r/AlternativeHealth

TW: abortion

I need advice on what is the most natural / least harmful / least toxic abortion option esp. as I am still breast-feeding a 1.5 year old (who also eats solids but has breastmilk every 2-4 hours and overnight to comfort back to sleep). I don’t want to be talked out of this. I am already devastated that I need to do this, I cannot take more guilt, judgment, preaching, criticism, etc. I’m hard enough on myself about it.

I only now need to decide which is the most natural / least harmful of the following two abortion options available to me:

Option 1: medical abortion at home, where you take mifepristone and 24 to 48 hours later you take misoprostol and you basically bleed out the baby.

Option 2: in office option where you have to take antibiotics, pain medications, anti-anxiety relaxants like Ativan / lorexopan, then they put lidocaine on your cervix and put a tool through through, and suction all the tissue out.

The first one felt like a more natural option because women report that it feels more like a natural miscarriage and I don’t want anyone probing through my body and I certainly don’t want to take antibiotics that in the past messed up my microbiome, and most likely led to a very serious digestive issue which I suffered from for several years.

But these two pills may be disastrous and too systemic /unsafe for my nursing baby. Is there 100% proven evidence that this will not negatively harm my 1.5 year old who I am still breast-feeding? Of course the conventional medical system never wants to commit to that. Risk is on you!

I asked what type of antibiotic is given and at what dosage but I haven’t heard back yet. I asked if I can take natural antibiotics and apparently there is no flexibility on this.

I will only be about 6 weeks pregnant during the procedure so it’s just like a tadpole at this stage but I also wonder if there’s any possibility of pain and if so, which would be less for the embryo. Some research says I believe pain starts at 9 weeks, but really, how do they know? So I would want the method where their death is more instant.

I almost wish there was some kind of natural herbs I could take at home to just do this entirely on my own, which would also bypass the required ultrasound which I hate to do, but I don’t know if I want to mess with that when it comes to something this serious.

I also read that the chance of breast cancer goes up with abortions, but that could be because there’s extra breast cells created that don’t have a job anymore, I don’t think that applies in my case since I’m breast-feeding.

My friend said she did both options and that the first option was way more painful, like as if she was in actual labor for like four hours, but she thinks that her situation might be specific, like something getting stuck maybe. In general, it seems like a foreign object being inserted into your body unnaturally (like without a natural cervix dilation process) has a much higher risk, but I don’t know, I’m just confused at this point.

Thank you very much for the guidance.

My husband needs to get some natural relief, any recommendations?

I am with a group of lifelong friends, we are all in our early 60s. Until 5 years ago they used to be fun to hang out with, now our conversation revolves around their health choices, naturopaths, gut health, supplements, new exercise routines, anti aging treatments, and frankly questionable information that they had seen online (mouth taping?? dangerous seed oils???) Because of their various diets they are on (gluten free, keto,, etc), sharing a meal is a nightmare to navigate through. I recently said that I may be going on statins, as I have high cholesterol, and due to natural aging and hereditary issues (both my parents had heart attacks in their 60s) and you would have thought I was selling my soul to the devil. They all declared I should avoid statins at all costs, yet this has been proven to be a safe, effective treatment for most. They used to be chill, fun people, now its just endless chatter on subjects I am uninterested in.

Everyone in this community knows the anti-seed oil talking points. But I wanted to go deeper than the usual "they're poison" vs. "the AHA says they're fine" back-and-forth, so I spent time going through the actual studies. The honest answer is: nobody fully knows yet, and both camps are cherry-picking their data.

What The Pro-Seed Oil Research Actually Shows

The strongest case for seed oils centers on linoleic acid (LA), the primary omega-6 fatty acid in most vegetable oils.

• Li et al. (2020) pooled data from 31 prospective cohorts covering roughly 811,000 people and found higher LA intake or circulating LA biomarkers were associated with approximately 10-15% lower all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality when comparing higher vs. lower exposure groups. That's a meaningful signal across a very large sample.
• Marklund et al. (2019), the FORCE pooled analysis, used individual-level data from 30 cohorts (~68,700 participants) and found higher circulating linoleic acid associated with lower incident CVD, lower CVD mortality, and reduced ischemic stroke risk. Crucially, this study used blood biomarkers rather than self-reported dietary data, which makes it more reliable than most nutrition epidemiology.
• Farvid et al. (2014) looked specifically at dietary LA and coronary heart disease risk. Highest vs. lowest LA intake was linked to ~15% fewer CHD events and 21% fewer CHD deaths. Their substitution model showed that replacing just 5% of energy from saturated fat with linoleic acid was associated with 9% fewer coronary events and 13% fewer coronary deaths.
• The American Heart Association's 2017 Presidential Advisory on dietary fats drew on randomized trials and epidemiological evidence to support replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat as a cardiovascular risk reduction strategy.

That's a reasonably consistent body of evidence. But here's where it gets complicated.

The Healthy User Bias Problem Is Massive And Underreported

People who consume more polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils tend, as a group, to also eat more fruits and vegetables, smoke less, exercise more, and have better access to healthcare. Statistical adjustment can reduce this confounding, but it can't eliminate it. When Li et al. or Farvid et al. show favorable associations with LA intake, some portion of that signal almost certainly reflects the broader dietary and lifestyle patterns of people who eat that way, not the oil itself.

There's also a context problem both sides ignore. Higher linoleic acid intake in a population might mean more homemade salad dressing and stir fry, or it might mean more fried fast food and ultra-processed snacks. The health implications of those two scenarios are completely different, and most observational studies can't cleanly separate them.

The Oxidation Argument Deserves More Respect Than Mainstream Dietitians Give It

This is the most developed mechanistic critique of seed oils, what researchers call the Oxidized Linoleic Acid Metabolite (OXLAM) hypothesis, advanced prominently by Dinicolantonio and O'Keefe and elaborated by researchers including Cate Shanahan in Dark Calories.

Linoleic acid has two double bonds, making it chemically unstable. When it oxidizes during food processing, storage, or cooking, it generates bioactive compounds including:

• 4-Hydroxynonenal (4-HNE), a highly reactive aldehyde that forms protein adducts, impairs mitochondrial function, promotes inflammation through NF-κB activation, and has been detected at elevated levels in atherosclerotic plaques, Alzheimer's disease tissue, and various cancers
• Malondialdehyde (MDA), another oxidation byproduct with similar inflammatory and cytotoxic properties
• Oxidized LDL particles, well-established contributors to atherosclerosis

Circulating OXLAMs have been found in human plasma at biologically significant concentrations, and some animal studies have shown that diets high in oxidized linoleic acid produce more atherosclerosis and metabolic disruption than equivalent diets using fresh, unoxidized oil.

Then there's the tissue incorporation issue that almost nobody in mainstream nutrition discusses. Linoleic acid doesn't just get burned for fuel; it gets incorporated into cell membranes and stored in adipose tissue. A 2025 Frontiers in Nutrition article compiled adipose tissue studies from 1955 to 2006 and found LA rising from roughly 5-10% in 1955 to over 20% by around 2008. Modern diets have meaningfully shifted the composition of human body fat, and what that means for long-term susceptibility to oxidative stress remains genuinely unresolved.

The Two Most-Cited "Seed Oils Cause Harm" Trials Have Real Problems Too

The skeptic case leans heavily on two recovered-data reanalyses published in the BMJ:

• Ramsden et al. (2013) reanalyzed the Sydney Diet Heart Study (1966-1973), a secondary prevention trial in which 458 men with recent coronary events were randomized to replace saturated fat with high-linoleic safflower oil. The intervention group experienced significantly higher mortality: hazard ratios of 1.62 for all-cause mortality and 1.70 for cardiovascular mortality.
• Ramsden et al. (2016) recovered unpublished outcome data from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment (~9,570 participants), another trial replacing saturated fat with corn oil. Cholesterol dropped as expected, but there was no clear mortality benefit, and in some subgroups the trend moved in the wrong direction.

These are the strongest human outcome data questioning seed oils, but both trials were conducted in the 1960s-70s using early margarines that contained trans fats, in institutional settings with unusual dietary conditions that don't reflect how people use oils today. They're more a challenge to older trial methodology than a verdict on modern seed oil consumption.

Where The Concern Is Most Legitimate: High-Heat Cooking

This is the most practically solid part of the skeptic argument and it has real chemical grounding. At frying temperatures (180°C / 350°F and above), the rate of oxidative degradation in high-PUFA oils accelerates substantially. Studies measuring aldehydes in cooking fumes and in oils after heating have found that sunflower, safflower, corn, and soybean oils generate significantly more 4-HNE and related compounds than more stable alternatives:

• Olive oil is predominantly monounsaturated, giving it greater thermal stability and lower aldehyde generation under heat
• Avocado oil has a similar fatty acid profile to olive oil and comparable stability
• Coconut oil is largely saturated and very stable under heat, though its fatty acid profile raises separate cardiovascular considerations

All three are also minimally processed compared to refined seed oils, which typically undergo bleaching, deodorizing, and high-temperature extraction before reaching the shelf. Using seed oils repeatedly in a deep fryer, or heating them to smoking point, is a meaningfully different chemical situation than the conditions under which most clinical trials tested their effects.

What The Field Actually Needs To Settle This

Large, long-term randomized trials using modern oils, real-world foods, rigorous adherence tracking, and hard endpoints like heart attack, stroke, and all-cause mortality. Those trials largely don't exist. The RCTs we have are mostly old, conducted in specific high-risk populations, or designed to test broad dietary patterns rather than seed oils as an isolated variable. Until that evidence exists, confident claims in either direction are outrunning the data.

My Takeaway

Seed oils probably aren't the singular driver of chronic disease that some corners of the internet claim. But the blanket "they're fine" from mainstream nutrition is also premature. The OXLAM hypothesis raises legitimate mechanistic questions that haven't been resolved by clinical trials. The long-term effects of rising LA incorporation into human tissue are genuinely unknown. And for high-heat cooking, switching to olive or avocado oil is the most practically defensible recommendation you can make right now.

For cold applications like dressings, dips, and low-heat cooking, the risk is likely minimal for most people. In ultra-processed foods, the seed oils are probably the least of your problems given everything else those products contain.

Have you noticed any difference switching away from seed oils? Curious what people's real-world experience has been.