Seeing a headline about cow farts burning the earth down, breathing [or insert flavor of the month random daily behavior] linked to depression, and throw in a dash of chemical imbalance causes [problem only treated by highly profitable medication] is all enough to make me ask, maybe no one has the answers?
We mostly understand physical processes. The bits we do understand let’s us build trains, make them run on time, and stuff a supercomputer into your pocket that lets you argue with anyone in the world in real-time. That’s a lot. But it’s not comprehensive. Biology is just too complex to study by isolating a single variable. We are basically into linear algebra at this point to make any headway, are we not? Analyzing multivariate situations to isolate patterns.
It does select for a certain personality, but the ultimate cause is creating the situation for those kinds of broken souls to flourish to the detriment of everyone else.
Biology is really difficult to investigate when you get to the sophistication of humans. Thats before the perverse incentives brought on by funding sources.
People quick to call everything woo are almost never actually scientists themselves, and have made science into a sort of infallible religion, e.g. scientism.
I also don’t like it when people claim these things are backed by mechanistic understanding when they are not. I guess that is partly what gets them labeled as woo. It’s okay to say “this seems to work really good but we have no idea why.”
Politicians claim they are 100% certain they know how a policy will affect the economy or social environment in the future. They are lying and they know it, but humans rely on confidence as a cue for information reliability, so politicians, click-baiters, and advertisers use confidence as a rhetorical tool. This creates an environment where the simple act of saying "I'm not sure" is equivalent to saying "I'm wrong."
Think of it like a thermostat with leptin being a temperature sensor hooked up to the heater, and the gravitostat is a temperature sensor hooked up the A/C. If you're trying to make the house cooler it doesn't matter how much you tell the heater not to turn on.
Edible oils are those that are not produced from something that was never food.
You're talking about refined oils. This method of extraction has a higher yield and is therefore less expensive. It also increases the smoke point of the oil, making it more suitable for high-temperature frying and deep frying.
While I don't know what's available to consumers where you live, solvents and other chemical treatment are not required for vegetable oil production. Seeds can be cold extracted. The result is much more expensive though.
"the output is novel to humans on evolutionary scale"
This is true for all oils and all other highly processed foods.
"they come from inedible waste which for millions of years has been discarded - seeds etc"
Seeds are not waste. Do you think bread is made from waste?
The notion of using "waste" comes from the production of refined oils. The seeds are initially pressed, resulting in oil and meal as the byproduct. The meal still contains some oil which is extracted with solvents. After the solvent treatment, the meal is used as animal food.
>> "the output is novel to humans on evolutionary scale" > > This is true for all oils and all other highly processed foods.
That is not true. There is evidence that humans have sought out fats and oils for most of our history. Lard and other rendered fats are made from heating animal fats directly with modest heat being sufficient to liquify animal fats. Butter is made from churning milk. Olive oil and Coconut oil are made by squeezing fruits. All of that is quite different from modern vegetable oil processing which requires high temperatures which in turn convert a fraction of the oil into transfats. When oils refined in these ways are then used for cooking they become increasingly dangerous as they are heated.
This has then lead to the popular misconception that fat inherently makes you fat.
There's a reason we switched to ultraprocessed foods. And that reason largely isn't money, but too many people dying from lack of protection against natural adversaries.
It has nothing to do with ultra processed food (unless you imagine people eating raw wheat straight from the plant), plenty of people live without that, just fine, if not better actually
Having said that, we may need to preserve a subculture to keep the practice if we ever need it (just for diversification purposes, in case we lose other grains to disease or change in climate).