Live data from Hacker News

The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

statnews.com

41–50 of 261 posts

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#41
post #29

"eat less ultra-processed food" well, how do you think Canola Oil is made exactly? it's cracked, cooked, pressed, washed in hexane and acid, neutralized with caustic soda, bleached, deodorized on what planet is that not ultra processed? so, i should avoid ultra-processed food, except oils that are ultra-processed? whereas tallow, is...cut from meat i'm not suggesting you should only eat tallow, I'm just saying it's n…

> There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. They’re naturally occurring, present in all beef fat, and according to cardiologists, present in tallow at levels far above what’s considered safe.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#42

> Back in the hospital, my patients are replacing olive oil with beef tallow This is a weird thing to call out since olive oil isn't a seed oil. Is the point that patients are confused? Does the author (a purported dietitian) not know this himself/herself?

It really isn't weird, and given the entire rest of the article clearly the author understands. RFK and friends have health-washed tallow. While their ridiculous new food recommendations claimed to "end the war on protein", it's pretty clear by all the surrounding material that they really wanted to "end the war on saturated fats". Their recommendations are filled with saturated-fat heavy foods (while cowardly sticki…

I read about book called "the big fat lie" years and years ago. There are some indisputable problems specifically with how canola and flaxseed oils went from being an industrial product that was in excess in the post war economy, to being on everyone's table at every meal. There are meta studies that show benefits from animal fats from healthy naturally fed animals, which of course is not a qualification in the guidance RFK provides. The truth is that separating the most calorically dense part of a whole food and adding it to other foods is never a good idea. Not with tallow, not with canola, not with white rice, or orange juice and really not even with olive oil, just put some olives in there!

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#44
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#IAmVerySmart Edit: One of the few things I find more annoying than AI blogs is the gleeful rush to label everything as AI generated. It comes across as “I am so clever! You can’t fool me!” Meanwhile, that reads like a perfectly normal sounding thing for a human to have written. “This blog uses the word ‘the’ a lot. Sure sign of AI!”

Yup. Anything someone disagrees with is now "written by ai" as if that invalidates what was written.

I don’t think it’s even that. Someone could post an Emily Dickinson work and people would race to be the first to observe the number of tell-tale em dashes, pleased that they were cleverer than the other readers for not being tricked.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#45
post #29

"eat less ultra-processed food" well, how do you think Canola Oil is made exactly? it's cracked, cooked, pressed, washed in hexane and acid, neutralized with caustic soda, bleached, deodorized on what planet is that not ultra processed? so, i should avoid ultra-processed food, except oils that are ultra-processed? whereas tallow, is...cut from meat i'm not suggesting you should only eat tallow, I'm just saying it's n…

Sure, if you eat the tallow. People aren't doing that. They're using the tallow to make french fries etc. The problem is the french fries, not the oil choice. Eating beef tallow is self-limiting. It's hard to eat a lot of it directly. OTOH, it's really easy to eat a lot of French Fries.

> They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#46
post #29

"eat less ultra-processed food" well, how do you think Canola Oil is made exactly? it's cracked, cooked, pressed, washed in hexane and acid, neutralized with caustic soda, bleached, deodorized on what planet is that not ultra processed? so, i should avoid ultra-processed food, except oils that are ultra-processed? whereas tallow, is...cut from meat i'm not suggesting you should only eat tallow, I'm just saying it's n…

The animals that produce that tallow are part of the global industrial food system too.

And tallow, by itself, is not something you eat, it's just moving the point of thermal and chemical alteration and production into your home.

Finally, most of this "eat as much animal offal as possible" movement is directly funded by the producers of these products battling it out with the producers of competing products.

You should listen to your doctors over influencers that talk about chemistry in a way that makes simple things sound dangerous and evil.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#47
post #29

"eat less ultra-processed food" well, how do you think Canola Oil is made exactly? it's cracked, cooked, pressed, washed in hexane and acid, neutralized with caustic soda, bleached, deodorized on what planet is that not ultra processed? so, i should avoid ultra-processed food, except oils that are ultra-processed? whereas tallow, is...cut from meat i'm not suggesting you should only eat tallow, I'm just saying it's n…

Sure, if you eat the tallow. People aren't doing that. They're using the tallow to make french fries etc. The problem is the french fries, not the oil choice. Eating beef tallow is self-limiting. It's hard to eat a lot of it directly. OTOH, it's really easy to eat a lot of French Fries.

No, that's just as wrong. French fries deep fried in Sunflower oil are also unhealthy. Adding a spoon of tallow to your tomato soup is also unhealthy.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#48
post #9

"The food industry reformation underway isn’t making chips healthier; it’s swapping one fat for another inside the same ultra-processed product while everything else stays the same. " The same ignorance is driving the push to replace HFCS with sucrose. Vendors selling garbage products saw renewed life as now they can pretend they've made a change for good, and now it's somehow healthy. Like, people legitimately think…

"Mexican coke" a good example of American attention when it comes to health and nutrition: instead of focusing on big impact things like exercise, fiber, vegetables, saturated fat, building sidewalks, blood lipids, etc, we're stuck obsessing over food dyes, 50% vs 55% fructose, seed oils.

Probably because they let us feel like we're doing something for our health so we don't have to muster any real lifestyle change, like leaving our couch to go for a walk.

Sweetie, did you get those cookies with the butter instead of the seed oils? Oh good, thank you. I don't eat seed oils! -- "Health conscious" fat guy who just ate 12 cookies.

It would be funny, but these grifters are screwing over good people.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#49
post #39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people got 75% of their calories from plant based whole foods, a lot of health problems would probably disappear overnight.

Is that even possible with the current food supply chain though?

It absolutely is in Australia, and I suspect Europe (from when I went 5 or so years ago). Even mostly possible in Houston when I was there 15 years ago.

The US is even more cooked than I thought if you can get a bunch of fresh veggies from a grocery store.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#50
post #29

"eat less ultra-processed food" well, how do you think Canola Oil is made exactly? it's cracked, cooked, pressed, washed in hexane and acid, neutralized with caustic soda, bleached, deodorized on what planet is that not ultra processed? so, i should avoid ultra-processed food, except oils that are ultra-processed? whereas tallow, is...cut from meat i'm not suggesting you should only eat tallow, I'm just saying it's n…

Is criticism is directly, and convincingly, addressed in the article.

> Some of what’s driving the seed oil panic isn’t wrong — it’s just misattributed. Ultra-processed food really is a problem. . . . But seed oils are not why ultra-processed food behaves that way. They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.

Post reply on HN