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Comment by Godel_unicode | Hacker News Reader

Fat includes transfat. This back-and-forth does an excellent job of underlining GPs point about those being complex subjects that require study and nuanced explanation.

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Transfat? What is that? Oh, it’s that dietary fat which is illegal where I live and hence completely irrelevant to me.

There is hardly a back and forth here. Fat is essential and a lot of is not harmful.

The best you could do is to point out that heavily processed vegetable oils are harmful and probably give you too much omega-6. The cure? Just switch to things like olive oil and animal fats.

Compare this to sugar (also mentioned by the poster).. Which is... not essential to anything. Your body does not need it. It is actively harmful. Carbohydrates however can be fine, and fiber is good, but the particular kind of carbohydrate known as sugar (like the two molecular compounds more or less) are no bueno.

It's not that complex, actually. The vast majority of fats, all the natural ones, basically, are fine. Healthy, even. The weirdass plastic fats created by injecting hydrogen into vegetable oil are not fine.

Done! Was that really so nuanced? No. It was not.

Try explaining to an average person how they can identify which food products at the supermarket have noble-gas-fat-products in them and which don't.

"Check the nutrition facts label. If it has any trans fat, put it back."

Trans fats are now banned in the US so there's not much of a need to look.

just went shopping yesterday (Southern California) and much of the peanut butter still has trans fats.

There's many brands which have fully-hydrogenated oil, but I'm not aware of any still using partially-hydrogenated (what people typically mean when they're talking about trans fats), and I don't believe they're allowed to now.

That's easy. The packages are labeled with nutrient information, don't eat any that contain any amount of trans fats.

Also as a side note, hydrogen isn't a noble gas

I know. I edited my comment to correct that. Apologies for the error, hydrogen fans!

I'm a big fan of hydrogen, particularly the collaborative work with oxygen. You could say that it's central to my life.

I think this would mean eating nothing but home cooked meals or a 3x in grocery bill. I'm not even sure of the latter strategy

Really? Most food products I see, even processed ones, don't have trans fats.

What foods do you buy that do?

Trans fats are banned in the US: https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/trans-fat

I don't live in US. HN is a international community, please be mindful of that.

No.

> which food products

If it comes in a tin or a box, it is probably not good for you. Not all cases, but it is a good rule of thumb.

Sardines are a tasty exception

Palm oils in particular are not very healthy and are suspected to be a leading cause of diet-induced heart disease. Not all fats are created equally, or in equal proportions. Palm oils are high in specific saturated fats that are linked to cardiovascular disease.

Palm oils are some of the most common fats found in prepared foods, especially foods that need solid fats at room temperatures. The majority of peanut butter preparations on shelves in the US have had all of their peanut oils removed and then replaced with palm oil for "better" texture and to prevent separation.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_oil#Nutrition_and_health

What an interesting, and dare I say nuanced, point.

Let’s add to it how good fats can become bad through releasing free radicals, which happens at approximately the same temperature that a lot of animal fats are cooked at.

A few years ago, I did some reading on PubMed to figure out what fats are best to cook with. Came to the conclusion that extra virgin olive oil, which papers use the acronym "EVOO" for, is best for frying, whether that's pan or deep frying, and cooking in general.

It's high in monounsaturated fats and studies found that various compounds in EVOO prevent the formation of free radicals, volatile organic compounds, aldehydes like formaldehyde, etc compared to other cooking oils.

One study looked at the use of frying oils over time, since the longer the oils are heated, the more they decompose into harmful compounds. EVOO won out on that, too, and significantly inhibited the creation of harmful products. This would be relevant for restaurants, which tend to reuse oils over long periods of time, or anyone that cooks big meals for themselves or others. If you're going to be standing over a pan cooking for hours at a time, it's worth reducing the amount of harmful compounds you'll inevitably breathe in.

Typically refined oils are preferred for frying because they can be used at higher temperatures, but I've found cooking with EVOO to be just fine, just don't cook things at temperatures where it might start smoking.

I fry most everything in ghee these days. It’s delicious and the smoke point is north of 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ghee is like 30% palmitic acid. I use it for cooking everything that doesn't call for oil, but people on a palm oil crusade might want to steer clear.

I recently bought ghee for the first time from Organic Valley. Looking at their website, I don't see how it's 30% palmitic acid, could you please clarify?

https://www.organicvalley.coop/products/butter/ghee/clarifie...

Palmitic acid is called like that because it was first isolated in palm oil but it's naturally occurring in animal fat and breast milk because it's naturally produced by them.

Its not they are adding palm oil to butter and ghee, it's the because palmitic acid is not unique to palm oil (well some unscrupulous producer do adulterate ghee with palm oil but let's not go there yet what I'm saying apply to pure ghee)

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Fatty-acid-profiles-of-g... 16:0 is the acid you're looking for.

Very interesting point. Do you have any of your preferred research papers handy?

I went searching just now out of curiosity and did find this one [1] which indeed affirms what you're saying.

Personally, I reach for ghee when I want a neutral oil (e.g., for cooking scrambled eggs). And, like you, I reach for some fancy EVOO for everything else. I have to confess my approach to get here was a lot less scientific though; I mostly settled on these two using the metric of deliciousness.

I actually have them saved in my personal wiki, when I'm on my home network I'll bring it up and post the citations I've collected here.

Here's what I was able to find from my notes:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12090031

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15291498/

https://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e363

Pretty sure they're all on SciHub.

Here's some about heat, frying and other methods of cooking when it comes to creating mutagenic compounds:

https://www.marksdailyapple.com/safe-cooking-temperatures/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29911312

https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborneillnesscontaminants/chemic...

Last one is about acrylamide, which I believe there is little evidence to believe it's harmful (it's been a while since I've actually looked at studies on it), but I assume the conditions that produce it also end up producing compounds that can be harmful.

Adam Ragusea does a lot of well researched videos around food science, and did one around using olive oil, even past the smoke point, fairly recently - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_aFHrzSBrM

Some good interviews with food scientists, etc. Interesting for anyone wanting to learn a bit more on this subject.

I've swapped to using EVOO for most anything where it won't be too overpowering of a taste.

Your body produces palmitic acid on its own, 30% of your fat is palmitic acid yourself produced. Reducing consumption of palmitic acid mostly reduces your quality of life, a balanced diet with a good biscuit and noeccessive calories does much more than eating dry, sandy biscuits and excess on sugar later on.

Thank you, I did not know that.

> Excess carbohydrates in the body are converted to palmitic acid. Palmitic acid is the first fatty acid produced during fatty acid synthesis and is the precursor to longer fatty acids. As a consequence, palmitic acid is a major body component of animals. In humans, one analysis found it to make up 21–30% (molar) of human depot fat,[16] and it is a major, but highly variable, lipid component of human breast milk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmitic_acid

High-palmitic acid diets and dry, high-sugar diets are hardly the only two options.

Yeah but I bet people that are sold on palm oil is evil are on low fat diet. And that the calories from fat they don't consume come from carbohydrates, not proteins.

That's a strange assumption and certainly isn't true for me. I limit carbohydrates as much as possible. The majority of my calories come from fat and protein.

so wht fat you add to your diet? animal fats are, like, 30% palmitic acid.

Olive and avocado oil, flax seed oil, oil from fish and meat. I think there's a difference between eating palmitic acid that's part of a larger fatty acid profile in meat, and being conscious of just how much saturated fats you're eating, versus refined palm oil that's mostly been refined down to palmitic acid itself. If you're eating peanut butter, you might be literally eating refined palm oil by the spoonful, versus a relatively small amount of palmitic acid in meat.

I don't know where you're getting that idea about peanut butter and palm oil, it isn't true of the major US peanut butter brands

https://www.peanutbutter.com/peanut-butter/creamy

https://www.jif.com/peanut-butter/creamy/creamy-peanut-butte...

Same major manufacturers, different SKUs, palm oil in the "natural" versions since hydrogenated vegetable oil is not exactly natural:

https://www.peanutbutter.com/peanut-butter-spread/natural-cr...

https://www.jif.com/peanut-butter/natural/creamy

Seems like a good time to remind people that if the oil is not domestic, it most likely comes in chemical tankers:

https://www.agflow.com/commodity-trading-101/a-guide-to-chem...

Your previous cargo might have been benzene or acrylonitrile.

Plenty of Skippy's products have palm oil in them instead of peanut oil, and when I've looked, the "creamy" varieties of peanut butter tend to use palm oil for texture and stability. Store brands do the same thing in my experience.

Adding a little for texture is very different than removing the peanut oil and replacing it with palm oil. If that were the case, the saturated fat/total fat ratio would be much higher and the palm oil wouldn't be the 3rd ingredient listed after sugar.

Fine, true, palm oil is one of the rare exceptions. But the point is, this is not a tremendously complex issue. A person of average intelligence can learn about partially hydrogenated trans fats, and one or two other fats to avoid, and master this whole issue in a few minutes.

It never fails to amaze me how the benefits of hindsight can cause us to forget how little we used to know or how long it took us to learn. This is the exact type of science that we’re arguing needs to be extended to cannabis.

Go feign surprise somewhere else, mate. Fat was the dietary scapegoat for decades because the powers that be wanted to sell us cereal-dominated diets, not because there was some amazing science that proved (at the time) that fat was bad and carbs were good.

That describes both partially and fully hydrogenated fats, but only the partially hydrogenated fats contain trans fat. As far as I know fully hydrogenated fats are not any more unhealthy than other saturated fats.

There's plenty of nuance you're missing still:

- Baseline cholesterol levels

- Inflammation

- Genetic predisposition to heart disease / diabetes

- Types of fat and quantities consumed

- What else does your diet consist of

Edit: and these are just some risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. There's plenty more nuance still if we want to talk about quality of life, energy levels, digestive function etc...

To make it more complicated not all tranfats are bad. Conjugated Linoleic Acid is natural transfat that is beneficial.

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