Comment by bob1029
4 hours ago
Seed oils probably aren't ideal, but I also worry how much this narrative is distracting from the bigger problem of sugar consumption. Humans only have so much attention and discipline. It would be a shame to focus all that energy on a "no seed oil" diet only to wind up even more unhealthy.
How many products with seed oil also contain some form of added sugar? I don't seem to have much issue with moderating the occasional bag of cheezits or goldfish, but the moment I start getting into cookies and ice cream it's like a junkie broke into my house.
Yep. If there was one single thing that literally every person should do for their health, that is to greatly reduce or completely eliminate sugar. The evidence is overwhelming.
The evidence against seed oils is not quite as convincing. I see seed oils as a low quality food to be avoided - goes rancid too easily, requires chemical processing, etc. - but it's not strictly poison. These oils are in virtually every industrial "food product" which makes them unhealthy by association. Stop eating highly processed crap and you'll see the benefits - cutting out seed oils is a side effect.
Added sugar? I really don't think giving up all fruits and vegetables is a good idea.
The sugar you get from fruit is also accompanied by fiber, water and other nutrients. Also harder to overeat and generally gets released into the bloodstream more slowly. I think the argument here is to eat less (highly) processed food in favour of whole foods.
yes, sorry its an important distinction. Especially raw whole fruits since they are packed with fiber and nutrients and hard to overeat.
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They didn't say "added sugar" they just said sugar. If you want to avoid sugar, you have to realize that fruit does contain sugar (fructose is the culprit here) and it isn't always healthy.
If you think of the specialty oranges like cuties and halos, they are loaded with sugar, that's why they taste so good.
Apples and bananas still won't help you lose weight. Tomatoes have much less sugar and could actually be helpful to be less hungry without many calories.
There is no easy way out, you can't just eat a bunch of sugar loaded fruit and think the fiber will totally protect you or that because it is "fruit" it's healthy.
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wonder which is worse sugar or alcohol, 2 drinks a day vs 2 cans of coke a day
Probably alcohol, but they will both make you overweight, alcohol is metabolized in a similiar way.
When you see how much sugar it takes to make alcohol it starts to make sense.
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.
They can also tend to be harmful in combination, such as in the case of relatively unstable unsaturated fatty acids going on to be glycated in the presence of sugars (some moreso than others); it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were examples such as this which fuelled a significant proportion of all "diseases of civilization".
Really? I don't know exactly how long people have been eating oil from olive, flax seed, sesame, coconut or palm nut, but I believe not under 6000–7000 years. But yeah, not the stuff we eat today.
Yes, I wasn't talking about unrefined olive, flax, sesame, or coconut. I don't think most people concerned about "seed oils" are concerned about those.
It's the refined soybean oil, canola/rapeseed oil, cottonseed oil, grapeseed oil, sunflower seed oil, corn oil, safflower oil, peanut oil - these are the modern refined oils I'm referring to that were never eaten until very recently. I'd be dubious of refined / ultra processed olive and avocado oil too, which is a different thing from fresh cold pressed olive or avocado oil.
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To add, sunflower seed use predated maíz in some parts of North America, and mustard oil goes back to the Indus Valley Civilization.
Yes, the extraction of these oils is "novel" just like factory farms are novel. As the article explains, it is the ultra-processed food products that are the problem, not the seed oil ingredients.
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>Seed oils probably aren't ideal
Except they are. A refined monounsaturated fat is in the upper tier of perfect calorie. It makes a lot of sense for omega-9's to be a major part of caloric consumption. The omega-3 and omega-6 when fresh and uncooked are also unnecessary demonized by the idea that they are immediately rancid. Like many things the problems arise from the implementation or how they are used, not the chemical itself.
Ideally, yes. But the failure modes in seed oil manufacturing are what scare me. How many accidental hexane exposures would it take to outweigh a lifetime of the benefits of seed oils over more natural, but less healthy, oils?
My half-believed conspiracy theory is that "seed oils bad" is a psy-op from the corn/HFCS industries. I don't have hard data here, but it seemed like in the late 2010s people were converging on added sugar and especially HFCS as the thing which is truly messing up health. I can't help but wonder if the corn industry saw this, panicked, and began seeding (no pun intended) the seed oil meme among influencers.
I don't have evidence for this specifically, but there's certainly a long and documented history of both a) influencers suddenly adopting a new party line in response to a paid campaign and b) shitty policy specifically for the influential corn industry (ethanol subsidies, e.g.)