The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

kayo_20211030

Yeah. True, I feel. The signaling and recommendations have gone both overboard and data-free. The end results might be bad.

fabian2k

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.

thih9

https://archive.is/zlSkz

colingauvin

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.

llm_nerd

"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.

declan_roberts

> 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?

vjsrinivas

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.

Spide_r

This has a lot of ai-isms, wish they would share the pre-rewrite draft at this point.

InMice

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.

alkonaut

Where is this panic? In the US? I don’t hear anything about it (in Europe).

zzzeek

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.

elchief

"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.

erelong

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

PowerElectronix

It seems ignorance is harder to cure than a heart condition.

avazhi

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.

pessimizer

> 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 stat news. 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.

dj68k

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.

mmaunder

Fish, tree nuts, avocados and olive oil. Avoid butter, red meat and cheese. It’ll save your life.

aliasxneo

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.

bob1029

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.