> 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.
>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.
Did you get to the end? He addresses that.
>I’ll just be honest. I think this view is completely indefensible. I feel embarrassed when I see people promoting it. You’re sure? How? I don’t see any way to get to this conclusion other than heavily filtering the evidence—ignoring the flaws in everything that supports a predetermined view while scrambling to find flaws in everything that contradicts it.
>Again, I’m sure you can send me long lists of random citations. (You don’t need to send them; it’s OK; I’ve seen them already.) But for anything that’s been studied in detail, there’s always lots of evidence to support any semi-plausible view. Do you have any idea how much evidence people can produce for UFOs or chronic Lyme or colloidal silver?
The author makes no effort anywhere on the site to give themselves any credibility. They don't even give their name or occupation. A google search lends no more real information either.
From my POV it might as well be a youtube comment that is 8 pages long.
> I don’t see any way to get to this conclusion other than heavily filtering the evidence—ignoring the flaws in everything that supports a predetermined view while scrambling to find flaws in everything that contradicts it.
Is that not what he's doing when he dismisses the evidence that contradicts his view?
The article is fairly good. He specifically addresses research that doesn't support the conclusion. He’s not exactly a random blogger, this person is known for the quality of their research. At least in my circles…
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.
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.
They can also tend to be harmful in combination, such as in the case of relatively unstable unsaturated fatty acids going on to be glycated in the presence of sugars (some moreso than others); it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were examples such as this which fuelled a significant proportion of all "diseases of civilization".
Really? I don't know exactly how long people have been eating oil from olive, flax seed, sesame, coconut or palm nut, but I believe not under 6000–7000 years. But yeah, not the stuff we eat today.
Yes, I wasn't talking about unrefined olive, flax, sesame, or coconut. I don't think most people concerned about "seed oils" are concerned about those.
It's the refined soybean oil, canola/rapeseed oil, cottonseed oil, grapeseed oil, sunflower seed oil, corn oil, safflower oil, peanut oil - these are the modern refined oils I'm referring to that were never eaten until very recently. I'd be dubious of refined / ultra processed olive and avocado oil too, which is a different thing from fresh cold pressed olive or avocado oil.
It isn’t clear at all how refining oil makes it materially “worse” in terms of health than the unrefined equivalent. That claim lacks both evidence and a mechanism of action.
Every argument I’ve seen demonstrates a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the chemistry. These same bad chemistry takes are repeated everywhere by influencers. This isn’t unique to the oil discussions, dietary health is rife with vibe-based chemistry takes that are obviously unscientific.
Among other mechanisms, refining removes nutrients and other beneficial molecules, while purifying taste and reducing volume making it easier to overeat.
But the worst part isn't refining the oil itself, but the use of these oils in ultra-processed foods along with refined sweeteners, colorings, and fillers. Even if refined seed oils themselves aren't harmful, avoiding them is likely to be beneficial because it leads to avoiding ultra-processed foods.
Colorings and fillers are not that bad for you. You, and other, are missing the forest for the trees here: diets high in fat, sugar, and calories lead to heart disease and metabolic syndrome.
Replacing "seed oils" with hamburgers and french fries fried in tallow won't magically help your health. If anything, you would die quicker from the huge amount of saturated fat you're now intaking.
Ultra processed foods are bad generally, yes, but not because they're processed, but because they're high in fat and sugar, while being calorically dense with no nutritional value.
> Replacing "seed oils" with hamburgers and french fries fried in tallow won't magically help your health. If anything, you would die quicker from the huge amount of saturated fat you're now intaking.
I'd like to see your evidence for the first claim.
The second claim is not as well supported as you might think. A recent Cochrane review published by The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) rated "Reduction in Saturated Fat Intake for Cardiovascular Disease" as having Unclear Benefits with no significant effect on all-cause or cardiovascular mortality. This is based on randomized controlled trials that measured endpoints directly rather than LDL levels.
No, we know that eating less saturated fat and replacing it with unsaturated fat, such as those found in seed oils, can reduce your risk of CVD as much as statins.
We know, for sure, that eating less saturated fat reduces your markers that put you at risk of cardiovascular disease. Your study points that out. The problem with assessing cardiovascular mortality is that takes many many years to come home to roost. As your source points out, most studies were only 12-24 months.
As evidence for mortality related to saturated fat, that AHA statement cites only three sources.
First, in the Oslo Diet-Heart Study, "there were fewer cardiovascular deaths in the experimental group by 27% (P=0.09)", a non-significant result.
Second, it cites the reduction in CHD deaths in Finland between 1972 and 1992, attributing 50% of the reduction to cholesterol levels. But similar reductions occurred in many nations at that time, largely due to reduced smoking, improved treatment, and other changes that should not be ignored. There is no clear link to saturated fat here.
Third, it cites the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study, an observational study that didn't isolate PUFA intake, and is likely to be confounded by diet quality.
I would describe that evidence as weak-to-moderate at best.
The evidence regarding LDL is stronger, but that's a concern that should be measured and treated individually. People do not respond identically to diet, not everyone has high LDL, and there are many ways to lower it if needed. Personally, I don't worry much about saturated fat because my LDL is under 70.
What’s your background to describe this evidence as anything at all? Significant nutrition background? I’m not clear why you think you have standing to make any claims whatsoever, here, especially given the utter paucity of evidence you have cited.
This is typical Internet Nutrition Bullshit, just packaged in vaguely smart sounding words.
>Among other mechanisms, refining removes nutrients and other beneficial molecules, while purifying taste and reducing volume making it easier to overeat.
Should we cancel vaccines and water purification while we're at it? It's not hard to come up with vaguely plausible reasons for why those are bad as well, eg. "hygiene hypothesis", "gut microbiome", or whatever.
>But the worst part isn't refining the oil itself, but the use of these oils in ultra-processed foods along with refined sweeteners, colorings, and fillers. Even if refined seed oils themselves aren't harmful, avoiding them is likely to be beneficial because it leads to avoiding ultra-processed foods.
It's ironic you cite ultra-processed foods, another category which has questionable rigor and applicability, but people nonetheless defend because "Even if ultra processed foods themselves aren't harmful, avoiding them is likely to be beneficial because it leads to avoiding unhealthy foods."
> It's ironic you cite ultra-processed foods, another category which has questionable rigor and applicability, but people nonetheless defend because "Even if ultra processed foods themselves aren't harmful, avoiding them is likely to be beneficial because it leads to avoiding unhealthy foods."
The evidence that ultra processed foods are harmful is quite strong, much stronger than the association with saturated fat intake. Are you really suggesting that they might not be unhealthy?
The objection isn't over whether "ultra-processed foods" as a group tend to be unhealthy, it's that the classification is not rigorous, and conflates what's actually unhealthy or not with an heuristic that's at times inaccurate.
>Everyone knows that greens are good for your health and red meat is not. But everyone would laugh if I were to propose that red foods are dangerous and green ones healthy. I could prove my thesis making use of a few additional rules, such as postulating that some shades of red, tomatoes and apples for instance, should not be counted as red.
>The Nova classification system, which sorts foods into four categories depending on the degree of processing they undergo, uses similar logic. There is no scientific justification for the assumption that the number of processing steps is of any relevance for the health properties of foods. Making “ultra-processed” popcorn or chips is exceedingly simple. Making “minimally processed” natural yogurt requires some 20 processes.
>Heating is the process that affects foods the most, but heating is afforded no attention in Nova. It does not neatly fit into the processed or unprocessed scheme. In some cases it is essential for public health, in others it may induce carcinogens. And in a blatant example of the arbitrariness of the Nova classification, putting a loaf of bread into a bag moves it from the minimally processed to the ultra-processed category.
>The flawed, but intuitively easy to grasp, label of ultra-processed food is a handy justification for blaming food-related health problems on profit-hungry food companies. And it enables politicians to divert funding from serious research to meaningless eye-catching interventions.
The Nova classification system isn't based on the number of processing steps, it's based on ingredients.
Putting a loaf of bread into a bag certainly doesn't move it from the minimally processed to the ultra-processed category. That false claim is based on the fact that most bread sold in bags is ultra-processed, but it's not the bag that makes it so.
I think that professor of food engineering may have a conflict of interest related to the foods he creates for a living.
>The Nova classification system isn't based on the number of processing steps, it's based on ingredients.
So going back to the quote, is the potato chips vs yogurt example accurate?
>That false claim is based on the fact that most bread sold in bags is ultra-processed, but it's not the bag that makes it so.
What makes them ultra-processed then? Even the home made loaf is made from wheat that's dehusked, ground to a powder, and then chemically treated (bleaching). Making it into a dough and then baking it involves even more processing. The final product resembles the inputs almost as little as instant mash potatoes resembles potatoes. The only real difference is the use of dough conditioners and industrial sized ovens, but given all the previous steps, it seems arbitrary to draw the line of "ultra-processed" there.
~10,000 years is also evolutionary recent. It's enough time for fast evolution to weed out stuff that is very directly maladaptive, but not enough time to weed out more subtle effects. And given that a bad diet tends to kill people well past their prime childbearing years, evolution might consider a bad diet a good thing.
Good point, there are a lot of diseases of civilization that have been with us since large scale agriculture, that did not afflict most hunter gatherers.
To add, sunflower seed use predated maíz in some parts of North America, and mustard oil goes back to the Indus Valley Civilization.
Yes, the extraction of these oils is "novel" just like factory farms are novel. As the article explains, it is the ultra-processed food products that are the problem, not the seed oil ingredients.
There is also sunflower oil and high oleic sunflower oil, the latter, which after refinement is incredibly heat and shelf stable, and is essentially pure omega-9 monounsaturated fat.
The anti refinement process perspective is discounting that the end result is the perfect fat.
A similar thing can be said about hydrolyzed collagen with a little tryptophan added.
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.
The sugar you get from fruit is also accompanied by fiber, water and other nutrients. Also harder to overeat and generally gets released into the bloodstream more slowly. I think the argument here is to eat less (highly) processed food in favour of whole foods.
See but here is where I get confused. The advice you are saying is to "completely eliminate added sugar" but then you say it's due to fiber, nutrients, and hard to overeat.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but people who go to the level of "eliminate sugar completely" are usually pretty knowledgeable, so I'm trying to get into the specifics.
On a societal level the idea of reducing sugar is a positive one, but trying to eliminate sugar is the wrong idea. As far as I know eating a bowl of greek yogurt with homemade granola, raspberries, and maple syrup (or even some powdered cane sugar, which I don't use), has substantially more fiber, less sugar, and more nutrient balance (and less likely to overeat) than sitting down and eating a mango, yet under the current advice trend I'm doing it wrong by "adding sugar" to the greek yogurt, and I'm totally fine to eat the mango since the sugar was in there by default.
Given that factory farmed fruit has been having increasing amounts of sugar over time it's really a lot more about nutrients, fiber, and sugar, than it is about blanket rules.
Saying "no added sugar" is a positive high level societal rule, like "eat 3-5 servings of vegetables and fruit a day" but if you get into absolute rules among nutritionally educated people, things like "no added sugar" don't really track.
you can overeat fruit and vegetables and not all fruit is the same. Bananas vs kale is a good example. You should eat more kale, but you should avoid bananas unless they’re green (lots of resistant starch)
They didn't say "added sugar" they just said sugar. If you want to avoid sugar, you have to realize that fruit does contain sugar (fructose is the culprit here) and it isn't always healthy.
If you think of the specialty oranges like cuties and halos, they are loaded with sugar, that's why they taste so good.
Apples and bananas still won't help you lose weight. Tomatoes have much less sugar and could actually be helpful to be less hungry without many calories.
There is no easy way out, you can't just eat a bunch of sugar loaded fruit and think the fiber will totally protect you or that because it is "fruit" it's healthy.
I'm not trying to lose weight, and I've never knowingly bought a specialty orange. Sugar is in basically every plant food, and saying "give up all sugar" means going carnivore plus eggs and a select few dairy products.
Which, to be clear because some people legitimately believe in this diet, this is bad for you. Diets high in animal fat cause heart disease, and eating this much red meat without fiber is going to cause gastrointestinal distress and increase your risk of colon cancer. Also, it is very difficult to eat a reasonable amount of calories when you consume calorically dense food that's high in fat.
It's a matter of amount of course. A tomato has 1/4th the sugar of a normal orange.
The point here is saying "fruit is healthy" is just not true in any sort of black and white sense. Someone can easily get fat and be unhealthy by eating fruits with lots of sugar, and if they are juicing them, even more so.
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.
Ideally, yes. But the failure modes in seed oil manufacturing are what scare me. How many accidental hexane exposures would it take to outweigh a lifetime of the benefits of seed oils over more natural, but less healthy, oils?
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:
>. 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.
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.
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.
> There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats.
> The administration that declared it is “ending the war on saturated fat” has found a cooking fat that delivers more of the exact compounds most associated with cardiovascular mortality. MAHA is road paved with artery-clogging cholesterol, and they’re calling it a health revolution.
The article seems worth reading. I found it informative. It’s not that the scariest compounds in seed oils aren’t considered dangerous, but they’re probably not in vegetable oils in significant enough levels. So that’s conspiratorial misunderstanding by the MAHA contingent.
> 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?
The “seed oils” movement has grown beyond seed oils. People who follow seed oil influencers usually subscribe to a cluster of ideas. The superiority of beef tallow is one of them.
Right, but that should probably be a red flag. I mean, we put sugar in everything because it makes everything taste awesome and, yeah.
There's nothing wrong with using beef tallow or bacon fat in your cooking occasionally. I use bacon fat sometimes. But of course consuming saturated fat in excess is not good for you in the long run, so do it in moderation.
Yeah, as you say, the key point is moderation, always.
I find it extremely unlikely that evolution got us to like foods that are supposedly that bad for us. Our palate is actually a tool for evaluation of what is consumable and has the nutrients we need.
If you look at children not corrupted by ideologies, it will become extremely obvious that they naturally crave this stuff without any prompting.
The problem just comes from our modern ultra-abondance. Not that long ago, most people were very limited in the amount they could consume because it was expensive and rare.
> cooking with beef tallow is better though. It makes everything taste awesome
It is. I don’t tend to keep it handy, but I do tend to have bacon drippings I’ll swap into meals. What’s wild is this insistence on herding from one homogenous diet to another.
A few paragraphs into the article, the author addresses the "seed oil" misnomer; it's better to keep reading before jumping to the comments to do a knee-jerk comment to a single statement.
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.
Avocado oil is good for high temperature sautéing,
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.
Technically extra virgin olive oil should not be refined.
I'm always a little dubious because of the financial incentive to cut unrefined oil with some amount of cheaper refined oil, but I don't have any idea how much this actually is done with olive oil.
The label usually won't say what the process was in my experience, but you can look into what processes are used for refined olive oil. Just avoid refined oil entirely. And if I see "olive oil" as an ingredient in something or at a not-high-quality restaurant, I'd assume it's refined.
I'm not sure I've ever seen olive oil at the supermarket that didn't have "Extra Virgin" in the labeling. I'll try to remember to look closer next time I'm shopping for it.
>Does the author (a purported dietician) not know this him/herself?
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
Olives are a fruit and yet they are disfavored by the movement. Coconuts are a seed but they are considered acceptable. And within seeds, maíz, soy, and safflower are all very different botanically.
Coconuts are fruit, actually. Also while corn kernels and soy beans are technically seeds, they are, at least in my opinion, pretty far from the vernacular definition of seed. Part of this is that soy is a legume, corn a cereal, unlike safflower and rapeseed, which might matter nutritionally.
It really isn't weird, and given the entire rest of the article clearly the author understands.
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.
I read about book called "the big fat lie" years and years ago. There are some indisputable problems specifically with how canola and flaxseed oils went from being an industrial product that was in excess in the post war economy, to being on everyone's table at every meal. There are meta studies that show benefits from animal fats from healthy naturally fed animals, which of course is not a qualification in the guidance RFK provides. The truth is that separating the most calorically dense part of a whole food and adding it to other foods is never a good idea. Not with tallow, not with canola, not with white rice, or orange juice and really not even with olive oil, just put some olives in there!
Nutritional science has failed us before -- the low fat movement and the panic over salt. And then there's ye olde Food Pyramid which was marketing for Big Ag.
Another one was the concern of soy phytoestrogens, and claiming that only fermented soy was safe.
Much of this had some scientific basis, but science isn't perfect and evolves.
On the other hand, there's ideology and it rejects any scientific reporting that falsifies its beliefs. Science is about being falsifiable -- so when confronted with compelling evidence that earlier understanding is rejected and replaced with new knowledge.
RFK Jr. is an ideologue and is the worst person to be in the role he is. He may get some things right (food dyes, etc), but that's the broken clock effect.
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.
Apparently (per the Wiki) the fad grew after 2020, when Joe Rogan (an American podcaster) interviewed Paul Saladino (an American "carnivore diet" promoter and current food supplement business owner).
The Wiki claims that this fad diet / conspiracy theory is popular on the "political right". Actually, my guess is that a better description would be that this is particularly popular among certain social media "wellness influencers" and "alternative health" promoters. Especially wellness influencers who have been pushing anti-veganism / meat-only / high-protein fad diets in the past.
There seems to be overlap between this movement and anti-vaccination movement promoters (Joseph Mercola, a key figure in the later movement, is now also promoting anti-seed oil activism).
I don't see a whole lot of influencers promoting this yet who are not American. I also don't see this fad outside social media much personally, despite being an American. The primary thing I can think of is that the fast food chain Steak N Shake is heavily touting its "beef tallow fries" on their billboards now.
Yes. RFK Jr. was corruptly placed in charge of America's healthcare by Trump in exchange for dropping out as a presidential candidate.
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.
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 reason RFK resonated with people is because the highly credentialed experts were not producing favorable outcomes. Results have to matter, right? We’ll see how successful (or not) RFK’s policies are, but let’s not revise history to where things were great right before he came in and ruined everything.
> 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 (systematically located by organizing a healthcare system) would be available to treat the King when eventually the King needed such experienced help himself.
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 internally inconsistent 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!
Nobody is singularly powerful enough to stop the healthcare madness; if healthcare disappears it won't be due to RFK Jr. it will be because it will have gone out of style, and shrouded in shame, like doing a big poo poo on the carpet, stashed away as a traumatic collective memory, somewhere between Pol Pot and the Nazi's, that is the natural endpoint for the illusion of egalitarian healthcare without consequences.
Modern medicine saves lives. Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society. But you're suggesting that letting children die from preventable diseases is a bad thing. It's not.
> Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society.
It doesn't matter how authoritatively you state it, but wanting it not to matter is not the same as it not applying. It still applies modulo some distortion by "egalitarian healthcare". Every time you have a cold or whatever is a moment you are statistically less likely to reproduce. When a potential mate approaches you but sneezes all over itself, it has an influence on your attraction towards this mate. If only things were so simple as state them in a voice of authority...
Is it in the interest of the group, and of future children that they inherit deficiencies at higher rates simply because we apply healthcare?
What exactly is "civilized" about our healthcare behavior?
So what? Technology gives us free lunch after free lunch. And in the not so distant future we can just gene-edit our offspring, the ultimate free lunch.
There is a difference between technology and addiction, healthcare has never given a free lunch, it always came with this cost.
How about the following amended version: imagine healthcare can only treat people for an affliction if it ALSO treats the same person by gene-editing the same affliction away? or would you still support treatments for people when no gene-editing solution is known?
Suppose patients seek treatment but refuse gene-editing, should they be granted access to treatment?
If they accept gene editing, how do we determine what a healthy genome looks like?
There is a hidden assumption in what you propose, you propose implicitly that the fitness function that implicitly scores us is analytically available to us. But we don't have access to this expression. Allow me to give a more clear example:
Sickle cell anemia: we understand which mutations result in it, and we could genetically modify it away as a disease.
But nature explores and tallies all explored options and constantly reweighs them. Nobody has a crystal ball predicting the future: perhaps global warming could result in malaria affecting the whole world, and in that case its the Sickle cell anemia afflicted that have an advantage, the same condition that gives them their medical complaints is the same condition that increases their resilience against malaria. If it didn't have any advantage ever it would be strange for those mutations to survive systematically in malaria mosquito regions...
We don't have access to the implicit fitness function, we can only explore it through living it. If we did have access to this implicit fitness function we could perform gradient descent on a computer, and egalitarian healtcare without negative consequences for future generation fitness would be achievable. But show me this manual of the universe, and the exact page where the fitness expression is explicitly given!
Without access to the actual fitness function, it's just cultural aesthetics: in the West today slender female figures, in the past or elsewhere its more plump female figures. Without access to a fitness function, it just becomes a subjective beauty contest, and we might eliminate Sickle cell anemia, and doom that whole population into the hands of malaria. Healthcare is effectively Nazi eugenics with a facelift (and they rely on unethical Nazi experiment data).
On a per-calorie basis, yes. Animal protein requires 10x the input of what you get back: 100 calories of chicken requires 1000 calories of feed. Now what we feed livestock is unlikely what most people would want to consume, but the systems are in place to allow such a transition.
Last time I looked it up, the US produces something like a ~million+~ kilograms of corn for every person in the country.
Edit: it was pointed out my corn estimate was off, and it is order of magnitude 1000kg per person.
I think you have misplaced a unit somewhere, because that would be a truly absurd amount of corn.
A quick trip past wikipedia [1] suggest the figure was 383.6 million tonnes in 2021, which is still approximately a thousand kilograms of corn per person, which is still a lot (more than my annual consumption, that's for sure)
> Is that even possible with the current food supply chain though?
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.
Obviously. But you also need the time to cook and not to have the appetite of a 10 year old. The latter, from what I've observed, is quite common in grown adults.
Naturally any overnight change that drastic would collapse the global economy and society would collapse. But given some time and will, I don't see why not.
It absolutely is in Australia, and I suspect Europe (from when I went 5 or so years ago). Even mostly possible in Houston when I was there 15 years ago.
The US is even more cooked than I thought if you can get a bunch of fresh veggies from a grocery store.
> 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.
To be fair, plenty of niche diets exist that could not be adopted by the broader population without supply-chain retooling. But practically, yes, this is not a real objection.
> 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 work in an area that involves, among many other things, analysis of cooking oil in factories. It might be hard to pin down the terminology of "reused" frying oil, because many of the frying processes are continuous. The raw material goes through a vat of hot oil on a conveyer and comes out the other end dripping with oil
The quality of the oil is continuously monitored, and new oil goes in while old oil goes out in the fried food itself. The crunchy and salty aspects make it palatable to eat oil. The oil doesn't actually spend a long time in the vat before coming out in the product.
Analogous is the label on vodkas that says “distilled N times”, as if they were making it in batches using pot stills.
Vodka is made almost exclusively in industrial-scale continuous fractionating columns. The concept of it being “distilled N times” is farcical. (But technically defensible because you can map the output of the fractionating column to any arbitrary N via equivalence relationships.)
Good point that industrial use might not strictly be "reusing" - that might apply more to restaurants where they have big vats of frying oil and keep dipping food in it for multiple days. Even worse I've seen small scale home fryers where people neglect to change the oil for who knows how long - but that's probably not super common.
Absolutely agree. I don't think I'd want industrially prepared stuff fried in tallow either.
There is a chemical distinction in that tallow is mostly saturated fat which doesn't oxidize nearly as easily, so it might be less bad to fry with or re-fry with. But still.
> 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%.
…about same difference as taking statins (per the article)
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.
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.
True -- trans fat is 5-10% of beef fat [1] BUT "a lot" is not the standard when it comes to trans fat. The NEJM article makes the point that trans fat is damaging even in small quantities, like a single gram. It was a great day when trans fat was required to be listed on the Nutrition Facts Label. It spurred snack manufacturers to get it (mostly) out of their products.
If I take my 100%-handwritten prose and hand it to a detector, it tells me it's 30% AI. Those detectors are crap and they're training people to also be crap at it. I'm not changing how I write just to sound "less AI".
Some HN readers are blind to this, others are obsessed with it.
ChatGPT claims 900 million active weekly users. You really think a dietician who writes for the Minnesota Reformer (whatever that is), trying to get the word out about his current "evidence-based" whatever, isn't getting a little robo-coaching along the way?
This one sure smells like a human article that went through Claude 4.6 with a "proofread, identify passive voice, increase clarity, adapt to house-style.md, and make it fit in X words" prompt. Maybe the editor did it.
The issue is the quality of the writing, which still needs work whether an LLM was involved or not. Most sources (Forbes, Business Insider) require the author to sign a waiver that indemnifies. That's the chilling effect, not the AI tells.
Zero-GPT says it's human written, with a fairly low score of 11.4% for AI. I think I should mention this, as some people seem to try to kill the piece by branding it AI-ism.
There really is this streak of blaming victims in the grift economy. Seems surreal that there's no longer anyone to blame for committing fraud and putting out bullshit medical, nutrition, etc.
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
Yes, people putting effort into a "carnivore diet" can be healthy. The problem raised by the article is people continuing to follow their same eating patterns (namely, ultra-processed foods) while the fats have been swapped out.
The animals that produce that tallow are part of the global industrial food system too.
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.
Sure, if you eat the tallow. People aren't doing that. They're using the tallow to make french fries etc. The problem is the french fries, not the oil choice.
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.
> 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.
> There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. They’re naturally occurring, present in all beef fat, and according to cardiologists, present in tallow at levels far above what’s considered safe.
"Ultra-processed" does not mean "many steps in the process of creating it". Although I assume many people are somewhat misusing the term by now, it originally comes from the "Nova" system, where part of the current definition of ultra-processed is:
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).
Any isolation of certain compounds from whole food from other compounds would be part of what I refer to as processed. In the case of refined oils, I'd call it ultra processed just because of how much is removed - even before considering the chemical contaminants.
Is criticism is directly, and convincingly, addressed in the article.
> 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.
Absolutely a PR campaign. People started getting upset about the array of bizarre chemicals in their foods and the minimal standards and regulations about introducing new ones (or disclosing completely the ones that you are using.)
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.
Cows eating grain in concentrated feedlots and then made available in separate pieces all year round at the local grocery store... is also a modern industrial invention.
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 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.
What happens is that you have to find ways to dismiss the body of evidence to take on positions like "beef tallow and butter are actually amazing for you".
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.
"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.
"Mexican coke" a good example of American attention when it comes to health and nutrition: instead of focusing on big impact things like exercise, fiber, vegetables, saturated fat, building sidewalks, blood lipids, etc, we're stuck obsessing over food dyes, 50% vs 55% fructose, seed oils.
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 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 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.
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.
> 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.
If you're interested in just the pure statistics and outcomes of scientific trials, I highly recommend https://nutritionfacts.org/. It's a non-profit charity featuring numerous ~5 min videos highlighting specific findings across scientific studies about nutrition, with sources read directly and linked.
"Nutrition science is absolute garbage, [so I'll base my position on something worse.]"
So, emotions and preferences?
Btw, statins show a big difference if you take them early. Even more for people who have genetically low lipids. People tend to only go on statins in middle/old age, especially after an adverse event, after decades of accumulated plaque build up which statins can't reverse.
Rosuvastatin costs $5/mo and lowers LDL/ApoB 45% in a few weeks. You should probably get on one if your genetics prevent you from getting under 100 LDL and 60 ApoB despite a high fiber plant-based diet. But something tells me that's not your diet either.
Yep. A friend’s a cardiologist who told me about attending a lecture on statins at a conference. The speaker asked how many doctors in the audience started taking statins even before having indications that they should take them. Nearly everyone in the audience raised their hand.
What that tells me is that people who do this for a living, who study the actual science, who make a career of this very specific thing, all believe in statins enough to self-medicate.
That didn’t make me seek them out. What it did do was make me say yes the moment my own doc raised the idea.
Many people say that until they almost die. 350,000 people died of heart attacks in the US in 2025. A very preventable situation. Many more almost died. In many of those said they'd rather be dead than not eat butter, red meat and cheese.
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.
thats the one thing we all have in common. we all die. that said. everything in moderation and definitely avoid a few things like sugar and maybe seed oils. but butter red meat and cheese, rather be dead.
> 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.
I keep reading about "inflammation" and think about things like swollen joints, bruises, etc. It must mean something else. What would I notice in my body if the oils that I consume are causing severe inflammation?
There are tons of possible symptoms because systemic inflammation including from dietary causes basically damages the entire body. But here's a list of some common symptoms from one source:
persistent pain,
chronic fatigue or insomnia,
joint stiffness,
skin problems,
elevated blood markers (such as C-reactive protein),
gastrointestinal issues (constipation, diarrhoea, acid reflux),
depression, anxiety and mood disorders,
unintended weight gain or loss,
frequent colds or flu.
For myself, when I eat processed food I mostly feel fatigue and low energy and gastrointestinal pain. But it's been extremely rare for me to eat these things in the last 10 years.
Most of the US population are systemically inflamed including from diet basically all the time, and most of the US population are suffering from several of the above symptoms chronically. (Not to claim that it's definitely or only because of food, but I'd bet it's a big part of it.)
I notice that my allergies get worse, and a theory is that systemic low-grade inflammation and histamine response may be due to diet. I don't have a lot of other conditions, but people with autoimmune conditions (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis) might see it get better/worse with dietary changes.
When I'm eating beans+rice and a bit of protein that I cook myself, my allergies are a lot lower.
When I cheat and eat "crap" I tend to start sneezing and rubbing my eyes.
There are a lot of variables, though, and cheat foods tend to be highly processed, high in gluten, with a lot of additives and made with seed oils, and hidden sugars, and are much higher glycemic index with higher glycemic loading, amongst other things. Plus seasonal allergies are just variable day-to-day which is another confounding factor. So I don't really know what the X factor is. I get similar effects on an atkins-style high fat beef, butter and cheese kind of diet, because it also cuts out most of those things.
My theory is that the inflammation simply high-jacks your body's attention. Meaning, it has to spend more time dealing with it as opposed to handling other conditions. I don't strongly believe that chronic inflammation is the direct causal effect of many of my health symptoms, but I do strongly believe that, overall, it makes them significantly worse than they need to be.
That could be a valid observation for n=1. There could be any number of reasons seed oils cause inflammation for you but do not the general populace, or not at numbers large enough to offset recommending them as a general rule.
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?
I wouldn't pose it as anything more than n=1. I'm more empathizing with those being caught up in the politicization who may have more nuanced reasons they are being impacted beyond what the media puts out.
> 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?
I read this a couple of times, but I'm still not really understanding the question. I directly attributed the politicization to RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement. So I'm not sure why you're asking if I had other ideas.
I also think this is an interesting topic of research. I have had lifelong issues with chronic pain and always felt like diet influenced it, but I’ve never been able to isolate a single factor. I’be stopped cooking with low smoke point oils but it’s all guesswork at this point.
Your phrasing about politics was potentially ambiguous, so I asked for clarification. People can mean many different things when they say something is political.
> 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.
https://dynomight.net/seed-oil/
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.
>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.
Did you get to the end? He addresses that.
>I’ll just be honest. I think this view is completely indefensible. I feel embarrassed when I see people promoting it. You’re sure? How? I don’t see any way to get to this conclusion other than heavily filtering the evidence—ignoring the flaws in everything that supports a predetermined view while scrambling to find flaws in everything that contradicts it.
>Again, I’m sure you can send me long lists of random citations. (You don’t need to send them; it’s OK; I’ve seen them already.) But for anything that’s been studied in detail, there’s always lots of evidence to support any semi-plausible view. Do you have any idea how much evidence people can produce for UFOs or chronic Lyme or colloidal silver?
Why would I spend my time reading a random blog?
The author makes no effort anywhere on the site to give themselves any credibility. They don't even give their name or occupation. A google search lends no more real information either.
From my POV it might as well be a youtube comment that is 8 pages long.
> I don’t see any way to get to this conclusion other than heavily filtering the evidence—ignoring the flaws in everything that supports a predetermined view while scrambling to find flaws in everything that contradicts it.
Is that not what he's doing when he dismisses the evidence that contradicts his view?
The article is fairly good. He specifically addresses research that doesn't support the conclusion. He’s not exactly a random blogger, this person is known for the quality of their research. At least in my circles…
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.
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.
They can also tend to be harmful in combination, such as in the case of relatively unstable unsaturated fatty acids going on to be glycated in the presence of sugars (some moreso than others); it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were examples such as this which fuelled a significant proportion of all "diseases of civilization".
Really? I don't know exactly how long people have been eating oil from olive, flax seed, sesame, coconut or palm nut, but I believe not under 6000–7000 years. But yeah, not the stuff we eat today.
Yes, I wasn't talking about unrefined olive, flax, sesame, or coconut. I don't think most people concerned about "seed oils" are concerned about those.
It's the refined soybean oil, canola/rapeseed oil, cottonseed oil, grapeseed oil, sunflower seed oil, corn oil, safflower oil, peanut oil - these are the modern refined oils I'm referring to that were never eaten until very recently. I'd be dubious of refined / ultra processed olive and avocado oil too, which is a different thing from fresh cold pressed olive or avocado oil.
It isn’t clear at all how refining oil makes it materially “worse” in terms of health than the unrefined equivalent. That claim lacks both evidence and a mechanism of action.
Every argument I’ve seen demonstrates a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the chemistry. These same bad chemistry takes are repeated everywhere by influencers. This isn’t unique to the oil discussions, dietary health is rife with vibe-based chemistry takes that are obviously unscientific.
Among other mechanisms, refining removes nutrients and other beneficial molecules, while purifying taste and reducing volume making it easier to overeat.
But the worst part isn't refining the oil itself, but the use of these oils in ultra-processed foods along with refined sweeteners, colorings, and fillers. Even if refined seed oils themselves aren't harmful, avoiding them is likely to be beneficial because it leads to avoiding ultra-processed foods.
Colorings and fillers are not that bad for you. You, and other, are missing the forest for the trees here: diets high in fat, sugar, and calories lead to heart disease and metabolic syndrome.
Replacing "seed oils" with hamburgers and french fries fried in tallow won't magically help your health. If anything, you would die quicker from the huge amount of saturated fat you're now intaking.
Ultra processed foods are bad generally, yes, but not because they're processed, but because they're high in fat and sugar, while being calorically dense with no nutritional value.
> Replacing "seed oils" with hamburgers and french fries fried in tallow won't magically help your health. If anything, you would die quicker from the huge amount of saturated fat you're now intaking.
I'd like to see your evidence for the first claim.
The second claim is not as well supported as you might think. A recent Cochrane review published by The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) rated "Reduction in Saturated Fat Intake for Cardiovascular Disease" as having Unclear Benefits with no significant effect on all-cause or cardiovascular mortality. This is based on randomized controlled trials that measured endpoints directly rather than LDL levels.
https://www.aafp.org/afp/2022/0100/od2#afp20220100p19a-b3
No, we know that eating less saturated fat and replacing it with unsaturated fat, such as those found in seed oils, can reduce your risk of CVD as much as statins.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/10/21/advisory-replacing-...
We know, for sure, that eating less saturated fat reduces your markers that put you at risk of cardiovascular disease. Your study points that out. The problem with assessing cardiovascular mortality is that takes many many years to come home to roost. As your source points out, most studies were only 12-24 months.
As evidence for mortality related to saturated fat, that AHA statement cites only three sources.
First, in the Oslo Diet-Heart Study, "there were fewer cardiovascular deaths in the experimental group by 27% (P=0.09)", a non-significant result.
Second, it cites the reduction in CHD deaths in Finland between 1972 and 1992, attributing 50% of the reduction to cholesterol levels. But similar reductions occurred in many nations at that time, largely due to reduced smoking, improved treatment, and other changes that should not be ignored. There is no clear link to saturated fat here.
Third, it cites the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study, an observational study that didn't isolate PUFA intake, and is likely to be confounded by diet quality.
I would describe that evidence as weak-to-moderate at best.
The evidence regarding LDL is stronger, but that's a concern that should be measured and treated individually. People do not respond identically to diet, not everyone has high LDL, and there are many ways to lower it if needed. Personally, I don't worry much about saturated fat because my LDL is under 70.
What’s your background to describe this evidence as anything at all? Significant nutrition background? I’m not clear why you think you have standing to make any claims whatsoever, here, especially given the utter paucity of evidence you have cited.
This is typical Internet Nutrition Bullshit, just packaged in vaguely smart sounding words.
>Among other mechanisms, refining removes nutrients and other beneficial molecules, while purifying taste and reducing volume making it easier to overeat.
Should we cancel vaccines and water purification while we're at it? It's not hard to come up with vaguely plausible reasons for why those are bad as well, eg. "hygiene hypothesis", "gut microbiome", or whatever.
>But the worst part isn't refining the oil itself, but the use of these oils in ultra-processed foods along with refined sweeteners, colorings, and fillers. Even if refined seed oils themselves aren't harmful, avoiding them is likely to be beneficial because it leads to avoiding ultra-processed foods.
It's ironic you cite ultra-processed foods, another category which has questionable rigor and applicability, but people nonetheless defend because "Even if ultra processed foods themselves aren't harmful, avoiding them is likely to be beneficial because it leads to avoiding unhealthy foods."
> It's ironic you cite ultra-processed foods, another category which has questionable rigor and applicability, but people nonetheless defend because "Even if ultra processed foods themselves aren't harmful, avoiding them is likely to be beneficial because it leads to avoiding unhealthy foods."
The evidence that ultra processed foods are harmful is quite strong, much stronger than the association with saturated fat intake. Are you really suggesting that they might not be unhealthy?
The objection isn't over whether "ultra-processed foods" as a group tend to be unhealthy, it's that the classification is not rigorous, and conflates what's actually unhealthy or not with an heuristic that's at times inaccurate.
>Everyone knows that greens are good for your health and red meat is not. But everyone would laugh if I were to propose that red foods are dangerous and green ones healthy. I could prove my thesis making use of a few additional rules, such as postulating that some shades of red, tomatoes and apples for instance, should not be counted as red.
>The Nova classification system, which sorts foods into four categories depending on the degree of processing they undergo, uses similar logic. There is no scientific justification for the assumption that the number of processing steps is of any relevance for the health properties of foods. Making “ultra-processed” popcorn or chips is exceedingly simple. Making “minimally processed” natural yogurt requires some 20 processes.
>Heating is the process that affects foods the most, but heating is afforded no attention in Nova. It does not neatly fit into the processed or unprocessed scheme. In some cases it is essential for public health, in others it may induce carcinogens. And in a blatant example of the arbitrariness of the Nova classification, putting a loaf of bread into a bag moves it from the minimally processed to the ultra-processed category.
>The flawed, but intuitively easy to grasp, label of ultra-processed food is a handy justification for blaming food-related health problems on profit-hungry food companies. And it enables politicians to divert funding from serious research to meaningless eye-catching interventions.
>Petr Dejmek
>Emeritus professor of food engineering
>Lund University
>Lund, Sweden
The Nova classification system isn't based on the number of processing steps, it's based on ingredients.
Putting a loaf of bread into a bag certainly doesn't move it from the minimally processed to the ultra-processed category. That false claim is based on the fact that most bread sold in bags is ultra-processed, but it's not the bag that makes it so.
I think that professor of food engineering may have a conflict of interest related to the foods he creates for a living.
>The Nova classification system isn't based on the number of processing steps, it's based on ingredients.
So going back to the quote, is the potato chips vs yogurt example accurate?
>That false claim is based on the fact that most bread sold in bags is ultra-processed, but it's not the bag that makes it so.
What makes them ultra-processed then? Even the home made loaf is made from wheat that's dehusked, ground to a powder, and then chemically treated (bleaching). Making it into a dough and then baking it involves even more processing. The final product resembles the inputs almost as little as instant mash potatoes resembles potatoes. The only real difference is the use of dough conditioners and industrial sized ovens, but given all the previous steps, it seems arbitrary to draw the line of "ultra-processed" there.
~10,000 years is also evolutionary recent. It's enough time for fast evolution to weed out stuff that is very directly maladaptive, but not enough time to weed out more subtle effects. And given that a bad diet tends to kill people well past their prime childbearing years, evolution might consider a bad diet a good thing.
Good point, there are a lot of diseases of civilization that have been with us since large scale agriculture, that did not afflict most hunter gatherers.
To add, sunflower seed use predated maíz in some parts of North America, and mustard oil goes back to the Indus Valley Civilization.
Yes, the extraction of these oils is "novel" just like factory farms are novel. As the article explains, it is the ultra-processed food products that are the problem, not the seed oil ingredients.
There is also sunflower oil and high oleic sunflower oil, the latter, which after refinement is incredibly heat and shelf stable, and is essentially pure omega-9 monounsaturated fat.
The anti refinement process perspective is discounting that the end result is the perfect fat.
A similar thing can be said about hydrolyzed collagen with a little tryptophan added.
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.
Added sugar? I really don't think giving up all fruits and vegetables is a good idea.
The sugar you get from fruit is also accompanied by fiber, water and other nutrients. Also harder to overeat and generally gets released into the bloodstream more slowly. I think the argument here is to eat less (highly) processed food in favour of whole foods.
yes, sorry its an important distinction. Especially raw whole fruits since they are packed with fiber and nutrients and hard to overeat.
See but here is where I get confused. The advice you are saying is to "completely eliminate added sugar" but then you say it's due to fiber, nutrients, and hard to overeat.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but people who go to the level of "eliminate sugar completely" are usually pretty knowledgeable, so I'm trying to get into the specifics.
On a societal level the idea of reducing sugar is a positive one, but trying to eliminate sugar is the wrong idea. As far as I know eating a bowl of greek yogurt with homemade granola, raspberries, and maple syrup (or even some powdered cane sugar, which I don't use), has substantially more fiber, less sugar, and more nutrient balance (and less likely to overeat) than sitting down and eating a mango, yet under the current advice trend I'm doing it wrong by "adding sugar" to the greek yogurt, and I'm totally fine to eat the mango since the sugar was in there by default.
Given that factory farmed fruit has been having increasing amounts of sugar over time it's really a lot more about nutrients, fiber, and sugar, than it is about blanket rules.
Saying "no added sugar" is a positive high level societal rule, like "eat 3-5 servings of vegetables and fruit a day" but if you get into absolute rules among nutritionally educated people, things like "no added sugar" don't really track.
> here is where I get confused
It doesn't seem like you're confused, it seems like you're using that as a rhetorical device to be pedantic.
> I'm not trying to be pedantic, but
Followed by 4 paragraphs of pedantry, after moving the goalposts from "added sugar" to all sugar.
Eat less junk food. Spend less time lawyering the definition of junk food.
you can overeat fruit and vegetables and not all fruit is the same. Bananas vs kale is a good example. You should eat more kale, but you should avoid bananas unless they’re green (lots of resistant starch)
They didn't say "added sugar" they just said sugar. If you want to avoid sugar, you have to realize that fruit does contain sugar (fructose is the culprit here) and it isn't always healthy.
If you think of the specialty oranges like cuties and halos, they are loaded with sugar, that's why they taste so good.
Apples and bananas still won't help you lose weight. Tomatoes have much less sugar and could actually be helpful to be less hungry without many calories.
There is no easy way out, you can't just eat a bunch of sugar loaded fruit and think the fiber will totally protect you or that because it is "fruit" it's healthy.
I'm not trying to lose weight, and I've never knowingly bought a specialty orange. Sugar is in basically every plant food, and saying "give up all sugar" means going carnivore plus eggs and a select few dairy products.
Which, to be clear because some people legitimately believe in this diet, this is bad for you. Diets high in animal fat cause heart disease, and eating this much red meat without fiber is going to cause gastrointestinal distress and increase your risk of colon cancer. Also, it is very difficult to eat a reasonable amount of calories when you consume calorically dense food that's high in fat.
It's a matter of amount of course. A tomato has 1/4th the sugar of a normal orange.
The point here is saying "fruit is healthy" is just not true in any sort of black and white sense. Someone can easily get fat and be unhealthy by eating fruits with lots of sugar, and if they are juicing them, even more so.
Yeah we all need an eating disorder and be afraid to eat apples. And worry about loosing weight regardless of how healthy and fit we actually are.
wonder which is worse sugar or alcohol, 2 drinks a day vs 2 cans of coke a day
Probably alcohol, but they will both make you overweight, alcohol is metabolized in a similiar way.
When you see how much sugar it takes to make alcohol it starts to make sense.
>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.
Ideally, yes. But the failure modes in seed oil manufacturing are what scare me. How many accidental hexane exposures would it take to outweigh a lifetime of the benefits of seed oils over more natural, but less healthy, oils?
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!
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.
"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?
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.
FTA:
> There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats.
> The administration that declared it is “ending the war on saturated fat” has found a cooking fat that delivers more of the exact compounds most associated with cardiovascular mortality. MAHA is road paved with artery-clogging cholesterol, and they’re calling it a health revolution.
The article seems worth reading. I found it informative. It’s not that the scariest compounds in seed oils aren’t considered dangerous, but they’re probably not in vegetable oils in significant enough levels. So that’s conspiratorial misunderstanding by the MAHA contingent.
Some recent research says that natural trans fats are not as dangerous as the industrial kind.
https://www.reading.ac.uk/news/2026/Research-News/Natural-tr...
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nutres.2026.03.009
> 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?
The “seed oils” movement has grown beyond seed oils. People who follow seed oil influencers usually subscribe to a cluster of ideas. The superiority of beef tallow is one of them.
I mean, cooking with beef tallow is better though. It makes everything taste awesome.
Right, but that should probably be a red flag. I mean, we put sugar in everything because it makes everything taste awesome and, yeah.
There's nothing wrong with using beef tallow or bacon fat in your cooking occasionally. I use bacon fat sometimes. But of course consuming saturated fat in excess is not good for you in the long run, so do it in moderation.
Yeah, as you say, the key point is moderation, always.
I find it extremely unlikely that evolution got us to like foods that are supposedly that bad for us. Our palate is actually a tool for evaluation of what is consumable and has the nutrients we need. If you look at children not corrupted by ideologies, it will become extremely obvious that they naturally crave this stuff without any prompting.
The problem just comes from our modern ultra-abondance. Not that long ago, most people were very limited in the amount they could consume because it was expensive and rare.
> cooking with beef tallow is better though. It makes everything taste awesome
It is. I don’t tend to keep it handy, but I do tend to have bacon drippings I’ll swap into meals. What’s wild is this insistence on herding from one homogenous diet to another.
A few paragraphs into the article, the author addresses the "seed oil" misnomer; it's better to keep reading before jumping to the comments to do a knee-jerk comment to a single statement.
I read it and still was confused. The author flips back and forth on what they're purporting their patients think are bad
Much olive oil is not refined or ultra processed, but in the US market, 25%+ is.
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.
Avocado oil is good for high temperature sautéing,
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.
Technically extra virgin olive oil should not be refined.
I'm always a little dubious because of the financial incentive to cut unrefined oil with some amount of cheaper refined oil, but I don't have any idea how much this actually is done with olive oil.
The label usually won't say what the process was in my experience, but you can look into what processes are used for refined olive oil. Just avoid refined oil entirely. And if I see "olive oil" as an ingredient in something or at a not-high-quality restaurant, I'd assume it's refined.
I'm not sure I've ever seen olive oil at the supermarket that didn't have "Extra Virgin" in the labeling. I'll try to remember to look closer next time I'm shopping for it.
>Does the author (a purported dietician) not know this him/herself?
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
That may have been the dumbest line in the article, the oils in question, are made out of seeds.
Olives are a fruit and yet they are disfavored by the movement. Coconuts are a seed but they are considered acceptable. And within seeds, maíz, soy, and safflower are all very different botanically.
Coconuts are fruit, actually. Also while corn kernels and soy beans are technically seeds, they are, at least in my opinion, pretty far from the vernacular definition of seed. Part of this is that soy is a legume, corn a cereal, unlike safflower and rapeseed, which might matter nutritionally.
It really isn't weird, and given the entire rest of the article clearly the author understands.
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.
I read about book called "the big fat lie" years and years ago. There are some indisputable problems specifically with how canola and flaxseed oils went from being an industrial product that was in excess in the post war economy, to being on everyone's table at every meal. There are meta studies that show benefits from animal fats from healthy naturally fed animals, which of course is not a qualification in the guidance RFK provides. The truth is that separating the most calorically dense part of a whole food and adding it to other foods is never a good idea. Not with tallow, not with canola, not with white rice, or orange juice and really not even with olive oil, just put some olives in there!
Nutritional science has failed us before -- the low fat movement and the panic over salt. And then there's ye olde Food Pyramid which was marketing for Big Ag.
Another one was the concern of soy phytoestrogens, and claiming that only fermented soy was safe.
Much of this had some scientific basis, but science isn't perfect and evolves.
On the other hand, there's ideology and it rejects any scientific reporting that falsifies its beliefs. Science is about being falsifiable -- so when confronted with compelling evidence that earlier understanding is rejected and replaced with new knowledge.
RFK Jr. is an ideologue and is the worst person to be in the role he is. He may get some things right (food dyes, etc), but that's the broken clock effect.
Where is this panic? In the US? I don’t hear anything about it (in Europe).
Social media.
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.
Many restaurants around me have started advertising that they cook everything with beef tallow, as opposed to seed oil.
Ironically, most of them also happen to serve deep fried stuffs which are unhealthy no matter what oil you fry it with.
This could just be a function of your algorithm silo on social media.
Have you tried searching Youtube/Twitter in a euro language to check?
If you haven't already, you will. Expect supermarkets to start offering and marketing animal-based fats more frequently.
I was aware of the panic, but what I learned from this article is that food-makers are actually responding to it by changing their offerings.
Local stores I go to had animal based fats the whole time. They are fairly cheap and easy to buy in big buckets. Sunflower oil is somewhat cheaper.
But, I cant think of a single time I would had issue to buy animal fat (accross 4 different countries).
On social media.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_oil_misinformation
Apparently (per the Wiki) the fad grew after 2020, when Joe Rogan (an American podcaster) interviewed Paul Saladino (an American "carnivore diet" promoter and current food supplement business owner).
The Wiki claims that this fad diet / conspiracy theory is popular on the "political right". Actually, my guess is that a better description would be that this is particularly popular among certain social media "wellness influencers" and "alternative health" promoters. Especially wellness influencers who have been pushing anti-veganism / meat-only / high-protein fad diets in the past.
There seems to be overlap between this movement and anti-vaccination movement promoters (Joseph Mercola, a key figure in the later movement, is now also promoting anti-seed oil activism).
I don't see a whole lot of influencers promoting this yet who are not American. I also don't see this fad outside social media much personally, despite being an American. The primary thing I can think of is that the fast food chain Steak N Shake is heavily touting its "beef tallow fries" on their billboards now.
Yes. RFK Jr. was corruptly placed in charge of America's healthcare by Trump in exchange for dropping out as a presidential candidate.
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.
Yeah. True, I feel. The signaling and recommendations have gone both overboard and data-free. The end results might be bad.
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 reason RFK resonated with people is because the highly credentialed experts were not producing favorable outcomes. Results have to matter, right? We’ll see how successful (or not) RFK’s policies are, but let’s not revise history to where things were great right before he came in and ruined everything.
> 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 (systematically located by organizing a healthcare system) would be available to treat the King when eventually the King needed such experienced help himself.
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 internally inconsistent 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!
Nobody is singularly powerful enough to stop the healthcare madness; if healthcare disappears it won't be due to RFK Jr. it will be because it will have gone out of style, and shrouded in shame, like doing a big poo poo on the carpet, stashed away as a traumatic collective memory, somewhere between Pol Pot and the Nazi's, that is the natural endpoint for the illusion of egalitarian healthcare without consequences.
Modern medicine saves lives. Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society. But you're suggesting that letting children die from preventable diseases is a bad thing. It's not.
> Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society.
It doesn't matter how authoritatively you state it, but wanting it not to matter is not the same as it not applying. It still applies modulo some distortion by "egalitarian healthcare". Every time you have a cold or whatever is a moment you are statistically less likely to reproduce. When a potential mate approaches you but sneezes all over itself, it has an influence on your attraction towards this mate. If only things were so simple as state them in a voice of authority...
Is it in the interest of the group, and of future children that they inherit deficiencies at higher rates simply because we apply healthcare?
What exactly is "civilized" about our healthcare behavior?
So what? Technology gives us free lunch after free lunch. And in the not so distant future we can just gene-edit our offspring, the ultimate free lunch.
There is a difference between technology and addiction, healthcare has never given a free lunch, it always came with this cost.
How about the following amended version: imagine healthcare can only treat people for an affliction if it ALSO treats the same person by gene-editing the same affliction away? or would you still support treatments for people when no gene-editing solution is known?
Suppose patients seek treatment but refuse gene-editing, should they be granted access to treatment? If they accept gene editing, how do we determine what a healthy genome looks like?
There is a hidden assumption in what you propose, you propose implicitly that the fitness function that implicitly scores us is analytically available to us. But we don't have access to this expression. Allow me to give a more clear example:
Sickle cell anemia: we understand which mutations result in it, and we could genetically modify it away as a disease.
But nature explores and tallies all explored options and constantly reweighs them. Nobody has a crystal ball predicting the future: perhaps global warming could result in malaria affecting the whole world, and in that case its the Sickle cell anemia afflicted that have an advantage, the same condition that gives them their medical complaints is the same condition that increases their resilience against malaria. If it didn't have any advantage ever it would be strange for those mutations to survive systematically in malaria mosquito regions...
We don't have access to the implicit fitness function, we can only explore it through living it. If we did have access to this implicit fitness function we could perform gradient descent on a computer, and egalitarian healtcare without negative consequences for future generation fitness would be achievable. But show me this manual of the universe, and the exact page where the fitness expression is explicitly given!
Without access to the actual fitness function, it's just cultural aesthetics: in the West today slender female figures, in the past or elsewhere its more plump female figures. Without access to a fitness function, it just becomes a subjective beauty contest, and we might eliminate Sickle cell anemia, and doom that whole population into the hands of malaria. Healthcare is effectively Nazi eugenics with a facelift (and they rely on unethical Nazi experiment data).
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.
If people got 75% of their calories from plant based whole foods, a lot of health problems would probably disappear overnight.
Is that even possible with the current food supply chain though?
On a per-calorie basis, yes. Animal protein requires 10x the input of what you get back: 100 calories of chicken requires 1000 calories of feed. Now what we feed livestock is unlikely what most people would want to consume, but the systems are in place to allow such a transition.
Last time I looked it up, the US produces something like a ~million+~ kilograms of corn for every person in the country.
Edit: it was pointed out my corn estimate was off, and it is order of magnitude 1000kg per person.
I think you have misplaced a unit somewhere, because that would be a truly absurd amount of corn.
A quick trip past wikipedia [1] suggest the figure was 383.6 million tonnes in 2021, which is still approximately a thousand kilograms of corn per person, which is still a lot (more than my annual consumption, that's for sure)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...
Hmmm, sure enough. What's three orders of magnitude between friends?
> Is that even possible with the current food supply chain though?
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.
what does "notice" mean in this context???
Obviously. But you also need the time to cook and not to have the appetite of a 10 year old. The latter, from what I've observed, is quite common in grown adults.
If all you eat is junk food, I think the vegan food industry has already pretty much solved that part.
Naturally any overnight change that drastic would collapse the global economy and society would collapse. But given some time and will, I don't see why not.
It absolutely is in Australia, and I suspect Europe (from when I went 5 or so years ago). Even mostly possible in Houston when I was there 15 years ago.
The US is even more cooked than I thought if you can get a bunch of fresh veggies from a grocery store.
> 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.
> Is that even possible with the current food supply chain though?
Given that vegans exist, i'm going to say yes, its entirely possible if you feel like it.
To be fair, plenty of niche diets exist that could not be adopted by the broader population without supply-chain retooling. But practically, yes, this is not a real objection.
I would agree
Mammoth diet - Good good!
> 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 work in an area that involves, among many other things, analysis of cooking oil in factories. It might be hard to pin down the terminology of "reused" frying oil, because many of the frying processes are continuous. The raw material goes through a vat of hot oil on a conveyer and comes out the other end dripping with oil
The quality of the oil is continuously monitored, and new oil goes in while old oil goes out in the fried food itself. The crunchy and salty aspects make it palatable to eat oil. The oil doesn't actually spend a long time in the vat before coming out in the product.
Analogous is the label on vodkas that says “distilled N times”, as if they were making it in batches using pot stills.
Vodka is made almost exclusively in industrial-scale continuous fractionating columns. The concept of it being “distilled N times” is farcical. (But technically defensible because you can map the output of the fractionating column to any arbitrary N via equivalence relationships.)
That's interesting and nice to know.
Good point that industrial use might not strictly be "reusing" - that might apply more to restaurants where they have big vats of frying oil and keep dipping food in it for multiple days. Even worse I've seen small scale home fryers where people neglect to change the oil for who knows how long - but that's probably not super common.
If that industrial prepared food switches to tallow I still have doubts about how much it is reused and what chemical changes it goes through...
Absolutely agree. I don't think I'd want industrially prepared stuff fried in tallow either.
There is a chemical distinction in that tallow is mostly saturated fat which doesn't oxidize nearly as easily, so it might be less bad to fry with or re-fry with. But still.
saturated fat is bad however:
> 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%.
…about same difference as taking statins (per the article)
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
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.
[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra054035
> the amount of trans fat in beef tallow
Natural tallow doesn’t contain a lot of trans fat. The only way to consume trans fats in large quantities is through hydrogenated fats.
True -- trans fat is 5-10% of beef fat [1] BUT "a lot" is not the standard when it comes to trans fat. The NEJM article makes the point that trans fat is damaging even in small quantities, like a single gram. It was a great day when trans fat was required to be listed on the Nutrition Facts Label. It spurred snack manufacturers to get it (mostly) out of their products.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6356151/
This has a lot of ai-isms, wish they would share the pre-rewrite draft at this point.
If I take my 100%-handwritten prose and hand it to a detector, it tells me it's 30% AI. Those detectors are crap and they're training people to also be crap at it. I'm not changing how I write just to sound "less AI".
That's something an AI would say.
:-D
It seems human written with certain paragraphs that stood out to me.
It felt like they had an ai pad for wordcount, but there was definitely organic content in there (at least from my taste)
Some HN readers are blind to this, others are obsessed with it.
ChatGPT claims 900 million active weekly users. You really think a dietician who writes for the Minnesota Reformer (whatever that is), trying to get the word out about his current "evidence-based" whatever, isn't getting a little robo-coaching along the way?
This one sure smells like a human article that went through Claude 4.6 with a "proofread, identify passive voice, increase clarity, adapt to house-style.md, and make it fit in X words" prompt. Maybe the editor did it.
The issue is the quality of the writing, which still needs work whether an LLM was involved or not. Most sources (Forbes, Business Insider) require the author to sign a waiver that indemnifies. That's the chilling effect, not the AI tells.
Zero-GPT says it's human written, with a fairly low score of 11.4% for AI. I think I should mention this, as some people seem to try to kill the piece by branding it AI-ism.
It seems ignorance is harder to cure than a heart condition.
There really is this streak of blaming victims in the grift economy. Seems surreal that there's no longer anyone to blame for committing fraud and putting out bullshit medical, nutrition, etc.
All hail the grifters.
When it goes all the way to the top, their question isn’t how should we stop them, it’s how can we get in on this?
https://archive.is/zlSkz
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
Yes, people putting effort into a "carnivore diet" can be healthy. The problem raised by the article is people continuing to follow their same eating patterns (namely, ultra-processed foods) while the fats have been swapped out.
Externally "healthy". Any heavy red meat and high saturated fat diet can lead to CVD.
> carnivores exist
Cats are carnivores. We’re omnivores. Like bears. If you’ve ever come across bear scat, you’ll notice it’s usually plant material.
"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 animals that produce that tallow are part of the global industrial food system too.
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.
Sure, if you eat the tallow. People aren't doing that. They're using the tallow to make french fries etc. The problem is the french fries, not the oil choice.
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.
> 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.
No, that's just as wrong. French fries deep fried in Sunflower oil are also unhealthy. Adding a spoon of tallow to your tomato soup is also unhealthy.
> There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. They’re naturally occurring, present in all beef fat, and according to cardiologists, present in tallow at levels far above what’s considered safe.
"Ultra-processed" does not mean "many steps in the process of creating it". Although I assume many people are somewhat misusing the term by now, it originally comes from the "Nova" system, where part of the current definition of ultra-processed is:
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).
Hexane, acid, caustic soda, bleach, and deodorisers have no or rare culinary use.
Yeah, but those dont end up in the final product afaik, which i think is the distiction being made.
The "bleach" in the bleaching process for foods is not the bleach you buy to clean your bathtub.
Any isolation of certain compounds from whole food from other compounds would be part of what I refer to as processed. In the case of refined oils, I'd call it ultra processed just because of how much is removed - even before considering the chemical contaminants.
Is criticism is directly, and convincingly, addressed in the article.
> 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.
Absolutely a PR campaign. People started getting upset about the array of bizarre chemicals in their foods and the minimal standards and regulations about introducing new ones (or disclosing completely the ones that you are using.)
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.
Cows eating grain in concentrated feedlots and then made available in separate pieces all year round at the local grocery store... is also a modern industrial invention.
I wonder where avocado oil lands?
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.
> 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.
sigh, yeah - makes me side-eye the entire article.
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.
What happens is that you have to find ways to dismiss the body of evidence to take on positions like "beef tallow and butter are actually amazing for you".
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.
Exactly what I was getting at. Social media doesn't help since these algorithms can cocoon somebody from content that might challenge their notions.
"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.
"Mexican coke" a good example of American attention when it comes to health and nutrition: instead of focusing on big impact things like exercise, fiber, vegetables, saturated fat, building sidewalks, blood lipids, etc, we're stuck obsessing over food dyes, 50% vs 55% fructose, seed oils.
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.
The seed oil panic is quite possibly the dumbest health craze of the decade- I saw a chef saying beef tallow was healthy!
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:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02474-9
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260331
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.
You didn’t miss much there was a paywall after the 3rd paragraph.
> It's such AI-written slop
How do you figure? It's not obvious to me after skipping over the heart-string-pulling introduction
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.
I dunno man, if you’re dumb enough to take nutritional advice from TikTok influencers then good riddance.
It isn’t like it’s difficult to educate yourself about health related shit.
Just let people do their thing, boss.
the next season of natural selection just dropped. pop the corn (in olive oil, natch).
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.
I hope your interventions help, and that you live a long and healthy life.
thanks, me too!
> 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.
If you're interested in just the pure statistics and outcomes of scientific trials, I highly recommend https://nutritionfacts.org/. It's a non-profit charity featuring numerous ~5 min videos highlighting specific findings across scientific studies about nutrition, with sources read directly and linked.
+1 for this!
"Nutrition science is absolute garbage, [so I'll base my position on something worse.]"
So, emotions and preferences?
Btw, statins show a big difference if you take them early. Even more for people who have genetically low lipids. People tend to only go on statins in middle/old age, especially after an adverse event, after decades of accumulated plaque build up which statins can't reverse.
Rosuvastatin costs $5/mo and lowers LDL/ApoB 45% in a few weeks. You should probably get on one if your genetics prevent you from getting under 100 LDL and 60 ApoB despite a high fiber plant-based diet. But something tells me that's not your diet either.
Yep. A friend’s a cardiologist who told me about attending a lecture on statins at a conference. The speaker asked how many doctors in the audience started taking statins even before having indications that they should take them. Nearly everyone in the audience raised their hand.
What that tells me is that people who do this for a living, who study the actual science, who make a career of this very specific thing, all believe in statins enough to self-medicate.
That didn’t make me seek them out. What it did do was make me say yes the moment my own doc raised the idea.
Fish, tree nuts, avocados and olive oil. Avoid butter, red meat and cheese. It’ll save your life.
I’d rather be dead than not eat butter, red meat, and cheese.
But yeah don’t cook your vegetables in animal fat, that’s stupid.
Many people say that until they almost die. 350,000 people died of heart attacks in the US in 2025. A very preventable situation. Many more almost died. In many of those said they'd rather be dead than not eat butter, red meat and cheese.
And if heart attack / stroke doesn't scare you, you can also think about atherosclerosis in your dick.
Eh, I have a suicide attempt under my belt. I very sincerely mean it when I say give me steak and coke zero or give me death.
I absolutely said that about cheese.
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.
You’re under 50 and haven’t seen the results of a stroke. There are states worse than death.
Honestly, all this you must 100% do x is tiresome. Just use moderation and you'll be fine.
Also worth noting, that eating the seeds themselves is super healthy! They have more nutrients, including fiber, vitamins, minerals and more protein!
thats the one thing we all have in common. we all die. that said. everything in moderation and definitely avoid a few things like sugar and maybe seed oils. but butter red meat and cheese, rather be dead.
> 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)
Cladisticaly aren't all mammals a type of bony fish?
Yes. We are cladistically more related to a goldfish than it is to a shark.
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.
I keep reading about "inflammation" and think about things like swollen joints, bruises, etc. It must mean something else. What would I notice in my body if the oils that I consume are causing severe inflammation?
There are tons of possible symptoms because systemic inflammation including from dietary causes basically damages the entire body. But here's a list of some common symptoms from one source:
persistent pain, chronic fatigue or insomnia, joint stiffness, skin problems, elevated blood markers (such as C-reactive protein), gastrointestinal issues (constipation, diarrhoea, acid reflux), depression, anxiety and mood disorders, unintended weight gain or loss, frequent colds or flu.
https://stories.uq.edu.au/research/2023/9-signs-you-have-inf...
For myself, when I eat processed food I mostly feel fatigue and low energy and gastrointestinal pain. But it's been extremely rare for me to eat these things in the last 10 years.
Most of the US population are systemically inflamed including from diet basically all the time, and most of the US population are suffering from several of the above symptoms chronically. (Not to claim that it's definitely or only because of food, but I'd bet it's a big part of it.)
I notice that my allergies get worse, and a theory is that systemic low-grade inflammation and histamine response may be due to diet. I don't have a lot of other conditions, but people with autoimmune conditions (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis) might see it get better/worse with dietary changes.
When I'm eating beans+rice and a bit of protein that I cook myself, my allergies are a lot lower.
When I cheat and eat "crap" I tend to start sneezing and rubbing my eyes.
There are a lot of variables, though, and cheat foods tend to be highly processed, high in gluten, with a lot of additives and made with seed oils, and hidden sugars, and are much higher glycemic index with higher glycemic loading, amongst other things. Plus seasonal allergies are just variable day-to-day which is another confounding factor. So I don't really know what the X factor is. I get similar effects on an atkins-style high fat beef, butter and cheese kind of diet, because it also cuts out most of those things.
My theory is that the inflammation simply high-jacks your body's attention. Meaning, it has to spend more time dealing with it as opposed to handling other conditions. I don't strongly believe that chronic inflammation is the direct causal effect of many of my health symptoms, but I do strongly believe that, overall, it makes them significantly worse than they need to be.
That could be a valid observation for n=1. There could be any number of reasons seed oils cause inflammation for you but do not the general populace, or not at numbers large enough to offset recommending them as a general rule.
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?
I wouldn't pose it as anything more than n=1. I'm more empathizing with those being caught up in the politicization who may have more nuanced reasons they are being impacted beyond what the media puts out.
> 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?
I read this a couple of times, but I'm still not really understanding the question. I directly attributed the politicization to RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement. So I'm not sure why you're asking if I had other ideas.
I also think this is an interesting topic of research. I have had lifelong issues with chronic pain and always felt like diet influenced it, but I’ve never been able to isolate a single factor. I’be stopped cooking with low smoke point oils but it’s all guesswork at this point.
Your phrasing about politics was potentially ambiguous, so I asked for clarification. People can mean many different things when they say something is political.