I believe for seed oil (a controversy about I know right about nothing) that the idea is that if it were replaced with butter that would cause the end product to be less harmful, thus reducing the overall health impact of eating a lot of it.

I didn't mean to start an overly hashed discussion, but butter is high in saturated fat. So we would expect junk food consumption to stay the same but now also have a larger atherogenic effect.

For the sake of argument though, let's just say they are noninferior to each other. The point is that it's a red herring compared to our junk food culture and the ubiquity of junk food.

> butter is high in saturated fat. So we would expect junk food consumption to stay the same but now also have a larger atherogenic effect.

Isn't the danger of saturated fat a longrunning myth, given the "France paradox" and the fact that high consumption of coconut oil (even higher in saturated fat) in places like Fiji doesn't have the negative effects that would be predicted if it were real?

I see I was down-voted, I was not trying to argue anything about the relative merits of different kinds of fats in food.

I was just trying to explain how I interpreted the people who did argue that replacing seed oil with butter would be good. I don't know what they base that opinion on, since (again) I'm not read up or engaged in the matter. It could be that butter is felt to be "more natural" than seed oil, and thus "healthier".

Again, I'm not arguing that standpoint, I'm just trying to explain (for some reason), hence the quotes. Oh well.

What does corn syrup cost vs real sugar cost? Does that change the equation?

Does it matter when sugar is already dirt cheap? In bulk it costs 18 cents per pound. Given that a person is unlikely to eat even half a pound of sugar per day, the price is unlikely to be a factor. Even if for some reason corn syrup is free, the budgetary hit is less than a dime per day. I doubt that's going to change anyone's eating habits.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/sugar

Look it up. They are both dirt cheap. We just happen to subsidize one and artificially raise the price of the other.

Now, maybe caloric sweeteners should be much more expensive and maybe that will have a positive impact on society (like incentivize zero-cal sweeteners). But if that's what you're getting at, you shouldn't be arguing for that through a proxy argument about corn vs cane sugar.

> Since we use seed oils in junk food, it must be the seed oils making us fat instead of how we guzzle down junk food.

My low effort recollection is that seed oil memers go on about how consuming a lot of seed oil leads to inflammation, and inflammation is bad.

Indeed, it looks like they are right on that particular datum:

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/seed-oils-are-they-actual...

Now, their low cost makes them associated with ultra-processed foods, and overconsumption of those foods is what generates the significant digits of inflammation/health risk (as it appears you are pointing out above).

As the article points out, another problem with seed oils is that they themselves are also highly processed. So "seed oils bad" isn't orthogonal to avoiding highly processed food-- it's just a limited and error-prone approach subject to occasional exploit (e.g., some "healthy" alternative to cheezits that uses olive oil instead of seed oil).

Still, a memer's dogma to avoid seed oil probably cuts out a supermajority of the junk food found at the average supermarket. There's a good chance a memer gets bored and leaves before they even find the "healthy" cheezits! (Or, more likely these days, they scoff at the price.)

Edit: clarifications

Edit 2: I guess to be realistic, seed oil memers probably meme about any amount of seed oil leading to inflammation. Even so, seed oil saturates so much fast food (heh) that the memer dogma almost certainly would have a positive effect on overall health.

> you think we'd be in any different of a situation if junk food were made with cane sugar

That's pretty much the main difference between soft drinks inside the US and outside the US. Soft drinks are a big part of the problem. You see lots of people getting addicted to the sugar rush and drinking that stuff by the bucket load (conveniently supplied in huge containers at your favorite fast food place).

Obesity is a growing problem in many places; but the US is where it all started and where the problem is the largest. The correlation between excessive corn syrup consumption and obesity is not something that needs a lot of arguing.

Correlation is not the same thing as causation of course. But still, if you want to run an experiment where all the corn syrup gets replaced by regular sugar, leave the US and observe people around you. Most things are the same. But you'll have hard time finding anything that contains corn syrup. It's just not a common ingredient anywhere outside the US. There are other differences. But that would be the big elephant in the room.

Sorry about the bad puns here.