Soybean oil may make you fatter than coconut oil, fructose does

While you be keeping at bay from coconut oil and fructose to avoid weight gain, it turns out soybean oil causes more obesity than the both.

Scientists at University of California, Riverside, conducted an experiment on mice and found that a diet high in soybean oil lead to obesity and diabetes more than a diet high in fructose, a sugar commonly found in soda and processed foods.

The mice on the soybean oil-enriched diet gained almost 25 percent more weight than the mice on the coconut oil diet and 9 percent more weight than those on the fructose-enriched diet. And the mice on the fructose-enriched diet gained 12 percent more weight than those on a coconut oil rich diet.

Assistant project scientist Poonamjot Deol who directed the project said the findings was a major surprise, especially as headlines about the potential role of sugar consumption in the current obesity epidemic appeared every day.

The study also includes extensive analysis of changes in gene expression and metabolite levels in the livers of mice fed these diets. The most striking results were those showing that soybean oil significantly affects the expression of many genes that metabolize drugs and other foreign compounds that enter the body, suggesting that a soybean oil-enriched diet could affect one's response to drugs and environmental toxicants, if humans show the same response as mice.

The researchers cautioned that they didn't study the impacts of the diets on cardiovascular diseases and note in the paper that the consumption of vegetable oils could be beneficial for cardiac health, even if it also induces obesity and diabetes.

They also noted that there are many different types of saturated and unsaturated fats. This is particularly true for the saturated fats in animal products that were associated with heart disease in the studies in the 1960s: they tend to have a longer chain length than the saturated fats in coconut oil.

That research found that the new genetically modified, high oleic soybean oil (Plenish), which has a lower amount of polyunsaturated fatty acid than traditional soybean oil, is healthier than regular soybean oil but just barely.

The paper is published in the journal PLOS ONE.