When you eat seed oils, they stick around in your body and their levels have gone way up since the 1950s — just like how much we’ve been eating them.

Eating a lot of seed oils over a long time causes a type of fat called linoleic acid to build up in your body fat, which then triggers ongoing internal damage to your cells.

Scientists can tell how much of a certain fat (linoleic acid) you've eaten over many years by testing the fat under your skin — it acts like a living record of your diet.

Over the last 50 years, Americans have been eating more soybean oil and other seed oils, and as a result, more of the fatty acid called linoleic acid has built up in our body fat.

Over the last 50 years, the amount of a specific fat called linoleic acid in people’s body fat in the U.S. more than doubled, probably because we started eating more foods like vegetable oils and processed snacks.

Over the last 50 years, the fat stored in our bodies has changed—more of it comes from processed vegetable oils, which might be changing how our body burns energy.