I'm willing to consider and eventually accept the idea that vegetable oil, or some class of oil or fat in general, is causing significant public health problems and increases risk of disease. However, every time I delve into the research on vegetable oil I end up being more confused.
This seems to be the case in many of the studies cited in this essay as well. For example, a number of the studies aggregate over margarine and other types of vegetable oil, which seems really difficult or impossible to interpret, especially given that trans fats are now generally accepted to be unhealthy.
Other problems arise here in and elsewhere in defining oil composition. I've noticed for instance that safflower and sunflower oil are almost always lumped together in one category, even though there are chemically very different forms of both available. For example, high oleic and other sunflower oils are really different, and sunflower oil in general is generally relatively easily modified genetically speaking. So talking about "sunflower oil" as a single ingredient biochemically is problematic.
There's also issues with cooked versus raw oils, which the essay alludes to but seems extremely important given how different fat structures are transformed by heat.
I'm not trying to tear down the piece, but I do find this area of research really difficult to interpret.
Categorizing oils like this seems counter-productive to studying the effect of consuming certain fatty acids, as oils from the same category have wildly different composition. Coconut and olive oils are both from fruits, but contain different fatty acids.
I believe the oils aren't divided this way for any taxonomic reason, but rather because we already have evidence of olive, avocado, coconut etc. oils having little-to-no impact on health, in contrast to other oils. The groups are basically "presumed innocent" oils and "presumed guilty" oils.
Or, to be more charitable, the groupings can also be looked at as "oils humans evolved eating" (olive oil, butter, coconut milk, etc) vs "oils we just started eating recently, because they can't be extracted without modern technology."
Humans did not evolve eating olive or coconut oil.
Seed oils do not require modern technology. Soybean, sesame, sunflower, etc. can be extracted with stone pressing and were extracted that way prior to any chemical extraction process. Where my family is from they’ve been eating sunflower and peanut oil for hundreds of years, milled and pressed with stone.
You are right that some cold-pressed seed oils have been used since antiquity, e.g. sesame oil.
Nevertheless, until modern extraction methods based on the use of high temperature and organic solvents have been introduced during the last two centuries such oils had remained expensive, so they were only a minor part of the food, unlike today, when if you look at the label of any kind of industrially-made food you will invariably see that some cheap oil has been added to it, e.g. soybean oil, canola oil or palm oil.
Even today, if you choose vegetable oils extracted by good methods, i.e. by cold pressing or with supercritical carbon dioxide, they are much more expensive than standard oils. For instance, the price range for cold-pressed sunflower oil overlaps with that of the cheaper kinds of extra-virgin olive oil and the prices are several times higher than for standard sunflower oil.
I have read all the 4 parts of this "Death by Vegetable Oil" series of posts.
Some of its conclusions are likely to be true, but the title is extremely misleading. A much more appropriate title would be "Death by the Cheaper Vegetable Oils".
All the data presented in these posts about the harmful effects of some vegetable oils are not applicable to vegetable oils in general, but only to those vegetable oils that have one or more of the following characteristics:
1. A high content of linoleic acid and also a too high daily intake. The optimum daily intake of linoleic acid is unknown, but it is believed to be around 10 g/day and not much over 20 g/day. In my opinion, based on the current data, an example of a daily fat intake optimized for the fatty acid profile and vitamin E content, for a sedentary human, would be 55 mL of extra-virgin olive oil + 15 mL of cold-pressed sunflower oil + a DHA+EPA omega-3 supplement. The rest of the food should have low fat content, like in grains, vegetables, fruits or lean meat. For a higher calorie intake, only the amount of extra-virgin olive oil should be increased.
2. Extraction with high temperature and/or organic solvents. One should always prefer extra-virgin oils, cold-pressed oils or oils extracted with supercritical carbon dioxide. All such oils are very sensitive to light, so they must be stored in darkness, preferably in dark glass bottles. Avoid those sold in clear plastic bottles.
3. Vegetable oils that have been heated during cooking. All vegetable oils should be mixed with the food only after cooking it and cooling it. They should not be used for frying.
4. Vegetable oils with artificial additives, e.g. with TBHQ. Avoid these.
>In my opinion, based on the current data, an example of a daily fat intake optimized for the fatty acid profile and vitamin E content, for a sedentary human, would be 55 mL of extra-virgin olive oil + 15 mL of cold-pressed sunflower oil + a DHA+EPA omega-3 supplement.
Can you provide link to this current data? I thought sunflower oil is not good for our health.
In the last 2 years, I started replacing all my cookware with a combination of cast iron, carbon steel, and stainless steel pans. So far, the only way to cook something in all of them without making the food stick is by using oil.
So I have a dilemma: What kind of oil to use with this type of cookware if I want to cook often?
Traditionally, lard was used for this purpose, not oils. This remains one of the best choices.
Good alternatives are butter or high-oleic sunflower oil or other high-oleic refined vegetable oils, which also have a low content of PUFA and of substances that are not triglycerides.
This is different from the case when the purpose of an oil is to be eaten without being heated, when cold-pressed non-refined oils are preferable, because they include various beneficial nutrients.
In any case, even if some kind of fat is used for frying, it is good to try to avoid eating most of it.
It is also possible to never use frying. In this case everything that is neither boiled nor steamed can be baked in an oven. This includes all kinds of meat (which must be cut into slices or small pieces before baking).
Home cooking is generally going to be better than particularly fast food because you are not reheating the same oils over and over.
Coconut oil is generally held as better. Cold pressed oils otherwise. Prepare to pay more for them. Be aware that food packaging labels have been known to lie about oil origin. Basically, fewer steps between growing the food and your mouth the better.
Preparing food at home is going to reduce a lot of the processing and reprocessing that happens to commercial packaged foods. I think that's going to be a net win.
Maybe get a feel for exactly how much oil is required and keep it to a minimum.
When I was using pans with a non-sticking coating, I used very little oil.
Now switching to cast-iron or carbon-steel I noticed that the best point to cook the food is to add some oil to the pan, wait for the oil to be heated properly, and only then start adding the food. Of course, I still add very little oil (maybe 1-2 tablespoons) but compared with non-sticking pans it is yet a visible thin film.
I am currently using extra-virgin olive oil but I am not sure it is good. Now I understand that instead of focusing on "extra-virgin" label I should focus on the process used to produce the oil.
On the other hand, sharing here a bit of anxiety I am no sure what to eat:
- On one hand I could try to eat more non-processed, non-cooked food like salads, vegetables ... But the risk there is being contaminated with various pesticides. So I am a bit concerned to switch to a diet mostly based on this as it means to increase a lot the quantity of such food
- On the other hand, cooking using what people consider healthy cookware means (so far for me) using some oil which I now get should be limited
- There is also the idea of red meat being bad, but also fish having mercury or radioactive elements. Probably not all of them but after reading this kind of information, I am a bit more aware of buying fish as I don't know exactly which one can be contaminated and from what area.
- The chickens seem also be not be healthy (don't remember where I read this and I somehow suspect it is false).
So I am really a bit puzzled about what to eat.
I don't think there is an easy answer.
Probably the correct answer is to grow my own food. But that is another style of life.
If you rinse vegetables well most pesticide residue will be removed. Also, some vegetables that are peeled remove that exposure route as well.
There are studies showing some kinds of organic products are worth buying because of the reasons you mention, but others are not.
I think the more you can buy food that you trust the better. This doesn't mean growing your own, it means learning more about where your food is coming from and the chain of producing and selling it. It may mean going to smaller shops, more trips, farmers markets etc. It may just mean reading about brands etc.
I think many people are wrestling with similar questions as you; you're not alone.
Using saturated or monounsaturated fats or oils are your best bets for sauteing. You can also braise things, in some kind of liquid.
Not the use of oil to avoid sticking is the problem, but eating it after that.
Besides choosing a kind of fat that is less sensitive to temperature, as described in another answer, when possible you should try to clean the fried food of the frying oil and to throw away most of the used oil.
Long story short, plants that live where it is cold need to use less stable oils with a lower melting points. These oils lead to our cells being more fragile, and also lead to more free radicals.
Particularly if the oil is repeatedly heated. As happens in restaurants. And even more so when deep frying fast food.
For any kind of nutrient, saying that it is good or bad, without saying at which daily intake that is true, is totally meaningless.
Any essential nutrient, whose absence from your food can kill you, can also become a poison over a certain daily intake. For certain essential nutrients, the difference between the optimum daily intake and the lethal daily intake may be quite small, e.g. for selenium.
In the case of linoleic acid, it is likely that 10 g/day is very healthy, but 50 g/day is very unhealthy. It is not known for sure where the threshold between healthy and unhealthy lays, but it might be between 20 g/day and 30 g/day.
Most of the cheapest vegetable oils contain between 60% and 80% of linoleic acid.
With all kinds of industrially-made food containing large amounts of cheap oils, it has become very easy to eat too much linoleic acid per day, without being aware, like also too much sugar.
Wait a moment. The stereotypical unstable oil is alpha-linolenic acid, which seems to be generally regarded as quite healthy. Certainly oxidized ALA is disgusting (keep those flax seeds in the freezer!), but I’ve never heard of omega-3 fatty acids leading to fragile cells.
ALA is very unstable as oils go. It’s an omega-3 fatty acid. It’s generally regarded as healthy. The claim that unstable oils are somehow bad for you because they are unstable in your body seems entirely unsupported.
Certainly flaxseed oil is a terrible cooking oil unless you are trying to make furniture [0], but that’s a very different claim.
[0] You can also use flaxseed oil to produce a beautiful but mostly useless seasoning on cast iron. But the inside of your body is not made of hot iron, and the reactions that occur on a skillet don’t seem particularly relevant to what happens if you eat the oil.
it's really not. It's a useful grouping because the methods of extraction differ along these lines. Vegetable oils generally require a chemical intensive process to acquire involving solvents and cleaners. These oils tend to have high levels of linoleic acid which is toxic to humans.
Vegetable oils do not require chemical extraction. But even so, what does that have to do with the oil? Oil extracted with solvent shouldn’t have any significant solvent left in it when consumed.
Linoleic acid is not “toxic” to humans. It’s an essential fatty acid. You need it to survive. Your body needs it to
make other fats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linoleic_acid
seed oils do often require chemical extraction and the method of extraction does matter because it may have effects on the chemical structure of the oil in question. For example, to make canola oil, the seeds are ground at high temperatures to extract a very fragile oil. During this harsh process, the oil is oxidized and then needs to be washed with hexane (a known neurological toxin) and then bleached and deodorized so that the product does not smell rancid (which it is after the processing). Contrast this to cold pressing olives.
As for linoleic acid, it does store in adipose issue and cause oxidative stress and inflammation in humans. Below is one of several papers you can find on this.
A high linoleic acid diet increases oxidative stress in vivo and affects nitric oxide metabolism in humans
That study also shows that a diet high in chemically-extracted high-oleic sunflower oil did not have increased urine metabolites compared to control. So that study actually works against the hypothesis that seed oils or chemically extracted oils are inherently bad.
And here’s another study that directly tests the hypothesis that linoleic acid consumption causes damage via oxidative stress and concludes “our results provide no indication of increased oxidative stress or genetic damage as a result of increased dietary intake of linoleic acid. Therefore, we see no scientific basis to reconsider the public health policy to stimulate the intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids aimed at the reduction of coronary heart diseases.”
I agree that there is not consensus in the scientific/medical community about this. You can find MDs who will advise avoiding linoleic acid as a top health prioty (i.e Paul Saladino) and other scientists who do not agree there is sufficient evidence to indict seed oils (i.e Andrew Huberman). Likewise, you can find all sorts of studies.
To address your point about the study I linked -- I think you're mistaken. The LA group did have a significant increase in 8-iso-PGF2alpha urine metabolites, and decrease in nitric oxide metabolites. From the study:
> Urinary excretion of 8-iso-PGF2alpha was significantly increased after the LA diet (170 vs 241 ng/mmol creatinine, P=0.04), whereas the urinary concentration of nitric oxide metabolites decreased (4.2 vs 2.6 mg/mmol creatinine, P=0.03).
also
> In conclusion, the high-LA diet increased oxidative stress and affected endothelial function in a way which may in the long-term predispose to endothelial dysfunction.
The oleic acid group, the group that didn’t see an increase of metabolites, was given high-oleic sunflower oil. I brought that up because it’s a chemically extracted seed oil, and one of the most common seed oils. “Seed oil” is not a significant distinction of fatty acid composition. Seed oils have varying linoleic acid composition (sesame oil for example is quite balanced, high-oleic sunflower is close to olive oil ratios).
The study you linked showed an increase in oxidation metabolites for the LA group. But as far as I understand, those metabolites don’t demonstrate damage to anything or an impact on mortality. That’s why I linked to a study that measures oxidative DNA damage via 8-oxo-dG in blood, which found no impact from increased linoleic acid consumption. So the theory that linoleic acid is dangerous because of damage via oxidative stress isn’t clearly supported by current literature.
Not really. Here’s a study that measured hexane in various oil brands and didn’t find any problem. “The hexane residue was detected in thirty-six out of forty examined samples, ranged from lower than LOD to 42.6 µg/kg. However, in all of them hexane content were below the MRL of 1 mg/kg which set by the European Union.”
I just checked my "vegetable oil", and it is further labled as 100% soybean. I can't imagine why would waste the more expensive olive oil by using it as an additive for cheap vegetable oil.
it doesn’t really matter though because they all share the same common characteristics that make them unhealthy…eg high polyunsaturated fat content that easily degrades in high heat.
Do you fry in >400 degree oil? There are many foods that are fried in olive oil for example in Spanish food. It seems fine since most frying is done well below the smoke point.
"Monitoring of Quality and Stability Characteristics and Fatty Acid Compositions of Refined Olive and Seed Oils during Repeated Pan- and Deep-Frying Using GC, FT-NIRS, and Chemometrics"
There are several types of olive oils. Extra virgin (with lowest smoking point) is mostly used raw in salads and dressings, etc. Pure or refined(with highest smoking point) mostly used for cooking.
That’s why people started using the term “seed oil”. Olive oil is not a seed oil while sunflower and rapeseed oil is. Olives also aren't a vegetable though.
From what I understand, Canola is a more specific product. Like how Flaxseed oil and Linseed oil come from the same plant. Wikipedia mentions Canola as "a version" rather than "also known as"
Canola was bred from rapeseed cultivars of B. napus and B. rapa at the University of Manitoba, Canada, by Keith Downey and Baldur R. Stefansson in the early 1970s,[9][10] having then a different nutritional profile than present-day oil in addition to much less erucic acid.[11] Canola was originally a trademark name of the Rapeseed Association of Canada, and the name was a condensation of "Can" from Canada and "OLA " meaning "Oil, low acid",[12][13] but is now a generic term for edible varieties of rapeseed oil in North America and Australasia.[14] The change in name serves to distinguish it from natural rapeseed oil, which has much higher erucic acid content.[15]
It’s not really a gotcha. Seed oil isn’t a perfect term but if the oil comes from some seed that requires an extensive chemical process to extract, refine, and deodorize it’s a being referenced as a “seed oil” here.
Coconut oil is not that. Neither is olive oil or avocado oil.
Aren’t they nuts? Every time a story about oil comes up on HN I’m so confused. Everyone has different terms and expectations. Is there a one pager somewhere where we can all agree on some common ground?
> I'm willing to consider and . eventually accept the idea that vegetable oil, or some class of oil or fat in general, is causing significant public health problems and increases risk of disease. However, every time I delve into the research on vegetable oil I end up being more confused
The class of oil you're looking for is called sugar. We all know Big Sugar paid off a couple of researchers to spin the blame on fats, and perception has been baised since.
If we reduce sugar (including carbs) and we'll see health outcomes improve.
This is way more than "you're wrong." Do not eat trans fats. Period. Please don't kill yourself over this. Trans fats are not like "oh they're bad for you" in the way french fries are bad for you. There is a bug in Human 1.0. Normally when we encounter fats we temporarily produce "bad" cholesterol; but it's fine because we also produce "good" cholesterol to clean up the excess. But when we encounter trans fats our bodies don't do that second part. There's nothing inherently bad about trans fats, in another evolutionary timeline humans would metabolize it fine but in this one we don't.
There is no safe amount of trans fats to eat. Trans fats do permanent damage to your arteries. Always. Some foods naturally have small amounts and most studies on the subject say they're less bad but still bad. Your goal should be to minimize your lifetime consumption which is why people say to reduce your red meat intake because it can add up. It's not worth it. There is nothing trans fats do for you that makes it worth it, especially since we have plenty non trans fats that are solid at room temperature. Don't intentionally add non-natural sources to your diet.
And you're way more "you're distracted". It's barely an exaggeration to say: sugar is in EVERYTHING. It's so ubiquitous and normalized that you're blaming a handful of oils. When every meals, every snack, mucks with your insulin levels...ill health is going to happen.
You're not wrong about sugar, but you're not right. Some of the marked increase in diseases is shown to happen regardless of sugar consumption, so it's a mix of things? Sugar, processed foods, additives and emulsifiers, seed oils. We don't really know yet.
Hey, remember Napster? There was a chat facility so you could chat to people who were poking around in your shared files. Many many years ago - easily 20 years ago - I was downloading stuff off Napster and the person whose computer I was poking at popped up in chat and said "hey if you like that band, you'll probably like this band Big Sugar, try this track Let It Ride".
From reading the rest of this page, I can safely say that your claim, "vegetable oil is awful", is just false.
No one except you is claiming that. Some people are claiming that a subset of vegetable oils are bad, but so far I haven't seen one conclusive argument either way.
I think there should be a distinction between heated and raw oils. According to (DOI: 10.1016/j.vph.2014.02.004),
"Prolonged consumption of the repeatedly heated oil has been shown to increase blood pressure and total cholesterol, cause vascular inflammation as well as vascular changes which predispose to atherosclerosis."
When I was a teenager, I worked in fast food where there was a deep fryer, and the policy of the restaurant was to use the oil until it turned a deep brown (or customers complained). Believe me, that oil was reheated dozens of times. I can only imagine what it's like in a chip factory.
On the other hand, if you're just putting it in a salad dressing, the effects might be different, and there actually seems to be relatively few studies on this topic.
Anyway, this is definitely not the whole picture, but something to think about.
>Main ingredient: aluminum silicate. Not exactly something I want to sprinkle on my salad.
It's pretty obvious you're trying to imply that it's harmful in some way, but I checked wikipedia and I can't see anything bad about it aside from the generic "eww chemicals" feeling. Sure, technically speaking I wouldn't sprinkle that on my salad either, but that encompasses a wide variety of substances that aren't exactly bad for you. I wouldn't sprinkle sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) on my salad either, but it's not exactly bad for me.
Who is using seed oils unheated? There’s almost zero use cases for that.
You could maybe argue store bought salad dressings but any real homemade or high quality dressing is not going to be made with canola or sunflower oil but most likely olive oil.
But yes I suspect the health problems from people with heavy seed oil diets comes from consuming foods prepared with seed oils heated at very high temperatures because they quickly degrade and release free radicals in your body. The worst is vegetable oil that is being used over and over again for frying.
Unrefined sunflower seed oil is a popular salad dressing in Eastern European cuisine and included as an explicit ingredient in a variety of traditional dishes.
that’s only true for a store bought dressing, which frankly no one should ever really buy if you are health conscious. there is no “real” homemade dressing recipe that has seed oil in it.
If the main manner of consuming seed oil is via eating fried food (which sounds mostly right, though there are smaller amounts in some baked goods, and it may be used in sauteeing etc.), research into its health effects is to some degree superfluous. We already know that fried food is bad for you and that if you want to be healthy you should minimize how much of it you consume.
> Americans eat an average of over 3,600 calories a day ... The long-time recommendation is for you to aim for 2,000 to 2,600 calories per day if you’re a sedentary adult male and 1,600 to 2,000 if you’re a sedentary adult female. [1]
Isn't there still some not quite healthy stuff that happens even with fresh oil, just because of the high temps?
Also having calories without also having something you're deficient in and need more of might be enough to qualify as unhealthy, unless it's displacing something worse. Does tallow do anything specifically beneficial for the majority of people who don't need added energy?
he's talking about every time your reuse it you make ever more carciniogens as opposed to at home most people use it once or a few times at most, and usually under the smoke point.
It was nice to see the article include some studies with reheated oils - not sure if they're the same as the one you mentioned. I'm curious on what chemical changes and stuff occur after re/heating
> Vegetable oils, while nearly nonexistent a hundred years ago...
Vs.
> Such oils have been part of human culture for millennia. Oils such as poppy seed, rapeseed, linseed, almond oil, sesame seed, safflower, and cottonseed were variously used since at least the Bronze Age in the Middle East.[1]
Like, I don't know. Maybe seed oils are bad. But every article pushing this idea starts by wildly overstating the case and making assertions like this. To me this seems like another diet fad.
Curiously, that article only mentions olive oil, which is not a seed oil under discussion, and actually makes no mention of "poppy seed, rapeseed, linseed, almond oil, sesame seed, safflower, and cottonseed" at all.
This is also an interesting example where a calorie is not just a calorie - as can be seen by the rats getting identical calories but the group with the vegetable oil gaining more weight. I try to stay away from 'seed oils' but it's pretty difficult because they are in everything so most the fats in my diet are from meat (another controversial area).
There really is no such thing as a "pro seed oil" troll. He's pointing out gaps of evidence in the common claims that people who vilify seed oil, which is a real thing. If someone is making the claim that certain foods are deleterious, there has to be strong evidence to back those claims. And on a cursory glance, I'm not convinced that seed oils are deleterious. By all means though do your research. This is one source, but I've read others as well.
- nearly all processed snacks (chips, cookies, etc)
Cutting out seed oils is a good heuristic even if only to serve as a compass for avoiding foods that are widely accepted to be unhealthy. If you dig deeper, you may come to the conclusion, as I have, that these foods are unhealthy because of the seeds oils in them (in part).
A "processed" food is simply one that has any amount of added salt, sugar, or fat. Many snacks include seed oils, I'm sure, but "nearly all" processed foods certainly do not.
sure if that's a technicality you want to call out. What I meant is -- go down the grocery store snack aisles. Look at the chips, popcorns, cookies, etc. Anything in a brightly colored box in those snack aisles. 100% of the things I'm talking about have seed oils in them.
I don't feel that it's a technicality when the distinction is between a single aisle in the grocery store and a vast swath of foods. Bread is processed, some yogurts and cheeses (although fermentation alone might only qualify as "minimally processed"), many canned foods which add only salt to otherwise unprocessed foods (vegetables, beans, fish, chicken, etc).
By all means, focus your ire on snack foods. Or seed oils. Or whatever the latest trend says is unhealthy.
My point, every time this comes up, is that "processed" is uselessly vague, unless you really do believe that adding any amount of salt/sugar/fat is harmful to human health. I believe that many people using the term do not actually know its definition and merely use it as shorthand for some nebulous set of foods they believe are "too artificial", without seriously considering which aspects of those foods should qualify them for inclusion.
Yeah I think the actual distinction he is drawing is between the cheapest fats (soy, corn oil) and the classic and relatively expensive fats (butter or olive oil). It's correlation between cheap ingredients used in cheap, low-quality, often deep-fried or highly-processed foods. I'm sure a salad with extra virgin corn oil would be fine but nobody eats that.
they are cheap due to the scalable industrial processes than enable seed oils to be extracted from comparatively cheap raws (seeds vs. olives/avos) and it's this process that contributes to the negative health outcomes associated with these oils. The extraction process oxidizes the oils and makes them essentially rancid.
I don't know. Seems sensationalist. So I picked one of their referenced studies to look at, and to my untrained eye it doesn't seem to support the paper's position at all.
What it says in the linked article:
HEART DISEASE
In another study, the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, participants who increased their consumption of corn oil and margarine had 86% more heart attacks, and for those aged 65 or older, a higher risk of death after four years
What the linked study says:
Conclusions:
Available evidence from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat in the diet with linoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol but does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes. Findings from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment add to growing evidence that incomplete publication has contributed to overestimation of the benefits of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid.
Yeah, I read the first study because it seemed crazy.
TFA:
"The group consuming more vegetable oil had a 62% higher rate of death during the seven-year study compared to the group eating less vegetable oil. . .To put that into perspective, of the commonly cited diet and lifestyle risk factors, only severe obesity and heavy smoking are more dangerous"
The study in question, emphasis mine:
n=458
"Eligible patients were men aged 30-59 years admitted . . . for an episode of acute myocardial infarction (86%), or acute coronary insufficiency or angina (14%) . . . The intervention group received instructions to increase their PUFA [PolyUnsaturated Fatty Acid] intake to about 15% of food energy, and to reduce their intake of SFA[Saturated Fatty Acid] and dietary cholesterol to less than 10% of food energy and 300 mg per day, respectively. To achieve these targets. . . Liquid safflower oil was substituted for animal fats, common margarines and shortenings in cooking oils, salad dressings, baked goods, and other products, and was also taken as a supplement. . .Safflower oil is a concentrated source of [Omega]-6 LA and contains no other reported PUFAs Therefore, the intervention oil selectively increased [Omega]-6 LA without a concurrent increase in [Omega]-3 PUFAs."
TFA represents it as a population wide conclusion about all people consuming "more" "vegetable" oils, and then has the audacity to directly compare this misrepresentation to the results of large scale longitudinal and prospective studies, comparing it to a sedentary lifestyle, smoking, etc. Absolutely ridiculous. Like I actually think that's a valuable study to have read, but the Author's article is being sensationalist and dishonest with their representation.
FWIW as someone who reads a fair amount about nutrition to the point I consider it a hobby; I don't find this result on Safflower oil surprising, but the sensationalism in TFA is insane. There is a lot to unpack with that study–are people in that group predisposed to having biological processing or other confounding factors that make high Omega-6:Omega-3 diets particularly unhealthy? Is there something specifically bad about linoleic acid, or perhaps about a fatty acid regimen of specifically and primarily linoleic acid?
I read the linked study out of curiosity [1]. The study is from the other perspective, that replacing saturated fats with vegetable oil would lead to reduced mortality.
I couldn't figure out exactly where they got the 86% figure from, but the study found a significant negative effect: "There was a 22% higher risk of death for each 30 mg/dL (0.78 mmol/L) reduction in serum cholesterol" [resulting from vegetable oil consumption]. This is in accordance with what the article says.
I would think that if the study set out to test hypothesis Y, but their data actually suggests hypothesis X, then that's pretty convincing evidence for hypothesis X since we know that it wasn't a result of publication bias/researcher degrees of freedom. (Then again, I suppose hypothesis X might've been found in a fishing expedition...)
oh dear, another HN post on diet. no doubt someone will start a comment saying you can eat what you like provided you go to the gym every day.
why are americans so obsessed with these things? you can't live forever, and the older i get (nearly 70, now) the the less i feel like carrying on, and the less i worry about things like oils.
Okay. I bite. What’s the alternative though? Even if I don’t eat fried chicken every day, I still need to cook with something. 0 fat cooking is very tough unless you go on a raw diet. What are the options? Olive oil? Animal fats?
Avocado oil is about 15x as expensive as vegetable oil. Other oils (including animal fats) have too strong a taste to be used in applications where a neutral oil is required (e.g. salad dressings, emulsions).
Unless you're deep frying everything, which arguably unhealthy regardless of chosen fat, it's hard to believe avocado oil is a significant component to meal cost. I just pan fried some vegetables, and I may have spent 5c on oil?
I'm with you. Even using the most expensive Avocado I could find at the Whole Foods in the smallest container I'd still only be spending $0.30 on a tablespoon, which is enough to cook a meal for 1-4 people in a cast iron pan. Doing this makes me feel a lot better than having to worry about the temperature of a teflon-coated pan.
They have both california sourced oil and a blend of international oils, I think the blend came out when they were having supply issues. They state it plainly on the label.
And also the often forgotten Camellia oil that would play in the same top quality league as the olive oil. Extracted from the tea plant and mostly unknown out of Asian kitchens, probably.
75% is not almost all…plenty of local Californian higher end brands that I find difficult to believe is half soybean oil. Just don’t buy the cheap private label stuff.
Semantics, I guess -- If you pick one at random, you've got a 15-25% chance of it being pure avocado/olive oil. Sure, you can get real stuff if you know what you are looking for.
A potentially relevant data point that doesn't often come up in this discussion is the evidence produced from housecleaning. As a housecleaner I deal with all kinds of materials including pee, poop, and puke from people and their animals and other stuff like used machine oil from engines and physical things like sand and pine needles. By far the absolute worst is residue from cooking with seed oils. There are many special products out for dealing with this because simply scrubbing with hot water and concentrated soap is often not enough. The residues are most similar to glue or shellac. If a substance like heated seed oil generates material that is among the greatest challenges a housecleaner can encounter then how is ingesting it okay?
I suppose that this sort of article is useful, but seriously, doesn’t just about everyone know how unhealthy seed oils are? I have a few friends who have unhealthy eating habits, they know about seed oils and don’t care.
One reason people don’t care about consuming unhealthy seed oils is the simplicity of eating packaged foods - cheap and convenient.
I try to almost 100% avoid packaged foods and this system of eating is a HUGE hassle and time sink. I will compromise and for example use a Falafel mix instead of grinding fava beans and chickpeas, but otherwise buy whole grains in bulk, fresh vegetables, meat, and fruit. I only bake bread a few times a month so I also buy bread from a local bakery. This takes a lot of effort so I would not necessarily recommend this system to other people.
Coconut oil is OK and when I rarely cook with oil I use coconut oil.
Usually I convert “fried food” recipes to simmer in water or vegetable broth, then add a tablespoon of olive oil after the food has been removed from cooking heat. Easy to do, and I think tastes better.
While I don't disagree with the general tenor of the article and the apparent real issues with these oils,
Regarding the section quoted below: this doesn't appear to have any statistical coherence, since naive calculations like this tend to make many implicit unwarranted assumptions.
'If heavy smoking (a pack of cigarettes per day) increases risk of death by 80% and increasing vegetable oil consumption (by 12% of calories) increases risk of death by 62%, we can use some back-of-the-napkin math to infer that every 5% increase in daily calories from vegetable oil is as dangerous as smoking 7 cigarettes per day.
Another way of looking at it: each additional teaspoon of vegetable oil you consume could increase your risk of death as much as smoking 2 cigarettes. '
> Amazingly, the group eating repeatedly heated oil was actually consuming slightly fewer calories than the other groups, and still managed to gain significantly more weight.
So much for the reductionist and simplistic "calories in and out" trope brought up frequently on here.
CICO is neither a religion nor a complete explanation of metabolism. It’s a super simplified model that leads to some useful practical conslusions (eg it’s easier to eat less to lose weight than exercise more, some foods will make you more fat than others relative to how full they make you feel).
It’s super accessible, you can look up the calories of whatever you eat and whatever exercise you do.
I’ve seen lots of valid complaints about CICO, but never a suggestion for an alternative that’s similarly useful with even the same magnitude of simplicity.
Note I take CICO to mean bio-available calories roughly equals base metabolic rate plus exercise out for the average person. Actual energy-balance “draw a box around a person” joules in equals joules out is unhelpfully reductionist.
Calories in calories out is unfalsifiable so people hide behind it as if it makes them invulnerable.
If people don't or can't measure CI or CO then you can blame them for being wrong. All of this flies in the face of the fact that your body should be able to regulate this for you, which would make manual calorie counting in your head or via apps obsolete.
So there are only two possibilities left. Either our bodies are defective and we need crutches like machine assisted calorie counting or our bodies work just fine but there are some weaknesses that can be exploited and calorie counting is just a technique for defending against those who exploit them.
And no I don't mean there is an evil conspiracy by the food industry. Your obese parents telling you to eat two pizza per day can be equally exploitative because listening to parents' orders is higher priority than listening to what your body says about how many calories you have consumed.
> a suggestion for an alternative that’s similarly useful with even the same magnitude of simplicity.
To me the issues comes down to how people deal with the simplicity: when we’re told we don’t have to think hard and focus on reading numbers on a label, it’s comforting enough to not want to get back to the cold hard truth. Even when it doesn’t work, it’s just simpler to blame people (including us) than to try to think hard again.
People hate disclaimers and caveats. You can provide as many disclaimers and caveats as you want with the ultra simple theory, they will be forgotten instantly, only the simple part will remain, evolve on its own and live its life as a meme.
I’m with you that it should be fine if it’s a net positive for the vast majority of people. But it’s now the prevalent advice, and looking the stats it doesn’t seem to have a positive effect. If anything, we now know the meme advice doesn’t work for most people.
I've never seen poop included in the "calories in, calories out" diet talk, which seems strange. The argument for it is it's a 0 sum game, but they never mention poop as part of the equation. There seems to be an assumption that all food is absorbed at the same rate and across all people. Seems unlikely to me.
I wonder where/when this calories-in-calories-out trope ever made sense. Metabolism is so complex that the energy lost during reactions between and into metabolites cannot be measured - they happen inside cells mostly, at an insane rate. The mere presence of increased active thyroid hormone (T3) will elevate body temperature, leading to increased heat loss. Muscles become more efficient when used often. Muscles load glycogen after sports. Energy is conserved by warm clothing. Low room temperature leads to extra energy loss. Etc
How is one supposed to even approximate the energy balance without a fully body composition (dexa) scan every week?
due to conservation of energy, energy lost during reactions between and into metabolites becomes body heat, which can be measured; also virtually all of it consumes inhaled oxygen, which can also be measured
Body heat can't be accurately measured. You can just measure heat loss via the surface. But there's variations on the cell level. Since heat can be stored inside the body for a longer period, measuring heat loss over a short period of time is not representative.
Why would that be? Eg Organs are warmer than hands etc - there certainly is a gradient. The heat from metabolic processes will not become obvious immediately because it’s redistributed before it’s lost to the environment.
Besides heat loss, there’s also kinetic energy (muscle contractions, peristalsis etc), various pumps (eg sodium/potassium), fluid flow (blood, lymph etc) and weird things like biophotons.
I think calories in/out is just propaganda used to help the average person not overeat. Like most of the medical stuff were taught, it's a half truth because the systems are so complex that even the experts don't truly know.
Like sibling said, energy must be conserved. No matter how complicated the system is, calories in = calories out - the problem is that measuring (especially) the calories out part is tricky. What if you poop out your food mostly undigested? What if you spend your days half naked in a freezing cold unheated home? Etc
And because not even the experts know all the possible variables, from a practical perspective it's a half truth... so what there's conservation of energy, that doesn't give us any meaningful information to use for the application at hand.
There is if you expand eating less and moving more to being a surrogate endpoint instead of just being dials. If simply eating less causes a spontaneous reduction in activity that’s a signal. If changing what you eat lets you consume fewer (or desire more) calories for the same appetite/satiety that’s a signal. Paying attention to CICO is like having a gyroscope and accelerometer to help with navigation: leading indicators of where you’re heading until actual measurements (i.e. position/weight) confirm where you actually are. In fact it’s even better in this case because of how noisy weight is and needing multiple days (at least) to reliably judge the effect of an intervention.
Here's something that's always puzzled me. It seems almost inescapable that if two people of the same size have radically different metabolism, their body temperatures must be different. If anything, a skinny person should consume less energy because they have less skin.
Granted, this is me, a physicist, thinking simplistically. But it's what's always made me skeptical about metabolism.
There are too many aspects. Like gut flora and even enzymes present. Those could affect how and to what input is broken down. And then there are hormone responses and how body responses to those. In the end we are probably very far away of having complete understanding what is going on. And differences might be minute, but will add over years.
It’s accounted for in the “calories in” component: the calories printed on the side of a package are the calories absorbed by an average body, not the total chemical potential energy of the food.
That would require some sort of bioavailable calories metric that is specific to the person eating the food because I doubt people recalculate ther basic metabolic rate every single day.
CICO is just a philosophy that says you can lose weight by measuring then reducing your caloric intake. It works vastly more often than not, so it's a useful trope. Just about everyone I've met who says it doesn't work refuses to measure their intake, and they just estimate that they must be eating less and not losing weight. Put what they eat on a food scale and voila! Turns out they overeat but don't recognize it.
Of course it works. Over eating causing fat gain has been known about for hundreds or thousands of years. The idea that it doesn't has always been an excuse and probably came from mischaracterizing science into psychological issues around obesity and food addiction.
What doesn't work very well is "curing" fat people by just telling them to eat less. Yes it would work if they could just eat less, but it does not address their actual problem which is the compulsion to over eat. Might as well try to cure alcoholics by telling them not to drink. So I understand why over eaters get upset about it, it's not like they don't know they eat too much and they don't want to be so fat. Though advancing the conspiracy theory that food intake has little to no bearing on weight is not a helpful response to that either.
While that is a significant difference, I still think calorie counting gives a useful estimate, since people eat many foods and the error reduces in aggregate, as some are overestimated and others are underestimated.
In addition, people are not rabbits and may have evolved digestive systems better adapted to reheated fats since the invention of cooking (evidence of campfires 1-2 My ago).
> So much for the reductionist and simplistic "calories in and out" trope brought up frequently on here.
That's how models work. They are simplified ideas to help people understand things. They're not intended to be an all encompassing theory of everything. Just like "supply and demand" works but breaks down in certain circumstances. In general "calories in, calories out" does work. The body may adapt, various foods affect you differently, but CICO is not a heretical idea.
The Author of this article is the founder of a startup trying to make "cultured oil" happen. Not a particularly trustworthy and neutral source for "the studies".
He's certainly not going to be very motivated to tell y'all about studies showing that he is staking his time and money and reputation on a nonsense product. It's embarrassing that y'all upvoted this.
hmm, I think this is mostly about cherry picking some statistics to make vegetable oil bad. It is difficult to research on such topics because there are so many variables. If I ever become test subject, I am sure I will always use fresh vegetables oil, use less oil etc. And, animals have always lied because we all know mice lies and monkey exaggerate.
> the first group’s fat came primarily from vegetable oil sources like safflower oil and margarine while the second group’s fat came from sources like olive oil and butter.
Apparently the author does not consider olive oil to be a vegetable oil. Huh? As I understand it, a vegetable oil is an oil extracted from a plant and olives are the fruiting body of a plant.
Which is why some prefer to use the term "seed oil" rather than "vegetable oil". The main distinction though is that seed oils are mainly composed of polyunsaturated fats, unlike olive oil, coconut, avocado, butter, etc. Seed oils are often labeled "vegetable oil" on their containers.
I think the research mentioned in this article points more to bad influence of margarine, not vegetable oils in general. In the first study, the group that did better consumed more olive oil, which is a vegetable oil
A few weeks ago,
I wanted to know whether saturated fat (the kind that makes up most of
mammal and bird fat and tropical oils like coconut and palm oil) was
better or worse for you than unsaturated fat (the kind that makes up
most of fish oil and non-tropical oils of vegetable origin). At this
point the evidence strongly suggests that, at least if you live in the
rich world, saturated fat is pretty bad for you, and unsaturated fat
is much less bad for you (not counting trans fats, which almost don't occur naturally and are very bad for you indeed, but were abundant in margarine until they were outlawed).
The Cochrane Collaboration is kind of the gold standard for medical
research review studies. In my search I ran across this recent
open-access Cochrane review of only randomized clinical trials:
Hooper L, Martin N, Jimoh OF, Kirk C, Foster E, Abdelhamid AS.
Reduction in saturated fat intake for cardiovascular disease.
Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2020, Issue 8. Art. No.:
CD011737. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD011737.pub3.
They conclude that over the four or so years in the 16 RCTs they
reviewed, the decreases in all-cause mortality and cardiovascular
mortality due to lower saturated fat intake, if any, were too small to
detect with the usual p-values, but their measure of combined
cardiovascular events did decrease significantly, with a RR CI from
0.70 to 0.98.
On the face of it, this sounds kind of optimistic for the thesis that
saturated fat is fine: are heart attacks really that bad if they don't
increase your risk of dying? Maybe there was some countervailing
health benefit, like you're more likely to die of a heart attack but
less likely to die of cancer or an accident. And they have some
quotes with a remarkably low degree of hedging: "Critical importance.
Reducing saturated fat intake probably makes little or no difference
to cardiovascular mortality."
But I don't think it's actually that optimistic, for three reasons.
The numbers I've looked at so far don't suggest an actual protective
effect; the average death rates and cardiovascular death rates in the
intervention groups (with lower saturated fat) were still lower, just
not significantly so. Presumably part of the reason for that is that,
almost necessarily, fewer experimental subjects had a heart attack and
died from it than merely had a heart attack. But that would only
account for wider confidence intervals.
I think the stronger argument is that the studies were only for (an
average of) four years or so, and usually it takes about 50 years for
cardiovascular disease to kill you on a standard unhealthy "Western"
diet (and this is an aspect of "Westernization" we didn't get from the
Song Dynasty). So it's really pretty alarming that lowering saturated
fat intake significantly reduces the "combined cardiovascular event"
rate over only four years. Presumably there is progressive damage (or
recovery) if you continue the intervention for ten or twenty years.
The third argument is that a stroke that doesn't kill you can still be
pretty bad.
I'm not any kind of expert on public health (that would be my ex-wife the epidemiologist) or on nutrition, so I could easily be overlooking something important. In fact, I overlook important things in fields where I am an expert all the time. But I don't think Jeff Nobbs is an expert either; he's a startup founder and restaurateur, and this post seems to be a sales pitch for his vegetable-oil-substitution business (according to https://www.jeffnobbs.com/about). Searching in Google Scholar finds literally zero publications by him in any area, especially including nutrition. And in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34283915 it looks like Nifty3929 caught him saying that one of the studies said something very different from what it actually did say. So I think I'll trust the Cochrane Collaboration instead.
Heart disease in America is driven by hyperinsulinemia, which is driven by overconsumption of refined carbs and sugar. Hyperinsulinemia precedes diabetes by 10-20 years. If you want to prevent heart disease, stop eating refined carbs and sugar. And get a glucose insulin tolerance test. This is the test to get - as something like an a1c tells you NOTHING about your insulin resistance until you break past the thresholds.
i don't think sugar consumption is higher now in the usa than it was a century ago, when obesity and metabolic syndrome were rare (though statistics for america as a whole are hard to come by, since most countries in america didn't have anything like a public health system a century ago), and certainly very low compared to the hadza
by 'refined carbs' do you mean white flour
because white flour consumption was also pretty high in the usa a century ago
regardless, the topic at hand is the health effects of different kinds of fats, and it turns out that different kinds of fats do seem to have significant health effects (despite what effects other macronutrients like carbohydrate may or may not have) and that those effects run in the opposite direction to what nobbs is proposing
If your opening paragraph presents only a vague correlation then I'm going to suspect that the rest of your evidence is even more tenuous and not bother reading on.
This seems to be the case in many of the studies cited in this essay as well. For example, a number of the studies aggregate over margarine and other types of vegetable oil, which seems really difficult or impossible to interpret, especially given that trans fats are now generally accepted to be unhealthy.
Other problems arise here in and elsewhere in defining oil composition. I've noticed for instance that safflower and sunflower oil are almost always lumped together in one category, even though there are chemically very different forms of both available. For example, high oleic and other sunflower oils are really different, and sunflower oil in general is generally relatively easily modified genetically speaking. So talking about "sunflower oil" as a single ingredient biochemically is problematic.
There's also issues with cooked versus raw oils, which the essay alludes to but seems extremely important given how different fat structures are transformed by heat.
I'm not trying to tear down the piece, but I do find this area of research really difficult to interpret.