Harvard study finds seed oils healthier than butter
producer.com
producer.com
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr Guasch-Ferré reported grants from the Novo Nordisk Foundation and the International Nut and Dried Fruit Council outside the submitted work. Dr Willett reported grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study. Dr Stampfer reported grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported.
The International Nut and Dried Fruit Council may or may not be a conflict of interest about seed oils.
NIH and Novo Nordisk wouldn't be.
> I wish we could get studies without any conflicts of interest
You'd need to have a whole lot more public funding of research than we already do, if we're going to have the entire academic world not do any research for industry.
In this case, they didn't produce new data and made a relatively straightforward analysis. So the opportunities for shenanigans when other people can reproduce and evaluate the results are limited.
There's far more lucrative shenanigans that pay off much sooner :P
In one of the other narratives (LA makes cell membranes less flexible) it takes about 5 years of avoiding seed oils for enough LA to leave the cell membranes to reverse metabolic disease.
Why do you doubt that there’s a conflict there?
[1] emphasis on "plausible," as opposed to confirmed
If you did the basic research, then mandated 10 replications for each novel outcome (or whatever, some sort of structured process needs to be created), and then put up replication grants to fund it, you'd filter out the noise. The NIH and Congress and other government entities should have some number of yearly slots for replication grants, so that should the public or some agency have an interest in validating the findings of a paper, they can direct their representatives to pursue it, and so forth.
We have an enormous amount of money, an amazing system of research labs and universities and private corporations in the US, we just need a reliable and intentional system to use those things to best effect.
It's unfortunate but now I have little faith in health studies related to food.
Years later everyone went crazy banning trans fat.
I'll stick with butter and live with the health consequences (if any).
> It's unfortunate but now I have little faith in health studies related to food.
As someone who was taught the "food pyramid" in school, I'm firmly on the side of trust body builders and 'bro science' not the government.
You're in luck. Here's a strong bald man to tell you about seed oils:
In Ithaca though we have a population of hypochondriacs who are notoriously left wing.
Alternative ideas about the healthiness of fats have circulated a long time
https://www.amazon.com/Fats-That-Heal-Kill-Cholesterol/dp/09...
is the first one I saw against ‘seed oils’, certainly alternative ideas about the healthiness of cholesterol and saturated fats have been circulating a long time. What is different is the polarization of the post-COVID environment but the polarization is such that you find people who don’t think we are post COVID.
Avoiding poison is a "quick, easy fix" to the consequences of that poison (or the opposite in the case of vitamin deficiency). Whether there's any reason to believe seed oils are harmful, I have no clue, but the idea that we could be en-masse consuming something harmful has dozens of precedents.
Seed oil theorists will tell you they cause... a lot more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_oil_misinformation
> The theme of the misinformation is that seed oils are the root cause of most diseases of affluence, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and liver spots.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/doppelganger-a-trip-into-the-mi...
European politics is itself in a death spiral of the center left and center right forming an emotionally false coalition whereas the AfD looks emotionally truer by the day.
The Democrats still haven't had that "come to Jesus" moment, as evidence by both the treatment of Bernie in 2016 and Kamala's total unwillingness to talk about any of the populist parts of Biden's economic policy (antitrust, pro-labor, stronger regulation, etc), and it's what's cost them the 2016 and 2024 elections - neoliberalism has failed, and the longer the Democrats pretend that's not the case, the longer they're going to be out in the electoral cold.
"If your Naomi be Klein You're doing just fine If your Naomi be Wolf Oh buddy, big oof."
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n11/elaine-mokhtefi/diar...
What does the phrase "post-covid" even mean in a population with actively circulating covid? I don't think such a concept is even possible at this point.
There is a population of people today though who have internalized the threat of COVID as a core part of their identity such as one of those Ithaca hypochondriacs that doesn’t get invited to parties because the only thing she’s wanted to talk about since 2021 is face masks.
I imagine if you have a reason to be that scared of covid (e.g. immunocompromised or -adjacent) to propose that someone exclude a threat to their physical health from their identity seems like an impossible ask. The risk isn't imaginary, and it's notably higher than the pre-covid world. There is no going back.
Not sure why it's so hard to grasp that COVID allowed certain demographics to see how little society actually has regard for them.
My son lost two years of in-personal schooling which contributed to some serious problems he's had getting launched into adult life. The models that the education-industrial complex users, which I don't believe [1] tend to take the position that you can't get back what you lose when you lose something. My son is getting a lot of help from myself and others and I think he's going to do OK but you can't make the case that lockdowns were free or that people who had mental health vulnerabilities didn't take their own lives because of the effects of the lockdowns.
You'd better believe that many people think that people like yourself have very little regard for them. It's pretty easy to grasp if you understand just how poisonous political polarization is.
[1] ... or don't believe in letting apply to myself and my family
I had the same group of people living and doing yoga in a castle near my mother's home, that i would have described as left-wing hypocondriacs, extremely skeptics of modern medecine. A majority voted "right-wing" at the last european elections.
So using left-wing or right-wing is not a good way to describe this kind of group. They clearly have a minority habitus that could push them to vote "left-wing" (as long a they are not in power), but also share an anti-science sentiment that can push tehm easily towards a populist right (populist != bad in my eyes, i do think populism in politics is necessary.
They usually are left-wing because they are often parasites who always take more than they give. They like being in a group or community but it rarely lasts and work over time because of how exploitative and dishonest they usually are.
I know some very interesting specimens and my mother is one of them; not entirely because she made a decent amount of money in a public career, but now that she is retired it has become a lot more apparent.
Those people are not left because of values/principle, they just go with whatever is the most extreme version of something that looks like it will benefit them. Which is why they will gladly vote far-right, if they can see the benefits. The rise of far-right populists that try to sell a version of collectivism not far removed from the far left-version is why it is happening.
Prayer in schools, which has passed out of the Gartner Culture War hype cycle, seems like another one of those head scratchers.
Although frankly, with the way the propaganda machine is well oiled and constantly running, it’s easy to whip up opposition to anything.
Pick something almost everyone does and then claim that it is the source of the current great social ill... social media... profit! For bonus points use the phrases "cleanse", "detox", "inflammation", "processed", "all-natural" bereft of meaning.
I mean, it's not like the health effects of an oil would depend on what seed, or what quantity, or how you cook, or what other activities you do, is it?
p.s. all the silicon in your computer was inorganically grown!
Also, fiber advice is complete nonsense. There are now plenty of studies showing that fiber causes more problems, especially for people who get easily constipated.
The fiber bullshit comes precisely from bad science, that is directed by wants and political opinions, especially those of women in that case.
Fiber advice has come around because for some reason, it was thought that defecating more often is better and women like to "work" on their transit because of them wanting to look as fin as possible at all times. So, they make you eat very low energy (and nutriments) food to make you shit more often, just because.
Burning point of oil/fat however is a data which is extremely important when you cook, and you should avoid frying food with oil at a low burning point. If you want to use a specific oil for the taste, use first an oil without taste and a high burning point, then after the vegetables are cooked, add your unrefined sesame oil and sear for like 10 second maximum while mixing everything.
It’s also a straightforward thing to test for, assuming you can define “inflammation” without weird woo-pseudoscience.
Marketing departments and politicians are very good at using this to their advantage.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but this data is nearly useless.
Except for specific cases that are not common (dietary restrictions of all kinds), it seems like you should mostly consume the things you traditionally associate with being "healthy", but also give yourself some wiggle room.
Get your blood work done and see a doctor regularly - if there are no issues, you're probably fine. If you're not, I doubt the reduction of seed oils in your diet would've remedied that.
That said, I hope this is right. As someone who is allergic to dairy it would be nice to know that the substitutes I'm consuming aren't significantly worse for me, and it would be great to see more dairy free options for foods although the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction (for example, the amount of "dark" chocolate with milk in it is astounding, and brands that were reliably true dark chocolates have started adding milk too)
Regardless, the science behind this is so political and complex none of us will get a definitive answer in our lifetimes. RFK jr has just as much of an agenda and the large corps profiting from these oils.
Keep an open mind and try things out. I’ve personally benefited from eating simpler. Nothing overly processed and trying to eat the way my ancestors likely did. Chestertons fence applies just as much to diet and nutrition as it does software.
Such as?
The conclusion of the study mentions a few specific oils for what it's worth.
> ...replace animal fats like butter with nonhydrogenated vegetable oils that are high in unsaturated fats, especially olive, soy, and canola oil.
This refining usually involves: Extracting it using hexane, degumming with maleic anhydride and/or citric acid, neutralizing with sodium hydroxide, bleaching with clay, activated charcoal, and/or hydrogen peroxide. Then dewaxed with some combination of methyl ethyl ketone, toluene, dipropylene glycol and ethylene glycol, and finally deoderized via steam distillation.
There's legitimate science about them dating back to the late 80s/early 90s.
In 1999 Sally Fallon published a book called Nourishing Traditions which argued for rejecting modern industrial foods. A lot of the arguments you see today about seed oils originate from this book.
These got amplified in 2014 by Nina Teicholz who published a book called The Big Fat Surprise which made it the topic de jure of alternative health influencers.
Then it's been a steady build across social media for about a decade.
They used survey results from the Nurses Health Study (NHS), which are decades long studies, still running, where participants fill out a food frequency questionnaire once every few on how often they ate various foods.
Not only do these questionnaires rely on memory, they rely on memory of a perception, because people don't actually measure how many cups of broccoli they eat each day. It's the worst quality of data. It's a memory of a guess, there is no measurement involved whatsoever, which is why I hesitate to even call it data.
Not only is the data itself low quality, it is compounded by lifestyle factors that are impossible to fully correct for. As an example, people that eat red meat are more likely to smoke and have diabetes, more likely to eat fast food, more likely to exercise less, etc etc. Eating foods that are perceived as healthy is correlated with healthy lifestyles. Butter has been "unhealthy" for years, so it is almost certainly correlated with an unhealthy lifestyle.
The nurses health study has led to many incorrect conclusions for these very reasons:
- It suggested hormone replacement therapy reduced heart disease risk, but randomized trials later proved it increased it due to confounding factors like healthy user bias.
- It linked vitamin E to lower heart disease risk, but trials found no benefit, showing the association came from health conscious behavior.
- It linked beta carotene to reduced cancer risk, but trials revealed supplements could increase lung cancer risk in smokers, not prevent it.
Many weak associations from the study, like diet and disease, were overstated as causal but didn’t hold up in trials due to confounding and noise.
If you are interested in how often studies like this are wrong, see "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by Ioannidis (spoiler: 70%).
Ok, I guess soon there will be no buying options then.
Cook with: Avocado oil or butter as a secondary alternative
Consume raw: Extra virgin olive, flaxseed, or walnut oil