Death by vegetable oil: What the studies say (2020)
jeffnobbs.com
jeffnobbs.com
This seems to be the case in many of the studies cited in this essay as well. For example, a number of the studies aggregate over margarine and other types of vegetable oil, which seems really difficult or impossible to interpret, especially given that trans fats are now generally accepted to be unhealthy.
Other problems arise here in and elsewhere in defining oil composition. I've noticed for instance that safflower and sunflower oil are almost always lumped together in one category, even though there are chemically very different forms of both available. For example, high oleic and other sunflower oils are really different, and sunflower oil in general is generally relatively easily modified genetically speaking. So talking about "sunflower oil" as a single ingredient biochemically is problematic.
There's also issues with cooked versus raw oils, which the essay alludes to but seems extremely important given how different fat structures are transformed by heat.
I'm not trying to tear down the piece, but I do find this area of research really difficult to interpret.
The science is too shoddy to draw any conclusions. It’s hard to take seriously studies that don’t consider olive oil a “vegetable oil”.
> “Vegetable oils” in this context refer to oils extracted from seeds, grains, and legumes
This excludes olive/avocado/coconut/nut oils.
edit: okay maybe “invariably” is a bit strong. “often in my country” is perhaps more accurate
I usually fry and cook with olive oil.
this is a common myth
you also hear stuff about whether extra virgin is better or worse for cooking than just basic, with people coming out strongly on either side
Do you have a source for that? It's pretty easy to google the smoke points and most charts indicate olive oil is fine for sautéing but not for frying.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf503146f
See also this video:
Or, to be more charitable, the groupings can also be looked at as "oils humans evolved eating" (olive oil, butter, coconut milk, etc) vs "oils we just started eating recently, because they can't be extracted without modern technology."
Seed oils do not require modern technology. Soybean, sesame, sunflower, etc. can be extracted with stone pressing and were extracted that way prior to any chemical extraction process. Where my family is from they’ve been eating sunflower and peanut oil for hundreds of years, milled and pressed with stone.
Nevertheless, until modern extraction methods based on the use of high temperature and organic solvents have been introduced during the last two centuries such oils had remained expensive, so they were only a minor part of the food, unlike today, when if you look at the label of any kind of industrially-made food you will invariably see that some cheap oil has been added to it, e.g. soybean oil, canola oil or palm oil.
Even today, if you choose vegetable oils extracted by good methods, i.e. by cold pressing or with supercritical carbon dioxide, they are much more expensive than standard oils. For instance, the price range for cold-pressed sunflower oil overlaps with that of the cheaper kinds of extra-virgin olive oil and the prices are several times higher than for standard sunflower oil.
I have read all the 4 parts of this "Death by Vegetable Oil" series of posts.
Some of its conclusions are likely to be true, but the title is extremely misleading. A much more appropriate title would be "Death by the Cheaper Vegetable Oils".
All the data presented in these posts about the harmful effects of some vegetable oils are not applicable to vegetable oils in general, but only to those vegetable oils that have one or more of the following characteristics:
1. A high content of linoleic acid and also a too high daily intake. The optimum daily intake of linoleic acid is unknown, but it is believed to be around 10 g/day and not much over 20 g/day. In my opinion, based on the current data, an example of a daily fat intake optimized for the fatty acid profile and vitamin E content, for a sedentary human, would be 55 mL of extra-virgin olive oil + 15 mL of cold-pressed sunflower oil + a DHA+EPA omega-3 supplement. The rest of the food should have low fat content, like in grains, vegetables, fruits or lean meat. For a higher calorie intake, only the amount of extra-virgin olive oil should be increased.
2. Extraction with high temperature and/or organic solvents. One should always prefer extra-virgin oils, cold-pressed oils or oils extracted with supercritical carbon dioxide. All such oils are very sensitive to light, so they must be stored in darkness, preferably in dark glass bottles. Avoid those sold in clear plastic bottles.
3. Vegetable oils that have been heated during cooking. All vegetable oils should be mixed with the food only after cooking it and cooling it. They should not be used for frying.
4. Vegetable oils with artificial additives, e.g. with TBHQ. Avoid these.
In the last 2 years, I started replacing all my cookware with a combination of cast iron, carbon steel, and stainless steel pans. So far, the only way to cook something in all of them without making the food stick is by using oil.
So I have a dilemma: What kind of oil to use with this type of cookware if I want to cook often?
Home cooking is generally going to be better than particularly fast food because you are not reheating the same oils over and over.
Coconut oil is generally held as better. Cold pressed oils otherwise. Prepare to pay more for them. Be aware that food packaging labels have been known to lie about oil origin. Basically, fewer steps between growing the food and your mouth the better.
Preparing food at home is going to reduce a lot of the processing and reprocessing that happens to commercial packaged foods. I think that's going to be a net win.
Maybe get a feel for exactly how much oil is required and keep it to a minimum.
When I was using pans with a non-sticking coating, I used very little oil.
Now switching to cast-iron or carbon-steel I noticed that the best point to cook the food is to add some oil to the pan, wait for the oil to be heated properly, and only then start adding the food. Of course, I still add very little oil (maybe 1-2 tablespoons) but compared with non-sticking pans it is yet a visible thin film.
I am currently using extra-virgin olive oil but I am not sure it is good. Now I understand that instead of focusing on "extra-virgin" label I should focus on the process used to produce the oil.
On the other hand, sharing here a bit of anxiety I am no sure what to eat:
- On one hand I could try to eat more non-processed, non-cooked food like salads, vegetables ... But the risk there is being contaminated with various pesticides. So I am a bit concerned to switch to a diet mostly based on this as it means to increase a lot the quantity of such food
- On the other hand, cooking using what people consider healthy cookware means (so far for me) using some oil which I now get should be limited
- There is also the idea of red meat being bad, but also fish having mercury or radioactive elements. Probably not all of them but after reading this kind of information, I am a bit more aware of buying fish as I don't know exactly which one can be contaminated and from what area.
- The chickens seem also be not be healthy (don't remember where I read this and I somehow suspect it is false).
So I am really a bit puzzled about what to eat.
I don't think there is an easy answer.
Probably the correct answer is to grow my own food. But that is another style of life.
Besides choosing a kind of fat that is less sensitive to temperature, as described in another answer, when possible you should try to clean the fried food of the frying oil and to throw away most of the used oil.
There are studies showing some kinds of organic products are worth buying because of the reasons you mention, but others are not.
I think the more you can buy food that you trust the better. This doesn't mean growing your own, it means learning more about where your food is coming from and the chain of producing and selling it. It may mean going to smaller shops, more trips, farmers markets etc. It may just mean reading about brands etc.
I think many people are wrestling with similar questions as you; you're not alone.
Using saturated or monounsaturated fats or oils are your best bets for sauteing. You can also braise things, in some kind of liquid.
Good alternatives are butter or high-oleic sunflower oil or other high-oleic refined vegetable oils, which also have a low content of PUFA and of substances that are not triglycerides.
This is different from the case when the purpose of an oil is to be eaten without being heated, when cold-pressed non-refined oils are preferable, because they include various beneficial nutrients.
In any case, even if some kind of fat is used for frying, it is good to try to avoid eating most of it.
It is also possible to never use frying. In this case everything that is neither boiled nor steamed can be baked in an oven. This includes all kinds of meat (which must be cut into slices or small pieces before baking).
Can you provide link to this current data? I thought sunflower oil is not good for our health.
Long story short, plants that live where it is cold need to use less stable oils with a lower melting points. These oils lead to our cells being more fragile, and also lead to more free radicals.
Particularly if the oil is repeatedly heated. As happens in restaurants. And even more so when deep frying fast food.
https://www.drchristianson.com/blog/are-omega-6-fats-bad-for...
I see talk about seed oils causing “inflammation” as a big red flag for pseudoscience.
Any essential nutrient, whose absence from your food can kill you, can also become a poison over a certain daily intake. For certain essential nutrients, the difference between the optimum daily intake and the lethal daily intake may be quite small, e.g. for selenium.
In the case of linoleic acid, it is likely that 10 g/day is very healthy, but 50 g/day is very unhealthy. It is not known for sure where the threshold between healthy and unhealthy lays, but it might be between 20 g/day and 30 g/day.
Most of the cheapest vegetable oils contain between 60% and 80% of linoleic acid.
With all kinds of industrially-made food containing large amounts of cheap oils, it has become very easy to eat too much linoleic acid per day, without being aware, like also too much sugar.
Vegetable oil bottles tend to get sticky on the outside. Used vegetable oil is great for wood preservation. Many stains have heavy metals in them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_peroxidation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_peroxidation#Hazards
ALA is very unstable as oils go. It’s an omega-3 fatty acid. It’s generally regarded as healthy. The claim that unstable oils are somehow bad for you because they are unstable in your body seems entirely unsupported.
Certainly flaxseed oil is a terrible cooking oil unless you are trying to make furniture [0], but that’s a very different claim.
[0] You can also use flaxseed oil to produce a beautiful but mostly useless seasoning on cast iron. But the inside of your body is not made of hot iron, and the reactions that occur on a skillet don’t seem particularly relevant to what happens if you eat the oil.
Linoleic acid is not “toxic” to humans. It’s an essential fatty acid. You need it to survive. Your body needs it to make other fats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linoleic_acid
As for linoleic acid, it does store in adipose issue and cause oxidative stress and inflammation in humans. Below is one of several papers you can find on this.
A high linoleic acid diet increases oxidative stress in vivo and affects nitric oxide metabolism in humans
I used to use n-hexane spray as an electronics cleaner and it all evaporated very fast.
I get that a non-polar oil could hold it better, but does it hold it in after any amount of time?
And here’s another study that directly tests the hypothesis that linoleic acid consumption causes damage via oxidative stress and concludes “our results provide no indication of increased oxidative stress or genetic damage as a result of increased dietary intake of linoleic acid. Therefore, we see no scientific basis to reconsider the public health policy to stimulate the intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids aimed at the reduction of coronary heart diseases.”
To address your point about the study I linked -- I think you're mistaken. The LA group did have a significant increase in 8-iso-PGF2alpha urine metabolites, and decrease in nitric oxide metabolites. From the study:
> Urinary excretion of 8-iso-PGF2alpha was significantly increased after the LA diet (170 vs 241 ng/mmol creatinine, P=0.04), whereas the urinary concentration of nitric oxide metabolites decreased (4.2 vs 2.6 mg/mmol creatinine, P=0.03).
also
> In conclusion, the high-LA diet increased oxidative stress and affected endothelial function in a way which may in the long-term predispose to endothelial dysfunction.
The study you linked showed an increase in oxidation metabolites for the LA group. But as far as I understand, those metabolites don’t demonstrate damage to anything or an impact on mortality. That’s why I linked to a study that measures oxidative DNA damage via 8-oxo-dG in blood, which found no impact from increased linoleic acid consumption. So the theory that linoleic acid is dangerous because of damage via oxidative stress isn’t clearly supported by current literature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil
Canola was bred from rapeseed cultivars of B. napus and B. rapa at the University of Manitoba, Canada, by Keith Downey and Baldur R. Stefansson in the early 1970s,[9][10] having then a different nutritional profile than present-day oil in addition to much less erucic acid.[11] Canola was originally a trademark name of the Rapeseed Association of Canada, and the name was a condensation of "Can" from Canada and "OLA " meaning "Oil, low acid",[12][13] but is now a generic term for edible varieties of rapeseed oil in North America and Australasia.[14] The change in name serves to distinguish it from natural rapeseed oil, which has much higher erucic acid content.[15]
Coconut oil is not that. Neither is olive oil or avocado oil.
The class of oil you're looking for is called sugar. We all know Big Sugar paid off a couple of researchers to spin the blame on fats, and perception has been baised since.
If we reduce sugar (including carbs) and we'll see health outcomes improve.
Maybe it was you.
No one except you is claiming that. Some people are claiming that a subset of vegetable oils are bad, but so far I haven't seen one conclusive argument either way.
There is no safe amount of trans fats to eat. Trans fats do permanent damage to your arteries. Always. Some foods naturally have small amounts and most studies on the subject say they're less bad but still bad. Your goal should be to minimize your lifetime consumption which is why people say to reduce your red meat intake because it can add up. It's not worth it. There is nothing trans fats do for you that makes it worth it, especially since we have plenty non trans fats that are solid at room temperature. Don't intentionally add non-natural sources to your diet.
But yeah, let's blame oil. Makes sense. Smh
1) Look around, what do we see?
2) Look at history. What are / aren't we eating now vs prior and/or elsewhere?
Processed foods ~ sugar. It's not like ppl are spooning straight sugar into their mouths.
p.s. Sugar also impacts oral health. The health of your mouth / teeth is important (read: far too underrated).
"Prolonged consumption of the repeatedly heated oil has been shown to increase blood pressure and total cholesterol, cause vascular inflammation as well as vascular changes which predispose to atherosclerosis."
When I was a teenager, I worked in fast food where there was a deep fryer, and the policy of the restaurant was to use the oil until it turned a deep brown (or customers complained). Believe me, that oil was reheated dozens of times. I can only imagine what it's like in a chip factory.
On the other hand, if you're just putting it in a salad dressing, the effects might be different, and there actually seems to be relatively few studies on this topic.
Anyway, this is definitely not the whole picture, but something to think about.
Main ingredient: aluminum silicate. Not exactly something I want to sprinkle on my salad.
It's pretty obvious you're trying to imply that it's harmful in some way, but I checked wikipedia and I can't see anything bad about it aside from the generic "eww chemicals" feeling. Sure, technically speaking I wouldn't sprinkle that on my salad either, but that encompasses a wide variety of substances that aren't exactly bad for you. I wouldn't sprinkle sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) on my salad either, but it's not exactly bad for me.
You could maybe argue store bought salad dressings but any real homemade or high quality dressing is not going to be made with canola or sunflower oil but most likely olive oil.
But yes I suspect the health problems from people with heavy seed oil diets comes from consuming foods prepared with seed oils heated at very high temperatures because they quickly degrade and release free radicals in your body. The worst is vegetable oil that is being used over and over again for frying.
Most sesame dressings appropriately use sesame oil.
And others use tahini.
there’s nothing inherently unhealthy about fried potatoes fried in beef tallow outside watching excessive caloric intake.
Also having calories without also having something you're deficient in and need more of might be enough to qualify as unhealthy, unless it's displacing something worse. Does tallow do anything specifically beneficial for the majority of people who don't need added energy?
Yes.
> Americans eat an average of over 3,600 calories a day ... The long-time recommendation is for you to aim for 2,000 to 2,600 calories per day if you’re a sedentary adult male and 1,600 to 2,000 if you’re a sedentary adult female. [1]
[1] https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/average-calorie-intake-huma...
Everybody. Eating raw peanuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds or pickled olives as snacks is extremely common.
Cold pressed oils could also fall in this category (more or less).
Vs.
> Such oils have been part of human culture for millennia. Oils such as poppy seed, rapeseed, linseed, almond oil, sesame seed, safflower, and cottonseed were variously used since at least the Bronze Age in the Middle East.[1]
Like, I don't know. Maybe seed oils are bad. But every article pushing this idea starts by wildly overstating the case and making assertions like this. To me this seems like another diet fad.
Curiously, that article only mentions olive oil, which is not a seed oil under discussion, and actually makes no mention of "poppy seed, rapeseed, linseed, almond oil, sesame seed, safflower, and cottonseed" at all.
Vegetable oils are fine and the fears are unfounded. Here is a far better explanation.
https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...
Healing with Whole Foods covered this nicely.
What? I know several vegans and none of them think seed oils are bad.
- fast food
- nearly all processed snacks (chips, cookies, etc)
Cutting out seed oils is a good heuristic even if only to serve as a compass for avoiding foods that are widely accepted to be unhealthy. If you dig deeper, you may come to the conclusion, as I have, that these foods are unhealthy because of the seeds oils in them (in part).
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods...
By all means, focus your ire on snack foods. Or seed oils. Or whatever the latest trend says is unhealthy.
My point, every time this comes up, is that "processed" is uselessly vague, unless you really do believe that adding any amount of salt/sugar/fat is harmful to human health. I believe that many people using the term do not actually know its definition and merely use it as shorthand for some nebulous set of foods they believe are "too artificial", without seriously considering which aspects of those foods should qualify them for inclusion.
What it says in the linked article: HEART DISEASE In another study, the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, participants who increased their consumption of corn oil and margarine had 86% more heart attacks, and for those aged 65 or older, a higher risk of death after four years
What the linked study says: Conclusions: Available evidence from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat in the diet with linoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol but does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes. Findings from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment add to growing evidence that incomplete publication has contributed to overestimation of the benefits of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid.
I couldn't figure out exactly where they got the 86% figure from, but the study found a significant negative effect: "There was a 22% higher risk of death for each 30 mg/dL (0.78 mmol/L) reduction in serum cholesterol" [resulting from vegetable oil consumption]. This is in accordance with what the article says.
TFA:
"The group consuming more vegetable oil had a 62% higher rate of death during the seven-year study compared to the group eating less vegetable oil. . .To put that into perspective, of the commonly cited diet and lifestyle risk factors, only severe obesity and heavy smoking are more dangerous"
The study in question, emphasis mine:
n=458 "Eligible patients were men aged 30-59 years admitted . . . for an episode of acute myocardial infarction (86%), or acute coronary insufficiency or angina (14%) . . . The intervention group received instructions to increase their PUFA [PolyUnsaturated Fatty Acid] intake to about 15% of food energy, and to reduce their intake of SFA[Saturated Fatty Acid] and dietary cholesterol to less than 10% of food energy and 300 mg per day, respectively. To achieve these targets. . . Liquid safflower oil was substituted for animal fats, common margarines and shortenings in cooking oils, salad dressings, baked goods, and other products, and was also taken as a supplement. . .Safflower oil is a concentrated source of [Omega]-6 LA and contains no other reported PUFAs Therefore, the intervention oil selectively increased [Omega]-6 LA without a concurrent increase in [Omega]-3 PUFAs."
TFA represents it as a population wide conclusion about all people consuming "more" "vegetable" oils, and then has the audacity to directly compare this misrepresentation to the results of large scale longitudinal and prospective studies, comparing it to a sedentary lifestyle, smoking, etc. Absolutely ridiculous. Like I actually think that's a valuable study to have read, but the Author's article is being sensationalist and dishonest with their representation.
FWIW as someone who reads a fair amount about nutrition to the point I consider it a hobby; I don't find this result on Safflower oil surprising, but the sensationalism in TFA is insane. There is a lot to unpack with that study–are people in that group predisposed to having biological processing or other confounding factors that make high Omega-6:Omega-3 diets particularly unhealthy? Is there something specifically bad about linoleic acid, or perhaps about a fatty acid regimen of specifically and primarily linoleic acid?
why are americans so obsessed with these things? you can't live forever, and the older i get (nearly 70, now) the the less i feel like carrying on, and the less i worry about things like oils.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarod...
I specifically buy California olive oil because external attempts to verify (eg genetic assays) have found it actually is what it says it is.
For a long time, I was able to get California Olive Ranch (which was generically fine), but that brand has switched to a blend from various countries.
Why would it be unhealthy if the fat used is not unhealthy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...
In the uk I often find non-virgin coconut oil hidden in the Caribbean section of a big supermarket.
Sunflower oil doesn't do that, and is healthier.
You can get fats from whole foods like nuts and seeds. For instance, hummus is made with tahini.
This is because you aren't using hydrochloric acid to clean the stain, as our guts do all the time.
One reason people don’t care about consuming unhealthy seed oils is the simplicity of eating packaged foods - cheap and convenient.
I try to almost 100% avoid packaged foods and this system of eating is a HUGE hassle and time sink. I will compromise and for example use a Falafel mix instead of grinding fava beans and chickpeas, but otherwise buy whole grains in bulk, fresh vegetables, meat, and fruit. I only bake bread a few times a month so I also buy bread from a local bakery. This takes a lot of effort so I would not necessarily recommend this system to other people.
Usually I convert “fried food” recipes to simmer in water or vegetable broth, then add a tablespoon of olive oil after the food has been removed from cooking heat. Easy to do, and I think tastes better.
Regarding the section quoted below: this doesn't appear to have any statistical coherence, since naive calculations like this tend to make many implicit unwarranted assumptions.
'If heavy smoking (a pack of cigarettes per day) increases risk of death by 80% and increasing vegetable oil consumption (by 12% of calories) increases risk of death by 62%, we can use some back-of-the-napkin math to infer that every 5% increase in daily calories from vegetable oil is as dangerous as smoking 7 cigarettes per day.
Another way of looking at it: each additional teaspoon of vegetable oil you consume could increase your risk of death as much as smoking 2 cigarettes. '
So much for the reductionist and simplistic "calories in and out" trope brought up frequently on here.
How is one supposed to even approximate the energy balance without a fully body composition (dexa) scan every week?
I think we were referring to different sites of energy conversion.
think of it as a curriculum
Granted, this is me, a physicist, thinking simplistically. But it's what's always made me skeptical about metabolism.
There's really not much variation in metabolism. Most peoples' metabolisms are within ~10% of the average. [0]
Of course, even a very small variation adds up when compounded over years. 100 extra calories a day is a 10 pound weight gain per year.
But the variation itself is actually small. No one can "eat twice as much and not gain weight."
What doesn't work very well is "curing" fat people by just telling them to eat less. Yes it would work if they could just eat less, but it does not address their actual problem which is the compulsion to over eat. Might as well try to cure alcoholics by telling them not to drink. So I understand why over eaters get upset about it, it's not like they don't know they eat too much and they don't want to be so fat. Though advancing the conspiracy theory that food intake has little to no bearing on weight is not a helpful response to that either.
While that is a significant difference, I still think calorie counting gives a useful estimate, since people eat many foods and the error reduces in aggregate, as some are overestimated and others are underestimated.
In addition, people are not rabbits and may have evolved digestive systems better adapted to reheated fats since the invention of cooking (evidence of campfires 1-2 My ago).
That's how models work. They are simplified ideas to help people understand things. They're not intended to be an all encompassing theory of everything. Just like "supply and demand" works but breaks down in certain circumstances. In general "calories in, calories out" does work. The body may adapt, various foods affect you differently, but CICO is not a heretical idea.
CICO is neither a religion nor a complete explanation of metabolism. It’s a super simplified model that leads to some useful practical conslusions (eg it’s easier to eat less to lose weight than exercise more, some foods will make you more fat than others relative to how full they make you feel).
It’s super accessible, you can look up the calories of whatever you eat and whatever exercise you do.
I’ve seen lots of valid complaints about CICO, but never a suggestion for an alternative that’s similarly useful with even the same magnitude of simplicity.
Note I take CICO to mean bio-available calories roughly equals base metabolic rate plus exercise out for the average person. Actual energy-balance “draw a box around a person” joules in equals joules out is unhelpfully reductionist.
To me the issues comes down to how people deal with the simplicity: when we’re told we don’t have to think hard and focus on reading numbers on a label, it’s comforting enough to not want to get back to the cold hard truth. Even when it doesn’t work, it’s just simpler to blame people (including us) than to try to think hard again.
People hate disclaimers and caveats. You can provide as many disclaimers and caveats as you want with the ultra simple theory, they will be forgotten instantly, only the simple part will remain, evolve on its own and live its life as a meme.
I’m with you that it should be fine if it’s a net positive for the vast majority of people. But it’s now the prevalent advice, and looking the stats it doesn’t seem to have a positive effect. If anything, we now know the meme advice doesn’t work for most people.
If people don't or can't measure CI or CO then you can blame them for being wrong. All of this flies in the face of the fact that your body should be able to regulate this for you, which would make manual calorie counting in your head or via apps obsolete.
So there are only two possibilities left. Either our bodies are defective and we need crutches like machine assisted calorie counting or our bodies work just fine but there are some weaknesses that can be exploited and calorie counting is just a technique for defending against those who exploit them.
And no I don't mean there is an evil conspiracy by the food industry. Your obese parents telling you to eat two pizza per day can be equally exploitative because listening to parents' orders is higher priority than listening to what your body says about how many calories you have consumed.
He's certainly not going to be very motivated to tell y'all about studies showing that he is staking his time and money and reputation on a nonsense product. It's embarrassing that y'all upvoted this.
Apparently the author does not consider olive oil to be a vegetable oil. Huh? As I understand it, a vegetable oil is an oil extracted from a plant and olives are the fruiting body of a plant.
Olives are vegetables. Their oil is a vegetable oil. If the author claims otherwise, they are just factually wrong.
The Cochrane Collaboration is kind of the gold standard for medical research review studies. In my search I ran across this recent open-access Cochrane review of only randomized clinical trials:
Hooper L, Martin N, Jimoh OF, Kirk C, Foster E, Abdelhamid AS. Reduction in saturated fat intake for cardiovascular disease. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2020, Issue 8. Art. No.: CD011737. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD011737.pub3.
<https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...>
They conclude that over the four or so years in the 16 RCTs they reviewed, the decreases in all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality due to lower saturated fat intake, if any, were too small to detect with the usual p-values, but their measure of combined cardiovascular events did decrease significantly, with a RR CI from 0.70 to 0.98.
On the face of it, this sounds kind of optimistic for the thesis that saturated fat is fine: are heart attacks really that bad if they don't increase your risk of dying? Maybe there was some countervailing health benefit, like you're more likely to die of a heart attack but less likely to die of cancer or an accident. And they have some quotes with a remarkably low degree of hedging: "Critical importance. Reducing saturated fat intake probably makes little or no difference to cardiovascular mortality."
But I don't think it's actually that optimistic, for three reasons. The numbers I've looked at so far don't suggest an actual protective effect; the average death rates and cardiovascular death rates in the intervention groups (with lower saturated fat) were still lower, just not significantly so. Presumably part of the reason for that is that, almost necessarily, fewer experimental subjects had a heart attack and died from it than merely had a heart attack. But that would only account for wider confidence intervals.
I think the stronger argument is that the studies were only for (an average of) four years or so, and usually it takes about 50 years for cardiovascular disease to kill you on a standard unhealthy "Western" diet (and this is an aspect of "Westernization" we didn't get from the Song Dynasty). So it's really pretty alarming that lowering saturated fat intake significantly reduces the "combined cardiovascular event" rate over only four years. Presumably there is progressive damage (or recovery) if you continue the intervention for ten or twenty years.
The third argument is that a stroke that doesn't kill you can still be pretty bad.
I'm not any kind of expert on public health (that would be my ex-wife the epidemiologist) or on nutrition, so I could easily be overlooking something important. In fact, I overlook important things in fields where I am an expert all the time. But I don't think Jeff Nobbs is an expert either; he's a startup founder and restaurateur, and this post seems to be a sales pitch for his vegetable-oil-substitution business (according to https://www.jeffnobbs.com/about). Searching in Google Scholar finds literally zero publications by him in any area, especially including nutrition. And in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34283915 it looks like Nifty3929 caught him saying that one of the studies said something very different from what it actually did say. So I think I'll trust the Cochrane Collaboration instead.
by 'refined carbs' do you mean white flour
because white flour consumption was also pretty high in the usa a century ago
regardless, the topic at hand is the health effects of different kinds of fats, and it turns out that different kinds of fats do seem to have significant health effects (despite what effects other macronutrients like carbohydrate may or may not have) and that those effects run in the opposite direction to what nobbs is proposing