Ever since the new food pyramid dropped, there have been some really critical conversations happening about food, bolstered by a steady stream of headlines, videos, ad campaigns, opinion pieces, podcasts, and memes flowing through our social feeds.
Yet too often, it seems that these conversations aren’t just about food. Though they may start with health and what the human body needs, they can veer very quickly into politics or corporate ethics or the messenger instead of the message.
Modern food has become oddly complicated. And part of the problem is that food itself has changed. So much of what the average American eats isn’t built for nourishment so much as efficiency.
Even whole foods are often moved through long supply chains. They’re picked early, stored for weeks, and transported across great distances so they can be available year-round. For the system to work, crops must be bred to ship well, ripen evenly, resist bruising, and look appealing. The result usually lacks the richness that people know from more local or seasonal eating.
Maybe this explains why many people have begun to sense a gap between what they’re eating and how satisfied or nourished they feel afterward.
From farm to factory to table, the food spectrum goes on. Some foods are only lightly processed. Others are radically changed – refined, extracted, recombined, and engineered until they no longer resemble anything from nature or even food at all.
This evolution of our eating – from local and seasonal to transported and stored; minimally processed to heavily industrialized – helps explain why so many people feel uneasy about modern eating. It’s the cumulative distance between “boughten food” and its original form.
Modern seed oils provide a great example of this.
And they are everywhere, from packaged foods to restaurant meals – even to foods that are marketed as “better for you.” But unlike traditional fats, seed oils are industrial products. They’re extracted from crops like soy, corn, sunflower, and rapeseed (canola) through heavy processing. They’re refined, deodorized, and stabilized so they can withstand storage, transport, and high-heat cooking.
From the manufacturer’s point-of-view, seed oils are efficient and cheap. From a biological standpoint, though, they make unreasonable demands of the body.
The problem isn’t just that seed oils are heavily processed. They’re easily damaged by heat and time. Regular, heavy exposure to them has been linked to chronic inflammation. When they dominate the fat profile of the diet, they also tend to crowd out the more stable, healthier fats that humans have relied on for ages.
Of particular concern is how seed oils tend to be loaded with omega-6 fatty acids. The more of these a person eats, the more they tend to displace the healthy omega-3 fatty acids you find in fish, leafy greens, and certain nuts and seeds. This imbalance also fuels ongoing low-grade inflammation – quietly and gradually, in ways that affect healing, tissue health, and overall resilience.
In contrast, fats from whole or minimally processed foods – think butter or ghee, coconut oil, or fresh and properly sourced olive or avocado oil – are generally more stable. They also place much less inflammatory strain on the body. These are the kinds of fats that have supported human health and well-being through the ages.
When you center your diet on foods that are closer to their original form than engineered products, you typically find that the body responds with less inflammation, more energy, and an easier time recovering from stress.
Chronic inflammation often shows up most clearly in living tissues. In dentistry, we see this in the gums and other soft tissues of the mouth. These tissues are highly responsive to what’s happening elsewhere in the body. When a body is nourished according to its biological needs, the gums tend to be calmer, more resilient, and quicker to recover from any injury. When it’s not, inflammation can linger. And linger. And linger.
This matters even more when the body is already dealing with other threats, such as active infection or an imbalanced microbiome. The extra inflammatory stress can make existing conditions harder to resolve. Healing may take longer. Tissues may remain more reactive. Restoring balance can be a heavier lift.
This is one reason why food and nutrition come up so often in holistic dental care. It’s part of understanding the conditions that the body is working under and what changes may be warranted to ease the burden. The mouth is simply one of the first places where imbalance becomes visible.
Of course, the challenge for many is to cut through the barrage of competing claims and ever-shifting advice on what “healthy eating” actually is – much of it shaped by the very same food system that would like us to keep eating industrially instead of ancestrally.
Food writer Michael Pollan once summed up his response to that complexity in one simple, elegant line: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
