People aren't gaining weight on olive oil because people aren't consuming it in mass quantities required to gain weight, if one could even do so after having your intestines coated by oil. But many are consuming highly processed foods which is shown to lead to less optimal health outcomes.
> clearly
Clearly a post on HN doesn't make for a scientific study!
it's true about the laxative effect! you'd have to use a different oil. and it's true that steatorrhea ensues if you try to get all your calories from fat
but things like halvah, lemonade, buttercream frosting, and white chocolate are still a lot older than the obesity pandemic
the hypothesis that hfcs is significantly different in its nutritional effects from sucrose was interesting and has some anecdotal support but is not well supported by evidence so far
'refined foods' have many other nontraditional ingredients introduced around the same time as hfcs, like polyethylene glycol, and we might actually be talking about those instead
the cost of edible oil has not been a bar to access to calorie-dense foods for at least centuries if not millennia
clearly the proximate cause of obesity is eating more and metabolizing less (both by way of lower exercise and lower basal metabolism). but why are people doing that? did they lose the gene for willpower in a single generation? it seems to closely follow industrially-mass-produced foods, but the relevant feature of those foods is clearly not that they are more convenient or higher in calorie density than a can of crisco or an amphora of olive oil; they aren't