Could you elaborate on that? It doesn't surprise we that "genetic changes" is used sensationally, just would like to know what is actually happening and whether it's uncommon or something pretty normal?
> Your DNA is the "cookbook", of what your body can make.
> Gene expression is what your body happens to be making (and how much) from the cookbook
Gene expression is what you are making right now, and how much, in a direct and fairly uninformative sense.
But along with recipes for what you can make, your DNA obviously also encodes what you should make, and when, and how much, and how all of that should change in response to various things -- and gene expression is part of that too.
Epigenetics is just one of the mechanisms that regulate gene expression in some organisms, but there are many many more mechanisms at play. All cells of a given cell type don't express the same genes at the same level, or even maintain the same expression profile from hour to hour.
Close. But much of the control of gene expression is not formally epigenetic. Much is due to modulation by transcription factors and mRNA splicing machinery. Clearly related to DNA access for transcription but not what is typically meant by epigenetics.
Yep, and this is link to disease that people often miss - when we attribute conditions and diseases to "genetics", what is implied is that it is due to some environmental exposure or detrimental pattern of behavior that hasn't been identified, causing some gene expression/mutation that ends up being harmful.
For me it's enough to look at the process of making vegetable oils (acid wash, oxidation caused by high temperatures, bleaching, deodorization, degumming, etc.) to conclude ultraprocessed oils are not healthy for you.
It's nice to see the anti seed oil discourse ramping up lately, but I'm sort of pessimistic about this. Like what is the endgame, exactly?
Seed oils are in basically everything. Trying to avoid them is like trying to avoid endocrine disruptors by not touching plastic or eating anything that has touched plastic. It's sort of an absurd thing to even attempt, it would drive you insane.
As someone who's quite interested in the anti-seed oil discourse/slowly forming movement, my endgame is simply having more people aware of what's in their food. We've accepted what's been handed to us for so long, without a significant percentage of the population stopping to look at exactly what's on the plate.
The more people that are stopping to read ingredients labels. analyze their diet, and think critically about their consumption, the better.
This is an avoidable problem though. We invented this by racing to the bottom and assembling “food” with substitutes for real nutrition. The goal is to educate humanity so that we can start making more conscious decisions about what we eat and move away from this.
>The goal is to educate humanity so that we can start making more conscious decisions
I don't think you can educate your way out of economies of scale that make it cheap to feed people garbage. The only real solution would be to declare PUFA as unfit for human consumption but that won't happen obviously
Besides, many people really will just eat whatever crispy oily sugary slop has the shiniest packaging. It is unpleasant to believe this, but it's true. Think of how health conscious or critically minded the average person is, and remember that 50% of the population is below that average. A lot of people really just go through life without making choices, just consuming whatever is directly in front of them. This can be hard to believe if (like most people on this site) you are significantly smarter and richer than average, and spend your time around others who are similarly smarter and richer than average, but it really is true.
Like think of how more than 2/3 american adults are overweight. Why? Because they literally can't stop picking up food with their hands, putting it into their mouths, and chewing and swallowing it. All you have to do to not be fat is to instruct your fleshsuit to stop picking things up and placing them in your mouth. Calories cannot legally enter your body without your consent. And yet 2/3 adults are overweight. So I don't think education will do anything here.
> Like think of how more than 2/3 american adults are overweight. Why? Because they literally can't stop picking up food with their hands, putting it into their mouths, and chewing and swallowing it. All you have to do to not be fat is to instruct your fleshsuit to stop picking things up and placing them in your mouth. Calories cannot legally enter your body without your consent. And yet 2/3 adults are overweight. So I don't think education will do anything here.
Do you think the average American's willpower has radically plummeted since the 70s? And the rest of the developed world nosedived with them? It's gotta be calories-in/calories-out and discipline to a degree, but things have shifted so rapidly and decisively that it's worth entertaining environmental explanations.
Plus there's little harm in kicking this hypothesis around. A fat person who is otherwise unmotivated by traditional health advice might perk up once you appeal to his inner conspiracy theorist and tell him he's being fed industrial waste.
Actually there has been a well documented effort by the sugar industry to mis-educate our way in to this crisis so it seems perfectly reasonable that better correct education about health could help a lot. It’s not just about not putting too much in your mouth, it is about making informed decisions about what to eat. It’s about deciding which foods to eat and understanding what the trade offs are between various choices. That’s non trivial and requires education to get right. For example for breakfast should you have a bagel and cream cheese, a bowl of cereal, eggs and toast, a grapefruit, or nothing at all? These are things we can educate on.
I spent a month recently absorbing a lot of the videos created by NutritionFacts.org. The real answers are guided by scientific research and knowing them can make a huge difference.
yes, they are difficult to cut out. Your options are everywhere very much narrowed. But In 90% of cases I've been able to find a satisfactory alternative.
It is interesting how two simple rules (no seed oil, no corn syrup) almost entirely prevent you from putting terrible things in your body. It also repeatedly enforces a more mindful attitude towards diet.
I experimented with removing seed oils for the past six months or so. Almost every year in the winter I get a lot of pain in my joints and especially where previous injuries have occurred. Halfway through this season I've had very little discomfort, and it has been a bad winter where I am.
Recommend checking out this "How It's Made" segment on the process of making this stuff comestible (it involves bleach, very high temperatures and chemical refinement):
No corn syrup or seed oil sounds like a wise choice. What do you do about eating at restaurants? Just avoid dishes that are likely offenders? And soybeans themselves, as well as unfermented tofu, is OK?
Whole foods, steamed or grilled vegetables, legumes, butter or olive oil, fish, eggs, or other protein that isn't fried. Fewer ingredients are generally better. Ingredients that have ingredients are worse.
The end game is policy changes and regulation so they get removed from the supply chain and it ultimately becomes automatic for consumers to avoid them. You need studies demonstrating the danger is real to convince legislators.
I don't understand what you mean. Seed oils aren't in most things; if seed oil is in even half the food you eat, your diet is likely appalling. I'm pretty sure I haven't eaten seed oil in at least a few months. I mean yeah if you're eating Doritos, sure, but it's really not that hard to cook from whole foods.
Plastic is much harder to avoid; not even remotely close I'd say.
I don't buy anything pre-made, generally. If it's not seed oil it's HFCS or some other garbage ingredient. I 98% just buy ingredients themselves. The bread I buy is whole wheat and I've just confirmed that it does not have seed oils.
The thing is, I'd like to stress that I don't go out of my way to do this or expend much extra effort. It's not a burden to eat a potato instead of a cup ramen or something. People just don't care about their health and buy every trash food they see.
I’m vegan and already prepare basically all of my meals so this seems fine. I bet there are crackers and stuff I eat with this in it but I can control that. And I don’t eat caesar salad. I’m not going to worry now but I’ll keep an eye on this seed oil discourse, I hadn’t heard of it!
>Trying to avoid them is like trying to avoid endocrine disruptors by not touching plastic or eating anything that has touched plastic.
Is there any evidence that something transfers to you if you do touch it? This is the first I am hearing about something like this. I thought plastic was essentially a solid.
I have been interested in converting much of my daily interaction of plastic to other materials. Things like converting my Zerowater water filter to a homemade ceramic pot....but the water filter itself is plastic so whats the point?
Transfers to you? There are microparticles of plastic in every liquid you drink, floating in the air, in the digestive systems of practically every animal in the food chain.
When you wash a piece of polyester or microfiber in a washing machine you are sending millions of little microscopic pieces of plastic into the water supply.
Ever drink from a plastic water bottle that sat in a hot car and it tastes really funny? Enjoy your plastic.
If you google "plastic in the air", "plastic in food", "plastic in animals", "plastic in water", it's pretty much impossible to not find evidence. It's incredibly depressing. It's in the Mariana trench and on Everest.
It seems like there are varying definitions of microparticles. Are you referring to stuff that is still slightly visible to the naked eye (if you squint), something the requires a regular microscope or something that needs an electron microscope. I'd like to think that my zerowater filter which filters out enough such that a TDS meter reads 0 would filter out microplastics but who really knows. I don't inspect every cup of water I drink with a microscope.
I always wondered why there hasn't been more of a push to explore plastic pyrolysis technologies to help remove these plastics from circulations. I see countless pictures of discarded clothing, and other plastic based waste and I'm thinking that there is some potential solution: break it down back into its original oil based input.
>Is there any evidence that something transfers to you if you do touch it? This is the first I am haring about something like this. I thought plastic was essentially a solid.
I recall a few years ago there were a few articles/studies saying that that BPA were in thermal paper (ie. receipt paper). I think the conclusion was that if you were picking up a few receipts per day, the amount was negligible, but if you worked in retail it might be a hazard.
As an example, thermal paper receipts used to literally be BPA powder on paper. Ever known someone to eat after handling a receipt without washing their hands, or to tuck the receipt in their mouth (yes) to told its while juggling other items?
They're mostly difficult to cut out because we thought they'd be fine to mix in to all kinds of stuff. If we stop thinking that, and in particular if there were to be regulatory changes that made certain seed oils less desirable as an agreement, there would be rapid change.
Research like this can also help cut back on a lot of the scapegoating that goes around about the obesity crisis.
It's actually not all that difficult to parse ingredients lists while shopping. A good rule of thumb in American grocery stores is to stick to the perimeter while shopping (produce, dairy, meat) to avoid seed oils. :^)
The coconut is surprisingly complicated, a seed and more.
Botanically speaking, a coconut is a fibrous one-seeded drupe, also known as a dry drupe. However, when using loose definitions, the coconut can be all three: a fruit, a nut, and a seed.
The botanical classification doesn’t matter - coconut oil is primarily saturated fat which is what makes it better for you over the PUFA that comes from seed oils.
The endgame is to avoid them where possible in order to minimize the risk. It's not absurd and very reasonable. People stick to all kinds of obscure diets and most are not going insane.
On a societal level, I think the endgame should be to eliminate the subsidies which make seed oils so cheap, and to design a subsidy/tax structured to reduce the cost of healthy foods and increase the cost of unhealthy foods.
> The same UC Riverside research team found in 2015 that soybean oil induces obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance, and fatty liver in mice. Then in a 2017 study, the same group learned that if soybean oil is engineered to be low in linoleic acid, it induces less obesity and insulin resistance.
> “The hypothalamus regulates body weight via your metabolism, maintains body temperature, is critical for reproduction and physical growth as well as your response to stress,”
Italics mine.
Linoleic acid is what induces torpor (hibernation) in mammals. We are mammals. People in the modern world are possibly something like half hibernating, inclusive of mental effects and of course the effect on difficult-to-remove-weight. The rise in Soybean oil consumption is an enormous change in the human diet over the last 50 years. The scale of it replacing so many fats, especially formerly animal fats, is just huge.
See: Humans and Hibernating Mammals React to The Same Amount of Dietary Linoleic Acid in the Same Way. By Becoming Torpid.
> One additional note on this study — the research team has not yet isolated which chemicals in the oil are responsible for the changes they found in the hypothalamus. But they have ruled out two candidates. It is not linoleic acid, since the modified oil also produced genetic disruptions; nor is it stigmasterol, a cholesterol-like chemical found naturally in soybean oil.
1. We're not mammals that experience torpor. That doesn't even remotely apply to us.
2. The study explicitly states this isn't lineolic acid.
3. The site you linked is a snake oils salesman who has a vested interest in you buying their products and living the lifestyle they espouse.
- 13.2% of Americans have taken an SSRI in the past 30 days (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db377.htm). To be clear, depression and torpor are different conditions, but it seems reasonable that a torpid-like state might include depression-like symptoms, and that those might be treatable with SSRIs.
First, I'm not sure there's a strong case that our lifestyles today are any more sedentary than in, say, the 1970s (when obesity rates were around 12% rather than 30%). We had cars, transit, elevators, escalators, school buses, television, keyboards, etc. in the 1970s, while at the same time "going to the gym" was just not something that average people did on a regular basis. Even going jogging was mildly eccentric.
Second, this is looking at resting metabolic rates, not overall calorie expenditure, although there is probably some association between RMR and physical activity.
Which brings me to the third point, which is that you're just shifting the burden of answering question of "why are we fat?" to "why are we sedentary?". If we are in fact increasingly sedentary, it could be that an outside factor is causing both low RMR and sedentary behavior. Anecdotally, I (as a comparatively skinny person) have a lot harder time sitting still than some of my friends and acquaintances that struggle with their weight. They might consider spending a day in bed as a great way to recharge, whereas it is something I would only do if I were pretty miserably ill.
I don't think any significant portion of the population is going to the gym regularly these days. There is definitely a fitness community, but most people just sit around and eat.
They will be in the coming decades as the population ages. The direct and indirect effects of sitting all day long are going to be incredibly costly to the society, and the only reasonable policy would be to combat our car addiction by any means necessary – and this is even distegarding all the other disastrous externalities of widespread personal car use!
I kind of wonder how much of a role climate control has to play as well. Surely must have a role alongside straightforward inactivity.. until pretty recently, people would burn a lot of calories just regulating body temperature indoors. People with outdoor jobs/lifestyles obviously still do.
>> We're not mammals that experience torpor. That doesn't even remotely apply to us.
Your first sentence is obviously true. Your second one is probably false, since the total removal of that seems unlikely compared to evolution simply disabling it. I have no evidence that part of it remains, nor do I see any evidence of total removal.
If there are effects of linolenic acid on mammalian torpor, then the second sentence is still true.
Life science is based on observational evidence, and since humans are some mammals who have never been observed to undergo torpor, effects observed inducing mammalian torpor do not apply to humans. They're not making a positive evolutionary statement about human torpor never existing, just that any observed effects from linolenic acid on mammalian torpor do not apply to humans the way the other person was implying it does.
Obesity is always a case of calories in vs calories out. Were they controlling an exact caloric difference?
Also: This is on male mice, which experience topor, which means they can dial their metabolisms way back.
Human metabolism just doesn't work like that. Studies have consistently shown that metabolism is pretty constant across the gamut of humans based on muscle mass, activity, and weight.
> 1. We're not mammals that experience torpor. That doesn't even remotely apply to us.
We do not experience torpor naturally. That does not exclude that you can blast a human body with the right amount of hormones or substances that act like ones and artificially induce torpor in humans. NASA has been researching ways to do that for years now [1], given that even a small amount of saved resources per human on a months-long space trip saves a lot of resources in total, not to mention the potential of a reduced metabolic rate also protecting the traveling humans from cosmic radiation-induced damage.
As for "how to induce torpor", well, we don't even know what exactly causes it in animals. We are just guessing - and we are at the same time also noticing that wide swaths of the population show up with a lot of health issues that used to be either rare or mostly spread on older people. Auto-immune diseases (allergies, diabetes, neurodermitis), precocious puberty, cancers of all kinds, obesity in young people, circulatory issues, Alzheimer's and other neuro-degenerative diseases, just to point out the most obvious and most-researched. And since there are only three major things that changed over the last hundred years from the previous default - our food, the introduction of heavy industry, plastics and pollution, and our way of living under modern capitalism (your ordinary medieval farmer did not work 40 hour weeks for the entire year for his whole life) - it is not surprising that correlations appear there. The key thing is to find out if the correlation also has a corresponding causation!
While he has a science background, he's definitely selling something. Drawing a straight line for evolutionary ancestors with a gene to modern humans and not showing that we have the same gene is a non-starter. Even if we have it, it could have changed in expression and function such that we are not capable of torpor.
We know from animal research that torpor/hibernation in non-human mammals creates a sleep deprived state. We know that there is no evidence of humans being able to enter a state of torpor. We know that humans have high sleep requirements for our brain function. It stands to reason that humans distant ancestors lost the ability to hibernate at some point and that it wouldn't work with our physiology.
I'm not going to criticize your all-chocolate diet, but its always sensible to take supplements in the form of embedded nuts, nougat, praline and perhaps fruit and mint flavoured confections.
I think the most charitable reading of their comment would be something like "replace other fats you use (butter, olive oil, etc) with coconut oil for two weeks".
Edit: you added your edit while I was writing my comment :)
>Coconut oil is the least fattening of all the oils. Pig farmers tried to use it to fatten their animals, but when it was added to the animal feed, coconut oil made the pigs lean [See Encycl. Brit. Book of the Year, 1946].
IIRC, that was more from the fact that coconut oil has zero linolenic acid, which is an essential metabolite. Coconut oil is still a huge calorie source for livestock, just that it's also mixed with soybean oil.
Basically, any combination of coconut oil in your diet that isn't 100% coconut oil will lead to calorie gain.
I would hope that there would be a better source than a 75 year old "summary of news book". If this is true there would surely be more recent and thorough scientific studies.
You'll feel a difference because coconut has a high amount of MCT (medium chain triglycerides). MCT is often touted as a weightloss tool, I've seen plenty of posts talking about pigs not getting fat on MCT, or how it takes more calories to break it apart (which is bullshit) or it some how raises your body temp/metabolism.
The truth is that our stomach has a hard time digesting a sudden influx of MCT. Adding a large amount of MCT to a diet previously free of MCT will cause nausea. And that short term nausea is largely the cause of any "weightloss" seen by MCT. The studies that study MCT and show weightloss are all short term studies, and not the 6-12 month study you really need for weightloss.
In short, you'll feel a difference because coconut oil upsets your stomach. Not because it's a non-animal fat. Hell, we use sesame, peanut, canola, and olive oils all the time. Replace all your dietary fat with canola oil or olive oil and you'll not notice. Will probably have health benefits because of the reduction in saturated fats.
1. We have common genes going back to mammals who did experience torpor.
2. A study doesn't "own" their data and have exclusive right to interpret this data
3. Someone selling something that they think is beneficial to their customer, does not mean it is not beneficial. I would say most people who sell things honestly think their customers will benefit from their product.
> We have common genes going back to mammals who did experience torpor.
We also have genes that are related to cows, have you tried subsisting on grass?
Your argument is farcical and entirely based on the preaching of a snake oil salesman, in a comments section based on a torpid male mouse study that specifically refutes the argument you're making.
The article specifically mentions, following that cited part, on Linoleic acid:
> the research team has not yet isolated which chemicals in the oil are responsible for the changes they found in the hypothalamus. But they have ruled out two candidates. It is not linoleic acid, since the modified oil also produced genetic disruptions; nor is it stigmasterol, a cholesterol-like chemical found naturally in soybean oil.
But the team DID note that "the SO + CO diet caused more weight gain over the 16-week study than the other HFD" (As opposed to the modified soybean diet). This is a quote from the paper, not the article.
According to the paper the Linoleic acid composition of the oils in question are:
soybean: %52.90
modified SO: %7.42 (aka plenish)
coconut: %0.06
So while some of the genetic expressions may exist in both, both have LA, and the higher LA = higher obesity according to the paper authors (they did not give a graphic for the obesity differences, unfortunately)
To note, even eggs and lard have large amounts of Linoleic acid, and I'm pretty sure lard and eggs have existed in the human diet for as long as chickens and pigs as livestock have existed.
the rates of linoleic acid in eggs, large, chicken, beef, pork have all changed drastically in the last 100 years because what we feed the animals has changed drastically.
a grass fed cow has a lower omega6 profile than one in a factory farm.
farmers have gotten tricky with it, raising "grass fed cows" but then for a couple months before slaughter, fattening them up with industry "feed". So now when you're at the store you have to find not only "grass fed" but "grass finished" beef.
Chickens that are allowed to eat at will (chickens eat a really wide range of shit, not just "feed" that's mostly corn - they eat grass, bugs, they'll even eat rodents if they can catch one). Chickens in farms usually don't eat like that. If your eggs say "organic", they're certainly not eating like that.
There's absolutely no way to get low PUFA pork these days. At all. Fire in the Bottle blog has partnered with a farm that's raising low PUFA pigs and you can have $100 of pork shipped to you, but that's the only place i'm aware of it.
But yeah, the fat profile of our animals havve radically changed. Because of what we feed them. And then we eat them and the problems goes on up the food chain.
I'm not a vegetarian and i'm not a globalist and there becomes a point where there's a lot of politics in what you eat. I'm not into diets to be kind to animals or even because of the environment. If healthy food hurt the environment, i'm eating healthy food. Ya know?
But at this juncture - you're better off being low meat (wild caught, mercury tested, salmon 1-2x a week, some skinless chicken, grassfed beef 1x a month or something), and eating a mostly vegetarian diet, roughly 1-2 meals a day, lots and lots and lots of veggies. It's simply too hard to account for all the garbage done to meat, from a health perspective.
'Grass fed' has a remarkable amount of wiggle room in it from a marketing and Truth in Advertising standpoint.
And there's also 'grass finished' which does the reverse process of grain first and grass at the end to boost the carotene a little and change the texture of the fat a bit (grain fed 'looks better' to shoppers which is part of how that changeover happened so fast)
Suggestions on how I can get enough complete protein in such a diet? I am open to reducing meat for health if this is a factor but eat about 150 grams complete protein every day and this is hard to replace from vegetarian. The few vegetarian dishes I see with significant protein are often not nearly as good as yogurt, meat, eggs or just stuff with whey protein in it. I can't see much with comparable protein to calorie to chicken breast, spirulina is comparable but is disgusting taste and not complete.
There is also that it is hard to eat 3000-3500 calories every day of clean food in a bulk with animal products, removing those will probably make it even harder.
I'm a little confused, you write "vegetarian" but did you mean "vegan"?
"The few vegetarian dishes ... are often not nearly as good as yogurt, meat, eggs, or [...] whey protein"
Yogurt, eggs and whey protein are vegetarian (but not vegan). Vegetarian is extremely easy (I eat 95% vegetarian because it's cheaper and easier), vegan is very difficult and requires significant sacrifices.
Or maybe I misunderstood your sentence in some way.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but it seems to me that the discussion is going to be difficult if vegan and vegetarian are getting mixed up.
Hmm I don't know that I have to be either strictly, I'm thinking about cutting down my intake mostly of meat but also things like eggs that can carry through higher concentrations. Plus if there is some good complete plant protein that tastes fine, I hope maybe it's cheaper (eating lots of protein is expensive LOL)
I really like canned black beans. They have a decent amount of protein and fiber, they taste good, they're pretty cheap, and you just have to heat them up. Lentils are also good, but they take a while to cook. I use the white rice setting on the rice cooker.
I eat a good bit of those but more for health than protein and because they're cheap, but not complete protein and about 1/2 protein per calorie of chicken breast.
There's a life-span way and a health-span way. Do you want to live longer? or do you want to feel and potentially look better? When it comes to protein, these two things seem to be at odds with one another.
High protein is correlated with shorter lifespans.
You'll notice the first link shows higher lifespan when protein intake is increased after a certain age (65). it's assumed this is largely due to the number of deaths from injuries (falls) and complications from injuries that happen to the elderly and that muscle mass at this stage is vital.
But protein tends to active mTor. You want that to not be activated and you want IGF-1 to be low. These are correlated with longer lifespan.
And it looks like studies in humans and animal models seem to reflect correlative data for "Blue Zone diets" (more or less). ( https://www.bluezones.com/2020/07/blue-zones-diet-food-secre... ). Most of the regions in the Blue Zones are high in veggies, low in meat, often with a bit of seafood, and virtually zero processed foods.
How you define a little meat really varies when going by "blue zones". Some might say 4-6oz a day, some might say 1-2x a week. The low amounts of meat and obtaining incomplete proteins with more narrow amino acid profiles is beneficial for health in the long term, largely due to mTor activation being avoided or reduced. The body evolved (it seems) to an extent, to struggle for certain nutrients (but that doesn't mean do without them entirely, but just periods of not having everything at once, constantly). This seems very apparent with studies into proteins. When it comes to other vitamins and minerals (electrolytes, vitamins, etc..) we seems to need those fairly constantly/consistently.
the ultimate way to not activate mTor or stimulate IGF-1, is to fast. Either do time-restricted eating where you eat in a 4-8 hour window every day, or periodically do multiple day fasts..
The timing of your eating, IMHO, is more important than how much meat or veggies you consume. If you ate one meal a day and had meat at that meal, even in large amounts, it'd be more benefitial than say... eating 3 meals a day and being fully vegan or vegetarian. How often you're eating seems to have a more negative effect on lifespan than, to some extent, what you're eating.
I don't avoid meat. I rely on greek yogurt, eggs 1-2x a week, 4-5oz of meat (mostly fish, low-fat chicken breasts without skin, and beef 1x a week), a variety of nuts (i prefer macademia nuts b/c they're low in omega6, low in oxylates and high in monosaturated fats, most other nuts are high in Omega6s and/or oxylates).
I probably eat at a midway point between what i should do for health and lifespan.
If you're more concerned with health span than lifespan then you really want to get about 1G of protein per KG in body weight.
If you're more concerned about lifespan, 0.5G per KG of body weight is more where you want to be.
If you went full carnivore, you'd probably feel absolutely amazing. Eating a lot of meat spurs on testosterone, increases fertility and reproductive capability, and all sorts of great stuff, but the trade off seems to be for lifespan.
You'll notice body builders often don't make it to 100 years old. But look at the Mediterranean, look at japan - fairly thin, active people - often with religious/community connections, who are eating mostly veggies, a little meat, and some seafood once in a while, they're the ones passing the 100 year mark more often.
Doing stuff like fasting, or eating a, lets call it a plant-based diet as opposed to vegetarian, (or both), doesn't feel so great. You can't perform at the gym like you usually would, for example.
The body is best, from a lifespan perspective and to a certain extent, a healthspan perspective, when it's exposed to hormetic stressors. These are little stressors that improve the over-all functioning of your body. Exercise is one. Sauna use is another. Cold exposure (showers, ice baths) is another.
But fasting is too, spurring on autophagy (which is the strongest anti-cancer process we have, internally) and all other great processes like the down regulation of IGF-1.
The body not quite having all the protein it needs, ALL THE TIME, is a beneficial stressor that works to increase lifespan as well. As far as I've read anyways.
Eating many vegetables are also hormetic stressors. Various phytonutrients are built by plants as reactions to when they are stressed, these phytonutrients produced under those conditions are some of the best substances we can eat. Like sulphorafane (from broccoli, broccoli sprouts, kale, cabbage, brussel sprouts, etc.)
IMHO - i'd keep on with (grass fed/finished where applicable) meat, yogurt, nuts, a little whey from time to time, 4-5oz of meat a day, (free range or omega3+) eggs every once in a while. But at 40 years old and experiencing some health problems stemming from a mix of a lifetime of bad habits (drinking, smoking, sodas, fast food) and a bit of anxiety that clobbered me in adulthood.. i lean more towards longevity these days that i do in making sure i can lift at the gym and maximizing my athletic performance.
i don't care about what i look like anymore. I don't care about satisfying my ego at the gym anymore either. I just want to be happy and live to see my grandkids be born and maybe go through some pivotal things in elementary school before kicking the bucket.
I eat 2 meals a day 5 days a week
i fast 2-3 days a month, at the beginning of the month.
I eat "normally" for social purposes on the weekends.
I don't calorie count. I've found that based on WHAT i'm eating, calories don't matter much. I did Keto for 6 months and even eating tons of meat and hitting 3kcals a day, i was still losing weight when my carbs were under 20g a day.
But now I probably don't hit 2k cal a day and sometimes my weight fluctuates up 1-3 pounds or back down, here and there. And i exercise 5-6 days a week.
i know i ramble (ADHD) but i used to pack on 3k a day or more, and drink protein shakes and hit the gym and make sure i was getting lots of protein.
I've long abandoned that mentality. I stopped listening to fitness people and started listening to doctors and scientists.
This is wise and comprehensive HN comment. My only recommendation is to realize that no human ever sits right on a high dimensional mean or median. You are all unique!
The variances explained by the statistical models of longevity and health are generally woefully low.
Don’t even talk about correlation for populations unless you add the “variance explained” and unless you are sure the statical model and cofactors apply broadly.
You, as an individual, may be way out in metabolic and life-style left field. Are these recommendations even of the correct polarity for you?
We raised 80 different strains of inbred mice on both standard and very high fat (60% calories from lard) diets. Each strain was randomly assign to either diet for life with about 8 to 10 replicate “identical twins” per diet.
Do you think we can make a dietary recommendation for mouse number 81? Well at a crude level, sure. The high fat diet generally is not a good diet in terms of lifespan. But there are big deviations from the mean and at least one strain lived much longer on the ridiculous high fat diet than on the standard chow diet.
Paper by Roy S et al 2021 in Nature Metabolism, and open in bioRxiv:
Good points and I looked into risks, I think there are some, but there also is some stuff suggesting positive brain effects, enough that it seems inconclusive.
I agree on metabolic benefits from eating 1 time or so every day but that is not a problem for me, I've done it in the past but can't build muscle on it. I am hoping something like rapamycin matures for some anti-mtor potential.
I am closer to 1.8g/kg protein since this is about the most i get any help from. Less than that I notice effects on getting stronger much slower. I agree with you on lots of vegetables with that, my diet tends to be lots of whole foods like oatmeal, yogurt, chicken, turkey, fish, chickpea, some milk and cheese with lots of different vegetable (usually the "bulk" of food I eat). Over all a mostly good diet and I have cheat meals maybe 6 times per year or less, just larger quantity of food combined with heavy exercise.
I think maybe fewer meals and fasting is good if you have prior issues, I always had excellent metabolic health, I never needed to lose weight (did need to gain it in the past, doctor orders). I do fast occasionally on a heavy cut though I have to be careful how much I do or I go too catabolic.
Last, I think "bodybuilders die young" is overstating and refers to competition bodybuilders. First almost all of them are on gear, it's just how much. And most of them who get on stage are on a lot of it and use some of the more side effect prone ones (e.g. tren, eq). Also cutting drug abuse (clen, dnp). Also heavy diuretic abuse. Mostly even the "natural" ones. I skip all this stuff, no gear, no sarms, no cutting drugs, no diuretics, I don't compete. So I think it's a lot less harm.
I somewhat agree that the fear of linloeic acid doesn't always match facts. I do tend to avoid seed oils as they are relatively new and their health effects are rather suspect.
However, in this case, the eggs and lard that existed in the human diet for a long time, are not the same. The chickens and pigs are eating a different diet and this does effect the composition of the fatty acids present in the flesh/eggs.
Fixating on lineolic acid is kind of hard when basically all high-heat vegetable oils contain a lot of it. If lineolic acid is the problem then basically every unsaturated cooking oil other than olive oil is now unusable. Maybe canola, depending on how much lineolic acid is safe.
Avocado sits somewhere between olive and canola in terms of linoleic acid content (one reference said 13%; another said 7–20%), and has one of the highest smoke points of all cooking oils at 271°C. It's also pretty flavour neutral. It's a fantastic choice for high-heat cooking.
Yeah, I tend to use avocado oil when it's available or refined high-heat olive oil when it's not. The heavy processing of high heat olive oil is concerning but it does mean low linoleic acid.
There have been many instances, throughout history, where something that had massive adoption by our society has turned out to be bad. Lead being a relatively recent example. All the plastics (BPA, BPA free "safe" plastics, phthalates, etc) probably being the current/next.
canola is probably the best out of the bunch but it's still too high in omega6s.
PUFAs - as cooking oils - should be totally and utterly avoided. People should be using butter, ghee, beef tallow, coconut oil, avocado oil (which is a little higher in omega6s that i'd like but it's mostly a monosaturated fat), duck fat, emu oil.
Macademia nut oil is higher in monosaturated fats than olive oil and has a higher smoke point, but it's expensive. Tallow, butter and coconut is where it's at for high heat cookiing.
Most seed, nut, corn, and vegetable oils are trash. Cottonseed, soybean, corn, canola, grapeseed, peanut, etc..
As I understand it, canola is the same as rapeseed oil, or is a refined version of it. For what I think are obvious reasons, I stay away from refined oils.
However, where I live I can get locally produced cold pressed "extra virgin" rapeseed oil. How would you say that compares to canola oil regarding how healthy (or trashy) it is?
And the omega3s it has is ALA, which your body has to convert to EPA or DHA to use, and the conversion is usually crap. Like 5-10% of ALA actually becomes something usable.
Rapeseed isbetter than canola due to the processing for canola raising the omega6 profile even higher.
It's interesting to try and square the multiple conflicting findings about the effect of the modern diet on the brain and other observed phenomena such as The Flynn Effect (https://ourworldindata.org/intelligence) that mean IQ is increasing over time.
The Flynn effect has been observed to have reversed in a number of nations in Scandinavia and elsewhere. [1] Scandinavia is the typical test bed because of have compulsory military enlistment paired with IQ testing. And the declines are quite substantial with Norway seeing a 5 point decline between individuals born in 1991 compared to those born in 1975, and a 3 point decline compared to those born in 1962.
Big meta studies may miss this because its a relatively new trend, and IQ is full of a million biases that can just generate noise when combined. When people are young, their IQ is significantly influenced by environmental factors, but as they age genetic factors become dominant. And in countries without some form of compulsory testing, sample biases abounds.
As for the past gains, look at height! Height is reasonable proxy for nutrition and globally it's just skyrocketed [2]. Japan is one of the more extreme examples, with their average height increasing by about half a foot since 1896!
There was a good article I read years ago (and can't find again with how useless Google has become) which talked about IQs rising but people getting dumber. The main theory it had was adapting to the tests and teaching skills that help answer questions on IQ tests.
Happy to see it in HN, if only as a canonical example of the current “rage” of reductionist n-of-1 science funded by you and others through NIH and many other research funders. This is the very opposite of robust and translatable research. It is science to “get a paper out” with a snappy press release.
Would you trust n-of-1 clinical trial? One monozygotic twin gets diet X, the other is control. A study of C57BL/6N mice, no matter how many are used is an n-of-1 study. And these mice all completely inbred. At least the human MZ twins are not inbred!
There is just no excuse for style of reductionist science. Gives mouse models a terrible, but perhaps deservedly bad reputation for translational ir-relevance.
Yet you see these n-of-1 studies in many of the top tier journals. The NIH BRAIN initiative mouse studies make the same error. Do we really want just ONE connectome? How do we compute our way to causal models with n-of-1?
We are also feeding those beans to cows, pigs, and I think chickens? People have been complaining about lineolic acid rising in these meats too.
In a way I think this gives some ammo to the vegetarian philosophy, but I'd like to know the lineolic acid content of tofu, since bean curd is not exactly equivalent to whole beans.
ALA is alpha-linolenic acid (the essential omega-3 fatty acid). LA is linoleic acid (the essential omega-6 fatty acid). They are the "raw materials" of the Arachidonic Acid Cascade.
Presumably this is somewhat parallel to the poly- and mono-unsaturated fat versus saturated fat. The bones of these chemicals are pretty similar but what hangs off the molecule makes a huge difference in behavior, like CO2 versus CO.
So does this mean they should have similar effects on the body or that they are different enough to be essentially just two different fats that are significantly different enough not to draw conclusions that ALA causes the same (potential) effects as LA as brought forth in the article?
They're both polyunsaturated fats. While an over-simplification Omega3s (which ALA is) tend to be anti-inflammatory and have tons of positive effects of cardiovascular health (up to a point - more on this later) while Omega6s, which are necessary for our survival, do tend to have an inflammatory effect.
The goal is to be high-ish in Omega3s without getting mercury poisoning and low in Omega6s.
The modern diet - so if you go out to eat at all, if you cook with corn/canola/soybean/cottonseed oils or shortenings like Criso, if you use 90% of most modern pre-made marinades, salad dressings, cereals, chips, crackers, cookies, and even most bread (not including some brands of butter bread), they all load up on "seed oils" (Meaning LA).
When people say a good diet is rich in whole foods and low in processed foods - this is what is at the heart of it. Processed foods tend to be high in omega6s, high in sugar, and high in sodium,. The latter 2 are largely for taste, or in salt's case taste and preservation.
Omega6s are used b/c the oils are super cheap. These are oils that couldn't exist without modern industry, in the bulk in which we produce them. (unlike say..beef tallow, coconut oil, butter, olive oil, ghee, duck fat, etc.) And initially they were sold by non-food industries as a way to maximize profits on byproducts from other industrial processes.
They have incredibly high smoke points and they don't go rancid or spoil, so if you want to make say... Cheeze-Its or Pringles, it's a perfect choice for production - it's cheap, it's stable, it doesn't burn easily, it doesn't spoil, etc..
What's worse is we've radically changed what we feed animals too - chickens, pigs, cows, and now all of the meat we eat also has a much higher omega6 profile than it ever did before these seedoils came along or "corn" became the staple of our lives from ethanol to chicken feed.
Foods high in Omega3s tend to be fatty fish, the low mercury types would be salmon and sardines, mostly. Tuna is good too but higher in mercury. and you'll want to eat the wild versions of these b/c at least in Salmon's case it also contains an antioxidant called Astaxanthin, which is an amazing anti-oxidant. Salmon get this from eating Krill (Krill get it from eating algae - and it's why krill and salmon are red/pink).
Unlike most anti-oxidants, Astaxanthin doesn't flip to being pro-oxidant under any circumstances and it, particularly, prevents Poly-Unsaturated Fats from Oxidizing. Which is really important since they oxidize so easily ( this is why Omega3 based oils, for example, aren't good cooking oils).
Fish are high in EPA and DHA, which are forms of Omega3. ALA is the type found in flax or papaya or some other sources. I'd mention chia seeds but being as they're higher in oxylates than spinach, i reject them as a health food. ALA is a poor Omega3. Your body can't use it directly and it must be converted into EPA and DHA and it's done so at a really poor conversion rate. Something like only 5-10% of the Omega3s in ALA form ever get converted to a form that your body can use.
And while there's 1000s of blogs and videos going on about the benefits of Omega3s, which there are many, let me also give warning that high doses of EPA (pure EPA at 4-7g) given to patients in a clinical trial, for years, gave them heart arrhythmias. While no fun, the main cause of death from heart arrhythmias is stroke, and funny enough, Omega3s lessen the risk of death from stroke. So you'd get a heart arrhythmias but still be less likely to die from it. The lesson here, though, is the poison is in the dose.
The more you read Fire in a Bottle (blog linked in first comment), you'll notice that the human body really isn't meant to process mass amounts of PUFAs at all.
Thanks for these, really enjoying your posts here to complement the things I've figured out.
You might also enjoy the brief remarks from this old OpenVisConf USDA parallel coordinates data visualization+video of animals aggregating the things we feed them.
I find it sort of underscores your point of linoleic acid in egg likely not being stable over history, if you feed a chicken differently, even though USDA treats food as if they are, in data: https://twitter.com/thadk/status/1352034735548194817?s=20
It's every high-heat unsaturated cooking oil. Basically every cooking oil except olive oil and full-fat stuff like coconut, butter, and lard contain a decent amount of linoleic acid.
Anecdotally when someone is believed to be "Ahead of the curve" in nutrition science they are more likelty to be shown to have shot entirely off the road in a few years.
I saw this video about seed oils a few months back.[1] Some of the information there tracked stuff I have been reading for a while. Decided to switch over completely to coconut oil and ghee (clarified butter).
A comment on the video that matches my view on the subject:
> If you want to be healthy just do the exact opposite of everything we were told about nutrition by mainstream experts for decades
There are thousands of possible explanations. Indians may just tolerate the western lifestyle worse than westerners do. This study seems to look at a single chemical compound that is suspected of some connection with atherosclerosis, which is pretty thin.
In Grad school (and as someone who had no idea about the western diet or macros for that matter at the time), pizza everyday seemed like a low cost option. I got fat. I've spent the last 5 year undoing all that damage.
Cholesterol is more than just fat consumption. You can't talk cholesterol without talking about carbohydrates.
All fat oxidizes, some oxidize easier than others. Some are more inflammatory tahn others (omega6s are way more so than saturated fats). Carb intake has complex interactions kicking off the oxidation of fats too.
We have been using ghee in India for thousands of years. If immigrant Indians are having problems, they should look into what changed in their diet and lifestyle after they immigrated.
Indians in India have skyrocketing diabetes and obesity numbers in recent decades. 20+ years ago you would struggle to see a single non thin person.
Drastic increase in quantity of ghee (and sugar since a lot of Indian tests are a lot of ghee and sugar) consumed and reduction in labor (trading strenuous, perspiring work for air conditioned, sitting work) could be relevant factors that make ghee consumption from the previous thousand years not comparable to today.
> Indians in India have skyrocketing diabetes and obesity numbers in recent decades
About a decade ago, my Indian colleagues told me that Indians had been encouraged to switch away from ghee, based on health concerns. I forget which oil most moved to, but I think it was palm, vegetable or sunflower oil. In addition, they said consumption of refined sugar had skyrocketed, where palm sugar had previously been used.
Ghee has been consumed for centuries (at least) in India - I wonder if it's these ghee alternatives and refined sugar are the main causes of increased diabetes and obesity.
> Ghee has been consumed for centuries (at least) in India - I wonder if it's these ghee alternatives and refined sugar are the main causes of increased diabetes and obesity.
Yes, carbohydrates like sugar are of course a huge part of the problem, but the health crisis has many factors and my intention was to convey that ghee has downsides. Saturated fats are saturated fats regardless of how many thousand years they have been used.
> I wonder if it's these ghee alternatives and refined sugar are the main causes of increased diabetes and obesity.
This is the most likely cause. People in India are consuming way more sugar, refined flours and seed oils than they used to three decades back. That is when all these colas/biscuits/chocolates/chips/pizzas and oils started being advertised heavily on television.[1]
People in India are consuming way more of everything, including ghee, than they did three decades ago. Ghee was a luxury then and carefully portioned out. Growing up I ate a lot more Dalda than ghee, simply as a matter of what we could afford. Traditionally ghee was even more of a luxury than in my time. Outside the traditional cowbelt areas, ghee was substantially more expensive relative to other goods prior to Operation Flood. So while Indians have been eating ghee for millennia, they probably ate a tiny fraction of how much we eat it now.
> Indians in India have skyrocketing diabetes and obesity numbers in recent decades. 20+ years ago you would struggle to see a single non thin person.
I have noticed that. I have also noticed that youngsters started adopting Western habits and diets and consumption patterns over the same time period.
> Drastic increase in quantity of ghee
Unless you are rich or belong to the upper middle class, ghee is generally consumed in moderate quantities because the family would not be able to afford it.
Today, ghee is between Rs. 500-600/kg. Seed oils are about Rs. 125/kg.
Yup. Rich/Upper Class people used to consume a lot of Ghee (rich people - they can afford it. Upper class - usually because they're connected to temple food preparation and ghee is abundant there). The rest of us used a tiny amount at the very end for flavor. Peanut oil & Coconut oil were common in our household. Followed by sunflower oil.
Presumably, the Indian immigrant populations discussed above would belong to upper middle classes, by virtue of being able to immigrate at all. But also, the sheer scale of Indian population can mean we are talking about a couple hundred million people easy in India whose lifestyle is no longer conducive to the amount of ghee they were used to eating.
There is no concrete evidence that ghee is unhealthy. Even the linked study is only talking about a "possible cause," that too in Indians who are not even in India. Indians adopt western habits when they immigrate. Who knows what they have been eating once they assimilated into English and West Indian societies.
On the other hand, I consume massive amounts of flaxseed oil (insane amounts of omega3), olive oil, sunflower seed oil every single day. I have no issues with weight, no heart or blood vessel issues, blockages.
Ingredient isolation studies of foods are a complete disservice to scientific method.
Any particular food can be part of a healthy diet and lifestyle, absolutely any.
People today are sedentary, just look at natives living in wilderness across the world. They gorge on honey, occasionally eat meat and have insanely strong skeletons and muscles. Look at others that eat only meat, milk and blood, have massive amounts of atherosclerotic plaque, but given their lifestyle in the wilderness, their blood vessels expand and are insanely flexible, only a few unlucky ones die of heart attack very young.
The RDA for Calcium in Western world is so high due to sedentary lifestyle not promoting usage of calcium by the body. There are healthy populations, consuming half the amount and have even less bone fractures.
Coconut oils are high in lauric and palmitic acids, both of which have tomes of evidence pointing to them causing and exacerbating cardiovascular disease. The MCTs in coconut oil might have some positive health effects alone, but research on the consumption of coconut oil itself suggest that it increases risks of CVD.
> pointing to them causing and exacerbating cardiovascular disease
Unless the studies include tens of thousands of people from South India (particularly Kerala) and Sri Lanka where the coconut and its oil have been used in large quantities in the diet for thousands of years, I don't consider them to be relevant. It is possible that the West has no tolerance for the stuff.
You should try to eat what your ancestors did. We Indians became obese and incidences of lifestyle diseases like diabetes and heart disease increased heavily after we shifted to seed oils and started consuming sugar, refined flours and processed flours in massive quantities since the late 1970s/ early 1980s.
Yep, it's weird how the "boomer" types who said to eat butter, steak and potatoes, ended up having healthier diets than almost anyone does today. Personally I just eat like an ancient Greek and leave it at that. They didn't have Doritos, so I can do without them too.
I used to eat sardines every day trying to get the health benefits of fatty fish. They were packed in soybean oil. I drank the oil too. With time I began to have bizarre mental issues that I finally tracked down to the sardines. Sardines packed in olive oil don’t cause this issue. That’s my anecdata to share.
The higher end canned fish are available cooked in their own juices without any added water even [0].
As with anything quality varies substantially. I personally stay away from any of the oil-packed fish. Wild caught sardines in water with no additives can be found, even cheaply from the Season kosher brand.
I guess it would best be described as enhancement of repetitive, obsessive thoughts and just in general not feeling good and even angry for the rest of the day after eating them. It was a really weird time.
I have the same thing. It took me ten years to rule things out. Plain as day, if I have soy oil, I will go a little wayward emotionally, mentally, and if I have enough, also noticeable skin issues - canker sores, flaking skin, scalp pimples, and random itchy patches I'll scratch to bleeding. Oh, and if I have enough, in a short amount of time, I can easily trigger a migraine. Sushi with soy oil, mayonnaise (soybean oil), and fried foods are all drifting away from me.
I'm not allergic to soy - I went to an allergy doctor and did the little skin application test, and it's not a histamine reaction. So the term is "sensitive" - I'm "soy sensitive".
If I eat 'clean' for 14 to 21 days, I get a clarity that compels me to continue avoiding it. I'm happy to connect with anyone (profile) that wants to swap notes on this - it's incredibly frustrating to figure out. Dealing with it, not so much. Almost all aspects improve with its avoidance.
Get your gallbladder checked. Oil causes the gallbladder to squeeze bile. If you have instruction (stones/polyp), the obstruction causes inflammation.
That inflammation (chole ystitis) can cause a plethora of health issues.
Some oils trigger more output of bile than others. Do not consider all fat sources equal when it comes to bile production from the gallbladder.
I had gallbladder issues for many years, before classic signs appeared. I had cognitive decline, general discomfort, fatigue, rapid heart rate, secondary infections, and other non typical indicators that in retrospect were due to my gallbladder. Typical symptoms appeared very close to when I was able to identify the source. Unfortunately, if left untreated, it can rupture and kill a person, albeit rarely.
Either way, I wish you the best.
PS: In the USA you can get an ultrsound for $140. False positives and negatives do occur. Some people have no noticable pathologies, yet removal of the gallbladder alleviates gastro intestinal symptoms.
Maybe that was oils in general? Eating too much cooking oil makes me feel like absolute crap mentally, regardless of type.
Obviously the syndrome described in article is possible in your case, but the article sounds like a chronic accumulated damage thing, not an acute reaction just after eating.
Recently I learned the Whole Foods Plant Based diet avoids processed oils altogether, including olive and coconut. Not sure I could go that far myself, but it's interesting to know that people do it, and it's the one diet known to reverse cardiac disease.
Interesting, thanks for sharing, I always avoided the oil ones on taste/principle. As a fan of canned fishes, have you tried sardines in tomato sauces, or herring in dill or mustard sauce? Fantastic, but a little harder to find.
Yep, you can always add oil yourself if you like the taste. I also recommend buying the ones that have the skin and bones, because there's a lot of nutrition there. The bones are barely noticeable. This was the brand I went with: https://www.amazon.com/Crown-Prince-Sardines-Water-4-25-Ounc...
The flavor of the oil isn't what makes oil-packed fish taste better— it's just a better storage medium for fish. Oil doesn't wash fish of its delicate water soluble flavors, oil deeply penetrates the flesh and to keep it from getting as tough, and it won't dilute additional flavorings like smoke or aromatics.
Getting oil-packed fish without soybean oil isn't difficult but it is obviously more expensive. I'd worry as much or more about pharmaceutical waste and other pollutants in cheap, mass-produced fish, too. Fortunately, sardines don't have a ton of mercury.
There's nothing remotely wrong with Crown Prince sardines, but if you're interested in a comparison, something like this, while twice as much per oz (.69us vs .33us) should clearly illustrate the differences.
I bought some expensive “wild Norwegian cod liver oil” from Whole Foods recently. Didn’t look closely enough at the ingredients. Turns out the carrier oil is soybean oil.
I happen to agree, partly. Canned food 24/7 isn't healthy when other options are available, but that's why it shouldn't be an exclusive ingredient of one's diet.
Interestingly enough, soybean oil is virtually non-existent over here in Germany - at least not as oil that you can buy (here the dominant ones are canola, good ol' sunflower and olive - the latter not for frying though), and I also haven't heard of it as an ingredient in industrial foods, but I wouldn't vouch for that.
Yes. As I mentioned above -- soybean doesn't grow well in most of Europe (certainly not in the UK), canola grows very easily. Also soya is one of the 14 notifiable allergens in Europe, which makes it almost unsaleable in its unrefined form. Unusual to find it outside of specialist asian food stores.
In the UK, "vegetable oil" is almost always canola.
Even sunflower oil will be marketed as such because it's more expensive (imported from Germany, Ukraine, Albania I imagine). And I imagine it'll only get more expensive because of the situation.
It's not a common oil you find on the shelves of a grocery store, even in the US.
It is, however, a prominent ingredient in a lot of bottled sauces and dressings. You can find it on the ingredients list of most salad dressing and sauces.
It's a very German thing to not use olive oil for frying. It took me by surprise when living abroad, and to realise it's a common frying oil in Mediterranean countries but also in the UK.
Economics, probably -- sunflowers and canola grow more easily.
Olive oil is a nice pan-frying oil, it's what I use.
Linguistic thing:
When Americans talk about oil for frying, in my experience, they are a fair bit more likely than us to specifically mean deep frying, for which olive oil is no use. Way more of a deep-frying culture, from several different influences.
American cooks are slightly more likely (than the Brits at least) to use the term "broiling" for shallow/pan-frying. Unusual word here.
“Broiling” would refer to using the broiler on one’s oven, I’ve never heard that term used to describe pan-frying. Terms I have heard are sautéed and seared
As another aside, deep fat frying is quite uncommon in homes in the UK now.
Many people under the age of say 25 will never have eaten deep-fried food cooked at home.
There was quite a concerted campaign against it in the early 80s because so many house fires and serious injuries were caused by either unsafe fryers or unsafe technique. Safety campaigns, TV ads, fire brigade campaigns, a campaign to get people to fit extractor hoods and smoke detectors etc. Coincided with a public health campaign aimed at getting us
to lower our fat intake, about deep fried food, full fat milk etc.; government "nudge unit" stuff.
Time was, deep fried food was a staple of cheap home cooking; nowadays a deep fat fryer is really an enthusiast cook's appliance, in white British homes at least.
> use the term "broiling" for shallow/pan-frying. Unusual word here.
I don't think that's right; it's more used for what you do in the oven under the "broil" setting.
Americans use "saute" and "fry" in somewhat context dependent , somewhat interchangeable ways. Along with "sear" being somewhat specific to browning at high heat.
I was aware that "broiling" was a cooking method, but I have no concept of what it involves. After checking a dictionary, I still don't -- wikipedia redirects "broiling" to "grilling", and Merriam-Webster defines "broil" as "to cook by direct exposure to radiant heat: grill", with an example given of "broil the steak in the oven". I would be more likely to use "bake" for heating something in an oven, though I'm uneasy about applying "bake" to a steak; I'd probably just say "cook the steak in the oven".
I would use "fry" for cooking something in oil; I would not personally use "sauté" at all.
I note further that neither Merriam-Webster nor wikipedia seems to be aware of a distinction between grilling and baking, or at least not one they're willing to articulate. I would have said that baking involves being cooked within an oven and grilling involves being cooked on top of a hot surface.
Grilling is _under_ a hot surface. Like broiling. But when you broil you use a different pan. Or something.
Now if you want a really weird distinction: baking and roasting. Same appliance, much more similar temperatures than you might think, often only subtly different prep.
You might think, no, you "bake" things that rise or are transformed by the process, like dough. But you might also "bake" potatoes and fish. Or you might say that roasting involves oil and basting, but you might baste baked fish. Or roasting involves an open dish or tray. But often so does baking.
In this case it really is a kind of convention in English, in the same way that adjective order force is a convention.
We generally consistently use one word for a given application or a given origin of the food.
You mean grilling of the kind that is also done _outdoors_ there. Heating on wire above fire.
Like the Aussies we call it "barbecuing". They do it all the time; here it is understandably done very infrequently, and is generally known to reliably summon rain.
In a British kitchen, certainly domestically, what is called "grilling" does involve cooking on a wire grill, but invariably under a radiating heat element positioned above the food. In, like, 100% of cases.
With my gas cooker it's a separate (eye level) set of gas jets. In an electric cooker it's either a specific element mounted on the roof of the smaller top oven, or it's a use of only one of the two or more elements in that oven. But the grill is always above.
If we cook food in its own juices on an heated flat surface indoors, that would be a "griddle" or a "hot plate" -- that's what the commercial burger cooking machinery is called.
Essentially nobody has that equipment inside their homes; safety standards would tend not to allow it.
This is one of those things that shows that no nation owns the meaning of a word.
> If we cook food in its own juices on an heated flat surface indoors, that would be a "griddle" or a "hot plate" -- that's what the commercial burger cooking machinery is called.
To me a hot plate is a (small, portable) substitute for a stove, rather than being the device you use to cook the food, which would rest on top of the stove or hot plate. They are best known for being something college students can smuggle into dorm rooms.
I occasionally visit a fondue restaurant which offers, among other options, a "grill" for the meat course, and the grill is a griddle (a lightly curved slab of iron rested on a heat source) with no cover.
You also make me curious what you think of the George Foreman Grill, which as I understand it is a ridged, hinged, self-heating griddle that you fold around whatever hopefully-flat thing you want to grill. Almost exactly the same as a waffle iron, except it's a "grill" instead.
Anyway, outdoor grilling is certainly a part of American culture, but the American concept of a "grill" is not restricted to that, and clearly includes cooking on a griddle.
(To your earlier point, I tend to agree that there are many words that basically just mean "cook", and the particular word used is determined by convention according to the object being cooked. Bread is baked; beef is not baked, even if what you do to the beef is identical to what you do to the bread.)
> To me a hot plate is a (small, portable) substitute for a stove
Also that here too (or the plate of an old-style metal electric cooker). Portable hot plates are a thing again here but were out of favour for a good while, again due to electrical safety standards.
> You also make me curious what you think of the George Foreman Grill, which as I understand it is a ridged, hinged, self-heating griddle that you fold around whatever hopefully-flat thing you want to grill. Almost exactly the same as a waffle iron, except it's a "grill" instead.
I think in Europe and the UK we were kind of confused that the George Foreman Grill was such a big deal; we've had press-type grills like that over a long period, particularly as panini presses. But they've always been used to cook things like bacon. What makes the George Foreman Grill good is the quality of its construction.
When I was a student we relied on a toasted sandwich maker; like a smaller panini press, a bit like a waffle iron except designed to enclose, seal and cook a filling -- cheese and tomato, tuna etc. -- between two slices of bread. Genius invention but capable of heating cheese beyond what is allowed by physics. You definitely could cook other things in a toasted sandwich maker if you were OK with them coming out triangle-shaped.
This is making me hungry (and homesick for my vintage gas cooker, since where I am staying has a decidedly unimpressive early 90s electric cooker)
> (To your earlier point, I tend to agree that there are many words that basically just mean "cook", and the particular word used is determined by convention according to the object being cooked. Bread is baked; beef is not baked, even if what you do to the beef is identical to what you do to the bread.)
Right. It also occured to me last night that there are heritage/legacy aspects. e.g. perhaps "roasting" comes from cooking over open fire on a stick; we just now do it in an oven.
Oh, I agree lots of American's don't use the word broil; I was (obviously not clearly) trying to say that those who do use it probably use it because there oven has a setting marked "broil". For ovens that have that, it usually means heat only using the top element (and sometimes only full blast), so the heat is only coming from above.
I think fry is more often used than saute, and often context dependent (e.g. fried chicken may imply deep fried, fried onions doesn't) This latter may be regional.
Exactly, I was wondering why none of the comments were talking about sunflower oil, which is what I used in my whole life along with olive oil. Vegetable oil does exist in Germany, I think it is sold as pflanzenöl, although I just don’t use it.
What is soybean oil traditionally called in the US? I've never actually seen "soybean oil" myself (though it surely exists). Is this the same as "vegetable oil"?
Yeah, more just surprised that Soybean specifically so ubiquitous. Felt like last time I looked it was a range of weird oil name (corn oil, sunflower oil, canola oil, etc.) Just astonishing how the huge CPG conglomerates have engineered such highly processed food all in the name of price efficiency. I love brands like Primal Kitchen and how many others like it gain popularity as they're one of the few brands whose ingredients are just normal and easily identifiable.
I think it's revelatory that the supply side finds some byproduct (hey we have all these seeds from cotton, can we do anything with them) and then they force a product from it after the fact, and now we are all worse for it. The market is fake.
Ran into that problem yesterday at the grocery store. I wanted to buy horseradish sauce but every single product offered had soybean oil as a primary ingredient, often the first ingredient. Thankfully horseradish root can still be obtained for making sauce at home.
not just every sauce. But salad dressings, marinades, processed crackers/cookies, cereals, granola, most bread, most tortilla shell (soft and hard).
Hell - most "dried fruit" aside from raisins, like blueberries, dried cranberries, and so forth, are all swimming in it. Eating those "healthy" kale chips, beet chips, coconut chips? Check how much added sugar and how much omega6 ridden oils they use
Sardines are packed in soybean oil.
If it's not soybean oils, then it's cottonseed, grapseseed, canola, corn oil, or any other number of oils that we have as larger industrial byproducts.
I expect that most of the soybean oil consumed in the US is consumed as an ingredient in something else—salad dressing, sauces, snacks, etc.—rather than a bottle of "soybean oil" (usually "Vegetable Oil") in their pantry.
"Vegetable oil" can be soybean oil but it can also be other things. And I do often see "soybean oil", or something like "vegetable oil (soy and/or palm and/or canola)" in a list of ingredients.
Usually. Vegetable oil almost always contains soy oil, but it can be a medley of soy and other oils, or other oils entirely. It’s safe to assume though that any bottle of vegetable oil you see is all or mostly soy.
Is it supposed to be a big thing in Asian grocery stores? If you walk into a grocery store in China it will quickly become apparent that you're expected to do your cooking with corn oil.
In the UK, something marked "vegetable oil" is basically going to be rapeseed (canola), but sometimes sunflower seed oil if it's come from Europe.
If it is marked "pure vegetable oil" it essentially always 100% rapeseed.
Rapeseed grows very easily here, and we don't grow soybeans -- they barely grow at all here.
Soya is a notifiable allergen in the UK -- it must be labelled as such when it's in an unrefined form. And even if it's refined, the law still says the origins of oils have to be declared.
The combination of these two things (cost and allergens) means that if an oil has soya on it, you'll know from the front label. Indeed, if it's anything other than rapeseed it'll probably be marketed that way.
Taking account that this is unproven in humans -- it's enough for me to avoid soybean oil, as cooking oil choice is not very important for my palate.
That said, which oils would you use for frying and baking? Most high smoke point oils are, like soybean, polyunsaturated, so I'd guess that they could have some of the same (proposed) negative effects. Bonus points if the alternative is widely available (I see potential options like avocado oil and ghee, which may not be in my local stores).
Edit:
To clarify, the following oils are ALSO very high in PUFAs and thus might have similar issues to soybean oil: grapeseed, safflower, sunflower, corn, walnut, cottonseed.
Somewhat lower but still fairly high in PUFAs: sesame, canola, peanut.
Finally, some oils are low in PUFAs but not suitable for the same uses as soybean oil. Olive oil is one of these.
One pet theory that I've been harbouring for a while is that the different obesity rates in the US and Canada could be party explained by the dominance of canola vs soy/corn oil in various prepared products. Many brands of mayonnaise or potato chips will use canola oil in the Canadian version and soybean oil in the US version. A sensitive palate can taste the difference in the same way that Mexican coke made with cane sugar is distinguishable from the US HFCS version.
Contrary to what many people think canola's omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is actually not too bad, while soy and corn are off the charts in terms of omega-6 dominance.
EDIT: to answer your question on cooking or baking, coconut and avocado are great, mostly monounsaturated, and have high smoke points. As does pure olive oil (the yellow stuff, not the green EVOO, which is preferred for salad dressings or lower heat cooking). There was a recent study, done at UC Davis, that found a lot of avocado oil to be fraudulent.[0]. Otherwise for frying, beef tallow is still the best, and ghee can also be used for sautéing since it has a much higher smoke point than unrefined butter.
> Only two brands produced samples that were pure and nonoxidized. Those were Chosen Foods and Marianne’s Avocado Oil, both refined avocado oils made in Mexico. Among the virgin grades, CalPure produced in California was pure and fresher than the other samples in the same grade.
For frying and baking the so-called "high oleic" sunflower oil should be very good, if not the best.
It degrades less with heating than other oils and it has a very healthy fatty acid profile.
For salads or other food that is not cooked after adding oil, extra virgin olive oil may be preferred, because it contains other desirable substances besides fatty acids, but heating will degrade those, so for frying and baking olive oil does not have any advantage over the much cheaper high oleic sunflower oil.
Besides high oleic sunflower oil, there are also other kinds of oil that are claimed to be "high oleic", which should have similar frying properties, but I do not have any experience with those.
Avocado oil is fantastic for high-temperature cooking (smoke point ~500F). "Pure" or "refined" olive oil has a smoke point of around 410F; it's EVOO that has the lower smoke point. Deep frying happens at ~375F. Coconut and MCT oils are great for baking, but they do have lower smoke points (320-350F) so they're inappropriate for frying.
I generally prefer cooking, frying, and baking with avocado oil, both because of its health profile and because because it's extremely flavor-neutral, while olive and coconut both add a distinct taste to the dish which may not necessarily be desirable.
I am sure that avocado oil is excellent for high-temperature cooking and I assume that in USA it is cheap, so it is a good choice.
However the price of avocado oil varies wildly from country to country. In Europe, where I live, it is 3 to 6 times more expensive that olive oil and 15 to 20 times more expensive than high oleic sunflower oil.
So in most places of Europe, the best choice for high-temperature cooking would be high oleic sunflower oil, because it is very cheap, being produced locally and not imported, like avocado oil.
Oh, I didn't know there's a variant of olive with higher smoke point. I'll look out for that, thanks! Not sure if I'll be able to find avocado but I'll try.
If you have a Costco nearby, they sell a pretty high quality avocado oil under the "Chosen Foods" label. It runs about $20 for a 2 liter bottle. The UC Davis study that found a bunch of adulterated avocado oils specifically called out the Chosen Foods oil as being one of the good ones.
A couple reasons. One, I believe the reason soybean was chosen for this study was simply its prevalence in US food -- not because it's special or unique. As an oil it shares characteristics with a number of others, and the most notable of these characteristics is its fat profile (>50% PUFA).
Two, a connection between high PUFA oils in general and poor health outcomes is being postulated by other researchers... and, to be fair, many people who probably have no particular expertise and/or hidden associations, such as diet fads. But that's one of the reasons I asked the question initially; even the sources that would normally be trustworthy on other science (government scientists) have proven to be wildly incorrect and untrustworthy when it comes to dietary issues. I was honestly hoping someone that works in the field would pop up to comment.
My personal philosophy is that nothing is good in excess. Avoiding soy products is hard since soybean oil seems to be the oil of choice for anything pre-made. So I basically avoid soy in most everything I prepare myself (and try to prepare most things myself).
When I'm cooking/baking, I use butter, olive oil, and (lately) bacon grease, depending on what I'm making.
Coincidentally, in January I had made a list of everything in my fridge and pantry. The only things left with soy were mayonnaise, tortillas, and hamburger buns. I started making the bread products myself for fun. I haven't tried to replace the mayonnaise yet (I really dislike avocado mayo), but it's next.
They are really easy. I have a tortilla press, but I don't like it (the tortillas weren't thin enough). I've just been rolling them out with a small rolling pin.
Yeah, the thinness was my issue as well. Which is how my press got broken: pressing too hard. (That, and extremely low quality iron being used to make it.)
It's fairly neutral in flavor (slight nuttiness), has high smoke point, and is one that is a source of Vitamin E.
For frying and then roasting, I use avocado oil, but keep in mind that many avocado oil bought on the shelves are already oxidized or rancid. There's a handful of brands that tested to be pure, one being Chosen Foods (that I use).
FWIW grapeseed oil is the absolute worst you could use if PUFAs are bad. It's >80% PUFA, higher than any other.
Of course that's based on two suppositions: 1) that the reason soybean oil is bad in this study is its PUFA content, and 2) that it's also bad for humans, not just mice.
The PUFA in grapeseed oil is linolenic acid (~75%), which this specific study ruled out as the cause of the genetic expression changes observed in high-fat diets with soybean oil.
FTA:
>One additional note on this study — the research team has not yet isolated which chemicals in the oil are responsible for the changes they found in the hypothalamus. But they have ruled out two candidates. It is not linoleic acid, since the modified oil also produced genetic disruptions; nor is it stigmasterol, a cholesterol-like chemical found naturally in soybean oil.
Huh, I did actually miss that. Thanks for pointing it out. Linoleic acid isn't fully accepted as being healthy, so it was an easy assumption for me to make.
My understanding of linoleic acid is that it got a ton of good press as a result of the blowback from the discovery that we were basically poisoning ourselves with trans fats. So it wasn't really that we know PUFAs / linoleic acid are good, it's just that we know they're an existing alternative to something very bad.
A few years ago, I went digging through studies and journals to answer this question. The answer I came to was avocado oil, EVOO and refined olive oil for when you desire a higher smoke point than EVOO.
EVOO, contrary to intuition, is apparently one of the better oils to use for long periods of pan and deep frying. The impurities lower the rate of oxidation of the oil and the formation of volatile organic compounds.
Why not fry in tallow and other animal fats? I'm not an expert in this at all, but I will at least make the argument that we have historically eaten more animal fats than vegetable oils, so we might be better adjusted to it. I'd love to hear from someone who's more educated.
Alcohol is certainly safe, just not while operating machinery or so much that it poisons you. These are pretty much modern problems. Back in the day, it was safer to drink alcoholic beverages than water. Alcohol wasn’t as strong back then, or use industrial methods so this is like comparing apples to apple juice.
fwiw while fermentation is at least as old as farming, distillation into liquor only came about in the renaissance. you have to get really competetive to overdose on beer.
Alcohol is an endocrine/hormone disruptor and has all sorts of effects on the body.
It's kind of like saying sugar isn't bad by bringing up LD50 (13.5g/lb bodyweight). Immediately dying from overdose is probably the last thing people have in mind when discussing what foods are bad for us.
You can use low-smoke-point oils for a lot of cooking if you use them right. Pack a pan full of onions, add EVOO, and fry at medium heat. The release of water from the onions keeps the temperature of the oil down. It works because physics (reducing conductive temperature transfer via evaporative cooling).
However, if the pan only has a couple onion slices, or there's more oil than onions, or the heat is way too high, the situation changes. You can also overheat high-smoke-point oils if you're not careful. Careful observation and regulation of environmental factors is necessary in all cases.
This is something of a modern myth — me and my ancestors have been using olive oil for all forms of cooking for centuries. It does fine in high heat applications, you just need to vent off the smoke. Flavor isn’t affected in any noticeable way. There’s some YouTube videos with more science behind the “low smoke” oils and the myths of their being bad for cooking at high heats.
I do use EVOO for pan frying and sometimes just let it smoke. However, I thought I could detect an altered flavor as a result. Will have to read more, thanks!
I would second Avocado oil for high heat cooking, high in MUFAs. Also good for uses where you want a tasteless oil like mayo if you don't enjoy the taste of extra virgin olive oil.
Extra virgin Olive for low heat application.
Definitely want to avoid Cottonseed as it contains a chemical used as male contraception (unless you want that!)
Sunflower oil has even higher PUFA content than soybean, which is presumably the cause of these health issues in mice. I believe soybean was just chosen for the study because it's extremely ubiquitous in the US.
Besides traditional sunflower oil, which contains mostly linoleic acid (a PUFA), now there is "high oleic sunflower oil", which is extracted from a variety of sunflower initially developed in Russia some 50 years ago, but now grown in most countries.
This non-traditional sunflower oil has little PUFA and it is perfect for frying and baking.
The sunflower variety grown for high oleic oil has a genetic mutation with this effect, but it was not obtained with the modern genetic modification technologies, because obviously such technologies did not exist in the Soviet Union in the seventies of last century.
Instead of that, the Russians have treated some sunflower seeds with a chemical known to cause random genetic mutations. Then they have grown and selected several generations of plants until they have found one type with the desired characteristic of producing oil consisting mainly of oleic acid.
Later analysis has shown that this is due to a single mutation, which diminishes the activity of the enzyme that converts oleic acid into linoleic acid in traditional sunflower plants.
The three oils/fat I have been taught to use in my Indian kitchen are: sesame seed oil, ghee and coconut oil. Sesame seed oil because it has a high smoke point. Ditto with ghee.
The choice of oils always has to do with smoke point and hence what we use it for in the kitchen.
[..] Sesame oil is full of antioxidants. Along with vitamin E and phytosterols, it contains lignans, sesamol, and sesaminol. These compounds help fight free radicals in your body, which may reduce your risk of developing chronic diseases. Sesame oil has a balanced ratio of omega-3, omega-6, and omega-9 fatty acids.[..]
And I am from the south of india which is very hot. In the northern climes where it gets colder, sesame seed oil is substituted with mustard seed oil.
I don’t use olive oil for anything that requires heat. Mostly for salad dressings or drizzling etc. good olive oil..esp unrefined olive oil has very low smoke point. It’s actually harmful to use it for frying etc.
Regionally where olive oil is more abundant, grape seed oil is used for high smoke point cooking. I am also fond of avacado oil these day. I still stick to the trinity of coconut/sesame/ghee…but I also need to test other oils for diff gigs.
Wow. Read one article from the web and everything else is ‘BS’.
I mentioned that this is for an Indian kitchen. Specifically. Our cooking involves tadka(tempering) and sautéing..we use more pulses/lentils and one pot vegetable preparations than meat..meat requires high heat for Maillard reactions.
High smoke point is not to just guide for deep frying in Indian kitchens. We don’t use oil just for deep frying. Everything I learnt is by sound rather than sight with high heat. With the spices we use, aroma and flavour is an integral part of the cuisine. When we temper mustard seeds, we have to ‘listen’ to the sputtering. With ghee, we have to ‘listen’ to the sound of milk solids caramelising. Higher heat will destroy the food.
Good quality olive oil at any heating point is wasted. Refined olive oil at high smoking point is more trouble than food. Considering I have an actual degree in cooking..of international standard for many kinds of cuisines ..…plus multi generational/multi regional Indian cuisine by experience, I think that I can safely ignore any calls for BS about my food and cooking on Hacker News. Stick to your lane.
To back up and... refine... your point. EVOO does contain non-oil elements that will burn when heated and that's obviously not something anyone wants. However, pure olive oil (the yellow stuff) has a higher smoke point and is suitable for frying. In Germany they actually sell refined olive oil specified as Bratolivenöl, "literally frying olive oil", and it will state on the label that it is safe to heat up to 210 C.
The best olive oil is cold pressed which most people have probably never tasted..anyone who has tasted a fresh ripe olive will spit it out..it’s literally inedible.
Olive oil at its best is bitter and sharp and super astringent. That no one would ever recognize even in its most commonly used form..emulsions like mayo. It’s is a viscous opaque yellow liquid gold. Altho there are also varieties that can be green gold at first pressing.
I contracted via my farm to harvest olives from old city trees that were planted by some heiress and they were ancient no name varieties which had a more yellow gold tinge. Lovely bitterness at first pressing. Most olive oils we can buy is refined and processed and blended. When blended with grapeseed oil, they have longer shelf life and doesn’t become rancid as fast.
More recently there has been efforts to mechanize and automate olive harvests but it has resulted in entire olive groves being razed so new dwarf varieties and cultivars suitable for automated harvest are being planted in Europe and Morocco..with table olives from canopied trees being planted in Tunisia and other places where labor is cheaper.
South italian here. People from south italy have traditionally produced and used olive oil pretty much exclusively and for pretty much everything. Frying stuff is a huge part of the tradition. No relevant problem ever found regarding that. On the contrary: the mediterranean diet is a well known healthy diet.
Tradition doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. I agree though, olive oil may not be the best oil to fry with but I don’t think it’s harmful. If you’re cooking Indian cuisine it’s probably a bit of a waste though.
we have decided to go with having mustard seeds pressed for oil while being physically present for the process. the result is a much much better oil than the one that comes packaged. they say its "plain unprocessed oil" but there is a significant difference between what we get in our press and what comes in a bottle.
I should not be surprised that soybean oil is the most widely consumed oil, but I had not actually realized it. I had to look it up; It is in margarine, mayonnaise, and most vegetable oils. And I just had not payed that close of attention.
There are 3 characteristics of the oils that influence how healthy they are.
The first is the fatty acid profile, i.e. the relative quantities of fatty acids.
It is best when the most abundant fatty acid is oleic acid. This is true for olive oil and avocado oil and for certain varieties of other oils which are claimed to be "high oleic", e.g. high oleic sunflower oil.
For the oils with high percentage of saturated fatty acids, it is better to have little palmitic acid and more of either longer fatty acids, i.e. stearic acid like in cocoa butter or shorter fatty acids, like lauric acid in coconut oil.
Besides the fatty acid profile, some oils are known to contain other substances with favorable influences. This is known with reasonable certainty only for extra virgin olive oil, which is good for preventing cardiovascular diseases but it is not known which exactly is the substance with the good effect.
And third, there are oils which may contain other substances with bad effects, as shown here for the soybean oil or as is the case for the traditional rapeseed oil with erucic acid. Such oils must be avoided, at least until the undesirable substance is identified precisely and its removal from the oil becomes possible.
Now it is understood that erucic acid is not so dangerous as initially believed, because rats are much more sensitive to it than most other mammals.
Nevertheless, the same paragraph from Wikipedia says that erucic acid was shown to also cause heart problems in pigs, but at much higher quantities than in rats. Therefore it is dangerous, but only when eaten in larger quantities.
Canola oil is widely used in food and it contains erucic acid. However it contains much less than traditional rapeseed oil, so the current food standards are based on the assumption that it should not have bad effects when eaten in normal quantities.
Nevertheless, someone cautious could avoid it entirely, because the only desirable property of the oils which contain erucic acid is that they are cheap.
Be aware that all these oils contain a lot of omega-6, and very little omega-3 fatty acids. So if you consume a lot of that stuff, you also need a good source of omega-3 DHA/EPA (fish or supplement).
Also, there's quite a bit of controversy around the purported health benefits of coconut oil. Personally, I'm rather skeptical about it.
I think this is an important distinction for evaluating oils. For example, you mention avocado oil and coconut oil. Are these processed with heat (and possibly solvents)? Or are they cold-pressed with no other chemicals used to aid extraction?
In the UK, it is very common to find cold-pressed rapeseed oil (canola oil) in supermarkets. The canola oil sold in US supermarkets is highly processed. Is the cold-pressed version still bad?
The problem is that when seed oils are demonised, no distinction is made of the method of extraction. There are hundreds of researchers (and YouTubers) repeating the mantra 'seed oil = bad' without further distinction between heat-pressed and cold-press oil extraction. If extraction methods don't matter, then researchers need to provide evidence to confirm this.
You are right that the extraction method matters a lot for any oil.
Any method that uses high temperatures may cause various chemical reactions that degrade some of the oil components.
Some of the methods that use solvents for extraction may leave very small quantities of the solvents in the oils (e.g. hexane, i.e. a light fraction of gasoline), which are undesirable.
Nevertheless, cold-pressing is not necessarily the best method, even if it is preferable to most other old methods.
While the extraction using carbon dioxide at high pressure (supercritical CO2) is also classified as a solvent extraction method, it does not leave anything in the oil and it is able to extract any oil more completely and with less degradation than any other method.
However this modern method is encountered only in relatively recent oil production facilities, and unlike cold pressing it is not known by most people so it is not used in marketing.
Thus, except for cold pressing, the buyer cannot know whether the oil has been produced by a worse method like hexane extraction or by a better method, like CO2 extraction.
My research shows that coconut oil's benefits are chiefly as a topical treatment. As far as ingesting it, the benefits are minimal to nonexistent, and better derived from other sources.
Personally I only purchase California olive oil, I don't trust anything coming out of Europe due to the risk of adulteration. If you want a widely available brand: California Olive Ranch but look at the label carefully, you only want their 100% California olive oil.
> Only two brands produced samples that were pure and nonoxidized. Those were Chosen Foods and Marianne’s Avocado Oil, both refined avocado oils made in Mexico. Among the virgin grades, CalPure produced in California was pure and fresher than the other samples in the same grade
It's more nuanced than that but you could do a lot worse than that list. Fat profile matters, and smoke point matters, e.g. olive oil is great but if you're frying stuff with it you're turning a lot of it toxic; avocado oil is better for high heat.
Smoke point refers to the temperature at which an oil will break down. You're right that broken-down oil is unhealthy but, more importantly, it makes for bad-tasting food and should be avoided when possible.
That's not quite what's shown in that PDF...All oils tested showed signs of instability when heated, but EVOO was the most stable. But EVOO still had an increase in trans-fats, for example, when heated. Furthermore, in the conclusion, they note
note that the experiments were carried out without food being
cooked. While cooking, the water and steam which comes from the
food being cooked aids the process of hydrolysis. The absence of
food in these trials may have allowed for a greater impact of oil oxi-
dation when compared with other deterioration reactions
They didn't test the affects of water and food contact on stability and note the potential significance of hydrolysis.
But just going by that, I'd avoid all refined oils and heating/frying.
same pitfalls as most vegetable oils, and high in omega 6, which can throw off your omega3:6 ratio if you consume lots, which increases risk of obesity among other things.
Mostly, yes, unfortunately. Avocado oil is also quite highly processed but is the lesser among the evils. Extra virgin olive oil and unprocessed coconut oil are good. I've come to understand that reducing fat intake via cooking oils but increasing it via healthier raw/unprocessed fats are better (olive oil, dietary fats from fish, eggs, etc).
Also note that, oils can oxidize fairly easily. I still don't know how to procure oils from supermarkets that I'm sure are not already oxidized. Then comes the matter of storing it in ways to prevent oils from oxidizing.
Because the 3 most consumed oils are soybean, corn and canola oils, I wonder why didn’t they study the 3 oils at once. The effects, if any will be easily visible through differences.
> In all likelihood, it is not healthy for humans.
I'm sure their mouse studies are showing them something, but this is the kind of bold claim that wants to be tested anthropologically as much as bio-pharmacologically.
China is the leading consumer of soybean oil. It's been a dietary staple since the 11th century.
Any claim it's generally unhealthy has to reconcile with the fact that it's been used for 1000+ years. Perhaps one could claim "not optimally healthy," but it's not a novel chemical.
In aggregate it has, but the processing and quality of the oil has certainly changed. Notwithstanding, there has been a steep increase in total consumption of vegetable oil since the mid 20th century, owing to boxed / processed products. It's possible that the primary issue is oil consumption is not as moderate as it was.
Yes, the fact that the Chinese have been using soybean oil for one thousand years may be completely irrelevant for the properties of the soybean oil produced today.
Until last century, the oil was produced by pressing.
Now it is produced by solvent extraction, which extracts much more oil, but it may also extract other substances, which were not extracted by pressing.
The research commented here has shown that not the actual fat from soybean oil causes problems, but another unidentified component.
It is quite possible that the dangerous soybean oil component is something that is present only in the modern soybean oil, obtained by solvent extraction.
Two thoughts, be wary of academics with "specialties" until their work is reproduced and/or peer reviewed. Also people are not exactly rodents so they need to reproduce this in humans which is understandably far more difficult.
Whole industry started because of this claim, plant based cooking oil, margarine, trans fat. Each targeted in replacing one aspect of animal oil. Each are later found to be (more) harmful than animal fat.
Soybean oil has less partially hydrogenated oils than other deodorized oils, making it potentially the healthiest of the deodorized oils.
Obviously deodorized oils are not very healthy, but I honestly don't understand all the posts like "Eat only coconut oil/butter/lard". For the "appeal to science", there's plenty of data that diets very high in saturated fats is a risk factor for heart disease. For the "appeal to nature", ancient peoples did not have our modern access to animal fats, hunter gatherers ate a lot of seeds, nuts and bugs to fill out a diet that otherwise ate small lean game with occasional big fatty hunting successes.
I really don't understand why calling me ignorant or uninformed is neccesary. I'm just bringing up some counterpoints - something else to consider, I'm not recommending a diet based on soybean oil or anything.
I'm curious if you have any direct response to my points - do you know of any reasons that could make another deodorized oil a better option? I would really love to hear it, since I do recommend people that soybean oil is healthier than deodorized palm, canola, or peanut oil.
I listened to a great CBC-produced story on all of the "propaganda" surrounding soybeans back in the 90s... there were stories floating around that it raised estrogen levels in men and made you grow man-boobs basically if you ate it. I remember my friends joking about it at the time.
CBC wrote it off as completely without basis, said the chinese had been subsisting off of them for thousands of years, if they are fine eating it so should we be etc...
It was a convincing argument... but then again Canada grows a huge amount of soybeans and CBC is always pro-government so what to believe?
Probably, I know I distrust most of the food "science".
When I stuck to "food" pyramid, I was the most unhealthy, overweight, and unhappy I've ever been. When I basically switched to high fat, high protein, and lowish carbs,I got healthier and more importantly my hormone profile went back to normal and I wasn't depressed anymore.
It's astounding what lies the government pushes around food, and how damaging it can be to your life!
The thing with food science is that not every human is the same and people react differently to different things. Some people may thrive on a high fat diet, other might tolerate or even need more carbs, it really depends and isn't black and white. Thats why it's important to look at the sample size of studies among other factors.
Is there some evidence that humans really react that differently all else being equal?
Literally anything that can affect our bodies might be a confounding factor: sleep; water intake; type, frequency, duration, and difficulty of exercise; sunlight exposure; climate (average temperature, humidity, temperature swings, atmospheric salinity); elevation; latitude, etc...
If you think something about those reports was fishy, you can go and look up how long the Chinese had been subsisting off of them and if they've had any problems. Any possible CBC bias would have zero effect on that.
This is all hypothetical, since we don't have access to the actual report referenced by the GP. However, it would be up to the CBC to support any such claim, not up to the rest of us to validate it.
You could verify that the extant Chinese population does not have trouble with estrogen and soybeans. However, thousands of years is long enough for evolution to work on soybean eating populations, so I'm not convinced that would be a meaningful claim in the first place. Best case scenario, you'd find some metric for measuring historical estrogen levels in Chinese men and look as far back as possible.
I went all carnivore 15 months ago, and a side effect of that is the removal of all seed oils from the diet. The results include complete remission of my diabetes and associated fatigue and brain fog, the loss of more than 60 excess pounds, greater joy of life and emotional stability, and a new, regular desire to exercise and move my body.
I don't know how much of that is about cutting out seed oils. I am getting large amounts of butter and tallow in my diet.
I've been eating beef tallow past three weeks. Not strictly carnivore, but using the broth and oil from my cooking pots. Wow I feel great. The best part is that the beef tallow is free. I went to the butcher and asked for some fat trimmings, they laughed and asked me what for. To render tallow. I got a 5lb bag for free.
Also I discovered I can use Rosemary in the fat, for flavor and memory improvement.
>I went all carnivore 15 months ago, and a side effect of that is the removal of all seed oils from the diet. The results include complete remission of my diabetes
[...]
It's equally plausible that all the effects stemmed from removing carbs.
Over the last 3 decades I've had the experience of working on and off in the restaurant industry so I've been able to observe what happens to my body and which type of health issues seemed to always disappear when I'm not working in a kitchen versus when I am, and I have narrowed it down to only the kitchens where there was soybean oil in the fryer that correlated with extreme sinus issues.
Eventually people will realize that the vast majority of the foods they buy at the store are:
* Undernourishing: lacking historical nutritional value
* Lopsided / Disproportionate: ingredients are wildly over/ under represented wrt 'nature', like extreme levels of PUFAs in products due to added seed oils
* Addictive Filler: Added suger or other added sweeteners, added corn derivatives, etc
The only way to really avoid this is to go to extremes. For me that means cooking all my own food and tracing as many of my ingredients back to their sources and vetting them. Just buying 'USDA Organic' isn't enough these days, I need to ensure the various farms are not contaminating their soil with pesticides / fertilizers, among other factors.
What I'd really like to see, and this is a bit out there for HN, is a US certification for farmers practicing both USDA Organic and Korean Natural Farming (a somewhat radical organic approach to farming). I trust KNF with my health.
What astonished me is that it has been shown that the vegetables and fruits of today, at least the commercially available ones, are substantially less nutritious than what was available in the past.
What makes diet studies even more difficult is that you can have genetically identical twins, and they will react differently to diets only because of their gut bacteria.
It looks to be covered in the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article.
> Canola are a group of rapeseed cultivars which were bred to have very low levels of erucic acid and are especially prized for use as human and animal food.
I used to be so pro-science, but the more you follow it the more you see the stumbles (Folic acid causes cancer, but doesn't stop it) and just how much studies are funded by big corporations and can be easily killed if results start turning out unfavorably.
Older I get the more hippy-dippy I feel about food. We should probably have simple food, vegetables and grains, as our main staples. That's what people used to mostly eat and people that do eat that are healthier.
The next big scare about this or that oil, or tofu (which is a staple in many populations which are healthier than the US), come and go. And if they ever get contradicted you won't ever hear it.
I'm glad that this study was published -- it seems interesting -- but I hate the controls chosen. Coconut is a weird oil. It contains a lot of lauric acid, a fatty acid found in high amounts in coconut, palm kernel oil, and pretty much nothing else. You should also compare soybean to a normal oil, like olive oil, palm oil, duck fat, butter, lard, canola, or something else.
Imagine you want to evaluate the effect of switching to [insert your favorite language here] on programmer productivity, so as a control language for comparison, you choose Haskell. Doesn't that sound just a little weird?
The whole point of the free market is choice so that when people realize that certain things are unhealthy, they are able to switch to something else. Also, we aren't exactly in a free market at the moment: https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=soyb...
This lines up with that big research paper that came out last year saying the obesity epidemic almost certainly has an environmental cause beyond pure calories available, based on water table data, etc.
> Used for fast food frying, added to packaged foods, and fed to livestock, soybean oil is by far the most widely produced and consumed edible oil in the U.S.
Just in terms of the scope of the problem ... is there any evidence that these findings apply to humans eating products from livestock fed with soybean oil? If not, surely what matters in this context is not how much is "produced and consumed" but how much is consumed by humans?
Another related source of information is The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz, Erin Bennett. It goes deep into pretty much every major nutritional study from 1950-2005 and shows a lot of how soybean and many other seed/vegetable oil was originally founded on poorly constructed studies and how there is likely much more harm from them.
Highly recommended. It lines up well with this article.
Fatty liver is a big deal. Insulin resistance is as well. Both lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, and Type II diabetes.
The impacts on our health care system from these conditions dwarf anything else. It should be noted that these conditions, along with obesity dramatically increased the death/hospitalization rate for COVID.
I remember writing soy is basically poison and definitely not a health food here on HN not long ago. People would be smart to wise up to this sooner rather than later. It is still an extremely unpopular stance because many are lead to believe that this dirt cheap source of protein is "okay".
There seems to be a lot of info that it's both great for you and terrible for you. This is probably a good case for when "all things in moderation" is a reasonable approach.
I'm not obese. I have a family history of obesity. On the contrary, I am a bit underweight, and I have tried very hard to gain weight and have never managed to accomplish much. What are obese people eating that I'm not eating? What foods are high in soybean oil?
My experience with obese people in my family is that the most consistent theme is quantity. If you're eating 1,000 calorie meals and don't work out all the time you're going to be obese no matter what you're eating. Sugar and carbs definitely help pack the calories, but I've seen people eat 1,000 calorie salads.
Have you ever kept a log of the food you eat in a day? Admittedly I come at this from a very different perspective being obese, and having been much more obese in the past, but actively logging my food and retrospectively calculating calories gave me a much better sense of how much I was actually eating.
When you've recorded some data on that it would be productive to calculate your basal metabolic rate, which are the calories your body uses on the daily (so any exercise adds on to that). Comparing those two figures might be productive.
Of course there may be genetic factors going on but perception is so powerful it's the first thing I'd question
I figured the cheapest oil ( vegetable, canola, etc ) would be the most widely used cooking oil as well. I've never even heard of soybean oil let alone know anyone who uses soybean oil.
In some places, generic "vegetable oil" is all or mostly soybean oil, even some of the cheap brands. The midwest US has lots of corn and soybeans, and it is pretty natural that soybean oil would be fairly common.
And honestly, a lot of oils seem obscure. I use grapeseed oil, but hadn't heard of it 10 years ago. I don't know anyone else that does either. They sell it in one of the grocery store chains here, though, and I decided to try it. Something similar must be the case for soybean oil: Some stores in Norway sell a bottle labeled 'soybean oil', so someone must be buying it.
I wonder if it would be possible to add a feature to HN whereby you could have a secondary, important link. I know on some occasions the original link is replaced with a better one.
Gene expression changes are very common with food. What you eat commonly changes gene expression, this is why inherited traits are not very relevant to your health. What diet you inherit is much more important. If you have a family history of a certain illness it's most likely that your diet is what is expressing those genes and not your inherited traits. This also means if you change your diet you can plot whole different disease and health outcomes.
Most people are going to assume this article is bad news because they don't understand this fact, that makes this article pretty suspicious (without having read it) in my mind. Industry propaganda "science" isn't uncommon, a few years ago a big set of papers were published that were basically made up evidence that were completely bogus that was written by a pro-industry lobby, the reason was because of a pro plant based diet health related documentary that came out at the same time. It's a tactic of sewing doubt in peoples minds, if people have doubt they wont change their behavior or oppinion for the better.
I'm gonna read this article later and I hope it's not propaganda..
We already have explanations for the obesity issues in the west. It's tempting to look for "the one thing," but the story is far more interesting than that:
Do not take this work seriously unless you are a male inbred mouse of the C57BL/6N persuasion.
This is a classic N=1 study of one sex and one genome of mouse. As such this work is of almost no know relevance to other strains of mice, let alone to humanity.
If you want an example of how mice dietary studies should be done then look to the National Institute on Aging and its Interventions Testing Program. They use both sexes and mice that are as genetically diverse as humanity.
N-of-1 studies should be deprecated by journals and by NIH. Embrace diversity before making broad translational claims.
Then that should be the title of the article... If you want to be taken seriously for future studies, don't write a clickbait title off of a sample size of 1...
The article as written is making strong claims about a population it doesn't define very well...
LOL. And except for the pathetic Chr Y all three of you (and you unmentioned father) are also all the same genetic individual. Yes, mice are a bit weird.
Sorry to hear about the short tail running in the family.
We use model systems because they are often in fact representative of the systems we are actually concerned about but cannot reliably measure like we could in a lab environment with an established model system. This does not mean the work is meritless.
It is only meritorious as a pilot study to do the work properly. Would you consider an n of 1 study of a human a basis for commenting on dietary interventions? i hope not.
The article is terrible and at least the 2015 study makes bigger claims than they really ought to considering the scope and sample size.
>Fructose enhances liver/body weight ratio and kidney weight; soybean oil is protective in spleen and kidney.
From the caption on fig 2.
>To our surprise, we found that at 20 weeks the F-HFD did not cause diabetes (fasting blood glucose level > 200 mg/dL) whereas the SO-HFD did (Fig 4A).
This is in the results section as well under what I hope is just the heading and not an actual conclusion they drew: "Soybean oil induces diabetes, glucose intolerance and insulin resistance (IR)"
That's enough to give me some serious pause. If anyone has an explanation for why they felt comfortable claiming such certainty from the trial, I'd love to be wrong about this. It looks like you could just as easily claim that coconut oil prevents these things from the data provided.
I also am curious where the fructose + soybean oil + high fat diet group went when they started doing genetic analysis. They just disappear. Maybe I missed it, but it doesn't seem to be addressed in materials and methods or in the conclusions.
I think this is a fair point. I see other comments pointing out the value in this as exploratory research. There's some middle ground here though. I think studies like would serve the lay reader and non-scientific community by including a disclaimer sentence in the abstract about not extrapolating conclusions from this. Their opening sentence does the opposite, "Soybean oil consumption has increased greatly in the past half-century", which seems to set up the reader to think about the impact to humans. This paper is written by scientists, for scientists, but the scientific community as a whole would be well advised to realize that lay readers and lay press will skim these articles, in particular the abstract, for the key takeaways.
If you want something to be written by scientists for scientists, you have to make it inaccessible to non-scientists. Otherwise people are going to take it as the gospel truth. And honestly, they should put up major guard rails on any article interpreting a scientific study. It's too easy to miss things that other people will take to heart.
As a lay-person, when I come to this article, I have no idea of the information in the study. Which is why the veneer of a scientific study on this makes it actively worse for me to trust. And then if I ever find out the study is wrong, I trust science less, because I put my bets on a finding that was basically a coin-flip conclusion.
Now, I'm not inclined to trust the scientific process less because it finds something is wrong, but I also don't think I'm the average internet person.
The article also states:
"A caveat for readers concerned about their most recent meal is that this study was conducted on mice, and mouse studies do not always translate to the same results in humans."
TLDR; I spent way too long thinking about this in the short time I looked at it. I still want to post my rambling but at the same time take it all with a good dash of salt.
That title though. Why does the UoC feel the need to use clickbait titles?
I guess it becomes a mouthful when it is "America's most consumed cooking oil, which is soybean oil, causes genetic changes in the brain."
But my first though is ... I've never bought soybean oil afaik. Is soybean oil vegetable oil? Because I buy vegetable oil.
Ah clarification later in the post "Additionally, the team notes the findings only apply to soybean oil — not to other soy products or to other vegetable oils."
The difficult part is that most of the things I consume that use soybean oil I don't have a choice in what oil they used. Sure I can not eat those chicken nuggets but the easier solution would be to change the manufacturing process to use something better right?
Any fried foods are atrocious for one's health. Frying is the cooking method that creates the highest levels of advanced glycation end-products, which are deadly.
I kinda doubt there's a ton of overlap between "right wing" twitter and HN, but there's been a decent amount of hate on seed oils (especially soybean oil) over there lately. Here's one of the bigger accounts promoting it in case anyone here'd wanna glance at what those people might be saying: https://twitter.com/SeedOilDsrspctr
Now that you mention it, I don’t remember ever really hearing about this stuff before the “meat is a treat” thing started going around. So you’re probably correct about that to some degree.
This title is pretty click-baity in my opinion. Why doesn't the title contain the words "soybean oil"? It seems bizarre to use the words "most widely consumed cooking oil" without mentioning which one.
And referring to changes in gene expression as "genetic changes" kind of fear-mongers, given most things we eat lead to "genetic changes" in our bodies...everything we eat is processed by proteins which are regulated by gene expression.
Because it’s clickbait! How can anyone not see that from the title alone? Even a cursory reading of it shows it to be ridiculous fearmongering nonsense.
In mice. Let's temper the usual nutritional conspiracy allegations and grand proclamations of effects on humans until someone trained and knowledgable provides an interpretation of this study. Most of these rodent studies end up not being applicable to humans anyway.
Do you have a source for the claim that most studies done in mice don’t hold up? As far as I know, mice are quite a good proxy, although there are some differences. It seems like it would be a complete waste of time to study mice if most results didn’t hold.
The post itself includes a caution against applying this information directly to humans. It is a sign further research is warranted, nothing more (as opposed to completely pointless).
Mice strike the best balance for science of animals who are decent proxies for humans, are inexpensive to breed and genetically manipulate, and who don't trigger much ethical backlash.
It seems to me though that the extent to which mouse biology and behavior translates well to human biology and behavior might also be the extent to which it's totally immoral. "Yes, but think of how many future lives I'll save by vivisecting this sentient or semi-sentient being..."
> A caveat for readers concerned about their most recent meal is that this study was conducted on mice, and mouse studies do not always translate to the same results in humans.
