Sunflower Oil: Friend or Foe?

I get asked a lot about sunflower oil and my thoughts on it, so thought to give you the quick and dirty rundown here.

If you've followed me for any amount of time, you know that I'm not a fan of seed oils and generally try to avoid them.

If you've gone through my Metabolic Revamp Toolkit, you know that I mention sunflower oil on the "avoid" list.

So then, why is there small amounts of sunflower oil in my Post-Lift Whey and Daily Collagen products?

Here's the deal:

First off, cooking in teaspoons or tablespoons of a seed oil like sunflower oil, or drizzling copious amounts over your salad, is NOT the same as the trace amounts used in MANY proteins powders. Sunflower oil is used in tiny amounts in many nutritional powders as a flow agent. It keeps the powder from clumping together. We use such high quality ingredients in both my Post-Lift Whey and my Daily Collagen that it would be heart breaking if it clumped and didn't mix well into your liquids. There's not much of a way around this, so if you choose to use nutritional powders, you can almost guarantee that you're going to find small amounts of some oil that you may not approve of.

Second, I'm not as concerned about sunflower oil as I am about many of the other seed oils. So that's the one I settled on as we needed a flow/anti-clumping agent. We also aren't heating it to high temperatures, which is where a lot of seed oils become even more problematic. I do eat sunflower seeds AND sunflower butter as a snack sometimes, gasp!

Third, I've always said "avoid" seed oils.  We do the best we can. I don't bring them into the house, as an example, and I rarely eat out. I practice "harm reduction", which means I avoid what I can and don't beat myself up if I happen upon ingesting some. We can't avoid all the things all the time, and that leads to feeling crazy if we try. Considering I don't ingest much in the way of seed oils at all throughout most of my days, a small amount of sunflower oil in an occassional scoop of collagen or protein powder is not a huge concern of mine. If it is for you, I understand and please don't buy it.

I chose the best ingredients that I could get my hands on when it came to my supplement line. I also chose to share out my Metabolic Revamp Toolkit as a general guide, not a set-in-stone list of rules that I expect everyone to abide by perfectly. It's an overview to get you moving in the right direction, not a novel. Rational people understand this. Obsessive people like to email and freak out on us because things don't alway match up 100%. Trust me, I'm trying to give you the best guideposts I can while still understanding that we live in reality, and reality isn't always perfect.

Lastly, I FULLY expect everyone to look over the list of ingredients found on all of my product pages, along with the Product Info Guides available for most, and to KNOW what they are purchasing, BEFORE purchasing. Always read the ingredient list before you purchase anything . We expect that you'll vet out any product before putting your money into it or putting it into your mouth.

If you don't like that there's trace amounts of sunflower oil in my protein powder and collagen products, then please don't purchase them.

If you don't mind and you realize the incredible value of the extremely high quality ingredients that ARE in those products, then go ahead and buy as much as you like while supplies last. Because the Post-Lift Whey is limited stock and when it's gone, it's gone. I'm cutting several products out of my line in 2023 so as to simplify my life and that product is on the list.

The Daily Collagen I plan keeping in stock, but we shall see. I personally take it daily and I love it, as do my joints and skin. My diet is so clean and void of seed oils otherwise that a tiny amount of sunflower oil a day is not a concern for me.

I hope this helps clarify for those asking.