We’ve been told that the secret to curing heart disease is to consume unsaturated vegetable oils rather than saturated animal fats. So now all the fats in our processed foods are labelled ‘vegetable oil’ and the labels are rarely more specific than that. The irony is that there is no such thing as oil from a vegetable. The products being pushed as vegetable oils are in fact fruit oils (coconut, palm, olive or avocado), nut oils (macadamia, peanut, pecan, and so on) or seed oils (canola, sunflower, soybean, grapeseed or rice bran). There’s nothing much wrong with fruit oils and some nut oils are okay, too. But seed oils are extraordinarily dangerous. And unfortunately they make up almost all of the ‘vegetable oils’ in our food.

I am not telling you this because I am a ‘greenie’, a conspiracy theorist or a herbal jerbal knit-your-own-food purveyor. I am telling you because if you knew this (and could prove it) and didn’t tell me and my family, I’d be furious with you. I am not a doctor or a nutritionist. I have no formal training in human biochemistry or even chemistry. I am a lawyer and the only relevant skill I bring to the table is an ability to gather, understand and synthesise evidence. Science is based on people making hypotheses about how things might work and then collecting evidence that will prove them right (or wrong). Just like law, science should be all about the evidence. However, when it comes to the river of gold that is the processed food industry, evidence runs smack bang into commercial interest and, unfortunately for us, commercial interest generally wins out.