What Industrial Food Did to Dietary Lipids
By Kiran Dayaram
We didn’t just change what we eat. We narrowed the spectrum of lipids in the human diet.
When most people hear the word lipids, they think of “fats” in the simplest possible sense — something to reduce, avoid, or count on a nutrition label.
But from a scientific perspective, lipids are far more than calories.
They are an enormous family of molecules that form cell membranes, participate in biological signaling, transport fat-soluble compounds, and play structural roles throughout living systems. In food, lipids do not exist as a single substance. They arrive as complex assemblies of different molecules: fatty acids, phospholipids, sterols, glycolipids, sphingolipids, and many other lipid species.
Each organism contains its own distinctive lipid profile, shaped by its environment, diet, and evolutionary history.
Marine organisms in particular are known to contain especially complex lipidomes — broad collections of lipid classes and molecular species that extend well beyond the small number of compounds most people hear about in nutrition discussions.
That complexity matters, because human nutrition did not evolve in a world of isolated nutrients.
It evolved in a world of whole foods.
For most of human history, dietary lipids came from many different sources: animals, eggs, dairy, nuts and seeds, and — in many parts of the world — seafood, shellfish, and other marine organisms. Archaeological and evolutionary research suggests that coastal and aquatic foods were reliable and important resources for many human populations. Shellfish and other gatherable marine foods could often be obtained even when hunting or fishing was difficult.
The result was not a single universal diet. But it was often a diet characterized by diversity of lipid sources.
Over the past century, however, the lipid landscape of the human diet has changed dramatically.
Industrial food systems introduced highly scalable vegetable oils that could be produced cheaply, refined efficiently, and incorporated into processed foods at massive scale. Today, a large share of dietary lipids in modern diets comes from a relatively small group of commodity crops — most notably soybean, palm, sunflower, and rapeseed.
This shift is not simply a story about good ingredients or bad ingredients. Industrial food brought enormous benefits in terms of food availability and affordability.
But industrial systems tend to favor standardization and efficiency, and when that happens, diversity often decreases.
Instead of lipids arriving from many different whole foods — animals, marine organisms, seeds, and seasonal sources — modern diets increasingly deliver lipids from a narrower set of highly refined inputs.
And then nutrition science simplified the story even further.
When marine nutrition entered the mainstream conversation in the late twentieth century, the discussion quickly centered on two molecules: EPA and DHA.
These long-chain omega-3 fatty acids are important and have been widely studied in human health research. Fish oil supplements, nutritional guidelines, and product labels frequently emphasize their EPA and DHA content.
But marine biology tells a much richer story.
Modern lipidomics — the study of the complete lipid profile of biological organisms — continues to show that marine species contain complex lipidomes composed of many different lipid classes and molecular structures, extending far beyond EPA and DHA alone.
In other words, the nutritional biology of marine organisms is more complex than the simplified omega-3 narrative that often dominates the conversation.
When viewed from a wider perspective, the trajectory of modern nutrition begins to look like a gradual process of simplification.
First came diets built on diverse whole foods.
Then came industrial food systems dominated by a small number of refined oils.
And finally came an attempt to recover part of the nutritional story through isolated molecules.
In the process, something important may have been lost.
We became increasingly good at measuring individual nutrients, but we sometimes lost sight of the complex biological environments those nutrients originally came from.
This observation is one of the reasons our work focuses on marine lipids.
At OceaNZ Vital, we are interested in the possibility that lipid diversity itself may matter — not just individual fatty acids in isolation, but the broader spectrum of lipids naturally present in whole marine organisms.
This is not a claim that we can perfectly recreate ancestral diets, nor that any single food contains all the answers. Nutrition science continues to evolve, and many questions remain open.
But one thing is increasingly clear.
For most of human history, our biology interacted with foods that were chemically complex.
Over time, modern food systems simplified that complexity.
For decades, nutrition has largely moved in the direction of reduction: isolating compounds, refining oils, and reducing foods to a handful of measurable nutrients.
Perhaps the next chapter will involve moving in the opposite direction.
Not by abandoning science, but by using science to rediscover and understand the complexity that was always present in nature.
That is the idea that continues to guide our exploration of marine lipids.
This question ultimately led us to explore marine organisms like abalone, whose lipid composition reflects the complexity of ocean ecosystems. Rather than isolating a single compound, we became interested in the broader lipid spectrum these organisms naturally contain.