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The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

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Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#122

The scariest part of this well-reasoned piece is the amount of trans fat in beef tallow. Trans fat is unbelievably destructive. A review in the New England Journal of Medicine 20 years ago [0] sent that message well. I doubt there has been any significant revision to the understanding of the physiology. [0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra054035

> the amount of trans fat in beef tallow

Natural tallow doesn’t contain a lot of trans fat. The only way to consume trans fats in large quantities is through hydrogenated fats.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#123
post #71

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 occas…

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.)

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

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.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#125
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “seed oils” movement has grown beyond seed oils. People who follow seed oil influencers usually subscribe to a cluster of ideas. The superiority of beef tallow is one of them.

I mean, cooking with beef tallow is better though. It makes everything taste awesome.

> cooking with beef tallow is better though. It makes everything taste awesome

It is. I don’t tend to keep it handy, but I do tend to have bacon drippings I’ll swap into meals. What’s wild is this insistence on herding from one homogenous diet to another.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#126
post #5

The media and the scientific community are not set up for the situation where cranks with absurdly unscientific views are at the top of the major scientific and health authorities. RFK Jr. still gets too much benefit of the doubt for his initiatives when it is obvious that he is opposed to science and has views about health that are just outright dangerous. And we have the usual problem with this administration that…

[flagged]

So what? Technology gives us free lunch after free lunch. And in the not so distant future we can just gene-edit our offspring, the ultimate free lunch.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#127

> There’s a secondary argument about oxidation — seed oils go rancid at high heat, producing potentially harmful compounds. This idea is chemically real and worth being thoughtful about (don’t reuse frying oil repeatedly). But the evidence that oxidation at home-cooking levels causes measurable harm in humans isn’t there. Even if oxidation at home-cooking levels doesn't cause harm, which I suspect that it does though…

If that industrial prepared food switches to tallow I still have doubts about how much it is reused and what chemical changes it goes through...

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#128
I was always under the impression that canola oil was mildly poisonous. It is sort of true in that it has euric acid but far below levels that can hurt you. I think I was confusing things with an event where industrial rapeseed oil in spain was sold as olive oil in the 80s and many people were poisoned.

Also, TIL that canola is a portmandeu of canada and oil.

All the above reference here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#129

> There’s a secondary argument about oxidation — seed oils go rancid at high heat, producing potentially harmful compounds. This idea is chemically real and worth being thoughtful about (don’t reuse frying oil repeatedly). But the evidence that oxidation at home-cooking levels causes measurable harm in humans isn’t there. Even if oxidation at home-cooking levels doesn't cause harm, which I suspect that it does though…

I work in an area that involves, among many other things, analysis of cooking oil in factories. It might be hard to pin down the terminology of "reused" frying oil, because many of the frying processes are continuous. The raw material goes through a vat of hot oil on a conveyer and comes out the other end dripping with oil

The quality of the oil is continuously monitored, and new oil goes in while old oil goes out in the fried food itself. The crunchy and salty aspects make it palatable to eat oil. The oil doesn't actually spend a long time in the vat before coming out in the product.

Re: The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

#130
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Is that even possible with the current food supply chain though? Given that vegans exist, i'm going to say yes, its entirely possible if you feel like it.

To be fair, plenty of niche diets exist that could not be adopted by the broader population without supply-chain retooling. But practically, yes, this is not a real objection.
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