> One additional note on this study — the research team has not yet isolated which chemicals in the oil are responsible for the changes they found in the hypothalamus. But they have ruled out two candidates. It is not linoleic acid, since the modified oil also produced genetic disruptions; nor is it stigmasterol, a cholesterol-like chemical found naturally in soybean oil.

1. We're not mammals that experience torpor. That doesn't even remotely apply to us.

2. The study explicitly states this isn't lineolic acid.

3. The site you linked is a snake oils salesman who has a vested interest in you buying their products and living the lifestyle they espouse.

- 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 (https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/1/22/21075218/no...).

- 13.2% of Americans have taken an SSRI in the past 30 days (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db377.htm). To be clear, depression and torpor are different conditions, but it seems reasonable that a torpid-like state might include depression-like symptoms, and that those might be treatable with SSRIs.

- Obesity has absolutely exploded in the past 40 years, and none of the prevailing hypotheses have much explanatory power (https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...).

Market pressures ended up selecting a diet made of poisonous food that lies to your tastebuds and satiety center.

First, I'm not sure there's a strong case that our lifestyles today are any more sedentary than in, say, the 1970s (when obesity rates were around 12% rather than 30%). We had cars, transit, elevators, escalators, school buses, television, keyboards, etc. in the 1970s, while at the same time "going to the gym" was just not something that average people did on a regular basis. Even going jogging was mildly eccentric.

Second, this is looking at resting metabolic rates, not overall calorie expenditure, although there is probably some association between RMR and physical activity.

Which brings me to the third point, which is that you're just shifting the burden of answering question of "why are we fat?" to "why are we sedentary?". If we are in fact increasingly sedentary, it could be that an outside factor is causing both low RMR and sedentary behavior. Anecdotally, I (as a comparatively skinny person) have a lot harder time sitting still than some of my friends and acquaintances that struggle with their weight. They might consider spending a day in bed as a great way to recharge, whereas it is something I would only do if I were pretty miserably ill.

In 1969 48% of US kids walked to school; in 2011 it was 13%. http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...

Public transit is actually great for walking since you are walking to and from a stop.

People have become so unused to children walking around unsupervised that it has become grounds to call child protective services.

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.

Your first sentence is obviously true. Your second one is probably false, since the total removal of that seems unlikely compared to evolution simply disabling it. I have no evidence that part of it remains, nor do I see any evidence of total removal.

Life science is based on observational evidence, and since humans are some mammals who have never been observed to undergo torpor, effects observed inducing mammalian torpor do not apply to humans. They're not making a positive evolutionary statement about human torpor never existing, just that any observed effects from linolenic acid on mammalian torpor do not apply to humans the way the other person was implying it does.

Plenish just has less LA, not zero, and they were trying to rule it out from a few genetic expressions they were looking at, not obesity.

Also: This is on male mice, which experience topor, which means they can dial their metabolisms way back.

Human metabolism just doesn't work like that. Studies have consistently shown that metabolism is pretty constant across the gamut of humans based on muscle mass, activity, and weight.

We do not experience torpor naturally. That does not exclude that you can blast a human body with the right amount of hormones or substances that act like ones and artificially induce torpor in humans. NASA has been researching ways to do that for years now [1], given that even a small amount of saved resources per human on a months-long space trip saves a lot of resources in total, not to mention the potential of a reduced metabolic rate also protecting the traveling humans from cosmic radiation-induced damage.

As for "how to induce torpor", well, we don't even know what exactly causes it in animals. We are just guessing - and we are at the same time also noticing that wide swaths of the population show up with a lot of health issues that used to be either rare or mostly spread on older people. Auto-immune diseases (allergies, diabetes, neurodermitis), precocious puberty, cancers of all kinds, obesity in young people, circulatory issues, Alzheimer's and other neuro-degenerative diseases, just to point out the most obvious and most-researched. And since there are only three major things that changed over the last hundred years from the previous default - our food, the introduction of heavy industry, plastics and pollution, and our way of living under modern capitalism (your ordinary medieval farmer did not work 40 hour weeks for the entire year for his whole life) - it is not surprising that correlations appear there. The key thing is to find out if the correlation also has a corresponding causation!

[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/content/torpor-inducing-transfer-habita...

We know from animal research that torpor/hibernation in non-human mammals creates a sleep deprived state. We know that there is no evidence of humans being able to enter a state of torpor. We know that humans have high sleep requirements for our brain function. It stands to reason that humans distant ancestors lost the ability to hibernate at some point and that it wouldn't work with our physiology.

Look, if we're going to make major life changes on the basis of this one study, you've missed the opportunity for an all-chocolate diet.

Does it have to be dark chocolate?

Eat more than a few tablespoons of any edible oil in one sitting and you'll definitely feel a difference.

Edit: using only added coconut oil in cooking is, upon reflection, a more probable interpretation. Sorry.

Edit: you added your edit while I was writing my comment :)

You can mix it in with things like coffee and shakes, easy way to get it.

https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/unsaturated-oils.shtml

Basically, any combination of coconut oil in your diet that isn't 100% coconut oil will lead to calorie gain.

What difference will I feel that couldn't be explained simply by my expectation that I would feel different?

The truth is that our stomach has a hard time digesting a sudden influx of MCT. Adding a large amount of MCT to a diet previously free of MCT will cause nausea. And that short term nausea is largely the cause of any "weightloss" seen by MCT. The studies that study MCT and show weightloss are all short term studies, and not the 6-12 month study you really need for weightloss.

In short, you'll feel a difference because coconut oil upsets your stomach. Not because it's a non-animal fat. Hell, we use sesame, peanut, canola, and olive oils all the time. Replace all your dietary fat with canola oil or olive oil and you'll not notice. Will probably have health benefits because of the reduction in saturated fats.

Coconut oil is mainly comprised of saturated fatty acids. Its closer to butter, not the refined PUFA oils.

Consuming anything to excess is gonna mess up your system, water included.

We also have genes that are related to cows, have you tried subsisting on grass?

Your argument is farcical and entirely based on the preaching of a snake oil salesman, in a comments section based on a torpid male mouse study that specifically refutes the argument you're making.

> the research team has not yet isolated which chemicals in the oil are responsible for the changes they found in the hypothalamus. But they have ruled out two candidates. It is not linoleic acid, since the modified oil also produced genetic disruptions; nor is it stigmasterol, a cholesterol-like chemical found naturally in soybean oil.

According to the paper the Linoleic acid composition of the oils in question are:

    soybean:     %52.90
    modified SO:  %7.42  (aka plenish)
    coconut:      %0.06

Ironically, lineseed oil is also low in linoleic acid.

https://www.news-medical.net/health/Oils-Rich-in-Linoleic-Ac...

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 store you have to find not only "grass fed" but "grass finished" beef.

Chickens that are allowed to eat at will (chickens eat a really wide range of shit, not just "feed" that's mostly corn - they eat grass, bugs, they'll even eat rodents if they can catch one). Chickens in farms usually don't eat like that. If your eggs say "organic", they're certainly not eating like that.

There's absolutely no way to get low PUFA pork these days. At all. Fire in the Bottle blog has partnered with a farm that's raising low PUFA pigs and you can have $100 of pork shipped to you, but that's the only place i'm aware of it.

But yeah, the fat profile of our animals havve radically changed. Because of what we feed them. And then we eat them and the problems goes on up the food chain.

I'm not a vegetarian and i'm not a globalist and there becomes a point where there's a lot of politics in what you eat. I'm not into diets to be kind to animals or even because of the environment. If healthy food hurt the environment, i'm eating healthy food. Ya know?

But at this juncture - you're better off being low meat (wild caught, mercury tested, salmon 1-2x a week, some skinless chicken, grassfed beef 1x a month or something), and eating a mostly vegetarian diet, roughly 1-2 meals a day, lots and lots and lots of veggies. It's simply too hard to account for all the garbage done to meat, from a health perspective.

And there's also 'grass finished' which does the reverse process of grain first and grass at the end to boost the carotene a little and change the texture of the fat a bit (grain fed 'looks better' to shoppers which is part of how that changeover happened so fast)

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.

"The few vegetarian dishes ... are often not nearly as good as yogurt, meat, eggs, or [...] whey protein"

Yogurt, eggs and whey protein are vegetarian (but not vegan). Vegetarian is extremely easy (I eat 95% vegetarian because it's cheaper and easier), vegan is very difficult and requires significant sacrifices.

Or maybe I misunderstood your sentence in some way.

I don't mean to be pedantic, but it seems to me that the discussion is going to be difficult if vegan and vegetarian are getting mixed up.

Even this list of vegan complete proteins are mixtures of multiple foods

https://www.peta.org/living/food/complete-proteins-vegan/

There's a life-span way and a health-span way. Do you want to live longer? or do you want to feel and potentially look better? When it comes to protein, these two things seem to be at odds with one another.

High protein is correlated with shorter lifespans.

- https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/protein... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC-ej7HbPWg

You'll notice the first link shows higher lifespan when protein intake is increased after a certain age (65). it's assumed this is largely due to the number of deaths from injuries (falls) and complications from injuries that happen to the elderly and that muscle mass at this stage is vital.

But protein tends to active mTor. You want that to not be activated and you want IGF-1 to be low. These are correlated with longer lifespan.

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6611156/ - https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/understanding-mtor-pathway-and-... - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31316753/ - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15501691/

And it looks like studies in humans and animal models seem to reflect correlative data for "Blue Zone diets" (more or less). ( https://www.bluezones.com/2020/07/blue-zones-diet-food-secre... ). Most of the regions in the Blue Zones are high in veggies, low in meat, often with a bit of seafood, and virtually zero processed foods.

How you define a little meat really varies when going by "blue zones". Some might say 4-6oz a day, some might say 1-2x a week. The low amounts of meat and obtaining incomplete proteins with more narrow amino acid profiles is beneficial for health in the long term, largely due to mTor activation being avoided or reduced. The body evolved (it seems) to an extent, to struggle for certain nutrients (but that doesn't mean do without them entirely, but just periods of not having everything at once, constantly). This seems very apparent with studies into proteins. When it comes to other vitamins and minerals (electrolytes, vitamins, etc..) we seems to need those fairly constantly/consistently.

the ultimate way to not activate mTor or stimulate IGF-1, is to fast. Either do time-restricted eating where you eat in a 4-8 hour window every day, or periodically do multiple day fasts..

The timing of your eating, IMHO, is more important than how much meat or veggies you consume. If you ate one meal a day and had meat at that meal, even in large amounts, it'd be more benefitial than say... eating 3 meals a day and being fully vegan or vegetarian. How often you're eating seems to have a more negative effect on lifespan than, to some extent, what you're eating.

I don't avoid meat. I rely on greek yogurt, eggs 1-2x a week, 4-5oz of meat (mostly fish, low-fat chicken breasts without skin, and beef 1x a week), a variety of nuts (i prefer macademia nuts b/c they're low in omega6, low in oxylates and high in monosaturated fats, most other nuts are high in Omega6s and/or oxylates).

I probably eat at a midway point between what i should do for health and lifespan.

If you're more concerned with health span than lifespan then you really want to get about 1G of protein per KG in body weight.

If you're more concerned about lifespan, 0.5G per KG of body weight is more where you want to be.

If you went full carnivore, you'd probably feel absolutely amazing. Eating a lot of meat spurs on testosterone, increases fertility and reproductive capability, and all sorts of great stuff, but the trade off seems to be for lifespan.

You'll notice body builders often don't make it to 100 years old. But look at the Mediterranean, look at japan - fairly thin, active people - often with religious/community connections, who are eating mostly veggies, a little meat, and some seafood once in a while, they're the ones passing the 100 year mark more often.

Doing stuff like fasting, or eating a, lets call it a plant-based diet as opposed to vegetarian, (or both), doesn't feel so great. You can't perform at the gym like you usually would, for example.

The body is best, from a lifespan perspective and to a certain extent, a healthspan perspective, when it's exposed to hormetic stressors. These are little stressors that improve the over-all functioning of your body. Exercise is one. Sauna use is another. Cold exposure (showers, ice baths) is another.

But fasting is too, spurring on autophagy (which is the strongest anti-cancer process we have, internally) and all other great processes like the down regulation of IGF-1.

The body not quite having all the protein it needs, ALL THE TIME, is a beneficial stressor that works to increase lifespan as well. As far as I've read anyways.

Eating many vegetables are also hormetic stressors. Various phytonutrients are built by plants as reactions to when they are stressed, these phytonutrients produced under those conditions are some of the best substances we can eat. Like sulphorafane (from broccoli, broccoli sprouts, kale, cabbage, brussel sprouts, etc.)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz4YVJ4aRfg - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PNGxNzogOY

IMHO - i'd keep on with (grass fed/finished where applicable) meat, yogurt, nuts, a little whey from time to time, 4-5oz of meat a day, (free range or omega3+) eggs every once in a while. But at 40 years old and experiencing some health problems stemming from a mix of a lifetime of bad habits (drinking, smoking, sodas, fast food) and a bit of anxiety that clobbered me in adulthood.. i lean more towards longevity these days that i do in making sure i can lift at the gym and maximizing my athletic performance.

i don't care about what i look like anymore. I don't care about satisfying my ego at the gym anymore either. I just want to be happy and live to see my grandkids be born and maybe go through some pivotal things in elementary school before kicking the bucket.

I eat 2 meals a day 5 days a week

i fast 2-3 days a month, at the beginning of the month.

I eat "normally" for social purposes on the weekends.

I don't calorie count. I've found that based on WHAT i'm eating, calories don't matter much. I did Keto for 6 months and even eating tons of meat and hitting 3kcals a day, i was still losing weight when my carbs were under 20g a day.

But now I probably don't hit 2k cal a day and sometimes my weight fluctuates up 1-3 pounds or back down, here and there. And i exercise 5-6 days a week.

i know i ramble (ADHD) but i used to pack on 3k a day or more, and drink protein shakes and hit the gym and make sure i was getting lots of protein.

I've long abandoned that mentality. I stopped listening to fitness people and started listening to doctors and scientists.

The variances explained by the statistical models of longevity and health are generally woefully low.

Don’t even talk about correlation for populations unless you add the “variance explained” and unless you are sure the statical model and cofactors apply broadly.

You, as an individual, may be way out in metabolic and life-style left field. Are these recommendations even of the correct polarity for you?

We raised 80 different strains of inbred mice on both standard and very high fat (60% calories from lard) diets. Each strain was randomly assign to either diet for life with about 8 to 10 replicate “identical twins” per diet.

Do you think we can make a dietary recommendation for mouse number 81? Well at a crude level, sure. The high fat diet generally is not a good diet in terms of lifespan. But there are big deviations from the mean and at least one strain lived much longer on the ridiculous high fat diet than on the standard chow diet.

Paper by Roy S et al 2021 in Nature Metabolism, and open in bioRxiv:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/776559v3

I agree on metabolic benefits from eating 1 time or so every day but that is not a problem for me, I've done it in the past but can't build muscle on it. I am hoping something like rapamycin matures for some anti-mtor potential.

I am closer to 1.8g/kg protein since this is about the most i get any help from. Less than that I notice effects on getting stronger much slower. I agree with you on lots of vegetables with that, my diet tends to be lots of whole foods like oatmeal, yogurt, chicken, turkey, fish, chickpea, some milk and cheese with lots of different vegetable (usually the "bulk" of food I eat). Over all a mostly good diet and I have cheat meals maybe 6 times per year or less, just larger quantity of food combined with heavy exercise.

I think maybe fewer meals and fasting is good if you have prior issues, I always had excellent metabolic health, I never needed to lose weight (did need to gain it in the past, doctor orders). I do fast occasionally on a heavy cut though I have to be careful how much I do or I go too catabolic.

Last, I think "bodybuilders die young" is overstating and refers to competition bodybuilders. First almost all of them are on gear, it's just how much. And most of them who get on stage are on a lot of it and use some of the more side effect prone ones (e.g. tren, eq). Also cutting drug abuse (clen, dnp). Also heavy diuretic abuse. Mostly even the "natural" ones. I skip all this stuff, no gear, no sarms, no cutting drugs, no diuretics, I don't compete. So I think it's a lot less harm.

I could have written parts of it myself as I’m at a similar age with a similar journey and also adhd.

I’m going to think very carefully about what I’ve read here. Thanks again.

However, in this case, the eggs and lard that existed in the human diet for a long time, are not the same. The chickens and pigs are eating a different diet and this does effect the composition of the fatty acids present in the flesh/eggs.

compared to what? various foods contain oil (eg. peanuts, cashews, soybeans, sunflower seeds). Are they different, or "suspect" as well?

There have been many instances, throughout history, where something that had massive adoption by our society has turned out to be bad. Lead being a relatively recent example. All the plastics (BPA, BPA free "safe" plastics, phthalates, etc) probably being the current/next.

PUFAs - as cooking oils - should be totally and utterly avoided. People should be using butter, ghee, beef tallow, coconut oil, avocado oil (which is a little higher in omega6s that i'd like but it's mostly a monosaturated fat), duck fat, emu oil.

Macademia nut oil is higher in monosaturated fats than olive oil and has a higher smoke point, but it's expensive. Tallow, butter and coconut is where it's at for high heat cookiing.

Most seed, nut, corn, and vegetable oils are trash. Cottonseed, soybean, corn, canola, grapeseed, peanut, etc..

However, where I live I can get locally produced cold pressed "extra virgin" rapeseed oil. How would you say that compares to canola oil regarding how healthy (or trashy) it is?

And the omega3s it has is ALA, which your body has to convert to EPA or DHA to use, and the conversion is usually crap. Like 5-10% of ALA actually becomes something usable.

Rapeseed isbetter than canola due to the processing for canola raising the omega6 profile even higher.

But if it were up to me? I'd find another oil.

Big meta studies may miss this because its a relatively new trend, and IQ is full of a million biases that can just generate noise when combined. When people are young, their IQ is significantly influenced by environmental factors, but as they age genetic factors become dominant. And in countries without some form of compulsory testing, sample biases abounds.

As for the past gains, look at height! Height is reasonable proxy for nutrition and globally it's just skyrocketed [2]. Japan is one of the more extreme examples, with their average height increasing by about half a foot since 1896!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...

[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-of-men?tab...

Would you trust n-of-1 clinical trial? One monozygotic twin gets diet X, the other is control. A study of C57BL/6N mice, no matter how many are used is an n-of-1 study. And these mice all completely inbred. At least the human MZ twins are not inbred!

There is just no excuse for style of reductionist science. Gives mouse models a terrible, but perhaps deservedly bad reputation for translational ir-relevance.

Yet you see these n-of-1 studies in many of the top tier journals. The NIH BRAIN initiative mouse studies make the same error. Do we really want just ONE connectome? How do we compute our way to causal models with n-of-1?

I always try to study many genomes of mice and whenever possible both sexes.

Does it make it harder and more expensive? You bet. But the data are much more robust and translationally relevant.

See almost any paper by RW Williams at UTHSC.

In a way I think this gives some ammo to the vegetarian philosophy, but I'd like to know the lineolic acid content of tofu, since bean curd is not exactly equivalent to whole beans.

Is this the same as ALA in flax-seed oil that is supposedly good for us?

The goal is to be high-ish in Omega3s without getting mercury poisoning and low in Omega6s.

The modern diet - so if you go out to eat at all, if you cook with corn/canola/soybean/cottonseed oils or shortenings like Criso, if you use 90% of most modern pre-made marinades, salad dressings, cereals, chips, crackers, cookies, and even most bread (not including some brands of butter bread), they all load up on "seed oils" (Meaning LA).

When people say a good diet is rich in whole foods and low in processed foods - this is what is at the heart of it. Processed foods tend to be high in omega6s, high in sugar, and high in sodium,. The latter 2 are largely for taste, or in salt's case taste and preservation.

Omega6s are used b/c the oils are super cheap. These are oils that couldn't exist without modern industry, in the bulk in which we produce them. (unlike say..beef tallow, coconut oil, butter, olive oil, ghee, duck fat, etc.) And initially they were sold by non-food industries as a way to maximize profits on byproducts from other industrial processes.

They have incredibly high smoke points and they don't go rancid or spoil, so if you want to make say... Cheeze-Its or Pringles, it's a perfect choice for production - it's cheap, it's stable, it doesn't burn easily, it doesn't spoil, etc..

What's worse is we've radically changed what we feed animals too - chickens, pigs, cows, and now all of the meat we eat also has a much higher omega6 profile than it ever did before these seedoils came along or "corn" became the staple of our lives from ethanol to chicken feed.

Foods high in Omega3s tend to be fatty fish, the low mercury types would be salmon and sardines, mostly. Tuna is good too but higher in mercury. and you'll want to eat the wild versions of these b/c at least in Salmon's case it also contains an antioxidant called Astaxanthin, which is an amazing anti-oxidant. Salmon get this from eating Krill (Krill get it from eating algae - and it's why krill and salmon are red/pink).

Unlike most anti-oxidants, Astaxanthin doesn't flip to being pro-oxidant under any circumstances and it, particularly, prevents Poly-Unsaturated Fats from Oxidizing. Which is really important since they oxidize so easily ( this is why Omega3 based oils, for example, aren't good cooking oils).

Fish are high in EPA and DHA, which are forms of Omega3. ALA is the type found in flax or papaya or some other sources. I'd mention chia seeds but being as they're higher in oxylates than spinach, i reject them as a health food. ALA is a poor Omega3. Your body can't use it directly and it must be converted into EPA and DHA and it's done so at a really poor conversion rate. Something like only 5-10% of the Omega3s in ALA form ever get converted to a form that your body can use.

And while there's 1000s of blogs and videos going on about the benefits of Omega3s, which there are many, let me also give warning that high doses of EPA (pure EPA at 4-7g) given to patients in a clinical trial, for years, gave them heart arrhythmias. While no fun, the main cause of death from heart arrhythmias is stroke, and funny enough, Omega3s lessen the risk of death from stroke. So you'd get a heart arrhythmias but still be less likely to die from it. The lesson here, though, is the poison is in the dose.

The more you read Fire in a Bottle (blog linked in first comment), you'll notice that the human body really isn't meant to process mass amounts of PUFAs at all.

This is a fantastic talk on Omega3s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f-CFQxaUY4

I have weaponized my health anxiety, so subscribe if you'd like to know more.

You might also enjoy the brief remarks from this old OpenVisConf USDA parallel coordinates data visualization+video of animals aggregating the things we feed them.

I find it sort of underscores your point of linoleic acid in egg likely not being stable over history, if you feed a chicken differently, even though USDA treats food as if they are, in data: https://twitter.com/thadk/status/1352034735548194817?s=20

Point on eggs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459016

It's good to see it. This guy is so ahead of the curve.

I saw this video about seed oils a few months back.[1] Some of the information there tracked stuff I have been reading for a while. Decided to switch over completely to coconut oil and ghee (clarified butter).

A comment on the video that matches my view on the subject:

> If you want to be healthy just do the exact opposite of everything we were told about nutrition by mainstream experts for decades

[1] The $100 Billion Dollar Ingredient making your Food Toxic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k)

Cholesterol oxides in Indian ghee: possible cause of unexplained high risk of atherosclerosis in Indian immigrant populations:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2887943/

"Substantial amounts of cholesterol oxides were found in ghee (12.3% of sterols), but not in fresh butter"

All fat oxidizes, some oxidize easier than others. Some are more inflammatory tahn others (omega6s are way more so than saturated fats). Carb intake has complex interactions kicking off the oxidation of fats too.

We have been using ghee in India for thousands of years. If immigrant Indians are having problems, they should look into what changed in their diet and lifestyle after they immigrated.

Drastic increase in quantity of ghee (and sugar since a lot of Indian tests are a lot of ghee and sugar) consumed and reduction in labor (trading strenuous, perspiring work for air conditioned, sitting work) could be relevant factors that make ghee consumption from the previous thousand years not comparable to today.

About a decade ago, my Indian colleagues told me that Indians had been encouraged to switch away from ghee, based on health concerns. I forget which oil most moved to, but I think it was palm, vegetable or sunflower oil. In addition, they said consumption of refined sugar had skyrocketed, where palm sugar had previously been used.

Ghee has been consumed for centuries (at least) in India - I wonder if it's these ghee alternatives and refined sugar are the main causes of increased diabetes and obesity.

Yes, carbohydrates like sugar are of course a huge part of the problem, but the health crisis has many factors and my intention was to convey that ghee has downsides. Saturated fats are saturated fats regardless of how many thousand years they have been used.

This is the most likely cause. People in India are consuming way more sugar, refined flours and seed oils than they used to three decades back. That is when all these colas/biscuits/chocolates/chips/pizzas and oils started being advertised heavily on television.[1]

[1] Sundrop super-refined sunflower oil: the healthy oil for healthy people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI-39Wxd5U8)

[2] Saffola: refined Kardi/Safflower oil (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTaMTD3taVc)

I have noticed that. I have also noticed that youngsters started adopting Western habits and diets and consumption patterns over the same time period.

> Drastic increase in quantity of ghee

Unless you are rich or belong to the upper middle class, ghee is generally consumed in moderate quantities because the family would not be able to afford it.

Today, ghee is between Rs. 500-600/kg. Seed oils are about Rs. 125/kg.

That in of itself is not a particularly good argument. What has been the life expectancy for those thousands of years?

Doing something unhealthy for “thousands of years” does not make it healthy.

There is no concrete evidence that ghee is unhealthy. Even the linked study is only talking about a "possible cause," that too in Indians who are not even in India. Indians adopt western habits when they immigrate. Who knows what they have been eating once they assimilated into English and West Indian societies.

On the other hand, I consume massive amounts of flaxseed oil (insane amounts of omega3), olive oil, sunflower seed oil every single day. I have no issues with weight, no heart or blood vessel issues, blockages.

Ingredient isolation studies of foods are a complete disservice to scientific method.

Any particular food can be part of a healthy diet and lifestyle, absolutely any.

People today are sedentary, just look at natives living in wilderness across the world. They gorge on honey, occasionally eat meat and have insanely strong skeletons and muscles. Look at others that eat only meat, milk and blood, have massive amounts of atherosclerotic plaque, but given their lifestyle in the wilderness, their blood vessels expand and are insanely flexible, only a few unlucky ones die of heart attack very young.

The RDA for Calcium in Western world is so high due to sedentary lifestyle not promoting usage of calcium by the body. There are healthy populations, consuming half the amount and have even less bone fractures.

Unless the studies include tens of thousands of people from South India (particularly Kerala) and Sri Lanka where the coconut and its oil have been used in large quantities in the diet for thousands of years, I don't consider them to be relevant. It is possible that the West has no tolerance for the stuff.

You should try to eat what your ancestors did. We Indians became obese and incidences of lifestyle diseases like diabetes and heart disease increased heavily after we shifted to seed oils and started consuming sugar, refined flours and processed flours in massive quantities since the late 1970s/ early 1980s.

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Nutrition-Your-Genes-Traditional...