Let me remind readers what happened in 1960-1990: the big saturated fat scare, and the push towards low fat (i.e. high sugar) diets.
People STILL to this day are afraid of eating butter, yet consume margarine, seed oils (vegetable oils are the worst type of food known to man) and hundreds of grams in sugar EVERY DAY. And in many places, I bet in here too, this is still controversial and the only mode of dieting people know is eating less fat and less meat, as if they ever were the problem.
Keto and low carb diets are still described as "fad diets" on Wikipedia, and I wonder whose silly agenda they are pushing. If it is the one of the official health dept of Western governments, it should be clear that what is claimed to be healthy it is obviously not, and made even more dubious due to major lobbying from Big Food.
The same Big Food that has just won with the popularity of GLP-1 agonists: why eat healthy when you can eat packaged crap and take a pill?
I knew I had to qualify for the pedantics. Vegetable seed oils are the worst type of food known to man, and I stand by it. The research is just a google away.
Vegetable pulp oil (i.e. coconut, extra virgin olive oil, etc.) is alright, if not beneficial.
Can you provide some of this research that's just a google away? What do you even mean by "the worst type of food known to man"? The worst in what way?
Opinions about food are full of excessive generalizations that are of little help.
There is no logical reason to expect that seeds, in general—carrying the energy for new life, containing the most valuable and precious resources—would constitute the "worst" food ingredient known to mankind.
Yes, there was the Minnesota Coronary Survey which was an RCT on polyunsaturated fats vs saturated fats. It was launched intending to prove the opposite conclusion, but ended up proving that polyunsaturated fats cause significantly higher mortality rates than saturated fats. It's hard to do better than this as a study because it's an RCT that did not rely on self-reported data (it was conducted in hospitals and nursing homes), and it measured a variable that's challenging to fake and relevant to health (death).
A [meta-analysis of all RCTs](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28526025/) seems to suggest there's no real difference between these kinds of fats. Is there a particular reason you are using only one study to draw strong conclusions?
Sorry, but this is not me being pedantic. Many vegtable seed oils also have beneficial micronutrients. For example linseed oil has a lot of Omega-3. Sunflower oil has Vitamin E and K.
"Worst type of food known to man" is a very strong statement, and surely there's a long list of foods that come before vegetable seed oils.
I'd never eat linseed oil. Lookup what it's used for historically, varnishing and what not. That rancidification and cross-linking is something you def don't want happening in your body.
Just because something is used for varnishing doesn't mean it's unhealthy. Can you post any serious and credible source that says linseed oil is unhealthy?
It's trash. Unedible. You know how even in the mainstream, it is common knowledge that burnt oil is bad? Linseed doesn't even need to heat up to start reacting.
There is also what seems like 10 times the amount of fast food restaurants, way larger portion sizes, the explosion of casual dining chains in the 1980's and 1990's...
Haha that's funny, but if there is someone to blame it is actually, Phil Solokoff, Jewish businessman who lobbied heavily and shamed McDonald's into the change
> vegetable oils are the worst type of food known to man
actually, there is no evidence that the commonly consumed vegetable seed oils such as sunflower, corn, canola, soy, peanut, safflower, cottonseed, walnut, linseed, etc., are harmful at all, except when rancid, trans, or hydrogenated. there was a long period when they were believed to be harmful simply because they were fats, but we now know that was wrong
there's a lot of old research where they were conflated with high-trans-fat-content partially-hydrogenated versions of themselves, and we now know that the trans fats were the major problem there. there was a period when it was believed that low ω-3 fatty acid levels relative to ω-6 levels were causing inflammation, and some people do see improvements in health when they eat more ω-3, but both ω-3 and ω-6 fatty acids are unsaturated fatty acids of the kind you find predominantly in vegetable seed oils; that's not a question of eating more or less seed oils but of which ones you eat. (and the ω-3 effect turned out to be fairly small on a population level.)
finally, there's a certain fanatical contingent that is convinced that unsaturated fatty acids in general (seed oils, fish oil) are terrible, and saturated fat (coconut oil, beef) is what's good for you, but this is basically completely unsupported by the evidence. a and there's a mountain of evidence against it. see https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-... for a deeper dive
the trans fats are a big problem. a lot of those veggie oils turn into trans fats with high heat, so even if you're using the "good oils" you gotta make sure they're not overly heated
do you know of good research on how fast the trans fat levels rise with normal cooking temperatures? i'd like to know if i'm poisoning myself by frying eggs
this is fantastic, exactly what i was hoping for! i wonder how i hadn't found this article before. thank you!
(also it's hilarious that the article's academic editor is named "meat hacker" in german)
the abstract says
> Overall, heating to temperatures <200 °C had no appreciable impact on different TFA levels. Between 200 and 240 °C, levels of C18:2 t (0.05% increase per 10 °C rise in temperature, 95% CI: 0.02 to 0.05%), C18:3t (0.18%, 95% CI: 0.14 to 0.21%), and total TFA (0.38%, 95% CI: 0.20 to 0.55%) increased with temperature. A further increase in total TFA was observed with prolonged heating between 200 and 240 °C. Our findings suggest that heating edible oils to common cooking temperatures (≤200 °C) has minimal effect on TFA generation whereas heating to higher temperatures can increase TFA level.
so i probably shouldn't worry too much about frying eggs in sunflower oil
You lose all credibility with the butter is good nonsense. You can't even buy the unhealthy margarines anywhere. They have not been a thing for decades.
> I assume this has never happened in human history at this scale.
We never had synthetic nitrogen fertilizers before. This is the first era where humanity does not have to experience widespread, frequent, deadly, hunger. This is also why there are eight billion people on the planet: we have enough calories to support that many. There were only 1.7 billion people when the Haber process was invented.
Although true, it still has nothing to do with the obesity rate. My comment was about the idea that it was a lack of food availability that prevented obesity before about 1980.
The 1960 to 1974 numbers seem rather high to me. I was born in the south of England in 1955 and I rarely saw anyone who would these days even be described as fat. let alone obese. Certainly not one in eight adults and absolutely not one in twenty children
That’s pretty wrong. The BMI cutoffs were established in the 90s when people were less sedentary than today. Sure, if you’re a bodybuilder it’s wrong. For the vast majority of the population it’s wrong the other way.
It’s not the most accurate thing, but it’s close enough for most people.
This is correct. BMI is only wrong if you have pro athlete or bodybuilder levels of muscle. None of us internet armchair jockeys have that. If you're within two standard deviations of the mean (95% of the population) for muscle mass and general body structure, BMI is accurate enough, and if it says you're overweight then you are. Everyone wants to think they're exceptional but hardly anyone actually is.
It's pretty shocking how little food the human body actually needs and how little weight you actually need to carry, and anything over that is just stressing the circulatory and muscle systems. (And providing more cells from which cancer can potentially start, and more energy to feed it if it does.)
I’m 6’4”. According to the CDC, I should be 202 lbs. I’m 248 and look skinny, but obese per BMI table. I have muscle, but not a bodybuilder physique. Stomach is flat, I run 8-10 miles every other day in my mid 40s. I wear size large athletic wear and wear a 58 jacket.
Losing 40 pounds on my frame… I’d look like death. I think BMI as estimated by the simple formula is a useful guide for the median height and build person, but it’s used as a health designation whose meaning is frankly bunk. I lay higher insurance rates, for example because of supposed risk of diabetes.
My wife was even worse. She had big boobs, so was declared obese. She was a runner, cyclist, and was a competitive swimmer, but was labeled a fat girl by her doctor.
Stupid things like this turn people off from medicine and delay being treated for real problems.
I decided to check for Finland, a country I’ve often fantasized about moving to since it often scores very highly on happiness maps.
> As of December 2023, Finland's obesity rate is 27% for men and 30% for women, with a body mass index (BMI) above the obesity threshold of 30 kg/m2. This is higher than the EU average and has increased significantly in recent decades. Obesity is most prevalent among people aged 40–64, with one in three in this age group being obese. Abdominal obesity is also common, affecting almost half of adults.
Sedetary life style combined with lots of sausages, red meat an butter does that to a people. Alcohol is also a huge problem in Finland. Not uncommon for men to drink beer daily.
It’s a function of wealth. As nations increase their wealth, their obesity goes up. Except for Japan, they seem to have it figured out. But all the Euro nations have also seen obesity spike over the same time period. Just not as much as the US because they aren’t as wealthy.
Sweden and Switzerland are the lowest obesity of that list while being of the highest wealth. While Ukraine has been near the top with the lowest wealth. Greece and France are also outliers.
While wealth is involved in food abundance aspects, it’s not just a function of wealth as Greece’s obesity increased from 2010-2020 while their wealth decreased. And the wealthier parts of the US are the least obese.
1971–1974: About 5% of children were obese
1980: 13.4% of adults were obese
2008: 34.3% of adults were obese
2009–2010: 36% of adults were obese
2014: 36.5% of adults were obese
2017–2018: 42.4% of adults were obese
A truly astonishing set of data. I assume this has never happened in human history at this scale.