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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Let me remind readers what happened in 1960-1990: the big saturated fat scare, and the push towards low fat (i.e. high sugar) diets.

People STILL to this day are afraid of eating butter, yet consume margarine, seed oils (vegetable oils are the worst type of food known to man) and hundreds of grams in sugar EVERY DAY. And in many places, I bet in here too, this is still controversial and the only mode of dieting people know is eating less fat and less meat, as if they ever were the problem.

Keto and low carb diets are still described as "fad diets" on Wikipedia, and I wonder whose silly agenda they are pushing. If it is the one of the official health dept of Western governments, it should be clear that what is claimed to be healthy it is obviously not, and made even more dubious due to major lobbying from Big Food.

The same Big Food that has just won with the popularity of GLP-1 agonists: why eat healthy when you can eat packaged crap and take a pill?

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> vegetable oils are the worst type of food known to man

Of course, this is wrong.

I knew I had to qualify for the pedantics. Vegetable seed oils are the worst type of food known to man, and I stand by it. The research is just a google away.

Vegetable pulp oil (i.e. coconut, extra virgin olive oil, etc.) is alright, if not beneficial.

Any RCT's showing it is incredibly more dangerous than butter or other vegetable oils?

Yes, there was the Minnesota Coronary Survey which was an RCT on polyunsaturated fats vs saturated fats. It was launched intending to prove the opposite conclusion, but ended up proving that polyunsaturated fats cause significantly higher mortality rates than saturated fats. It's hard to do better than this as a study because it's an RCT that did not rely on self-reported data (it was conducted in hospitals and nursing homes), and it measured a variable that's challenging to fake and relevant to health (death).

A [meta-analysis of all RCTs](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28526025/) seems to suggest there's no real difference between these kinds of fats. Is there a particular reason you are using only one study to draw strong conclusions?

Can you provide some of this research that's just a google away? What do you even mean by "the worst type of food known to man"? The worst in what way?

Sorry, but this is not me being pedantic. Many vegtable seed oils also have beneficial micronutrients. For example linseed oil has a lot of Omega-3. Sunflower oil has Vitamin E and K.

"Worst type of food known to man" is a very strong statement, and surely there's a long list of foods that come before vegetable seed oils.

I'd never eat linseed oil. Lookup what it's used for historically, varnishing and what not. That rancidification and cross-linking is something you def don't want happening in your body.

Just because something is used for varnishing doesn't mean it's unhealthy. Can you post any serious and credible source that says linseed oil is unhealthy?

It's trash. Unedible. You know how even in the mainstream, it is common knowledge that burnt oil is bad? Linseed doesn't even need to heat up to start reacting.

Opinions about food are full of excessive generalizations that are of little help.

There is no logical reason to expect that seeds, in general—carrying the energy for new life, containing the most valuable and precious resources—would constitute the "worst" food ingredient known to mankind.

Of course not wrong, it was lobbyied into existence.

Some of the healthiest and long-living people live on diets that are high on vegetables and vegetable oils (e.g. the Mediterranean diet).

Olive oil is not a seed oil.

There is also what seems like 10 times the amount of fast food restaurants, way larger portion sizes, the explosion of casual dining chains in the 1980's and 1990's...

You might enjoy this "Funny or Die" skit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ua-WVg1SsA

Well and people quit smoking, and people cooked and ate at home then because women didn't work as much.

McDonald's used to fry in beef fat. Now? Lowest-tier vegetable oil

Blame the vegans. (or possibly the 7th Day Adventists.)

Haha that's funny, but if there is someone to blame it is actually, Phil Solokoff, Jewish businessman who lobbied heavily and shamed McDonald's into the change

> vegetable oils are the worst type of food known to man

actually, there is no evidence that the commonly consumed vegetable seed oils such as sunflower, corn, canola, soy, peanut, safflower, cottonseed, walnut, linseed, etc., are harmful at all, except when rancid, trans, or hydrogenated. there was a long period when they were believed to be harmful simply because they were fats, but we now know that was wrong

there's a lot of old research where they were conflated with high-trans-fat-content partially-hydrogenated versions of themselves, and we now know that the trans fats were the major problem there. there was a period when it was believed that low ω-3 fatty acid levels relative to ω-6 levels were causing inflammation, and some people do see improvements in health when they eat more ω-3, but both ω-3 and ω-6 fatty acids are unsaturated fatty acids of the kind you find predominantly in vegetable seed oils; that's not a question of eating more or less seed oils but of which ones you eat. (and the ω-3 effect turned out to be fairly small on a population level.)

finally, there's a certain fanatical contingent that is convinced that unsaturated fatty acids in general (seed oils, fish oil) are terrible, and saturated fat (coconut oil, beef) is what's good for you, but this is basically completely unsupported by the evidence. a and there's a mountain of evidence against it. see https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-... for a deeper dive

the trans fats are a big problem. a lot of those veggie oils turn into trans fats with high heat, so even if you're using the "good oils" you gotta make sure they're not overly heated

do you know of good research on how fast the trans fat levels rise with normal cooking temperatures? i'd like to know if i'm poisoning myself by frying eggs

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9002916/

this is fantastic, exactly what i was hoping for! i wonder how i hadn't found this article before. thank you!

(also it's hilarious that the article's academic editor is named "meat hacker" in german)

the abstract says

> Overall, heating to temperatures <200 °C had no appreciable impact on different TFA levels. Between 200 and 240 °C, levels of C18:2 t (0.05% increase per 10 °C rise in temperature, 95% CI: 0.02 to 0.05%), C18:3t (0.18%, 95% CI: 0.14 to 0.21%), and total TFA (0.38%, 95% CI: 0.20 to 0.55%) increased with temperature. A further increase in total TFA was observed with prolonged heating between 200 and 240 °C. Our findings suggest that heating edible oils to common cooking temperatures (≤200 °C) has minimal effect on TFA generation whereas heating to higher temperatures can increase TFA level.

so i probably shouldn't worry too much about frying eggs in sunflower oil

Big Corn also Big Soy.

You lose all credibility with the butter is good nonsense. You can't even buy the unhealthy margarines anywhere. They have not been a thing for decades.

Where do you get it is bad? It's a staple of many cultures, way healthier than your. India upper class? France? Europe?

“If you’re afraid of butter, use cream.”

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