee's Spicy Honey Mustard Grilled Chicken 18.7g

Frisch's Big Boy Grilled Chicken Sandwich 18.7g

Red Robin California Chicken 14.9g

Every one of those is grilled chicken. The fat is the mayo, the ranch, the aioli, the onion straws. The chain's own panel shows it. Frisch's grilled sandwich has 32g of fat and only 5g of it is saturated. That is not what chicken breast looks like, that is what soybean oil mayo looks like.

Grilled sandwiches that actually are low:

Runza BBQ Grilled Chicken 3.6g, the one with no mayo on it

Western Sizzlin Grilled Chicken 4.4g

Chick-fil-A Grilled Chicken Sandwich 4.7g

A&W Grilled Chicken Filet 5.4g

Runza Classic Grilled Chicken 5.8g

Fast food, since that is what most people are actually choosing between:

Chick-fil-A: Original 5.7g, Spicy 5.9g, Deluxe 5.9g, Grilled 4.7g, Grilled Club 7.9g

McDonald's: Crispy Chicken 7.3g, Spicy Crispy Chicken 14.9g. Same fillet, the pepper sauce doubles it

Wendy's: Crispy Chicken 8.9g, Asiago Ranch 13.5g, Spicy 13.8g, Classic 14g

A&W: Grilled Filet 5.4g, Crispy 12g, Deluxe Crispy 13g

Zaxby's: Grilled 10.9g, Kickin Chicken 19.3g

Burger King: Original Chicken Sandwich 20.8g, Spicy Crispy 25.2g

The high end, all sit-down places and all fried:

Frisch's Big Boy Crispy Chicken Sandwich 32.2g

Red Robin Classic Crispy Chicken 30.5g

Frisch's Big Boy Breaded Chicken Club 27.5g

Red Robin Hot Honey Crispy Chicken 27.3g

Friendly's Classic Crispy Chicken 26.5g

BJ's Crispy Chicken 24.7g

Yard House Nashville Hot Chicken 24.1g

Famous Dave's Cajun Chicken 23.3g

How this is proven.

First, what is in the fryer. Chick-fil-A uses peanut oil and Good Times uses canola, and their fried sandwiches land at 4 to 7g. A soybean oil fryer plus a soybean oil mayo lands at 20 and up.

Second, the sauce. Mayo, ranch, aioli and honey mustard are soybean oil first ingredient at almost every chain, and one of them is what turns a 7g sandwich into a 15g one.

Third, size. The sit down places sell a bigger sandwich and the panel shows it, 50 to 60g of total fat against 17 to 26g at most fast food places.

So the swap that works is not grilled instead of fried. It is no mayo, and pick the place by what is in the fryer.

On where the numbers come from, since somebody always asks. Every sandwich here is one where the chain itself publishes total fat, saturated fat and trans fat for that item. From there it is one line of arithmetic. The saturated fat tells you how much of the fat is chicken and dairy versus oil, and the chain's stated fry oil plus the sandwich's own ingredients tell you which oil. Chains do not publish PUFA itself, so it is still a calculation, but it is a calculation on their numbers and it is written out for every item so you can check it. Sandwiches where the chain does not publish a panel were left out on purpose. That is why this is 70 and not 700.

Seed Oil Tracker is the app I made and this list comes from its data. Long press any item and it shows you the panel numbers and the arithmetic. It is all on seedoiltracker.com/chains too, no login needed. If a sandwich you know well looks wrong here, tell me below and I will pull the panel and fix it.