Does Linoleic Acid Induce Obesity?

I personally think so, though I haven't come (even close) to digesting all the details. Worth noting it's a blog post that goes into some depth on a wide-variety of papers. (There's also a secondary follow-up post, which I haven't read yet.)

Almost everyone agrees the modern industrial diet is unhealthy, but no one agrees about why. Is it the sugar, the fat, the carbs, the preservatives, the hyper-palatability, ...? Basically, any ingredient you can imagine, there is some group of people that think that is the problem.

I've become convinced a leading factor is probably our historically-high levels of the n6 polyunsaturated fat, linoleic acid, which is the argument the blog post is making.

One very interesting thing about linoleic acid is that it increases endocannabinoid signaling, which increases appetite.

(As well as having many other, still not fully understood, effects:

"The ECS regulates and controls many of our most critical bodily functions such as learning and memory, emotional processing, sleep, temperature control, pain control, inflammatory and immune responses, and eating. The ECS is currently at the center of renewed international research and drug development."

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-endocannabinoid-syst...)

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence that linoleic acid may be obesegeni that there used to be a very effective diet drug, rimonabant, which blocked the LA -> canninboid pathway. (Unfortunately, it also caused higher levels of suicide in people taking it, so with was withdrawn from the market.)

So I think it probably has a lot of merit; a very interesting topic, at the very least.