Demand for seed-oil-free foods is growing
foodnavigator.com
foodnavigator.com
https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...
If you don’t want to read the whole thing skip to the discussion.
>It may be true that vegetable oils are food items that represent a stark divergence from traditional dietary norms. However, it does not appear as though these oils are uniquely causal of the chronic diseases we face in the modern, industrialized world. In fact, vegetable oils likely have a beneficial role to play in the prevention of many diseases— particularly heart disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus, and potentially skin cancer. Vegetable oils could plausibly have a beneficial role to play in preventing degeneration of the macula, fatty liver disease, and perhaps some auto-immune diseases.
>This in-depth analysis could find no persuasive evidence of harm with vegetable oils for any of the investigated endpoints. Vegetable oils seemed to have no consistent effect on the risk of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, obesity, or cognitive decline. Though there are many proposed mechanisms by which vegetable oils have been suggested to be harmful to humans, the actual human outcome data does not seem to support the importance of these mechanisms for these endpoints. If the outcomes consistently contradict our mechanistic speculations, the mechanisms are probably not interacting with those outcomes in the way we suspect.
These beliefs lead some people to cook exclusively with olive oil. And so most of their food tastes like olive oil, because it's not neutral.
Now, A bottle of good sunflower oil is somewhere between 1 and 1.5 euro at the local market. While a bottle of good olive oil is between 10 and 15 euro.
I enjoy my sunflower oil for most things that I cook, and I use olive oil for the stuff that demands it. If you cannot provide any serious evidence, it's just a marketing piece for non seed oils, whose manufacturers are not doing well due to the current economy and how expensive they can be.
But iirc sunflower demands greater land areal vs olives for same yield, and the shorter cycle process ought also then cause more CO2.
So I suspect although olive oil is more expensive, but environmentally a better choice.
Is there any strong evidence that see oils are distinctly worse than other fats and oils? Or is it just snake oil?
"We conclude that virtually no evidence is available from randomized, controlled intervention studies among healthy, noninfant human beings to show that addition of LA to the diet increases the concentration of inflammatory markers"
see: Effect of dietary linoleic acid on markers of inflammation in healthy persons: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22889633/
> "The strength of the evidence is hotly disputed however, and not all health experts agree that seed oils are a cause for concern."
I suspect this is a "submarine" article for the Seed Oil Free Alliance that is mentioned throughout.
There is real evidence that the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fats in the diet has measurable impacts to health outcomes. Unsaturated fats (those which contain carbon <-> carbon double bonds, rather than each carbon being "saturated" with 3 hydrogen atoms and a single carbon <-> carbon bond) are classified by where that double bond takes place. The alpha carbon atom is at the carboxylic acid end and the omega carbon is at the end of the "tail". Omega-9, Omega-6, Omega-3 are telling you where the double-bond exists, relative to the end of the tail. These molecules can have slightly different behaviors inside the body, despite being highly similar.
The reason that fish oil supplements sometimes show positive health outcomes is because they are high in omega-3s and help bring balance to the overall diet of people who eat an omega-6 heavy diet. People whose diets aren't overbalanced towards omega-6 don't see any positive impact from fish oil supplements.
All that said, the impact is quite small. Avoiding seed oils often has the practical impact of avoiding ultraprocessed snack foods or shifting people's eating away from packaged foods towards fresh, whole foods, which have numerous positive impacts (less sugar, less microbiome-disrupting preservatives, less artificial colors, more fiber, more vitamins, etc) and so at population-level it can work as a reasonable proxy for "healthy" versus "unhealthy" food choices.
TL;DR - seed oils have a sub-optimal ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids. People should try to eat an overall diet which gives them a higher omega-3 to omega-6 ratio than seed oils will provide. Seed oils can be an acceptable part of a diet as long as this ratio is balanced by other meals. Overall, the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is a relatively minor part of health, and a focus on sugar, total calories, sugar, fiber, sugar, protein, sugar, vitamins, sugar and minerals is the more important thing.