GTFTT somehow. 
The online fitness community rails against seed oils, asserting that they cause inflammation in the body.
There is a lot of pushback against this, but the controversy remains. Especially because the people who demonize seed oils also tend to promote eating unprocessed food, whereas seed oils are a filler in lots of processed stuff.
Essentially, the claim is that it is in fact healthy to cook with butter and lard, and that seed oil substitutes are causing health problems.
I’m not entirely sure of where the science lands, but I do cook my eggs with ghee instead of oil, and I replaced commercial protein shakes with homemade ones when I realized that one of their top ingredients was vegetable oil.
You refer, I assume, to this gem of a cookbook:
I can’t speak to the health aspects, but that sounds delicious. (I use olive oil for 98% of my cooking - only where it would be obviously out of place, for example in a Szechuan stir-fry, do I use something else, usually peanut oil.)
I use olive oil or butter for nearly everything. The exception is for baking where I use Canola, usually a tablespoon at a time.
Ghee is the new-ish trend. I was recently at a bbq with several Indian immigrants. They were complaining about how the price of ghee has skyrocketed since the whities discovered it.
The online fitness community is forever galloping headlong after some food-related health scare or miraculous food-related totem or other. If they’re right about seed oils, it’s a case of a stopped clock telling the right time twice a day.
Which wouldn’t be stopped if they used the right lubricating oil!
Well in this case they are promoting less supplementation or new fangled idea and instead arguing for eating more whole foods derived from nature.
The claim is that the adulteration of food has contributed greatly to our health problems. It is pretty apparent that people tend to be fatter than in early generations (for a whole host of reasons). Maybe they were indeed better off drinking whole milk and eating full cuts of beef than somebody today drinking commercial protein shakes or eating low fat snack foods.
I don’t know…there’s some science behind this.
General rules:
- Trans fats are always bad
- Saturated fats are best kept low.
- An ideal ratio of Omega 6s to 3s is probably around the 4:1 zone where the modern American diet tends to be more around 30:1.
- Generally, the more that you refine and purify an oil, the less beneficial it is for your health.
- The likelihood of the generation of unhealthy compounds varies by the specific makeup of an oil, how hot you get it, and how long you keep it there. Some oils are better for this and others are worse.
In terms of seed oils, they’re often higher in Omega 6s, often refined more, and often used by people to deep fry stuff.
But, flax seeds are high in Omega 3s and Macadamia nuts are fairly close to the 4:1 ratio at 6:1. Pair the latter with some salmon and roe and you’ve got a healthy dish. (Nuts are just big seeds.) But, functionally, there’s nothing wrong with something high in Omega 6s so long as you’re also getting your 3s from other sources - fatty fish, seaweed, flax, etc.
No oil has to be ultra-refined, and no one has to purchase versions of oils that have been ultra-refined. Cold pressed red palm oil is high in tocotrienols and, in moderation, probably gives you something that you can’t otherwise get easily.
You shouldn’t ever deep fry anything, regardless of whether it’s in Canola or EVOO, from a health standpoint.
Cites available as needed.
There nearly always is some science behind it. It’s the way it gets exaggerated to ‘POISON!!!11one’ that’s ridiculous.
I guess I’m just jaded by the serial nature of it all. Before it was seed oils, it was fats with low smoke points, and that was BS; before it was low smoke point fats, it was phytoestrogens in soy, etc.
Science is generally always true.
You do a study comparing how well black people do relative to white people and discover that blacks have lower incomes. That’s true.
The takeaways from this result - i.e the things that the general public decides must explain all this - we’ll imagine are that, say, blacks are discriminated against and so can’t get good jobs (believed by group A) and an alternate theory that blacks aren’t smart/competent enough to rise through the ranks (believed by group B).
When the next research shows that black children have lower grades in school, both groups might feel validated. When another new set of research shows that if you compare kids by the income of their parents, the racial difference goes away, though, both ideas are shaken. You might be able to attach back to the previous explanations, but maybe not if the issue isn’t with skin color so much as parental income and educational attainment.
Now you might have new ideas like that poor families are pushed into bad school districts, that parents pass on negative behaviors to their children, or that wealth disparity is too uneven to allow people to break free. Suddenly, all of the ideas and things that we need to do are (according to some) wildly different.
But, at no point was any of the research results wrong. The research never said that there was discrimination or that there was incapability, it just said, “There’s an income disparity.” Which was true. The takeaways by society from that one result were narrow relative to the full array of potential explanations. And even there, they’ll often focus on one or two things rather than align with the idea that there’s a mesh of different factors which might all be at play to lesser and larger extents.
That doesn’t ring true at all.
Facts are verifiable one way or the other. Science is not the mere collection of facts.
Scientists generally try to find explanations for those facts, which is why they also collect potentially relevant information such as income, race, etc.
Good science involves not letting researcher bias unduly influence the interpretation of particular facts by other facts.
And really bad science will collect facts in ways that favor (subconsciously in many cases) particular biases.
Which are hypotheses. Taking a hypothesis as a fact is unscientific. Just cause some scientist hypothesized some explanation for his results, that doesn’t mean he knows the answer any better than you do. The only thing anyone knows is what the test scenario was and the end results of that test. Everything else is just telling stories. You should mostly concern yourself with the former and take a healthy bit of skepticism towards any of the latter.
Sure. But sticking to making observations and recording facts is ALSO unscientific. Science includes the process of developing hypotheses and testing them and trying to figure out how much validity there is to any of them.
And sometimes that part goes pear-shaped - like with a lot of the fad diet garbage.
There are many things humans consume that are not POISON, but are nonetheless unhealthy, and if consumed for long enough or in high enough doses can lead to deleterious health consequences.
So if oil is criticized for being unhealthy, that doesn’t mean it’s being described as poison.
(And when it is described as POISON it’s surely because social media invites hyperbole)
It’s not a fad diet to encourage people to eat more basic, single ingredient foods like eggs, potatoes, and beef instead of processed foods made in laboratories and which come in a box.
If you start looking at processed foods, you’ll see that a lot of them contain oil. In my home, I don’t have a lot of such things, but I do have fig bars and breakfast muffins for my son. Both list oil on their ingredients. Same with potato chips, cookies, crackers and any number of other goods (I’ve mentioned those nutrition shakes, which I used to drink for breakfast)
As a result, Americans consume a bunch of these seed oils (mainly corn oil), far and away above what you’d get if you actually ate these foods whole. As the OP noted, if you decide to limit your oil consumption, you might find it challenging (until you start buying basic things like fruit, vegetables, staple grains, and animal products; which is to say, eat “old fashioned”)
So does this seed oil consumption cause any problems? Well, we as a country have more obesity than we used to, so might it be a contributing factor? Does it play a role in heart disease, or other health problems?
Perhaps more fundamentally, why is so much of it in our foods? Was it a health decision made by the food companies, or did they perhaps put price and product preservation over the impact it might have on consumers?
I don’t think any of those questions are inappropriate or outrageous.
As I’ve said, the research is mixed. I cited upthread a medical report indicating that it contributes to an imbalance of Omega 6s to 3s (which @Sage_Rat also noted, stating it is 30:1 when it should be 4:1), which might lead to obesity and heart disease.
There are also questions about heating it. Again, I’m no expert, but I don’t deny that an argument is ongoing.
Seed Oils are Under Fire: The Health Debate is Heating Up - The Food Institute.
I can’t help but feel like the attempts to downplay the controversy are predicated on normalizing the food industry. But I recognize the cynicism in that thought.
All I can say is that, for me personally, I wouldn’t want to drink a glass of oil, and think there’s some underlying truth that cooking with, and consuming, full fat natural food items is indeed better for you than cooking items that have been adulterated and processed. I also know that there is some empirical evidence to support my belief.
Omega 3s are used as a component of construction by the body, not just as an energy source. They’re maybe used in the heart (I haven’t checked) so maybe that would explain heart disease but definitely used in the optic nerves and in brain neurogenesis - both of which seem to be closely linked to one another. Insufficient Omega 3s is tied to degrading vision and to dementia besides what you have mentioned.
The essential fatty acids are, effectively, vitamins. Your body can’t generate them and your body degrades with an insufficiency.
There’s your problem, you should have invested in a hot air paint stripping gun instead of the grill. Hot-air fryer disgused as a hair dryer.
That was the point. I mean you only have to scroll up to the top of the thread to see the ‘poison’ thing.
The reason this matters is that the outcomes of these two things are different.
A sane reaction to research that shows some potential detrimental effect that occurs under some circumstances, to some people, at certain dosages, is to carefully consider making adjustments.
The ‘pOiSoN!!!’ argument accepts nothing less than total, urgent elimination of the stuff in question from everywhere, immediately. For some people on that end of the bell curve where they are especially prone to whatever detrimental effect it is, that might be what they need to do. For most people, obsessively trying to totally eliminate a thing from their diet is potentially more harmful than leaving it in, just because any drastic limitation to diet introduces fresh, different risks that you’re probably just not paying attention to, if you are fleeing a bogeyman.
Another good reason to eat your eggs whole! You can get your EFAs in the yolks.
(To be clear, I am not saying that I think that eating vegetables, nuts or seeds are bad for you; far from it. I eat nuts (usually almonds, cashews, pistachios and macadamia - no peanuts!) every day. But in the modern discussions of nutrition, “seed oils” is usually a reference to the oil that is added to processed foods; the palm, soybean, and/or canola oil in Oreo cookies, for example; or the sunflower, canola, and/or corn oil in Doritos)
I think this invites an interesting discussion on the toxicity of the substances we consume, and the level of concern to attach.
Let’s consider cigarettes, for example. At this point in time, the general consensus seems to be that they are not good for you. No, you won’t die from having one, but it is serious enough that long term consumption can literally lead to death.
In the face of that evidence, how would your measured tone by received? Is it enough for people to make adjustments, or is the prudent advice to ‘not smoke’?
Now, you may respond that this is a false analogy. Presuming you agree that cigarettes are indeed harmful, my guess is that you would take issue with the demonization of these oil additives.
But those arguing against them are indeed saying that their use does in fact lead to things like heart disease and obesity, which do literally lead to death.
Moreover, the analogy to cigarettes is underscored by the the fact that the producers of these popular food products have been the same companies that produce cigarettes. Phillip Morris used to own Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco, and RJ Reynolds had made similar investments.
They then applied their technology for generating cravings in consumers (without regard for their health).
If it’s true that cigarettes don’t cause you to drop dead, but will lead to disease in the long term, then I think It’s sensible to sound the alarm. No, I don’t propose banning smoking, but offering clear information about its expected impact on one’s health should be prioritized.
So when those companies transition to food, and the same policy approach to consumer safety is adopted, are we overreacting by pointing out the concerns?
Here, the specific concern relates to the use of seed oils. These companies figured out how to flood our pleasure zones with salt, sugar, and fat, delivered in products which are designed to maximize their freshness. This is accomplished by using these oils.
Just because they are natural makes them okay? The same could be said of the tobacco plants we smoke. And, again, modern human consumption of these oils tends to be far and away higher than what we would ordinarily consume eating these sources whole, or if it were just an additive when oiling a pan. So it’s a diet that is different than what nature has provided.
I’m not going to criticize anybody who chooses to eat this stuff (as I still do eat junk food occasionally), and I don’t care enough about the world to sound the alarm for others, but I do think the science is valid, and the health concerns are legitimate.
Not an argument I even made, or would think of making.
I think if your analogy falls down anywhere, it’s that cigarettes don’t really have very much in the way of benefit, alongside all of their harmful attributes; there are probably people who would argue some sort of minor benefit or other, whereas seed oils are actual food.
Companies doing things that benefit their bottom line, at the expense of their customers, sure, that’s not a great thing, but not all of these things are the same thing; my complaint (and it is not against you, it’s against the people who leapfrog from one social media food scare to the next, breathlessly repeating stern advice they don’t even understand) is that the moment one of these stories breaks, people latch onto it and start lecturing each other over not only, say, the inclusion of seed oils as main ingredients in some processed product, but also the use of small amounts for oiling pans. I may be oversensitive about this as I receive a lot of it as comments on my cooking video content.
If I stopped eating all of the things people yelled at me about, my problem would be starvation.