lithocarpus

Any isolation of certain compounds from whole food from other compounds would be part of what I refer to as processed. In the case of refined oils, I'd call it ultra processed just because of how much is removed - even before considering the chemical contaminants.

Two things can be harmful at once.

I am curious which is worse in terms of contribution to modern chronic metabolic disease.

In the case of ultra-processed/refined oils though, there is an argument to be made that these are novel foods that humans never ate until very recently. There aren't any old people who have been eating them their whole lives in the quantities we do now. This is probably true for industrially refined sugar too, but sugar is a more complex story since people have been concentrating plant sugars for a lot longer than they've been industrially refining oil for food.

I'm not defending sugar though to be clear - I strictly avoid it and even avoid fruit juice and such. I know empirically for myself I feel terrible if I eat very much sugar. I also feel terrible if I eat much refined oil and I strictly avoid that too.

Much olive oil is not refined or ultra processed, but in the US market, 25%+ is.

According to https://www.imarcgroup.com/united-states-olive-oil-market

10% of olive oil in the US market is refined using the same hexane process as canola or soybean oil, and another 15% is refined using other chemical processes.

It's not a seed oil but for many people concerned about ultra processed food including refined oils, it's not the "seed" part but the "refined" part that's the issue, and specifically how it is refined.

Though there is also a concern many have about cooking unsaturated fats at very high temperatures causing oxidation/rancidity/free-radicals and thus oxidative stress which is a primary driver of disease, and seed oils tend to have a lot more unsaturated fat than animal fat. Olive oil is more saturated than seed oils but not as saturated as animal fat so it is more prone to oxidation - i.e. it degrades much easier with heat and goes rancid faster and thus is more likely to be rancid/oxidized when used since we don't usually get it fresh.

A slightly different and no more charitable perspective is that the people pulling the president's strings are the same people pulling Fox News's strings.

Personally I don't trust big pharma or the natural or alternative medicine people who want to sell me things.

Pharma has shown itself untrustworthy too many times, and in general I don't trust big institutions with financial entanglements to have my best interest at heart.

I do have personal experience with some plant medicines being extremely effective at certain things. While most of the time it's hard to prove, some are so obvious that it makes me open to the possibility that the less obvious ones also may be helping. I use plant medicines all the time because they are free or cheap and relatively harmless like real food, in fact they often are food.

That said if I get in a car accident I will go to the hospital. It's not all or nothing.

Yeah.. there should be a prompt that gauges how savvy the user is, and if the user doesn't understand the implications of this, the default should be low precision location data with a random offset per item + random offset per user.

This represents 0.6% of meta's 2025 profits, or 0.2% of revenue. Though presumably it was based on harms from previous years, I haven't read the lawsuit.

Or further, the bets themselves could be an attempt at market manipulation.

Vetted by who?

To be clear I'd be very much in favor of scientific studies and their data having to be publicly available.

But on any controversial area, which is most of the areas anyone cares about, there will be 2+ sides of the issue and any vetting body will be compromised to some degree for one of those sides.

That's a good point. I would like to see long term problems from measles infection studied and better understood, but I also understand how they really can't be studied in the US where measles is extremely rare and I wouldn't advocate bringing it back to find out.

It is similar with covid but I wouldn't say it's quite the same. The measles vaccine seems very effective at preventing infection, while the covid vaccine is not. It might reduce harm from the infection, and whether this reduction in harm outweighs potential harm from the vaccine is not well understood. It may have done so early on when covid itself was more dangerous, and it might not with current strains of covid. I would similarly like to see long term studies comparing two similar populations where one took the vaccine and the other didn't. It's complex.

With covid, in the beginning there simply wasn't time to know if the vaccine was safe. And now that we've had some time, it turns out that longer term placebo controlled studies just were never done, so we still don't know. Once it became clear that the vaccine was very ineffective at preventing infection the choice became a lot easier - get the virus, or get the virus and the vaccine, which are categorically different things.

I'm not happy to get either of them, but I'd rather the one than both. The virus itself appears to have been modified and was certainly novel to humans. The vaccines are novel and hard-to-understand in many many more ways than.

There is also a point to be made about the body being a complex system and introducing novelty to a complex system can have consequences that are unpredictable and hard to understand. Still worth studying though.

Study Finds 82 Percent of Avocado Oil Rancid or Mixed With Other Oils

https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avo...

"In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil"

You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it.

Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)

If I see "avocado oil" as an ingredient, sure it could be simply pressed avocado flesh. But it could also be a rancid hexane-refined oil potentially cut with other stuff, and I'd bet that's more likely because it's probably a lot cheaper for the manufacturer.

I don't know as much about how the starches and proteins are extracted, I'd bet it's more benign, but there are added chemicals - even if they are considered safe, it's still not quite the same as eating actual peas and rice.

FWIW pea protein as used in beyond burger is extracted from peas in an industrial process - it isolates the protein from the rest of the pea.

Your point on cooking is fair. And, I'd still argue that modern processes introduce new types of chemistry that didn't exist in human food until very recently.

No it is not.

Different kinds of fruits from around the world may well have more in common with each other than categorically new synthetic compounds which are found in processed food.

Pretty much all people ate real foods - plants, animals, and fungus, and ferments of these, all over the world. There are categorical chemical differences between this stuff and much modern food.

I agree it's probably healthier to eat wild meat or homegrown meat grown on healthy pasture than it is to eat feedlot meat grown on whatever they feed them there. There are lots of differences between them.

Not particularly because it has more fat though. While it's true that wild deer for example especially in warmer climates can have very little fat, there are plenty of animals that were traditionally eaten all over the world that have much higher proportions of fat. Fish, geese and ducks and many kinds of birds, whales and seals and lots of aquatic mammals, bears, etc.

I'm not trying to argue in favor of industrial beef at all I'm just trying to say that natural animal fat isn't necessarily unhealthy. (I really want to know actually if it is, because I do eat a lot of it, and have for much of my life. As far as I can tell I'm very healthy but I'm always open to learning. I have not yet found any compelling evidence for natural animal fat being bad.)

Study Finds 82 Percent of Avocado Oil Rancid or Mixed With Other Oils

https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avo...

"In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil"

You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it.

Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)

That could be mostly true of some things like the starches, but with the caveat that the industrial processes used today aren't always the same as what was done traditionally or what I might do in my kitchen, and often involve new/synthetic/potentially toxic compounds.

Pea starch might be the most benign of all of these. I'm not making an argument that pea starch is bad either, just that it's not quite the same as peas, and isn't quite the same as home-made pea starch, and we don't really know if this is a problem.

For example, with pea starch, they use defoaming agents like siloxanes, as well as sulfur dioxide, sodium hydroxide, and others. And, because it's a concentrate of just part of the plant, you might get a heavier dose of pesticides or heavy metals depending on what part of the plant these bind with. (Sure, if you eat equal portions of each part of the plant, extracted, this factor would balance out.)

There's a spectrum of course with these things. Some things like refined oils might be far more harmful than the extracted starches based on the chemistry I've looked into. I'm not particularly afraid of pea starch but I just don't buy or eat processed food generally unless I'm in a pinch.

I mean there is a financial incentive to use byproducts of industrial processes that would otherwise be wasted, as food ingredients, and as there is no requirement to rigorously show that new ingredients are safe to consume in the US, this happens all the time and makes up a big portion of the average modern US diet.

Every single study I've seen so far on this topic conflates "red meat" and "processed meat".

I would argue that modern processed meat may well be really bad for us.

I imagine that burned/charred meat is carcinogenic too, same as burnt/charred anything is.

If there's a well constructed study that actually suggests that natural red meat is bad or causes cancer, please give a link and I'll look, I genuinely want to know.

I also wouldn't be shocked to learn that modern factory farmed red meat has stuff in it that's toxic, where say wild venison might not.

I won't disagree on harm to animal, I'm not a fan of industrial animal ag, etc.

Potato != extracted potato starch

Peas != extracted pea protein

They're not the same thing.

I do agree that wild meat is probably a lot healthier than modern industrially farmed meat. Just as wild plants are probably often a lot healthier than modern monocropped plants grown with synthetic fertilizers rather than healthy soil.

I'm not saying they're healthier simply because we've historically eaten them.

But there are many reasons to believe natural/traditional foods may be safer and healthier than new industrial foods. To name a few:

1) There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.

2) Many highly processed foods have within decades of their introduction to our diet been found to be really bad for us. Refined sugars, refined oils, refined flours, artificial sweeteners, many of the weird additives, many synthetic compounds like methylcellulose (someone close to me is extremely sensitive to this one), on and on.

3) These new ingredients, new kinds of refining and processing, and even synthetic food compounds, do not have to undergo any rigorous testing to be shown to be safe before being added to food. Even if they do some studies for some of them, how would you really know it's not causing serious long term problems for say 1% of people? Or even 10%? The size and duration of a study you'd need to find them to be safe would be expensive and they generally don't do it, since they're not required to.

4) These new ingredients often introduce novel molecules to the body that the body may not be adapted to. I hope I don't need to explain how many novel molecules that were invented and widely used in recent decades have proved to be highly toxic.

5) We have a huge increase in severe chronic disease in recent decades. I won't claim here that this is primarily because of the changes to our diet from industrially processed foods, but diet is a top contender given that it's one of the biggest things that has changed in the human lifestyle, along with all the other novel substances our bodies come in contact with now.

6) We know of tons of people who were healthy to age 80, 90, 100, eating primarily/entirely natural foods. We don't yet have any examples of this with people eating a large portion of modern industrial foods that didn't exist 80 years ago. This is not proof that they're dangerous, I'm just saying we don't know and have reason to be cautious.

Beyond Burger ingredients:

Yellow Pea Protein, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).

Except for Vinegar, every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years.

We have no way to even know if many of these are safe let alone healthy.

I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history. And for those who actually believe animal fat and salt are unhealthy one could make burgers with lean meat and less or no salt.

Same, right now it's great. I imagine we'll get enshittification soon enough when starlink gets enough lock in, but right now it's good.

Yup. There's definitely a pattern and it seems like an obvious consequence of the structure of incentives.

If you make a product you can make a study that shows it has some kind of benefit in some specific way, even if it probably causes more harm in other ways that are less obvious, and then you can sell it. Media will spread around your study especially if it shows something that will be a bit click-baity, and any study or discussion of the possible downsides will get far less attention.

This is also why basically every edible plant has some article saying it's a "super food" etc etc.

This is not a good analogy.

Aircraft manufacturers and airlines have a lot at stake if they let any risks slip through. If anyone dies it will be big news and visible to everyone, with real consequences for the companies responsible.

(I'm in the US so this may only be relevant there)

Childhood vaccines could cause a serious chronic disease in 1% of kids and we would have no way to know because: 1) Many vaccine clinical trials only monitor outcomes for a few days to a couple weeks. 2) Most vaccine clinical trials have no placebo control. If they have do have a control group in most cases the control group gets a different vaccine. 3) Most kids in vaccine clinical trials are also getting 10-30 other vaccine injections during their first two years of life during the period that they're being monitored for the one vaccine in their trial. So the only way this could even produce a signal would be if the one vaccine under trial was the only one that caused harm and all other vaccines did not.

I am not saying that vaccines do cause chronic disease in 1% of kids - just that it seems to me we don't have a good way to know.

Furthermore, even if it was proved that vaccines caused harm, vaccine manufacturers are not liable for harms from vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule.

It's a very different situation from flying.

If the doses of cannabis required to cure alzheimers would be high enough doses to destroy the rest of one's brain, it makes this finding not very useful, similar to the idea of curing alzheimers by destroying one's brain/

Yeah, I could see this being true if there was really _nothing else_ I could possibly be doing with my time that is worthy. But there are a lot of worthy things I could be doing with my time.

"That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would."

mmm..

A better analogy would be this:

You have $100k income, and $800k debt, on which you have to pay ~$40,000 interest every year. That takes up a good chunk of your income. But if the debt doubled, at the same interest rate, you could really be in trouble.

It's definitely worth practicing willpower because I can't always avoid temptation. Constant practice with the smaller things helps with the bigger things, like any practice or habit.

AND, avoiding temptation is hugely useful for me. With the right firefox extensions for example I've rid myself of most of the really enticing internet time sinks. I never have sweets or sugar or processed food in the house.

It doesn't have to be one or the other. I'd say for me avoiding temptation is the low hanging fruit that is obviously worth doing, and then practicing the choices I want to make is the real work. But avoiding temptation gives me more spaciousness of mind to practice my choices.

"who is going to be buying all the stuff?"

Easy - a greater portion of the world's resources can go toward the luxury market for the wealthy. This is already the trend.

It's dark but certainly not impossible to have a smaller and smaller group doing all the spending and keep spending the same, and to keep stability by force using technology.

I want no part of it.