The $1B Mistake in Your Pantry: Seed Oil Truth Exposed | Steven Rofrano DSH #1028

Put it on the label.

What?

So Tyson was selling these frozen chicken fingers or whatever, and there was no oil on the label.

And so some of these seed oil people called them and said, Are you sure there's no seed oils on here?

And the customer service said, Actually, no, we fry them in soybean oil for 10 seconds.

Wow.

But because it's less than 10 seconds or whatever, it doesn't have to go on the label.

And so these people are like eating soy-fried

chicken fingers.

And I don't even realize it.

All right, guys.

Steven Rafrano, co-founder of Masa.

And it's a great product, dude.

Thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

One of the healthier products I've seen.

Yeah, no, it's there's a lot of stuff out there, but I think we managed to get the best combination of like actually real food in the bag.

Yeah.

A lot of health foods are like, they have weird ingredients that no one's ever heard of.

They just sound healthy.

Right.

But this is like how your grandma might have made it 200 years ago or something.

Yeah.

No seed oils, right?

No seed oils.

And you use beef tallow.

Is it grass-fed tallow?

It's a small beef tallow, which costs a lot.

So people got to realize.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not a cheap thing to make.

It's like, I think five times the price of seed oils.

Wow like per pound or whatever nuts Yeah, and I'm not trying to call out any brands But when you go to the grocery stores and you buy tortilla chips a lot of them use pretty poor ingredients Yeah, pretty much all of them and the crazy thing is if you look at the labels It'll say canola and or sunflower and or safflower.

It's like they don't even distinguish like they don't even know it's in their own

and or yeah and or what if I said honey and or sugar and or maple syrup and or stevia, you know?

It's crazy what they could get away with with labels.

Yeah.

And they'll rename certain ingredients.

Yeah.

Well, I heard, okay, I heard this really interesting thing on Twitter the other day.

Basically, if you fry something in oil for less than 10 seconds, you don't have to put it on the label.

What?

So Tyson was selling these frozen chicken fingers or whatever, and there was no oil on the label.

And so some of these seed oil people called them and said, are you sure there's no seed oils on here?

And the customer service said, actually, no, we fry them in soybean oil for 10 seconds.

Wow.

But because it's less than 10 seconds or whatever, it doesn't have to go on the label.

And so these people are like eating soy-fried

chicken fingers and they don't even realize it.

So what about organic seed oils?

Is there a difference?

Technically, the only difference is that the root crop was grown organically.

But the main reason seed oils are bad is not necessarily because the pesticides that they're like the actual plant is grown with.

The oil itself is pretty highly toxic.

It's just incompatible with human biology for a whole host of reasons that we can get into if you want.

But whether they're organic or not, it doesn't change the core thing that makes seed oils bad.

Have you used the Yuka app on this?

The Yuka app, so the Yuka app thinks that saturated fat is bad for you.

Saturday fat?

Saturated fat.

Oh, saturated.

Yeah.

So the Yuka app basically thinks seed oils are good for you.

Yeah, it's based on,

I can't fault them in particular, but it's based on like the mainstream opinion of the American Heart Association and all the sort of fake science that's been paid for by the vegetable oil industry since the 1950s, which is that, of course, cholesterol is bad.

Unsaturated fat, which is seed oils, is good for you.

Saturated fat and cholesterol are bad.

And that's been the mainstream opinion of doctors for the past 70 years, But it's all based on very corrupt science.

There's some good books that go into this.

I don't know if you even have her on your show.

Nina Teicholtz wrote The Big Fat Surprise, which details the history of how the corrupt food industry paid for studies to basically say seed holes are good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's kind of crazy.

How can they frame the study in that way?

Like, what exactly was the study?

Yeah.

So this is,

so there's an interesting, I forget what they call this.

It's basically like a proxy, right?

So if doctors establish, hey, this thing is good, then they can say something else causes this thing.

And then that something else is considered good.

I'll give you an example.

So if they established cholesterol is bad and that we should lower cholesterol,

they don't have to say that doing this thing makes you healthier or causes less death or makes you live longer.

All they have to do is say, this thing causes lower cholesterol.

And because we know that lower cholesterol is good, this thing is also good.

And that's kind of what they did with the seed oil studies.

So based on some other kind of crazy science, they'd established cholesterol is bad and it should be minimized.

They figured out, hey, if we feed people vegetable oils, their cholesterol levels, which are seed oils are, by the way, if we feed people seed oils, their cholesterol levels decrease and therefore seed oils are good.

The thing is, though, the people in the group that they fed the seed oils to died more and more quickly.

Crazy.

Which is insane.

But they, of course, failed to publish that part of the results.

But they published that it lowered cholesterol.

And because everyone knows that cholesterol is bad,

it was considered good.

I think that's the Minnesota prisoners experiment or something.

Yeah, the cholesterol study got a lot of people, especially with the egg yolks.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And then it's like super crazy.

It's crazy what they do.

Like every other headline from some magazine like Time or whatever is egg yolks are bad.

Then egg yolks are good.

Then egg yolks are bad again.

And it's so confusing to people.

Super confusing.

And every time there's a new superfood, it's usually not a superfood.

No, it's usually some industrial waste products.

Yeah.

I remember acai was a big one for a bit.

Yeah, and then flax, right?

Yeah, flax.

Flax is,

so people don't really know this, but the flax seeds come from the plant that the same plant that makes linen fabric.

Wow.

You know, like linen shirts, you know, whatever.

So the fibers are spun to make fabric and the seeds, um, they have a lot of unsaturated fats, oils in them.

Um, for a long time in Europe, like flax was grown for its fabric exclusively.

Yeah, the seeds were maybe given to animals or whatever.

Um, they also used the oils and the seeds to make oil-based painting.

So, like the paint that Da Vinci used to paint the Michelangelo, or not the Michelangelo, the, what is the Mona?

The Mona Lisa,

freaking Michelangelo, the Mona Lisa, he used flaxseed oil to paint Mida.

Yeah, flaxseed oil-based paint because that's what it was used for.

But over time, acrylic paints and other sort of synthetics replaced the natural uses for flaxseed oil.

And so then Europe was left with this abundance of flaxseeds they didn't know what to do with.

And then starting in the 90s, they began marketing as health food.

Yeah.

But flaxseeds were never widely consumed by people prior to that.

That's so crazy.

Yeah.

So it's like same thing with fluoride in the water, right?

I believe the sodium hexafluoride or whatever,

that's a byproduct of the aluminum refining industry.

And so some dentists figured out fluoride is good.

The thing they, the form of fluoride they studied to say that wasn't even the same fluoride that they put in the water.

That form of fluoride was the thing that comes from the aluminum industry.

And so now we have this industrial product getting put into the water, telling everyone it's healthy.

And that happens way shockingly way more often than you think.

And the skin is the largest organ.

People are bathing in fluoride water every day.

Bathing water.

Yeah.

No, it's horrible.

I have a shower filter.

Same.

You have to these days.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It smells disgusting.

I remember when, so I grew up in a house that had well water and the water was great.

We didn't have to worry about this.

When I went to college, the water smelled like an indoor pool.

Yeah.

And I would get in the shower and like, I'm going swimming right now.

It's horrible.

Well water, I want to talk about that because there's a thing when the water's still where bacteria can grow, right?

Yeah.

Well, so the idea with well water is that

the water trickles through the dirt, the sand, the bedrock, and then it filters all the way into these giant aquifers where there's no light and whatever.

And so it's very clean.

At least in the U.S., the way we have relatively little pollution in our wells, obviously some exceptions for places where there's fracking.

There's very minimal bacterial

contamination in well water, right?

This isn't an open well like in the Middle Ages where you dropped a bucket in, you know, and like some animal could fall and die and pollute the well.

This isn't that.

It's like pumped up from underground and it's relatively clean.

the only thing is that depending on where you are there could be some metal contaminants in the water yep so where i grew up i learned this much later the well water is somewhat high in arsenic which okay it's not ideal but it's not the end of the world um but it's certainly way better than top water yeah heavy metals is really bad for the body because you can't detox your body if you have too many heavy metals yeah it's hard yeah and like you can sauna right like but it only goes so fast yeah yeah yeah i'm a big fan of saunas um any any plastics in this product in the bag uh well the bag is made of plastic.

Unfortunately, that's not leaching, is it?

Well, okay, yeah.

So the thing about plastics and people should learn about plastic contamination, plastics are everywhere.

They're somewhat unavoidable in the modern day, but you have to understand what causes a higher rate of plastic leaching.

And so one, everyone learns in chemistry class, heat accelerates chemical reactions, right?

So if you have food in a plastic Tupperware, not ideal, but if you put that plastic Tupperware in a microwave, that heat increases the rate at which the plastic leaches into the food got it another thing is that plastic leaches more into foods that are similar chemical structure so like fatty foods have the same chemical nature as plastics and so plastics will dissolve more quickly into fats wow yeah um and the last so like olive oil plastic bottle like come on

and then the worst thing is uh or the next big thing is like surface area it all just like everyone learns chemistry class things that accelerate chemical reactions The more surface area between the plastic and your thing, the faster it dissolves.

So water bottles made of plastic, you know, the entire surface of the water in the platform in the bottle is being is touching the plastic.

So that's an ideal.

So basically you want to minimize things where plastic is involved with heat, fats, and liquids.

So

Chips are neither of these things.

We put the chips in the bag when they're cool.

They're not a liquid.

They're fatty, of course, but like the plastic touching the chip is a very tiny little point.

It's not ideal.

I'll give you that.

The only other alternative would be to use like tin coffee can type things.

But that'd be way more expensive.

Which would be way more expensive, way more wasteful.

I get it from a business point of view.

And even for water, because you only drink it once, it's kind of like that, this bottle, you know, probably costs like a dollar or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, glass bottles are expensive.

I mean, and you can recycle them and whatever, but like there's, there's no industry of packaged foods coming in tin cans.

Yeah.

And I mean, the other thing with cans too, like a Campbell soup can, you think, or even a can like a soda or something, and you think, oh, it's, it's metal, it's not plastic.

No, cans are lined with plastic

because they're, yeah, at least drain cans are made of aluminum.

And if you put Coca-Cola in aluminum, in a pure aluminum can, it will dissolve the aluminum.

Yeah.

And so they line the cans with this little tiny little film.

And you can look at, people do this on YouTube all the time.

They'll dissolve.

a soda can in like drain cleaner or something and they'll pick it up and the aluminum's gone and it looks like this condom filled with

It's like this plastic liner.

Disgusting.

Yeah, so it's like you drink out of a can, you're drinking plastic.

Yeah, liquid death, not to call them out in particular, plastic-free, whatever.

No, it's lined with plastic.

Every can is lined.

Plus, their actual water is uh, they tested their water or something.

That's not good.

Yeah,

I like that you take quality.

Like, these are made in America.

Yeah, you guys take the quality really seriously.

Yeah, we make them by hand in Jersey.

Oh, by hand, by hand.

Wow.

Yes.

We have to.

The equipment that we're going to use to increase production capacity is very expensive.

We're working on it.

The cool thing about it, though, is that I can put the same ingredients into like a more automated piece of equipment and the same product comes out.

Part of the issue with a lot of these high-throughput machinery setups is they have parts that are made of plastic, same thing with plastic.

And it's actually shocking.

We bought a fryer that

has this hose so that you can like drain the oil with tallow, filter it, and then pump it back up to the top.

The hose is made of plastic.

What?

And this is 200-degree like fat, you know, in this really shitty plastic.

And that's like how they sell it.

Wow.

And there are, so there are people who bought that and then use it this way.

And then the food that's a result of this is contaminated plastic.

That's crazy.

I never even thought about that.

Yeah, no,

it's nuts because, and they don't think about it either.

The FDA says, oh, this material is food grade because some chemical company paid them to say it's food grade.

Right.

It's not.

But then because they say it, producers can get away with it.

So we had to,

we had had to get custom-made, flexible, stainless steel hoses to put onto the thing.

And that's how much you care about your customers because they would have, your customers would have never known that.

Yeah, and like they wouldn't know, they would not know, it wouldn't taste it or they wouldn't smell it, but like there would be, it's all plastic in my tallow.

So that shows you guys are willing to put ethics ahead of profits, though.

Yeah.

Well, we, I mean, we, we do what we need to do to make sure it's something that I would, and I, I would eat and I would feed to my family.

Yeah.

Like that's kind of the baseline.

And I've, you know, we started Mossaba two and a half years ago,

but I've been into health on a personal level for well beyond that.

Very, you know, extreme practices, like everything needs to be clean and, you know, all that stuff.

And the reason why I started this was because I couldn't find anything up to that standard out of the store.

Right.

And, you know, I would travel, I fly here, I go there.

I need to eat food.

And it was just so damn difficult to find anything that I could eat at a store.

And this was just like very convenient.

Even here, man, I'm not trying to call out this convention center.

No, I've been having to get lunch at the food court.

We had a picnic out on the street we brought like sourdough organic bread we got the farmer's market today

and like cheese and some organic turkey cold cuts i knew every place here was using seed oils because i'm so sensitive now that i don't eat them that when i do i i feel it immediately well there's so there's a few good restaurants in phoenix and also scottsdale uh do you have the app seed oil scout yeah i love that app yeah okay cool yeah so i we went to one last night it was a good restaurant yeah seed oil scout's a game changer and now i saw they're adding products so yeah we've been on there i i know seed oil scout very well we've been on there from very early on.

Yeah.

We're super, uh, super happy to be collaborating with them.

And they're coming out with, I don't know how much of a lot of teas, but they're, they're, they're coming out with a way to help you find, make sure that the stuff you buy in the grocery store is also.

I saw it.

They even had a raw milk thing you're adding.

I mean, it's raw milk's been demonized in the mainstream media.

There's people raiding farms.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like this, we actually donated to the Strong Sisters.

I don't know if you know them.

Was that the big one in PA that got raided?

That was Miller's Bio Farm.

Yeah.

Or no, that was Amos Miller's.

I don't know.

Miller is a a big Amish family out there.

That was also rated.

The Strong Sisters, I think, are in Ohio.

And there's two sisters there, Sabrinza, working out in health and whatever.

They started a farm.

And then there's this video that came out.

The Department of Agriculture just makes them throw out like $80,000 worth.

Oh, I saw that.

Like grass-fed, pasture-raised, raw butter and cheese.

It's like, this is the highest, healthiest, highest quality, nutrient-dense food that you can find anywhere anywhere on earth.

Yeah.

And these assholes who themselves are like obese walking in here, making them throw all this stuff into the dumpster.

Yeah.

It was, it was a travesty.

Yeah, we, we donated to their legal funds.

We, like, I, I suspect that in the, in the upcoming several years, a lot of that's going to be reformed and this type of thing won't become an issue anymore.

Absolutely.

I'm pumped for RFK to take some action, man.

Yeah, no, there's, and there's so much stuff you can do.

It's like, there's, we don't need to have this system that makes everyone so sick.

Yeah.

I think a big change would be just holding these fast food chains accountable for certain ingredients they're using.

Yeah.

I think because so many people eat those spots on a daily basis, you know?

Yeah.

And it's like they, you know, it's, it's the food they can get.

Like it's up to people who produce and sell food to make sure that what they're feeding people is not bad for them.

Right.

You know, it's not everyone has the luxury of being able to go to Erwan and buy whatever they want.

Yeah.

You know?

And in that case, people can't be subject to the poisonous desires of some large corporation or whatever.

Yeah.

It's insane.

Like, why do french fries have 58 ingredients?

I'm sorry, what'd you say?

French fries have 58 ingredients.

What?

Yeah.

I mean, that's a thing.

It's crazy.

That's insane.

Like, burgers have like 25 ingredients.

That's insane.

It's like meat, bread, and cheese.

You read like the ingredient list of any fast food chain and it's like stuff you can't pronounce.

Yeah, I actually think that would be a good one because so ingredient labels are pretty good in the U.S.

Like, I mean, I said the thing about the soybean oil with the chicken fingers.

It's not, they're not perfect, but they're pretty solid.

It would be be great if restaurants also had ingredient labels too.

Yeah,

that'd be great.

Yeah, because at least like calories

measure, I think a few cities have tried to do this where they mandate that Chipotle puts the calories in your meal or whatever.

You can only do so much with that.

I think, what's the guy?

KC Neistat famously actually tested the caloric content of certain foods.

Oh, really?

Yeah, and compared it against the number that they put on the menu.

And they were all completely way off.

Way off.

It's a famously inaccurate science, but a great labels, it's what's in the product, and it would help a lot of people make better choices.

I would love that because certain things at a restaurant, you see

what you want, but you don't know if there's seed oils in it.

Yeah, I have no idea.

And sometimes waiters don't know, sometimes chefs don't know.

And then they get annoyed if you ask to cook it in butter.

It's like a weird process right now.

Yeah, it's kind of awkward.

And then, even if they think they're doing it right, they may buy something from outside and they didn't even know.

Right.

The restaurant I went to yesterday is across the board very good you know no seed oils olive oil animal fats avocado oil um however i had to double check it wasn't on the menu their fryer had rice bread oil oh which is seed oil and it's like that wasn't on the menu they talked about how they don't use seed oils and i'm like well what's in the fryer and then i found it was rice bread oil so like being upfront about that i think would help a lot of people absolutely i went to a five-star steakhouse in vegas the other night and they use canola oil on the bread literally the bread that's that you start out with canola oil on on the bread yeah i need oil on bread.

What is oil part of bread?

So naughty.

What the hell?

I don't know if you meant they bake it with canola.

I don't know exactly what it was.

I mean, Wonder Bread has soybean oil in it.

So they're probably baking it.

So I was at a Fogo de Chao.

You know, it's like this Brazilian steakhouse chain.

Yeah.

Much against my will.

I used to go there.

The other day.

Yeah, it's like, it's a, it's a cool concept on paper.

But the salad bar, I was like, because I don't want to eat a lot of that stuff.

I know it's sus.

But I go and look at the white rice.

I'm thinking, white rice, how can you screw that up?

Yeah.

And then I noticed it was kind of shiny.

I was like, huh, shiny white rice.

And I go and inquire about it.

And the white rice was stirred with a canola olive oil blend.

And it's like, why is that necessary?

Dude, it's white rice.

Come on.

I'm assuming all the meats are cooked in seedwells there.

Well, actually, the meats are, I believe, at least what I saw, they were on a rotisserie over Baker.

So it looked like they were fine unless they sprayed them.

God knows what they did.

That wouldn't surprise me.

Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me.

They spray the sticks.

Yeah.

The meat quality was pretty poor though.

Yeah.

In general, it was not a great experience.

What's the future for MASA, man?

Where could people buy this right off?

So 80% of our customers find us on our website, maschhips.com.

We have another about 10%

that's on Amazon.

And then the rest are in a whole bunch of retail stores.

Nice.

So Erewhon, we did pretty well at.

We're the number one snack brand in Erewhon at the moment.

Please come to Whole Foods or Sprouts.

Yeah, oh, please.

Whole Foods, we're trying.

Okay.

I'll have more to say about that over this year.

But I mean, by the end of 2026, we should be all over Whole Foods and a bunch of other groceries.

Yeah.

But for the time being, our website is the main way.

And then, if you're lucky enough to happen to live in a city, especially Southern California, we have a lot of stores.

But outside of that, it's hit or miss.

I love it, man.

Thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Thanks for watching, guys.

Check out the website.

See you guys next time.