and its potential impact on health.

Over the past few years, I've really tried to clean up my diet.

My main focus has been to cut back on added sugar and other refined carbohydrates (and to generally eat more "real" food and less "processed" food). Recently, however, I was watching a Youtube video by BYU's Benjamin Bikman wherein he noted that, while sugar and refined carbohydrates are arguably the biggest dietary culprit for insulin resistance and chronic disease, other ingredients in processed foods, such as seed oils, also probably share blame.

As I avoid using seed oils in cooking (I mostly use butter, avocado oil, or olive oil), I was feeling pretty good about this until I realized that the mayo that I regularly use to make chicken, tuna, or salmon salad (Best Foods) contains soybean oil as a main ingredient (Bikman claims that this is one of the worst oils to consume). So now I'm considering throwing this out and using an different (e.g., avocado) oil-based mayo going forward.

But then I start to think, "is worrying about the type of oil used in the mayo I consume taking things too far and/or am I starting to delve into a realm of distinctions that won't really make much of a difference with regard to my overall health?"

My other thought in all of this is that if seed oils are as unhealthy as some people claim, then the food industry is really screwing us over because they're present in so many processed foods, arguably making such foods all the more unhealthy considering the added sugar, refined carbohydrates, and other crap also put in them.

So maybe following the saying, "avoid the middle aisles of the grocery store and shop around the edges," is even more impactful than I previously appreciated. Either that or I'm starting to take this healthy eating thing too far.