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Comment by alexfromapex | Hacker News Reader

I wish we could get studies without any conflicts of interest to confirm or deny this. This study has a few that we know of:

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.

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> This study has a few that we know of:

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.

If the anti-seed-oil narrative is correct, then Novo Nordisk would have a conflict of interest because the narrative says that seed oils cause metabolic disease, of which type-2 diabetes is an important one.

You're saying that Novo wants to obscure the true causes of metabolic disease to make, decades from now, marginally more from metabolic disease treatments?

There's far more lucrative shenanigans that pay off much sooner :P

In one of the narratives against seed oils (a large fraction of the linoleic acid molecules will be oxidized by the time they are ingested; oxidized LA is a potent cause of free-radical damage) it only takes a few months of avoiding seed oils to significantly reverse metabolic disease (by improving the function of the mitochondria).

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.

> The International Nut and Dried Fruit Council may or may not be a conflict of interest about seed oils.

Why do you doubt that there’s a conflict there?

Seed oils seem to be a tiny, edge portion of their advocacy. It's probably a conflict, but a relatively weak one.

I can think of plausible[1] motives for the NIH and Novo Nordisk that would make it a conflict.

[1] emphasis on "plausible," as opposed to confirmed

If you are going to say that anyone who ever takes public health money -or- private industry money is conflicted, then everyone who ever does -any- research for a living is conflicted.

Most science is junk, yes.

200 billion was spent in 2024 by the US, broadly, on research in general. I think we need to mandate that publicly funded research be open, doesn't get gamed by politics, clout chasing, or other flawed incentives, and we need to deliberately establish replication protocols. We should be establishing fundamental scientific data with rigorous and thorough standards, but people end up doing sloppy, incoherent, politicized papers that are published on behalf of a person or idea or pre-existing conclusion.

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.

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