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Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

universityofcalifornia.edu

321–330 of 464 posts

Re: Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

#321

Do not take this work seriously unless you are a male inbred mouse of the C57BL/6N persuasion. This is a classic N=1 study of one sex and one genome of mouse. As such this work is of almost no know relevance to other strains of mice, let alone to humanity. If you want an example of how mice dietary studies should be done then look to the National Institute on Aging and its Interventions Testing Program. They use both…

We use model systems because they are often in fact representative of the systems we are actually concerned about but cannot reliably measure like we could in a lab environment with an established model system. This does not mean the work is meritless.

Re: Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

#322
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To note, even eggs and lard have large amounts of Linoleic acid, and I'm pretty sure lard and eggs have existed in the human diet for as long as chickens and pigs as livestock have existed.

the rates of linoleic acid in eggs, large, chicken, beef, pork have all changed drastically in the last 100 years because what we feed the animals has changed drastically. a grass fed cow has a lower omega6 profile than one in a factory farm. farmers have gotten tricky with it, raising "grass fed cows" but then for a couple months before slaughter, fattening them up with industry "feed". So now when you're at the sto…

Suggestions on how I can get enough complete protein in such a diet? I am open to reducing meat for health if this is a factor but eat about 150 grams complete protein every day and this is hard to replace from vegetarian. The few vegetarian dishes I see with significant protein are often not nearly as good as yogurt, meat, eggs or just stuff with whey protein in it. I can't see much with comparable protein to calorie to chicken breast, spirulina is comparable but is disgusting taste and not complete.

There is also that it is hard to eat 3000-3500 calories every day of clean food in a bulk with animal products, removing those will probably make it even harder.

Re: Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

#323

I listened to a great CBC-produced story on all of the "propaganda" surrounding soybeans back in the 90s... there were stories floating around that it raised estrogen levels in men and made you grow man-boobs basically if you ate it. I remember my friends joking about it at the time. CBC wrote it off as completely without basis, said the chinese had been subsisting off of them for thousands of years, if they are fine…

Probably, I know I distrust most of the food "science". When I stuck to "food" pyramid, I was the most unhealthy, overweight, and unhappy I've ever been. When I basically switched to high fat, high protein, and lowish carbs,I got healthier and more importantly my hormone profile went back to normal and I wasn't depressed anymore. It's astounding what lies the government pushes around food, and how damaging it can be…

The thing with food science is that not every human is the same and people react differently to different things. Some people may thrive on a high fat diet, other might tolerate or even need more carbs, it really depends and isn't black and white. Thats why it's important to look at the sample size of studies among other factors.

Re: Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very German thing to not use olive oil for frying. It took me by surprise when living abroad, and to realise it's a common frying oil in Mediterranean countries but also in the UK.

Economics, probably -- sunflowers and canola grow more easily. Olive oil is a nice pan-frying oil, it's what I use. Linguistic thing: When Americans talk about oil for frying, in my experience, they are a fair bit more likely than us to specifically mean deep frying, for which olive oil is no use. Way more of a deep-frying culture, from several different influences. American cooks are slightly more likely (than the B…

> use the term "broiling" for shallow/pan-frying. Unusual word here.

I don't think that's right; it's more used for what you do in the oven under the "broil" setting.

Americans use "saute" and "fry" in somewhat context dependent , somewhat interchangeable ways. Along with "sear" being somewhat specific to browning at high heat.

Re: Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

#325
post #34

Soybean oil the most widely consumed? I would never have guessed. Figured canola would be.

It's not even close. Soybean oil is like 4-5x the consumption volume as canola. Which makes sense if you've ever seen rural Midwest. So much soybean, everywhere.

for more context - soybean is used to stuff nitrogen back into the soil, for the real cash crop (corn, etc).

So what you'll see is fields rotate between corn & soybean, or corn, corn, & soybean.

The US produces about 4 billion bushels of both corn and soybeans per year.

Re: Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

#326
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some interesting coincidences that make me think that the torpor hypothesis might be worth exploring: - Basal metabolic rates in present-day Americans are substantially lower than they were in the past ( http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nqBxKGn... -- Yes, the link is from the aforementioned blog, but you can check the citations). - Mean body temperatures today are lower than in the past…

Can’t all these things also be explained by our increasingly sedentary lifestyle?

Almost certainly.

Modern “western” people spend a tremendous amount of time sitting - either in an office or a car - and are almost totally sedentary.

In fact, so sedentary that the mere act of walking is considered “exercise”.

Frankly, I’m surprised the mental and physical outcomes aren’t even worse.

Re: Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

#327

My understanding is that most of the oils we use are unhealthy. They are highly processed and inflammatory. The good oils are avocado oil, extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil. Is this correct?

" ...highly processed... " I think this is an important distinction for evaluating oils. For example, you mention avocado oil and coconut oil. Are these processed with heat (and possibly solvents)? Or are they cold-pressed with no other chemicals used to aid extraction? In the UK, it is very common to find cold-pressed rapeseed oil (canola oil) in supermarkets. The canola oil sold in US supermarkets is highly process…

You are right that the extraction method matters a lot for any oil.

Any method that uses high temperatures may cause various chemical reactions that degrade some of the oil components.

Some of the methods that use solvents for extraction may leave very small quantities of the solvents in the oils (e.g. hexane, i.e. a light fraction of gasoline), which are undesirable.

Nevertheless, cold-pressing is not necessarily the best method, even if it is preferable to most other old methods.

While the extraction using carbon dioxide at high pressure (supercritical CO2) is also classified as a solvent extraction method, it does not leave anything in the oil and it is able to extract any oil more completely and with less degradation than any other method.

However this modern method is encountered only in relatively recent oil production facilities, and unlike cold pressing it is not known by most people so it is not used in marketing.

Thus, except for cold pressing, the buyer cannot know whether the oil has been produced by a worse method like hexane extraction or by a better method, like CO2 extraction.

Re: Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

#328
post #319

I listened to a great CBC-produced story on all of the "propaganda" surrounding soybeans back in the 90s... there were stories floating around that it raised estrogen levels in men and made you grow man-boobs basically if you ate it. I remember my friends joking about it at the time. CBC wrote it off as completely without basis, said the chinese had been subsisting off of them for thousands of years, if they are fine…

If you think something about those reports was fishy, you can go and look up how long the Chinese had been subsisting off of them and if they've had any problems. Any possible CBC bias would have zero effect on that.

This is all hypothetical, since we don't have access to the actual report referenced by the GP. However, it would be up to the CBC to support any such claim, not up to the rest of us to validate it.

You could verify that the extant Chinese population does not have trouble with estrogen and soybeans. However, thousands of years is long enough for evolution to work on soybean eating populations, so I'm not convinced that would be a meaningful claim in the first place. Best case scenario, you'd find some metric for measuring historical estrogen levels in Chinese men and look as far back as possible.

Re: Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably, I know I distrust most of the food "science". When I stuck to "food" pyramid, I was the most unhealthy, overweight, and unhappy I've ever been. When I basically switched to high fat, high protein, and lowish carbs,I got healthier and more importantly my hormone profile went back to normal and I wasn't depressed anymore. It's astounding what lies the government pushes around food, and how damaging it can be…

The thing with food science is that not every human is the same and people react differently to different things. Some people may thrive on a high fat diet, other might tolerate or even need more carbs, it really depends and isn't black and white. Thats why it's important to look at the sample size of studies among other factors.

Is there some evidence that humans really react that differently all else being equal?

Literally anything that can affect our bodies might be a confounding factor: sleep; water intake; type, frequency, duration, and difficulty of exercise; sunlight exposure; climate (average temperature, humidity, temperature swings, atmospheric salinity); elevation; latitude, etc...

Re: Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)

#330
I used to be so pro-science, but the more you follow it the more you see the stumbles (Folic acid causes cancer, but doesn't stop it) and just how much studies are funded by big corporations and can be easily killed if results start turning out unfavorably.

Older I get the more hippy-dippy I feel about food. We should probably have simple food, vegetables and grains, as our main staples. That's what people used to mostly eat and people that do eat that are healthier.

The next big scare about this or that oil, or tofu (which is a staple in many populations which are healthier than the US), come and go. And if they ever get contradicted you won't ever hear it.

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