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> My real worry about seed oil theory is that it’s a distraction. If you want to be healthier, we know ways you can change your diet that will help: Increase your overall diet “quality”. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Avoid processed food. Especially avoid processed meats. Eat food with low caloric density. Avoid added sugar. Avoid alcohol. Avoid processed food.
> I know this is hard. You could even argue it’s unrealistic. That wouldn’t make it wrong.
> Look, I wish strong seed oil theory were true. That would be great. All we’d have to do is reformulate our Cheetos with different oil, and then we could go on merrily eating Cheetos. Western diet without Western disease! Sadly, I think this is very unlikely.
Dynomight has written an excellent article on seed oils. We have examples in our families of people with very bad diets, favouring tons of butter because ‘at least it’s not processed’.
The research doesn't back this up. As the quote above suggests, we need to stop thinking of ‘magic bullets’ that’ll get us out of eating better. Added sugar and trans-fats might be the only true bullets.
It seems like the person is fighting the good fight, maybe, but who is Dynomight?
These random bloggers/influencers speaking from self-proclaimed high ground is in large part how we got in this mess. There are a gazillion people out there who know how to say the right things, to get the right minds, the click the right "follow" buttons, none of which has any bearing on truth, honesty, or accuracy.
> we need to stop thinking of ‘magic bullets’ that’ll get us out of eating better
I daresay that dietary fibre is likely the only 'magic bullet' that would improve people's diets and health. Or at least, non-processed fibre as some "food products" have cellulose/sawdust added to bump up the fibre figure.
Seed oils probably aren't ideal, but I also worry how much this narrative is distracting from the bigger problem of sugar consumption. Humans only have so much attention and discipline. It would be a shame to focus all that energy on a "no seed oil" diet only to wind up even more unhealthy.
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.
Yep. If there was one single thing that literally every person should do for their health, that is to greatly reduce or completely eliminate sugar. The evidence is overwhelming.
The evidence against seed oils is not quite as convincing. I see seed oils as a low quality food to be avoided - goes rancid too easily, requires chemical processing, etc. - but it's not strictly poison. These oils are in virtually every industrial "food product" which makes them unhealthy by association. Stop eating highly processed crap and you'll see the benefits - cutting out seed oils is a side effect.
Two things can be harmful at once.
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.
I'm not defending sugar though to be clear - I strictly avoid it and even avoid fruit juice and such. I know empirically for myself I feel terrible if I eat very much sugar. I also feel terrible if I eat much refined oil and I strictly avoid that too.
>Seed oils probably aren't ideal
Except they are. A refined monounsaturated fat is in the upper tier of perfect calorie. It makes a lot of sense for omega-9's to be a major part of caloric consumption. The omega-3 and omega-6 when fresh and uncooked are also unnecessary demonized by the idea that they are immediately rancid. Like many things the problems arise from the implementation or how they are used, not the chemical itself.
My half-believed conspiracy theory is that "seed oils bad" is a psy-op from the corn/HFCS industries. I don't have hard data here, but it seemed like in the late 2010s people were converging on added sugar and especially HFCS as the thing which is truly messing up health. I can't help but wonder if the corn industry saw this, panicked, and began seeding (no pun intended) the seed oil meme among influencers.
I don't have evidence for this specifically, but there's certainly a long and documented history of both a) influencers suddenly adopting a new party line in response to a paid campaign and b) shitty policy specifically for the influential corn industry (ethanol subsidies, e.g.)
I'm not a MAGA or MAHA person. I just hate anecdotal pontificating about science.
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.
That study is worthless.
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.
If you think this article is annoyingly hand-wavy about science, wait until you see the dietary guidelines put out by this administration!
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
- Michael Pollan
I don't know why, but this has always tickled me in a good way. It's like the best type of poetry. Extremely well phrased for my minimalist brain.
And the opposite of Claude's commit messages. Maybe I should add this as an example in Claude.MD?
100% - have always loved Mr Pollan's pithy summary. I also like Alan Goldhamer's (I am paraphrasing): "There are two types of cardiologist; vegans, and the ones who haven't studied the data yet."
Just kicking out seed oils replacing them with animal fat while still having a shitty diet is for sure of no help.
But what I would like to know: how bad is having a lot of beef steak in the context of a mostly unprocessed food context? Like basically berries, nuts, eggs, vegetables, fruits + beef.
> Back in the hospital, my patients are replacing olive oil with beef tallow
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?
Where is this panic? In the US? I don’t hear anything about it (in Europe).
Yeah. True, I feel. The signaling and recommendations have gone both overboard and data-free. The end results might be bad.
"The food industry reformation underway isn’t making chips healthier; it’s swapping one fat for another inside the same ultra-processed product while everything else stays the same. "
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.
The scariest part of this well-reasoned piece is the amount of trans fat in beef tallow. Trans fat is unbelievably destructive. A review in the New England Journal of Medicine 20 years ago [0] sent that message well. I doubt there has been any significant revision to the understanding of the physiology.
I try to take the middle road:
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.
The advice that surfaces here when a healthy-eating article is posted always leave me surprised. “Don’t eat added sugars, or only very rarely”. Have you looked around and seen the infinite amount of delicious food available literally everywhere? Sure, make an effort to reduce those, but to me cutting out those is akin to recommending someone to be celibate or not to ever commit a sin. Those ultra virtuous (and maybe boring) people who can live 100% on a perfect diet of fish and vegetables are like catholic priests advising everyone to join them in their renouncing of the wonders of life. Sugar (in all its forms) in moderation is probably a net positive in life quality than living an ideal life and rejecting a cake at your nephew’s birthday party because “you don’t eat poison”. Relax a bit people, eat nutritious meals most of the time, watch your caloric intake and enjoy your life.
> There’s a secondary argument about oxidation — seed oils go rancid at high heat, producing potentially harmful compounds. This idea is chemically real and worth being thoughtful about (don’t reuse frying oil repeatedly). But the evidence that oxidation at home-cooking levels causes measurable harm in humans isn’t there.
Even if oxidation at home-cooking levels doesn't cause harm, which I suspect that it does though to a lesser degree, two thirds of seed oil market in the US is industrial or prepared food, much of which does go rancid or is reused frying oil.
I was always under the impression that canola oil was mildly poisonous. It is sort of true in that it has euric acid but far below levels that can hurt you. I think I was confusing things with an event where industrial rapeseed oil in spain was sold as olive oil in the 80s and many people were poisoned.
Also, TIL that canola is a portmandeu of canada and oil.
All the above reference here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil
This has a lot of ai-isms, wish they would share the pre-rewrite draft at this point.
It seems ignorance is harder to cure than a heart condition.
I feel like its another symptom of dying health institutions. These kinds of beliefs also lead people down other ridiculous roads.
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.
The media and the scientific community are not set up for the situation where cranks with absurdly unscientific views are at the top of the major scientific and health authorities. RFK Jr. still gets too much benefit of the doubt for his initiatives when it is obvious that he is opposed to science and has views about health that are just outright dangerous.
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.
The maniverse, "wellness", MAHA, microbe denial, vaccine denial, and wing-nut politics in general are never going to be good for health care outcomes.
The worst aspect being the closure of healthcare providers in rural areas, since they don't provide enough profit.
See this later post:
It seems like carnivores exist and have done things like lost weight and have good medical tests to see the impact of the diet in relation to their health, hence there has been a push to experiment with more animal products in the diet over seed oils / veggies at times
The comments here have some of the highest bullshit content of any I've read on HN in recent memory.
The author's frustration is palpable in the article. People being misled by some twitverse influenza, while ignoring a long history of clinical trial data.
To me the solution seems simple: let people do whatever stupid-ass thing they want to do.
Calmly inform them of the proven risks, then let them make their own choices.
If they suffer chronic heart disease, and/or die younger, that was their choice and they suffered the consequences.
As the old hippie chicks used to say: Beans and Greens are all you need.
I wonder where avocado oil lands?
I'd recommend https://myticker.com/ which was shared here some time ago.
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.
> The food industry reformation underway isn’t making chips healthier; it’s swapping one fat for another
> 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.
I was into the second paragraph before I gave up. It's such AI-written slop that it makes me question any "science" this supposed "clinical dietitian" is trying to convince me of.
The seed oil panic is quite possibly the dumbest health craze of the decade- I saw a chef saying beef tallow was healthy!
"eat less ultra-processed food"
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.
The US is probably the only country in the world where they put an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracy theorist with no-qualification whatsoever in charge of the public health.
> A 2020 Cochrane meta-analysis of roughly 59,000 participants across 15 randomized controlled trials found that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced combined cardiovascular events by 21%. Cardiologists note that the risk reduction from this dietary substitution is comparable to the benefits of statin medications. We don’t make a habit of telling statin patients to stop their medication because of something they heard on a podcast.
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.
Fish, tree nuts, avocados and olive oil. Avoid butter, red meat and cheese. It’ll save your life.
> First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category.
"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)
Seed oils tend to cause severe inflammation in my body like most other ultra-processed foods. This is more than conjecture, due to existing health conditions, I keep a very strict diet with a food journal. I was excluding them long before RFK Jr. came around with the MAHA stuff. Yet another thing thats been politicized I guess.