A new study published in the Journal of Lipid Research suggests that soybean oil, the most widely consumed cooking oil in the United States, may play a direct role in promoting obesity, and the effect appears tied to how the body processes one of its main components.
Researchers fed mice a diet rich in soybean oil and tracked how they metabolized linoleic acid, an omega-6 fatty acid that makes up a large share of soybean oil.
Linoleic acid is broken down in the body into molecules called oxylipins, and eating a lot of linoleic acid can raise the amount of these oxylipins. The study shows tha