Dysregulation of hypothalamic gene expression by soybean oil in mice (2020)

Let’s upend diets on this latest fad of studies! No matter that both historical and modern trends raise questions about the conclusion, let’s upend people diets!

Happy now?

P.s. Also skeptical doesn’t mean that something isn’t possible. Just a word to the wise.

Look, I know you can't hear this, but these papers are really bad. They cite papers that have really poorly designed experiments that don't actually show what they claim to show. It's surprising, but you can publish papers that are obviously wrong.

Here's a non-scientific analogy: say you're on a desert island, and there are a bunch of rabbits and one wolf (you can also see the whole island from wherever you stand - it's extremely small - so you know there's nothing else hiding anywhere). You immediately throw the wolf into a solar-powered wood chipper, and subsequently observe that the rabbits and healthy and happy. But then a year later all the rabbits are gone. You then tell me: "I know, the wolf must have eaten them!" Uh...no. They drowned and floated away, or dug burrows underground, or you ate them in a fever dream and forgot about it. But the wolf has been gone for a long time.

Your digestive tract is basically the wood chipper. Exosomes are little droplets of oil that contain water and other water-soluble molecules on the inside. But bile (which your body produces) will dissolve them. Everything that's on the inside spills out and is digested further.

RNA and DNA that might be inside exosomes also gets digested. You produce enzymes that chop them up into individual bases, so any information they contained is destroyed. A double wood chipper!

So when I read these papers and they claim miRNAs in exosomes are flooding all over your body, I have to wonder how they measured that. And the answer is: never by sequencing, which would be definitive. They always use some method that is guaranteed to generate false positives, like just using a fat-soluble dye to label the exosomes. That dye is going to keep infiltrating the body long after the exosomes themselves have been digested. Or they just mix exosomes with cell cultures and pretend like that's meaningful.

Again, I urge people to abandon any non-plant based foods, but these claims about miRNA are unscientific and contradict an enormous body of evidence.