A new head coach walked into the building and removed seed oils on day one
When Robert Saleh took over as Tennessee Titans head coach in January 2026, he had coached in five other NFL facilities. His first priority in Nashville was not a scheme install or a roster audit. It was the kitchen.
"One of the first things we did here was get rid of all the seed oils in the building, which I think the players appreciate," Saleh said. Controlling owner Amy Adams Strunk approved the budget to replace them with alternatives. Saleh described the current kitchen setup plainly: "I've been in six different buildings and I'd put this staff up there with the best of them. The product they put out in the cafeteria daily is outstanding."
The players noticed. Safety Amani Hooker said what anyone paying attention to their body already knows: "(Seed oils) weigh on you, make you not feel good. Now, definitely, in the cafeteria we have a bunch of options."
Seed oils are not health food, and the debate about them is not settled
Seed oils, including canola, corn, soybean, sunflower, and safflower oils, are extracted from plant seeds through industrial processing. They are high in omega-6 linoleic acid, a polyunsaturated fatty acid that the American diet now contains at historically unprecedented levels.
The pushback to Saleh's decision arrived quickly. An assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health told Fox News: "There is abundant evidence suggesting that seed oils are not bad for you. If anything, they are good for you." An NFL insider dismissed the move as a "gimmick." The American Heart Association maintains there is "no reason to avoid seed oils."
What these responses do not engage with is the peer-reviewed literature that raises the specific concern about linoleic acid. A review published in BMJ Open Heart laid out the oxidized linoleic acid hypothesis in detail: when linoleic acid is consumed in large quantities, particularly from industrial seed oils, it incorporates into LDL particles and becomes susceptible to oxidation. It is oxidized LDL, not total LDL, that drives atherosclerotic plaque formation. The paper describes multiple lines of evidence suggesting that industrial seed oils are a likely contributor to coronary heart disease through this mechanism. A separate narrative review examining linoleic acid intake in the standard American diet identified associations with chronic disease and rising systemic omega-6 to omega-3 ratios.
The counterargument from most nutrition scientists is that randomized controlled trials have not consistently shown that omega-6 intake increases circulating inflammatory markers in healthy subjects. That is a real finding. It is also a narrow one. Measuring C-reactive protein or interleukins in healthy people over weeks does not capture the cumulative effect of decades of elevated linoleic acid incorporation into cell membranes, LDL particles, and adipose tissue. The absence of short-term inflammatory signal in RCTs is not evidence of long-term safety, and treating it as such confuses study design limitations with exoneration.
The people actually eating this food are the clearest signal
Saleh did not arrive at this decision through a literature review. He arrived at it through what players told him and through years of observing professional athletes at different facilities. When a player at the peak of physical optimization says that a change in what he is eating makes him feel materially different, that is not anecdote to be dismissed. That is signal from a highly calibrated physiological system.
The NFL operates at a margin where a fraction of a second, an injury avoided, or a practice session recovered from faster can determine careers and championships. Teams invest enormous resources in sleep protocols, hydration, load management, and soft tissue work. The idea that cooking oil is irrelevant to performance while everything else is optimized requires a level of selective attention that does not hold up.
Saleh is one coach, at one facility, making one decision. But the decision itself reflects a growing recognition across professional sports, functional medicine, and elite performance contexts that the oils used to cook food at scale matter, and that the default choice, soybean or canola at industrial quantities, is not a neutral one.
The standard response does not engage with the actual concern
The backlash to Saleh's decision follows a predictable pattern. A prominent institution cites its official position. A credentialed expert says the evidence does not support concern. An insider calls it a trend rather than a substance.
None of that addresses what Saleh or his players experienced. None of it engages with the oxidized linoleic acid hypothesis specifically. None of it reckons with the fact that human consumption of omega-6 linoleic acid has increased dramatically over the past century precisely because of the introduction and industrial scaling of seed oils, and that this increase has coincided with a rise in metabolic and cardiovascular disease that a population eating primarily saturated and monounsaturated fats for thousands of years did not experience at comparable rates.
The debate is not resolved. But the direction of the evidence, and the direction of the decisions being made by people whose performance depends on getting it right, are pointing the same way.
What this means practically
The seed oils most worth removing first are the ones present in the largest quantities: soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil, and sunflower oil. These appear in virtually every restaurant kitchen, packaged food, and fast food product at scale. At home, the swap is straightforward: cook with butter, ghee, tallow, or olive oil. The performance case and the mechanistic case point to the same substitution. Saleh's kitchen already made it.
