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 probable not in vegetable oils in significant enough levels. So that’s conspiratorial misunderstanding by the MAHA contingent.
Seed oils probably aren't ideal, but I also worry how much this narrative is distracting from the bigger problem of sugar consumption. Humans only have so much attention and discipline. It would be a shame to focus all that energy on a "no seed oil" diet only to wind up even more unhealthy.
How many products with seed oil also contain some form of added sugar? I don't seem to have much issue with moderating the occasional bag of cheezits or goldfish, but the moment I start getting into cookies and ice cream it's like a junkie broke into my house.
Yep. If there was one single thing that literally every person should do for their health, that is to greatly reduce or completely eliminate sugar. The evidence is overwhelming.
The evidence against seed oils is not quite as convincing. I see seed oils as a low quality food to be avoided - goes rancid too easily, requires chemical processing, etc. - but it's not strictly poison. These oils are in virtually every industrial "food product" which makes them unhealthy by association. Stop eating highly processed crap and you'll see the benefits - cutting out seed oils is a side effect.
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.
~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.
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 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.
> 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.
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)
The scariest part of this well-reasoned piece is the amount of trans fat in beef tallow. Trans fat is unbelievably destructive. A review in the New England Journal of Medicine 20 years ago [0] sent that message well. I doubt there has been any significant revision to the understanding of the physiology.
I'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.
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
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!
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
The US is probably the only country in the world where they put an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracy theorist with no-qualification whatsoever in charge of the public health.
> A 2020 Cochrane meta-analysis of roughly 59,000 participants across 15 randomized controlled trials found that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced combined cardiovascular events by 21%. Cardiologists note that the risk reduction from this dietary substitution is comparable to the benefits of statin medications. We don’t make a habit of telling statin patients to stop their medication because of something they heard on a podcast.
So what it found is a tiny difference, just like it did with statins, when all of the financing and an enormous amount of money was behind finding enough of a difference to justify the billions that get spent on statins and the category of marketing that relies on replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat. Additionally, the reason he chooses to focus on "combined cardiovascular events" is because that's the only place that any supportive number could be found. Mortality? Nah. Quality of life? Nah.
Saturated fat vs. unsaturated fat was one of those things that seemed obvious when you looked at them naïvely, and made an intuitive guess about what their respective effects would be. The same as how we intuitively thought about salt's effect on blood pressure because of how cell walls work.
It is sick how much of medical "research" is being targeted towards justifying interventions with 50-100 year old origins and whose scientific foundations have completely disappeared in the interim, but that careers, fortunes, and entire segments of the economy now rely on.
Headline: "Intervention X doesn't work how we thought it does, but it still works!* (* based on study completed before we told you that the foundation for it had disappeared.)"
Nothing I love more than dumb emotional manipulation delivered as an argument from authority, from a site called statnews. Just give me the goddamn statistics, and if studies about specific claims haven't been made, give me a non-insidious reason why no one would have bothered to check in decades. Especially when the checking costs millions, and the industries are worth hundreds of billions.
I don't have an opinion on seed oils, other than that cheap ones destroy pans, countertops and appliances, and seem absolutely foul. Nutrition science is absolute garbage and mostly quackery, though. You might as well have a degree in old wives tales.
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.
> 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)
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 probable not in vegetable oils in significant enough levels. So that’s conspiratorial misunderstanding by the MAHA contingent.
Seed oils probably aren't ideal, but I also worry how much this narrative is distracting from the bigger problem of sugar consumption. Humans only have so much attention and discipline. It would be a shame to focus all that energy on a "no seed oil" diet only to wind up even more unhealthy.
How many products with seed oil also contain some form of added sugar? I don't seem to have much issue with moderating the occasional bag of cheezits or goldfish, but the moment I start getting into cookies and ice cream it's like a junkie broke into my house.
Yep. If there was one single thing that literally every person should do for their health, that is to greatly reduce or completely eliminate sugar. The evidence is overwhelming.
The evidence against seed oils is not quite as convincing. I see seed oils as a low quality food to be avoided - goes rancid too easily, requires chemical processing, etc. - but it's not strictly poison. These oils are in virtually every industrial "food product" which makes them unhealthy by association. Stop eating highly processed crap and you'll see the benefits - cutting out seed oils is a side effect.
wonder which is worse sugar or alcohol, 2 drinks a day vs 2 cans of coke a day
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.
~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.
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 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
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
- Michael Pollan
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
If you think this article is annoyingly hand-wavy about science, wait until you see the dietary guidelines put out by this administration!
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.
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
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!
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?
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.
Where is this panic? In the US? I don’t hear anything about it (in Europe).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_...
> 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???
> 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.
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.
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.
I would agree
Mammoth diet - Good good!
This has a lot of ai-isms, wish they would share the pre-rewrite draft at this point.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
The seed oil panic is quite possibly the dumbest health craze of the decade- I saw a chef saying beef tallow was healthy!
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Is it in the interest of the group, and of future children that they inherit deficiencies at higher rates simply because we apply healthcare?
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?
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!
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.
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
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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