Is Corn Oil Healthy? What the Research Shows About Benefits, Risks, and Better Oils

Dr. Josh Axe · Free quiz

Cellular Health Quiz

Loading question one…

Is Corn Oil Healthy?

Corn oil is not toxic, but it is not a food I would build a kitchen around. It is a heavily refined, solvent-extracted oil that is about 54 percent linoleic acid, an omega-6 fat that oxidizes readily under heat.1 Fresh corn oil used occasionally in an otherwise whole-food diet is a minor issue. Corn oil reheated in a fryer, or eaten daily through packaged and restaurant food, is the version worth avoiding.

A Quick Read on Corn Oil

A fast orientation. The full oil comparison table and the ranked list of oils I use are further down.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Quick Answer & Key Takeaways

Corn oil sits in the bottom tier of cooking fats, though not for the reason most of the internet gives. The problem is less the linoleic acid molecule itself and more what happens to a fragile, highly refined, omega-6-dominant oil when it meets high heat, long fryer runs, and a diet already flooded with processed food. Replacing it costs you nothing and gains you a lot.

• The verdict · Limit. It is the one clear "avoid daily" tier in my cooking oil rankings.
• The composition · About 54 percent linoleic acid, roughly 1 percent omega-3, and an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio near 46:1.1
• The research picture, plainly · Large observational studies link higher linoleic acid to lower cardiovascular risk. Two recovered randomized trials found the opposite. Both findings are real.234
• The inflammation claim · Overstated. Feeding people more linoleic acid does not reliably raise inflammatory markers.5
• The oxidation concern · Legitimate. Frying PUFA-rich oils generates aldehydes and other lipid oxidation products that carry into the food.6
• The label story · Corn oil's FDA heart claim is a qualified claim, and the FDA's own wording calls the evidence very limited and preliminary.7
• What to do · Lead with extra-virgin olive oil, raise your omega-3 intake, and stop eating fried restaurant food. The corn oil question mostly answers itself.

Five Things to Understand About Corn Oil

1. It is refined, not pressed. Corn oil is extracted with a petroleum solvent, then degummed, bleached and deodorized. That is a different process from pressing an olive.
2. It is a grain oil that acts like a seed oil. The oil comes from the corn germ. Chemically and practically, it belongs with soybean and cottonseed oil.
3. The evidence really does conflict. Cohort data and recovered trial data point in opposite directions, and both sets have real limitations.
4. Heat is the variable that matters most. Fresh corn oil in a dressing and corn oil pulled from a restaurant fryer are not the same exposure.
5. The fix is additive. Adding olive oil and omega-3 foods does more for you than any amount of arguing about which oil is worst.

What Is Corn Oil, and How Is It Made?

I want to start here, because how an oil is made tells you most of what you need to know about it. Olive oil and avocado oil come from the flesh of a fruit, and you can get the oil out by crushing it. Corn germ does not give up its oil that way in commercial volume. So the industry uses a different approach.

How refined corn oil is made:

1. Corn kernels: germ separated by wet or dry milling
2. Washed in hexane, a petroleum solvent, to pull out the oil
3. Degummed and neutralized
4. Bleached to remove pigment
5. Deodorized at high heat to remove smell and extend shelf life
6. Output: a clear, odorless, flavorless oil with a long shelf life

Every one of those steps has a purpose. Deodorizing is what lets an oil sit on a warehouse shelf for a year. Bleaching is what makes it look clean in a clear bottle. The tradeoff is that the same processing strips much of what was protective in the original plant material and leaves behind a fat that is chemically fragile.

Here is the contrast that matters. Good extra-virgin olive oil smells green, tastes peppery, and carries a heavy polyphenol load. Those polyphenols are antioxidants, and they protect the oil from oxidizing. Refined corn oil has no smell and almost no flavor, because the process removed the compounds that would have provided both. What is left is mostly a fragile fatty acid with very little built-in protection.

Is Corn Oil a Seed Oil?

When people list the industrial oils to avoid, corn oil is nearly always on the list, sitting alongside canola, soybean, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed and rice bran oil. That grouping is fair in every way that affects your health, even though corn is botanically a grain.

The label matters less than the category. What puts an oil in the problem tier is the combination of heavy solvent refining, a high proportion of fragile polyunsaturated fat, and the fact that it shows up mostly inside processed and restaurant food. Corn oil checks all three boxes. For a fuller treatment of the whole category, see my guide to seed oils.

One thing worth knowing: not every seed oil belongs in the same bucket. Cold-pressed flax, pumpkin seed, sesame and black seed oil are mechanically pressed, keep their antioxidants, and have real benefits. They are simply too delicate to cook with. The problem is the industrial refining, not the word "seed."

Corn Oil Nutrition Facts

Per-tablespoon values calculated from USDA FoodData Central entry 171029 (per 100 g), using 13.6 g per tablespoon. Rounded. 1

The fatty acid breakdown is the part that drives the debate:

Fatty acid values for corn oil from USDA FoodData Central entry 171029. 1

Look at the last two rows together. Corn oil delivers about 46 times more omega-6 than omega-3.1 For comparison, the ratio in the American food supply as a whole has shifted dramatically over the past century, largely because of the rise of refined vegetable oils: per capita soybean oil consumption in the United States rose more than a thousandfold between 1909 and 1999, and linoleic acid went from under 3 percent of calories to over 7 percent.8

That shift is real and worth taking seriously. It is also not the same claim as "linoleic acid causes disease," which is where a lot of the internet goes next, and where the evidence gets complicated.

Is Corn Oil Healthy? What the Research Shows

I spent a long time with the studies on both sides of this before forming a position, and I want to show you both cases rather than pick a tribe.

The Case for Corn Oil, Made Fairly

The pooled cohort data is strong. An individual-level analysis pooling 30 prospective studies from 13 countries, covering close to 69,000 people and more than 15,000 cardiovascular events, found that higher circulating and tissue levels of linoleic acid were associated with lower risk of total cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular death and ischemic stroke.2 These are biomarker measurements, not food-frequency questionnaires, which removes a common source of error.

Corn oil does lower LDL cholesterol. In a randomized, double-blind controlled feeding trial, adults with elevated cholesterol who ate 4 tablespoons a day of corn oil for 21 days saw LDL cholesterol drop 10.9 percent, against 3.5 percent for extra-virgin olive oil.9 A follow-up analysis found corn oil also lowered apolipoprotein B and LDL particle number more than olive oil.10 Corn oil's plant sterol content is the likely reason.

Replacing butter with plant oils tracks with lower mortality. A 2025 analysis of three large US cohorts followed over three decades found that higher plant-based oil intake was associated with lower total mortality, and that swapping 10 grams a day of butter for plant oils was associated with an estimated 17 percent reduction in total mortality.11

Omega-6 does not reliably drive inflammation. This one surprises people. A systematic review of randomized controlled trials in healthy adults found that increasing dietary linoleic acid did not consistently raise markers of chronic inflammation.5 The mechanism people cite, omega-6 converting to arachidonic acid and then to inflammatory eicosanoids, does not show up cleanly when you feed it to humans and measure.

The Case Against Corn Oil, Made Fairly

The randomized trial data goes the other way. When researchers recovered the original data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study, a 1966–73 randomized trial in men who had already had a cardiac event, the group told to replace saturated fat with omega-6 linoleic acid had higher death rates than controls: 17.6 percent versus 11.8 percent all-cause, and 17.2 percent versus 11.0 percent cardiovascular.3

A second recovered trial found the same pattern. The Minnesota Coronary Experiment lowered serum cholesterol substantially in the linoleic acid group, and that cholesterol reduction did not translate into fewer deaths. In the pooled analysis, each 30 mg/dL drop in serum cholesterol was associated with a 22 percent higher risk of death.4 The authors noted that incomplete publication of these trials had inflated the apparent benefit of replacing saturated fat with omega-6 oils.

The Cochrane review lands on "not much." A Cochrane systematic review of randomized trials concluded that increasing omega-6 fat intake probably makes little or no difference to all-cause mortality or cardiovascular events.12 That is a long way from "heart healthy."

Frying creates a different product entirely. This is the concern I find most defensible. Heating PUFA-rich oils to frying temperatures generates cytotoxic and genotoxic lipid oxidation products, including aldehydes and epoxy fatty acids, which migrate into the food and are then absorbed.6 The higher the polyunsaturated content, the more of this you get. Corn oil is one of the most polyunsaturated oils in common commercial use.

The omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is a real signal. Higher omega-6 relative to omega-3 in red blood cell membranes tracks with higher obesity risk in prospective studies, through effects on adipogenesis, lipid handling and systemic inflammation.13 Corn oil pushes that ratio in the wrong direction.

Why Both Sides Can Be Right

A few things reconcile most of the apparent contradiction, and they are worth naming plainly.

The cohort studies mostly compare people who used plant oils against people who used conventional butter and margarine, not against grass-fed butter, ghee, tallow or extra-virgin olive oil. Winning that comparison is a low bar.

Olive oil is frequently pooled in with "vegetable oils" or "plant oils" in these analyses, which drags the whole category's results upward. In the 2025 mortality study, the individually significant associations were for canola, soybean and olive oil.11 Corn oil, specifically, did not carry its own significant benefit.

Almost none of this research distinguishes fresh oil from reheated fryer oil, which is the exposure that worries me and the one with the clearest mechanism behind it.6

And healthy-user bias runs through the older cohorts. For decades, the people following the advice to use vegetable oils were also the people who smoked less, exercised more and ate more produce. That is difficult to adjust away.

What the "Heart Healthy" Label on Corn Oil Really Means

This section matters because a Mazola product page currently ranks on page one for this exact question, and the claim on that label is doing a lot of work.

Here is what happened. In 2007, the FDA issued a letter of enforcement discretion permitting corn oil products to carry a heart claim.14 The petition came from ACH Food Companies, the maker of Mazola. The approved wording says that "very limited and preliminary" scientific evidence suggests eating about 1 tablespoon of corn oil daily may reduce heart disease risk, and it must be accompanied by a statement that the FDA concludes there is little scientific evidence supporting the claim.7

Read that again. The heart-health claim on the bottle contains, by regulatory requirement, a disclosure that the science behind it is thin. That is not a marketing failure. It is the system working as designed, and almost nobody reads it.

The same skepticism applies to the trial the marketing leans on. The corn oil versus olive oil feeding study was funded by ACH Food Companies and PepsiCo.910 The sponsors reviewed the protocol and the manuscript, though the investigators kept editorial control. Beyond funding, the design has three limitations worth stating: participants ate 4 tablespoons of corn oil a day, far above normal use; the trial ran 21 days; and the outcome measured was blood lipids, a surrogate marker, not heart attacks or deaths.

None of that makes the result false. Corn oil does lower LDL cholesterol, and its plant sterols are a plausible reason why. But a three-week, industry-funded, surrogate-endpoint trial at four tablespoons a day is a narrow foundation for a health claim, and it is a very different thing from the decades of hard-outcome data behind extra-virgin olive oil.15

Corn Oil Side Effects and Risks

Ranked by how much I weight them in practice:

1. Oxidation during frying. The strongest concern, and the best supported. Frying PUFA-rich oils produces aldehydes and other lipid oxidation products that transfer into the food and are absorbed from the gut into circulation.6 Reused fryer oil, which is standard in restaurants, compounds this with every cycle.
2. The company it keeps. Corn oil rarely arrives alone. It arrives in fried food, packaged snacks, dressings and baked goods. An umbrella review of systematic reviews found ultra-processed food consumption associated with higher risk across a wide range of chronic disease outcomes.16 Untangling the oil from the food matrix it lives in is nearly impossible.
3. Omega-6 crowding out omega-3. With roughly fifty times more omega-6 than omega-3, corn oil pushes tissue fatty acid composition in a direction associated with higher obesity risk.13 Your cell membranes are built from the fats you eat, and that composition is not cosmetic.
4. What refining removes. Solvent extraction, bleaching and deodorizing strip much of the antioxidant and polyphenol content that would otherwise slow oxidation. You are left with a fragile fat and less of its own protection.
5. Mycotoxin carryover. Zearalenone is fat-soluble, so it can follow the oil through processing. In a survey of Spanish samples, 32 percent of refined corn oils tested positive for zearalenone, though estimated dietary exposure stayed under 0.2 percent of the tolerable daily intake in every case.17

Is Corn Oil Good for Frying, and What About Its Smoke Point?

This is the single most misunderstood thing about cooking oils, so it is worth slowing down on.

Smoke point tells you about volatile compound release and free fatty acid content. Oxidative stability tells you how fast the fatty acids themselves break down into aldehydes and related products.6 They are different properties, and refining raises smoke point while removing the antioxidants that provide stability. So the number on the chart moves in the opposite direction from the thing you care about.

What predicts stability better is the degree of unsaturation and the antioxidant load. Corn oil is about 55 percent polyunsaturated, with little protective content left after refining.118 Extra-virgin olive oil is mostly monounsaturated and heavily polyphenol-protected, which is why it holds up in a pan far better than its lower published smoke point implies.

A simple rule is to choose your cooking fat by how stable it is, rather than by how hot it can get before it smokes.

And on frying generally, I will say what I say to patients. Deep frying is not a healthy cooking method with any oil. If you fry occasionally at home, use a stable fat and use it once. The exposure that concerns me is not your Saturday batch of fries. It is the restaurant fryer running the same oil all week.

Corn Oil vs. Vegetable Oil, Canola Oil and Olive Oil

Two clarifications that come up constantly:

Is corn oil the same as vegetable oil? No, but the distinction is thinner than it sounds. "Vegetable oil" on a US label is usually a blend, most often soybean-based, sometimes including corn and canola. Pure corn oil is a single oil. In cooking behavior and fat profile, they are near-equivalent. See our full guide to vegetable oil.

Is corn oil better than canola oil? On fat profile, canola has the edge. It runs lower in omega-6 and higher in monounsaturated oleic acid. Both are solvent-refined, so neither one belongs in the top tier, and I would not switch to canola as an upgrade so much as skip past both.

How We Rate Oils

Every oil on DrAxe.com is rated Best, Good, OK or Limit against six criteria, using one methodology across the library rather than a new score per article:

1. Processing · mechanically pressed versus solvent-extracted and refined
2. PUFA load · proportion of fragile polyunsaturated fat
3. Heat stability · resistance to oxidation, not smoke point
4. Evidence quality · strength and independence of the human research
5. Traditional use · depth of documented historical use
6. Clinical practicality · availability, cost and how it performs in a real kitchen

Only one oil currently earns Best. Corn oil earns Limit on processing, PUFA load, heat stability and evidence quality, and is neutral on practicality. What this rating does not mean: a Limit rating is not a claim that an oil causes disease.

Can You Use Corn Oil Instead of Vegetable Oil?

The only place a swap needs thought is baking, where a solid fat like coconut oil or butter changes texture slightly. For everything else, it is a straight exchange.

Where Corn Oil Lands on My List

I want to state my position plainly, including what I am not claiming.

I am not claiming corn oil causes heart disease. The evidence does not support that, and the people making that claim are usually reading one half of the literature. I am not claiming a tablespoon of corn oil in a restaurant meal will harm you. It will not.

What I am saying is that corn oil sits at the bottom of a long list of options, and there is no reason to choose it. It is heavily refined. It is dominated by a fragile fat. It loses most of its protective compounds in processing. Its main real-world exposure route is fried and ultra-processed food. And the strongest evidence in its favor comes from an industry-funded, three-week, surrogate-endpoint trial and from cohort comparisons against conventional butter.

Set that against extra-virgin olive oil, which has randomized hard-outcome evidence behind it. In the PREDIMED trial, a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil reduced major cardiovascular events compared with a low-fat control diet.15 That is a different tier of evidence entirely.

The thing I keep coming back to is that this argument is a distraction. The molecule is not the villain. The food matrix is. Someone eating whole foods at home with a little corn oil in a salad dressing is in good shape. Someone eating fast food fried in reused oil is not, and swapping that fryer to tallow would not save them.

So my advice is to stop litigating which oil is worst and get deliberate about which oils you use. That decision is easy, and it is where all the benefit lives.

The Oils I Use Instead, Ranked

What I Do in My Own Kitchen

Concretely, so you can copy it:

• Extra-virgin olive oil is the default for nearly everything: dressings, drizzling, sautéing, roasting vegetables.
• Avocado oil comes out for anything truly high heat, like searing or stir-frying.
• Coconut oil goes into baking and anything where its flavor works.
• Ghee shows up occasionally, usually for roasting or mashed vegetables.
• Most of our fat does not come from a bottle at all. It comes from wild-caught salmon, pasture-raised eggs, avocados, walnuts and olives.

That last point is the one I would underline. Oils are a convenience. The fats that build your cells are better taken from whole food, and whole-food fat sources bring the fat-soluble vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that a refined oil cannot. Higher nut intake, for one, is associated with improved cardiovascular risk factors in pooled randomized trials.24

And rather than only subtracting omega-6, add omega-3. Two servings of fatty fish a week, plus flax, chia and walnuts, does more to fix your fatty acid balance than eliminating corn oil ever will. A useful caveat from the trial literature: omega-3 supplements lower inflammatory markers most clearly in people whose inflammation is already elevated, and show little marker change in healthy adults.2526 Food first, then a supplement if you are not eating fish. See our guide to balancing omega-3, 6 and 9 fats.

Who Should Be Most Careful With Corn Oil

Some people have more reason than others to make this swap deliberately.

• Anyone with established cardiovascular disease or elevated ApoB. Particle count matters more than total cholesterol here, and it is worth measuring rather than guessing. See our ApoB test guide.
• People with autoimmune or inflammatory conditions. Membrane fatty acid composition influences inflammatory signaling, and shifting the ratio is a low-risk lever to pull.
• Anyone eating out frequently. Restaurant fryer oil is the highest-exposure route by a wide margin, and it is the exposure with the clearest mechanism behind it.6
• People with a documented corn allergy. Refining removes most of the protein that drives allergic reactions, which is why highly refined oils are usually well tolerated, but sensitivity varies and cold-pressed oils differ.27 Talk to your allergist rather than self-experimenting.
• Pregnant and breastfeeding women. Maternal fatty acid status shapes fetal and infant development. Prioritizing omega-3 sources is the more useful action here.

This is guidance for a grocery aisle rather than a treatment plan. If you have heart disease, an autoimmune condition, or you take medication for cholesterol or blood pressure, changes to your diet belong in a conversation with your physician, alongside your medical care and never instead of it.

The Bottom Line

Frequently asked questions

References

1. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central: Oil, corn, industrial and retail, all purpose salad or cooking. FDC ID 171029.
2. Marklund M, Wu JHY, Imamura F, et al. Biomarkers of dietary omega-6 fatty acids and incident cardiovascular disease and mortality: an individual-level pooled analysis of 30 cohort studies. Circulation. 2019;139(21):2422-2436. PMID: 30971107.
3. Ramsden CE, Zamora D, Leelarthaepin B, et al. Use of dietary linoleic acid for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease and death: evaluation of recovered data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study and updated meta-analysis. BMJ. 2013;346:e8707. PMID: 23386268.
4. Ramsden CE, Zamora D, Majchrzak-Hong S, et al. Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968-73). BMJ. 2016;353:i1246. PMID: 27071971.
5. Johnson GH, Fritsche K. Effect of dietary linoleic acid on markers of inflammation in healthy persons: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials. J Acad Nutr Diet. 2012;112(7):1029-1041. PMID: 22889633.
6. Grootveld M, Percival BC, Leenders J, Wilson PB. Potential adverse public health effects afforded by the ingestion of dietary lipid oxidation product toxins: significance of fried food sources. Nutrients. 2020;12(4):974. PMID: 32244669.
7. U.S. Government Accountability Office. Food labeling: FDA needs to reassess its approach to protecting consumers from false or misleading claims. GAO-11-102. 2011.
8. Blasbalg TL, Hibbeln JR, Ramsden CE, Majchrzak SF, Rawlings RR. Changes in consumption of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in the United States during the 20th century. Am J Clin Nutr. 2011;93(5):950-962. PMID: 21367944.
9. Maki KC, Lawless AL, Kelley KM, et al. Corn oil intake favorably impacts lipoprotein cholesterol, apolipoprotein and lipoprotein particle levels compared with extra-virgin olive oil. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2017;71(1):33-38. PMID: 27677368.
10. Maki KC, Lawless AL, Kelley KM, Kaden VN, Geiger CJ, Dicklin MR. Corn oil improves the plasma lipoprotein lipid profile compared with extra-virgin olive oil consumption in men and women with elevated cholesterol: results from a randomized controlled feeding trial. J Clin Lipidol. 2015;9(1):49-57. PMID: 25670360.
11. Zhang Y, Chadaideh KS, Li Y, et al. Butter and plant-based oils intake and mortality. JAMA Intern Med. 2025;185(5):549-560. PMID: 40048719.
12. Hooper L, Al-Khudairy L, Abdelhamid AS, et al. Omega-6 fats for the primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2018;11(11):CD011094. PMID: 30488422.
13. Simopoulos AP. An increase in the omega-6/omega-3 fatty acid ratio increases the risk for obesity. Nutrients. 2016;8(3):128. PMID: 26950145.
14. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Qualified health claims: letters of enforcement discretion. Corn oil and corn oil-containing products and a reduced risk of heart disease, March 26, 2007.
15. Estruch R, Ros E, Salas-Salvadó J, et al. Primary prevention of cardiovascular disease with a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil or nuts. N Engl J Med. 2018;378(25):e34. PMID: 29897866.
16. Barbaresko J, Bröder J, Conrad J, Szczerba E, Lang A, Schlesinger S. Ultra-processed food consumption and human health: an umbrella review of systematic reviews with meta-analyses. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr. 2025;65(11):1999-2007. PMID: 38363072.
17. Escobar J, Lorán S, Giménez I, et al. Occurrence and exposure assessment of Fusarium mycotoxins in maize germ, refined corn oil and margarine. Food Chem Toxicol. 2013;62:514-520. PMID: 24056029.
18. Chen J, Zhang L, Li Y, Zhang N, Gao Y, Yu X. The formation, determination and health implications of polar compounds in edible oils: current status, challenges and perspectives. Food Chem. 2021;364:130451. PMID: 34198033.
19. Keshani M, Rafiee S, Heidari H, Rouhani MH, Sharma M, Bagherniya M. Mediterranean diet reduces inflammation in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Nutr Rev. Published online November 10, 2025:nuaf213. PMID: 41211687.
20. Tang F, Green HS, Wang SC, Hatzakis E. Analysis and authentication of avocado oil using high resolution NMR spectroscopy. Molecules. 2021;26(2):310. PMID: 33435322.
21. Orsavova J, Misurcova L, Ambrozova JV, Vicha R, Mlcek J. Fatty acids composition of vegetable oils and its contribution to dietary energy intake and dependence of cardiovascular mortality on dietary intake of fatty acids. Int J Mol Sci. 2015;16(6):12871-12890. PMID: 26057750.
22. Jayawardena R, Swarnamali H, Lanerolle P, Ranasinghe P. Effect of coconut oil on cardio-metabolic risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis of interventional studies. Diabetes Metab Syndr. 2020;14(6):2007-2020. PMID: 33096510.
23. Benbrook CM, Davis DR, Heins BJ, et al. Enhancing the fatty acid profile of milk through forage-based rations, with nutrition modeling of diet outcomes. Food Sci Nutr. 2018;6(3):681-700. PMID: 29876120.
24. Houston L, Probst YC, Chandra Singh M, Neale EP. Tree nut and peanut consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Adv Nutr. 2023;14(5):1029-1049. PMID: 37149262.
25. Muldoon MF, Laderian B, Kuan DC, Sereika SM, Marsland AL, Manuck SB. Fish oil supplementation does not lower C-reactive protein or interleukin-6 levels in healthy adults. J Intern Med. 2016;279(1):98-109. PMID: 26497831.
26. Kavyani Z, Musazadeh V, Fathi S, Hossein Faghfouri A, Dehghan P, Sarmadi B. Efficacy of the omega-3 fatty acids supplementation on inflammatory biomarkers: an umbrella meta-analysis. Int Immunopharmacol. 2022;111:109104. PMID: 35914448.
27. Crevel RW, Kerkhoff MA, Koning MM. Allergenicity of refined vegetable oils. Food Chem Toxicol. 2000;38(4):385-393. PMID: 10722892.

Dr. Josh Axe, DC, DNM, CNS

Doctor of Natural Medicine · Founder, DrAxe.com

Dr. Axe is a certified doctor of natural medicine, clinical nutritionist, and multiple New York Times bestselling author. He has spent 20+ years in clinical practice helping people heal at the root cause and founded one of the most-visited natural-health platforms in the world.

Read the full bio →

Medically reviewed by the DrAxe.com Medical Advisory Board on Jul 28, 2026.

This article is for educational purposes and reflects current research on dietary fats. The science on omega-6 fatty acids and cardiovascular outcomes is actively debated, and the evidence summarized here includes findings that point in different directions. This content is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Talk with a qualified, licensed physician before making major changes to your diet, especially if you have a medical condition, take medication, or are pregnant.