How many products with seed oil also contain some form of added sugar? I don't seem to have much issue with moderating the occasional bag of cheezits or goldfish, but the moment I start getting into cookies and ice cream it's like a junkie broke into my house.
I am curious which is worse in terms of contribution to modern chronic metabolic disease.
In the case of ultra-processed/refined oils though, there is an argument to be made that these are novel foods that humans never ate until very recently. There aren't any old people who have been eating them their whole lives in the quantities we do now. This is probably true for industrially refined sugar too, but sugar is a more complex story since people have been concentrating plant sugars for a lot longer than they've been industrially refining oil for food.
No. Humans have been extracting oils from plants and used them for cooking for millennia. I mean, you could argue that 6000 BCE is recent in human history and evolution.
About the only thing modernity has changed is the access to these oils. It was much more region locked until modern shipping standards came about. But even then, we are talking about the 1700s at the latest where widespread use of all sorts of vegetable oils was common.
The politicization is coming directly from the Trump administration, as the article states - making spurious claims and eliding the science that backs up the contrary conclusions. Did you have some other idea of how this is being politicized?
First of all, regarding the trans-fat discussion - in general, yes, keep trans fats low. However there are a couple important things to consider. One is that not all trans fats are created equal, and trans fats from animals are generally found to be less dangerous:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4301193/
>. We found no relationship between R-TFA intake levels of up to 4·19 % of daily energy intake (EI) and changes in cardiovascular risk factors such as TC:HDL-C and LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C):HDL-C ratios
(One author is from a dairy group, but that doesn't invalidate the data. Unfortunately this is par for the course with nutritional literature, a huge amount of it is "sponsored").
Another small sidebar is that there is of course the chance that monounsaturated turn into trans fats as well, and presumably those developed by seed oils would be riskier than those found in animal fats. But the data on that are sparse-to-nonexistant.
The other thing that irks me here is the typical dietitian take is to see everything through the lens of food. It makes sense when you deal with cardiovascular patients, but cardiovascular patients are already already pre-selected for genetic risk, that represents up to or even greater than 90% of the signal in CV events. CV events are way more visible than whatever supposed systemic inflammation omega-6s provide, but it doesn't meant that they should be the sole guiding factor in policy. If anything, they are over-represented relative to more chronic effects.
I'm not saying that there's some easy answer, just this whole article was annoyingly hand-wavy about science that we can actually mostly track.
1. TC:LDL and LDL:HDL? Always be suspicious of nonsense ratios.
2. Trials lasted 3 to 7 weeks. Atherosclerosis shows up in decades.
3. Almost nobody even hit the high intake range of 4.19% calories, everyone was clustered at the low end.
4. It was a null finding (CI crosses zero, underpowered, just looks at surrogate markers), not evidence of no effect.
Do people who eat ruminant animals have better health outcomes in general? No, especially not better than people who, say, replace it with plant proteins. Which is why proponents try to focus on bad studies. We should be asking what is the best evidence, not cherry picking the worst evidence.
This is a weird thing to call out since olive oil isn't a seed oil. Is the point that patients are confused? Does the author (a purported dietitian) not know this himself/herself?
According to https://www.imarcgroup.com/united-states-olive-oil-market
10% of olive oil in the US market is refined using the same hexane process as canola or soybean oil, and another 15% is refined using other chemical processes.
It's not a seed oil but for many people concerned about ultra processed food including refined oils, it's not the "seed" part but the "refined" part that's the issue, and specifically how it is refined.
Though there is also a concern many have about cooking unsaturated fats at very high temperatures causing oxidation/rancidity/free-radicals and thus oxidative stress which is a primary driver of disease, and seed oils tend to have a lot more unsaturated fat than animal fat. Olive oil is more saturated than seed oils but not as saturated as animal fat so it is more prone to oxidation - i.e. it degrades much easier with heat and goes rancid faster and thus is more likely to be rancid/oxidized when used since we don't usually get it fresh.
Is there anything to look for on the label to tell what refining process is used for an olive oil? There are so many different brands now that I suspect some of them are just different labels on the same product.
FTA: First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category. What we’re actually talking about are vegetable oils high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats
RFK and friends have health-washed tallow. While their ridiculous new food recommendations claimed to "end the war on protein", it's pretty clear by all the surrounding material that they really wanted to "end the war on saturated fats". Their recommendations are filled with saturated-fat heavy foods (while cowardly sticking to the same old guidelines on percentage of calories from the same).
"Influencers" are pushing tallow as the best oil, despite literally the entirety of the evidence completely annihilating that claim.
Europe is not immune.
I almost never hear about it in person. It’s always on some social media site. Often the sites where people think they’re not using normal social media, like Twitter or Reddit.
I'm not sure of the genesis of it, but it got traction with "health-fluencers" (not to be confused with health experts) and has spread like wildfire despite no real evidence backing it up. Its just a circle of parrots repeating whatever is trending so they can get on the algo train.
Now it's starting to show up in brands and businesses because the mindless algo herd gravitates towards it.
Apparently at heart it has to do with solvents being used to extract the oil, but those solvents are trivially boiled out after processing.
He is a conspiracist with no medical credeentials, and he believes, without evidence, that seed oils are response for most of the ills of mankind, Tylenol causes autism, SSRI's should not be prescribed, etc. None of his beliefs are mainstream or evidence backed, but he now has a huge megaphone.
Making 50-75%+ of my calories come from refined, powderized carbs and sugar (original food pyramid) - Bad
Eating whole foods, lightly cooked. Whole food starch sources, often retrograde starch. avoid high heat fried foods, eat mostly leaner meats - Good
Declaring plants and seed oils evil, nothing but lard, tallow and red meat and a dozen eggs a day - Bad
Two meals day with no snacking works for me. 3 meals a day feels like im stuffing myself.
Last time I looked it up, the US produces something like a million+ kilograms of corn for every person in the country.
Yes. Potatoes, onions and beans have are healthy, cheap and well-supplied staples. And I absolutely notice when I’m on a bean and onion week versus a sandwich or rice week.
The US is even more cooked than I thought if you can get a bunch of fresh veggies from a grocery store.
Depends entirely on where someone is. I'd say the majority of the population can get to fresh veg. But there are people, particularly in rural and poor communities, who are isolated from fresh or frozen veg. We have "dollar stores" which go up in the poorest communities and are usually a sure sign of a food desert.
I'd say that anyone with a car can probably access fresh veg. They might have to travel some distance to do that.
All hail the grifters.
But yeah don’t cook your vegetables in animal fat, that’s stupid.
Then something happened I probably should have died from (80-90% of people don't make it). High blood pressure turned out to be a contributing factor. High salt consumption much of it from my favorite cheeses turned out to contribute to the high blood pressure.
I learned to like swiss. And be modest in my consumption of tastier saltier cheeses. I no longer glibly tell people someday I'll be found dead of dairy poisoning with a smile.
I would probably request cheese in a known last meal situation though.
We should all enjoy things, and many of us can still stand to be more restrained in how we enjoy. And what.
> A movement that threw out 421 pages of scientific recommendations... isn’t a revolt. It’s a rebrand
> 20 counts of em-dashes in a single article
Sorry but the usage of AI is too evident.
And we have the usual problem with this administration that there are so many different dangerous things happening that it's hard to concentrate efforts on fighting them. It got a bit quieter, probably due to some internal pushback, but RFK Jr. is still working on dismantling the US vaccination programs. And similar to the seed oil panic in the article, all the demonization of vaccines will result in a terrible price that some children will pay in the future.
I think we both agree when I say I think RFK Jr. knows nearly nothing about biology or ethics, just like squirrels, possums, insects know nearly nothing about biology or ethics, as practically all species on Earth.
I certainly don't think he comprehends the zooko's triangle between:
1) egalitarian access to healthcare (if not just privatize?)
2) the level of healthcare (as measured by deviation from non-intervention procreation statistics: if you medically could remediate a cold to the point that my cold didn't cause me to stay inside, suffering in a bed, I might have seduced a mate and procreated, natural selection works on rates, not caricatural life vs death; if my procreation statistics were unchanged by the "remedy" against the cold, it can't have been very effective, as I assure you it would have improved my procreation rate if it were, but perhaps I may be wrong and most people might actually have more successful dates with mates suffering a cold then mates not suffering a cold)
3) the fitness of future generations
you can have 2 but not all 3; we can't bypass natural selection and then say it didn't have an influence on natural selection.
The concept of socialized healthcare without depriving the future generations of as fit a genome as humans had in a pre-socialized healthcare society is effectively impossible. Every healthcare intervention just sends the grim reaper to the next generation. By what right does the current generation exploit knowledge on biology for the medical comfort of that generation, at the cost of a more vurnerable future population, precisely more vulnerable where we "succeeded" in temporarily thwarting its side effects?
so when you write
> will result in a terrible price that some children will pay in the future.
That is true, but only in a myopic sense.
While the conclusion is controversial, the premises are not. As formal verification gets picked up, not just by programmers and hardware designers, but by society at large, these insights in the form of formal scientific proofs will be publicly and unambiguously known.
How did humanity end up in this situation? "Healthcare" was rarely a true act of charity, it served the King if a baby could be secured to safety by surgically removing it from his wife, it served the King if his armies practiced medicine which boosted morale and healed its soldiers, it served the King if doctors could specialize and treat patients on a regular basis, so they would have ready knowledge and experienced stable hands were systematically located by organizing a healthcare system.
All of these directional practices originated long before awareness let alone agreement on evolution theory.
There is no ethical nor effective way to turbocharge natural selection, so as a species we should not repeat the mistakes of the Nazi's. Socialized healthcare is unethical across generations. Gated access to healthcare is unethical on egalitarian grounds. Ineffective healthcare is unethical on the grounds of quackery.
Somewhere between being born and our current age, billions of people were and still are indoctrinated about some putative ethical possibility of egalitarian access to healthcare, which was never proven, and plenty of evidence speaks to the contrary!
I think we both agree when I say I think RFK Jr. knows nearly nothing about biology or ethics, just like squirrels, possums, insects know nearly nothing about biology or ethics, as practically all species on Earth.
They don't need hospitals!
So keep the spiel about what may happen to children, because egalitarian healthcare will amplify every successfully treated affliction's incidence rates in the next generations!
well, how do you think Canola Oil is made exactly?
it's cracked, cooked, pressed, washed in hexane and acid, neutralized with caustic soda, bleached, deodorized
on what planet is that not ultra processed?
so, i should avoid ultra-processed food, except oils that are ultra-processed?
whereas tallow, is...cut from meat
i'm not suggesting you should only eat tallow, I'm just saying it's not ultra-processed.
Eating beef tallow is self-limiting. It's hard to eat a lot of it directly.
OTOH, it's really easy to eat a lot of French Fries.
And tallow, by itself, is not something you eat, it's just moving the point of thermal and chemical alteration and production into your home.
Finally, most of this "eat as much animal offal as possible" movement is directly funded by the producers of these products battling it out with the producers of competing products.
You should listen to your doctors over influencers that talk about chemistry in a way that makes simple things sound dangerous and evil.
Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates).
> Some of what’s driving the seed oil panic isn’t wrong — it’s just misattributed. Ultra-processed food really is a problem. . . . But seed oils are not why ultra-processed food behaves that way. They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.
The response has been to try to convert it into a moral campaign - actually the foods packed with bizarre barely regulated chemicals are also sometimes fatty and sweet, and you should stop indulging yourself and show some self-control.
Meanwhile, 20-somethings are starting to get a ton of colon cancer.
I've seen the thought process of someone go from:
- replacing seed oils with animal-based oils
- arguing against the role of LDL in increased CVD and events
- building a more animal-centric and meat-heavy diet
- using "looks-maxxing" terminology to describe their diet and associated beliefs around that diet
- digging deeper into that subculture and believing our ancestors only ate meat
- why do we eat plants or "goy-slop"? well because of [x]
- extreme pseduo-science about other topics
From a technological prespective, we all know that social media accelerates this thought pipeline by feeding people certain content. I also feel like Instagram orders comments in a certain way to specifically engage an individual user. Like making sure they see either a statement they'd agree with OR vehemently disagree with. This is regardless of the number of likes.
e.g. Since saturated fat is well-known to increase LDL/ApoB, and these people have high blood lipids because of it, they have to dismiss the research on it to continue believing it's healthy.
It further entrenches them in a position where they can be convinced of absolutely anything because they've given up all epistemic standards which is why they overlap with all sorts of contrarian positions learned from social media and youtube videos.
How do you figure? It's not obvious to me after skipping over the heart-string-pulling introduction
The same ignorance is driving the push to replace HFCS with sucrose. Vendors selling garbage products saw renewed life as now they can pretend they've made a change for good, and now it's somehow healthy. Like, people legitimately think a food is healthy if it has cane sugar.
Both HFCS and sucrose are trash to consume. When bucolic, seemingly holistic "cane sugar" is added to an acidic cola it rapidly decomposes to glucose and fructose, in very similar ratios to HFCS. Not that it matters much as your enzymes cracks sucrose into those same components almost immediately after consumption anyways.
And FWIW, when the anti-seed oil people need to refer to evidence, they always point to some old studies back when seed oils often came in trans-fat laden forms (an unenlightened period when sadly trans-fat filled margarines were wrongly seen as an improvement), during a period when we thought that was better than saturated fats. Since then there have been countless studies that not only demonstrate how incontestably better oils like canola[^note] are compared to animal fats, even some of the mythical claimed downsides like inflammation are not supported by the evidence whatsoever.
[^note]: Bunching seed oils as one thing has always been ignorant. An oil like canola has an excellent omega 3 to 6 ratio. Other "seed" oils aren't as good in "raw" form, though they're better when used in high-heat situations. They all beat saturated fats in every real study.
Probably because they let us feel like we're doing something for our health so we don't have to muster any real lifestyle change, like leaving our couch to go for a walk.
Sweetie, did you get those cookies with the butter instead of the seed oils? Oh good, thank you. I don't eat seed oils! -- "Health conscious" fat guy who just ate 12 cookies.
It would be funny, but these grifters are screwing over good people.
I followed the advice on this site and actually got very bad news. But the good news would be, that I'm on a strict medication regimen now and maybe I'll live to see my son's graduation.
RFK is killing people. it's what he does.
So what it found is a tiny difference, just like it did with statins, when all of the financing and an enormous amount of money was behind finding enough of a difference to justify the billions that get spent on statins and the category of marketing that relies on replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat. Additionally, the reason he chooses to focus on "combined cardiovascular events" is because that's the only place that any supportive number could be found. Mortality? Nah. Quality of life? Nah.
Saturated fat vs. unsaturated fat was one of those things that seemed obvious when you looked at them naïvely, and made an intuitive guess about what their respective effects would be. The same as how we intuitively thought about salt's effect on blood pressure because of how cell walls work.
It is sick how much of medical "research" is being targeted towards justifying interventions with 50-100 year old origins and whose scientific foundations have completely disappeared in the interim, but that careers, fortunes, and entire segments of the economy now rely on.
Headline: "Intervention X doesn't work how we thought it does, but it still works!* (* based on study completed before we told you that the foundation for it had disappeared.)"
Nothing I love more than dumb emotional manipulation delivered as an argument from authority, from a site called statnews. Just give me the goddamn statistics, and if studies about specific claims haven't been made, give me a non-insidious reason why no one would have bothered to check in decades. Especially when the checking costs millions, and the industries are worth hundreds of billions.
I don't have an opinion on seed oils, other than that cheap ones destroy pans, countertops and appliances, and seem absolutely foul. Nutrition science is absolute garbage and mostly quackery, though. You might as well have a degree in old wives tales.
It isn’t like it’s difficult to educate yourself about health related shit.
Just let people do their thing, boss.
Edit: One of the few things I find more annoying than AI blogs is the gleeful rush to label everything as AI generated. It comes across as “I am so clever! You can’t fool me!” Meanwhile, that reads like a perfectly normal sounding thing for a human to have written. “This blog uses the word ‘the’ a lot. Sure sign of AI!”
And I recently had an AI detector give a 40% to an article I’d written 100% by hand, every word, with not so much as a Grammarly check involved.
I've noticed Claude is specifically fond of three-element lists consisting of (standard example of class), (standard example of class), (nonstandard example of class). It's interesting because Claude often gets the nonstandard example more or less incorrect -- in this case, because gristle isn't an example of a high-fat-content food.
"Seed oils" (commonly used cooking oils extracted from plant seeds excluding coconut) are as valid of a construct as "reptiles" (quadrupeds excluding aves and mammals) or "fish" (vertebrates excluding quadrupeds)