What Are Seed Oils, and Why Does Everyone Suddenly Care?
We do not use seed oils in our kitchen. Not in the fryers, not anywhere. That is a real operational decision with real costs, and people ask us to justify it constantly.
So here is the honest version, including the parts that do not support our position. The seed oil argument online has gotten loud enough that both sides are overstating things, and we would rather be trusted than be emphatic.
What is a seed oil?
A seed oil is a cooking oil extracted from the seed of a plant rather than from a fruit. The common ones are soybean, corn, canola, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, and rice bran. Together they are often called "the hateful eight" in online discussion, which tells you something about the temperature of the conversation.
Olive oil and avocado oil are not seed oils — they are pressed from the flesh of a fruit. Coconut oil is not one either. This distinction matters because it is the source of most of the confusion in the topic.
How they are made, which is the actual point
You can squeeze an olive and get oil. You cannot squeeze a soybean and get much of anything, because a soybean is only about 18 percent oil by weight and that oil is locked in tight.
Industrial extraction therefore looks like this: the seeds are cleaned, heated, and mechanically pressed, then the remaining oil is pulled out with a chemical solvent, usually hexane. The crude oil is then degummed, neutralized with an alkali, bleached with clay, and deodorized at temperatures around 400 to 500°F.
The result is shelf-stable, cheap, and completely neutral in flavor. That neutrality is engineered — it is what is left after everything that tasted like anything has been removed.
None of this is illegal, hidden, or unusual. Hexane residue in finished oil is measured in parts per million and is far below regulatory limits. But "cold-pressed olive oil" and "hexane-extracted, bleached, deodorized soybean oil" are genuinely different categories of thing, and it is reasonable for people to feel differently about them.
What the health argument is actually about
Three claims get made. They are not equally strong, and lumping them together is how this debate goes wrong.
Omega-6 to omega-3 ratio — the strongest version of the argument
Seed oils are high in linoleic acid, an omega-6 polyunsaturated fat. Omega-6 is an essential nutrient and you need it. The concern is proportion: estimates put the ancestral human omega-6 to omega-3 ratio somewhere around 4:1 or lower, while the modern American diet runs closer to 15:1 or 20:1.
Because omega-6 and omega-3 compete for the same enzymes, a heavily skewed ratio may shift the body toward more inflammatory signaling. This is a plausible mechanism and it is taken seriously in the literature.
The counterargument is also serious: large observational studies generally do not find that people eating more linoleic acid have worse cardiovascular outcomes, and several find the opposite. The mechanism is real; whether it produces the outcome at dietary levels is not settled.
Oxidation at high heat — the most relevant one to a fryer
Polyunsaturated fats have multiple double bonds, and double bonds are where oxidation happens. Heat them repeatedly, as a commercial fryer does, and they degrade into aldehydes and other oxidation products, some of which are known to be harmful.
This one matters most in exactly our situation — a restaurant fryer running all day, every day, for weeks on the same oil. A saturated or monounsaturated fat like tallow has far fewer double bonds and is correspondingly more stable under that abuse. This is the part of the argument that actually drove our decision.
"Seed oils cause chronic disease" — the weakest one
This is the claim that gets made loudest and supported least. Seed oil consumption rose alongside obesity and metabolic disease, but so did total calories, added sugar, ultra-processed food, portion sizes, and sedentary behavior. Untangling one variable from that is genuinely hard, and nobody has done it convincingly.
Anyone telling you seed oils are the single cause of modern chronic disease is overselling. Anyone telling you the question is fully closed in the other direction is also overselling.
What we concluded
We are a restaurant, not a research institution, and we made a restaurant's decision.
The oxidation argument is the one that applies to us directly. Our fryers run hot all day. A fat that holds up under sustained high heat produces better food and degrades more slowly, and beef tallow is dramatically more stable than soybean oil under those conditions.
The rest of it — the ratio question, the chronic disease question — we treat as unresolved and we do not make claims about it. What we will say is that we cook with one ingredient, we know exactly what it is, and the food tastes better. That was enough.
What we actually use
Everything fried at The Garage comes out of beef tallow. The Ocean Springs Weekly Record confirmed it in print in January 2026. Fries, house-cut chips, tots, wings, catfish, Spam sticks — all tallow, no exceptions, no seed oils anywhere in the kitchen.
You can buy the same fat. Original Tallow Cooking Oil is what our fryers run on, refined so that it pours instead of sitting in a tub as a solid. One ingredient, smoke point around 400°F.
If you want the fuller case for tallow specifically, we wrote what is beef tallow, and the history of how American kitchens made this switch in the first place is in why people stopped using tallow — which is a genuinely strange story involving the FDA later banning the replacement.
The full tallow collection has both flavors and gallon sizes.
If you want to cut back on seed oils
The practical reality is that home cooking oil is not where most seed oil consumption happens. The bulk of it comes from packaged food and restaurant food, where you have no visibility.
Swapping your cooking oil is the easy part. Tallow or olive oil covers nearly everything — tallow for heat, olive oil for raw and finishing. Reading labels on packaged food is harder and matters more. Eating out is hardest, which is why directories of seed-oil-free restaurants exist and why we are listed in them.
For the practical side of avoiding them, we keep a running list of seed oil free restaurants on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and a direct comparison of beef tallow against vegetable oil if you want the numbers side by side.
Common questions
What are the seed oils to avoid?
The commonly cited list is soybean, corn, canola, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, and rice bran oil.
Is olive oil a seed oil?
No. Olive oil is pressed from the fruit, not the seed. Avocado oil and coconut oil are likewise not seed oils.
Are seed oils actually bad for you?
The evidence is mixed and the debate is unsettled. The strongest concerns are the skewed omega-6 to omega-3 ratio in modern diets and oxidation at high or repeated cooking temperatures. The claim that seed oils single-handedly cause chronic disease is not well supported. The claim that the question is fully settled in their favor is also overstated.
Is canola oil a seed oil?
Yes. Canola is made from rapeseed and is one of the most widely used seed oils in food service.
What should I cook with instead?
Beef tallow for high heat, searing, and frying. Olive oil for lower heat, dressings, and finishing. Butter where flavor and browning matter. Between those three, almost everything is covered.