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Comment by matt_daemon | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that’s sad about Max Chiswick.

I was reading about him and his peculiar approach to eating only a couple of months ago.

May his work on poker live on.

His peculiar approach to eating??? Wow I need to hear about this. I’ll Google, but do you have any recommended articles?

https://chisness.substack.com/p/automate-the-food

Very sad. Max wrote about optimizing nutrition and cited a satire piece about over-optimization ruining someone's life. Then, ironically, he died from malaria while traveling—despite having donated to malaria prevention. Life defies our attempts to control it.

Is this satire or was he a conspiracy theorist? It didn’t take very long into the article before he started talking about “seed oil infiltration”.

My eyes rolled into the back of my head and I was unable to continue reading any more of the article after that

My impression is that he’s sincere, but that his writing is lighthearted and does “overplay” things for humorous effect. That said, I do think he’s opposed to seed oil. Not having looked into it much, I can’t judge whether he’s crazy or not. But even if he’s wrong, who among us _doesn’t_ have some conspiracy-ish views? I’ll go first: I think fruit juice and milk are not “health foods”, and more comparable to soda. We’ve been duped by Big Milk.

Plenty of agricultural subsidies there for sure, but milk and even fruit juice do provide some nutrients (besides sugar and water) so I think it might be overstating the case a little to lump them in with soda.

I don’t think they’re quite as bad as soda, but I do think they’re fairly close. I think this video is what first convinced me (been a long time since I watched, sorry if I’m wrong about small details): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hzyFZcuHmeI&pp=ygUWSGVhbHRoY2F...

I don’t think it requires conspiratorial thinking to believe that seed oils are less healthful than more traditional sources of cooking oils / fats (for one reason or another). Regardless of that, given that seed oils can be produced cheaply and incorporated in to foods to increase profit, “seed oil infiltration” into foods is very real.

It does require conspiratorial thinking because it’s a conspiracy theory.

It’s not a particularly old one either, it started showing up a year or two before Covid if I recall right.

You sound very confident and certain, about something which it is not possible yo be this certain about. How do we know with very high certainty that seed oils are not worse for us, say than olive oil?

I am certain in the same way that I am certain there is not a teapot in the same orbit as earth but conveniently on the opposite side of the sun so that it may never be observed.

The hullabaloo about seed oils showed up roughly 5-6 years ago, has no scientific backing beyond the level that gets you flat earthers and climate change deniers, and is now being touted by people like you as something I must be so confident doesn’t exist that now I have to be the one supplying evidence for the claim.

Add in the normal seed oil enthusiast tropes like Big Pharma and now it’s a conspiracy theory based on nebulous and unproven or actors conspiring against everyone who knows the simple answer of just getting rid of seed oils.

There’s a long history of producers making something unhealthy, and suppressing evidence it is unhealthy (cigarettes, corn syrup, milk formula, bacon, the list is quite long). It’s _not that remarkable_ if they’re doing the same thing here. I don’t believe the seed oil thing, this is my first time hearing about it; I just don’t think it’s hard to believe evidence about seed oil health could be suppressed. Given the long history of deceit in food products, I don’t think it’s crazy for people to ask for evidence in either direction.

" I don’t think it’s crazy for people to ask for evidence in either direction."

That's literally the point of view that Russell's Teapot is demonstrating as fallacious. There needs to be evidence "for" something before you can argue its validity. Arguing for a statement with no evidence is easy, common, and unfortunately absolutely pointless.

The seed oil advocates are not asking for proof that a new substance is healthy before accepting is use. They took something that as existed for as long as humans have known you can crush seeds to get oil out of them, have actively harmful properties that they can explain.

They have no evidence and make active claims. If you want to join their side on that flimsy logic because it sounds mean or you don’t like big pharma then enjoy the company you keep

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