The evidence against seed oils is not quite as convincing. I see seed oils as a low quality food to be avoided - goes rancid too easily, requires chemical processing, etc. - but it's not strictly poison. These oils are in virtually every industrial "food product" which makes them unhealthy by association. Stop eating highly processed crap and you'll see the benefits - cutting out seed oils is a side effect.
When you see how much sugar it takes to make alcohol it starts to make sense.
Not relevant.
what gets killed by alcohol is not what gets killed by refined sugars
This has nothing to do with the discussion.
very different end products with very different effects
In this case they share the effects being talked about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8G8tLsl_A4
And overweight is not caused by sugar or by alcohol directly,
They are the major contributing factors to obesity. This is not generally disputed. It is a systemic problem and trying to deny the problems by saying the primary factor isn't "the direct cause" (without any detail, nuance or information of your own) is the kind of hand waving people have been doing to obscure people understanding these problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fermentation
https://thep53.com/how-alcohol-is-metabolized-and-its-relati...
https://scitechdaily.com/the-sugar-pathway-that-links-alcoho...
The difference between out two comments is that what I said is relevant and sourced.
Honestly, the 'avoir sugar' crowd is wrong in its messaging, the correct message should be 'increase your fiber intake'.
Also an effect of fiber is that it increases your transit speed and quality a lot (a lot). I don't know if that also have an effect on how much sugar and fat is absorbed in the small intestine, but I recently managed to loose weight I had a lot of trouble eliminating without changing my calorie intake. Basically I went from 115 kg to 95 with reducing my calorie intake without much trouble (stopped sugar and alcohol basically) in 2-3 years, and didn't manage to go much lower in the last 6 year (I was around 90-88 by starting physical activity, but those 5kg took 4 years to loose and I stabilized again). But I recently had transit issues, and started eating more fiber like 3 months ago. I lost 1 kg over the timeframe, while having a way better time on the toilets, and it was even easier than stopping sugar (just eat more greens, beans and oats), as I didn't change my meal size.
My thoughts are that it's too sweet, though I don't know what quality its fiber has: like is it decent dietary fiber or a nutrition label dodge of some sort.
Besides, are you sure that eating that sugar with more fiber would not have been better for you? And if not, perhaps a 100 km bike ride is far enough outside the body's design that you need to give it relatively pure glucose because the calorie requirements, if satisfied with more fibrous food, would not physically be able to contain the required calories. And I don't think the latter case is relevant to a discussion of general diet, even if the post lacked explicit qualifiers.
I don't think it is, there are a lot of bikers, runners, triathlon people between my colleagues and friends that regularly do that much energy output. Several of them even do much longer rides. And we are not even that young or sport-mad.
> Besides, are you sure that eating that sugar with more fiber would not have been better for you?
Yes, you don't want to get your bowels very active/full during biking. As an aside, top road cyclists (and I'm sure also long distance runners etc) are currently consuming up to 120g of glucose/fructose per hour during their performance, and have to train their guts so they are able to consume that much.
> And I don't think the latter case is relevant to a discussion of general diet, even if the post lacked explicit qualifiers.
And the point of my post was exactly that I think that either there should be always explicit qualifiers around 'sugar bad' or better just don't write that at all, because it's plain wrong. Sugar as a reasonable part of a quality diet is fine. It's different for children and obviously some other groups of people, but it's not bad in general (and if you want to lose weight, try to eliminate starch, not simple or short-chain sugars, but that's too hard for most people, and might not be healthy either). And messages like that just destroy the credibility of the speaker.
'sugar bad' is a clearly wrong advice that only confuses people in any context.
I do live a fairly sedentary life too. The point of aerobic exercise such as cycling is to counteract that. I log my exercise on Strava, which reportedly has 50 million MAU. I'm sure at least half of them (+ many millions of non-Strava users) could do that easily (or equivalent in their chosen sport). Still an edge case?
"Watch your energy balance", "watch your weight", nutrients, processed foods, etc. I would consider generally good advice. "Sugar bad" or even "added sugar bad" certainly not.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but people who go to the level of "eliminate sugar completely" are usually pretty knowledgeable, so I'm trying to get into the specifics.
On a societal level the idea of reducing sugar is a positive one, but trying to eliminate sugar is the wrong idea. As far as I know eating a bowl of greek yogurt with homemade granola, raspberries, and maple syrup (or even some powdered cane sugar, which I don't use), has substantially more fiber, less sugar, and more nutrient balance (and less likely to overeat) than sitting down and eating a mango, yet under the current advice trend I'm doing it wrong by "adding sugar" to the greek yogurt, and I'm totally fine to eat the mango since the sugar was in there by default.
Given that factory farmed fruit has been having increasing amounts of sugar over time it's really a lot more about nutrients, fiber, and sugar, than it is about blanket rules.
Saying "no added sugar" is a positive high level societal rule, like "eat 3-5 servings of vegetables and fruit a day" but if you get into absolute rules among nutritionally educated people, things like "no added sugar" don't really track.
It doesn't seem like you're confused, it seems like you're using that as a rhetorical device to be pedantic.
> I'm not trying to be pedantic, but
Followed by 4 paragraphs of pedantry, after moving the goalposts from "added sugar" to all sugar.
Eat less junk food. Spend less time lawyering the definition of junk food.
If you think of the specialty oranges like cuties and halos, they are loaded with sugar, that's why they taste so good.
Apples and bananas still won't help you lose weight. Tomatoes have much less sugar and could actually be helpful to be less hungry without many calories.
There is no easy way out, you can't just eat a bunch of sugar loaded fruit and think the fiber will totally protect you or that because it is "fruit" it's healthy.
The point here is saying "fruit is healthy" is just not true in any sort of black and white sense. Someone can easily get fat and be unhealthy by eating fruits with lots of sugar, and if they are juicing them, even more so.
I am curious which is worse in terms of contribution to modern chronic metabolic disease.
In the case of ultra-processed/refined oils though, there is an argument to be made that these are novel foods that humans never ate until very recently. There aren't any old people who have been eating them their whole lives in the quantities we do now. This is probably true for industrially refined sugar too, but sugar is a more complex story since people have been concentrating plant sugars for a lot longer than they've been industrially refining oil for food.
I'm not defending sugar though to be clear - I strictly avoid it and even avoid fruit juice and such. I know empirically for myself I feel terrible if I eat very much sugar. I also feel terrible if I eat much refined oil and I strictly avoid that too.
It's the refined soybean oil, canola/rapeseed oil, cottonseed oil, grapeseed oil, sunflower seed oil, corn oil, safflower oil, peanut oil - these are the modern refined oils I'm referring to that were never eaten until very recently. I'd be dubious of refined / ultra processed olive and avocado oil too, which is a different thing from fresh cold pressed olive or avocado oil.
Every argument I’ve seen demonstrates a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the chemistry. These same bad chemistry takes are repeated everywhere by influencers. This isn’t unique to the oil discussions, dietary health is rife with vibe-based chemistry takes that are obviously unscientific.
But the worst part isn't refining the oil itself, but the use of these oils in ultra-processed foods along with refined sweeteners, colorings, and fillers. Even if refined seed oils themselves aren't harmful, avoiding them is likely to be beneficial because it leads to avoiding ultra-processed foods.
Replacing "seed oils" with hamburgers and french fries fried in tallow won't magically help your health. If anything, you would die quicker from the huge amount of saturated fat you're now intaking.
Ultra processed foods are bad generally, yes, but not because they're processed, but because they're high in fat and sugar, while being calorically dense with no nutritional value.
I'd like to see your evidence for the first claim.
The second claim is not as well supported as you might think. A recent Cochrane review published by The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) rated "Reduction in Saturated Fat Intake for Cardiovascular Disease" as having Unclear Benefits with no significant effect on all-cause or cardiovascular mortality. This is based on randomized controlled trials that measured endpoints directly rather than LDL levels.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/10/21/advisory-replacing-...
We know, for sure, that eating less saturated fat reduces your markers that put you at risk of cardiovascular disease. Your study points that out. The problem with assessing cardiovascular mortality is that takes many many years to come home to roost. As your source points out, most studies were only 12-24 months.
First, in the Oslo Diet-Heart Study, "there were fewer cardiovascular deaths in the experimental group by 27% (P=0.09)", a non-significant result.
Second, it cites the reduction in CHD deaths in Finland between 1972 and 1992, attributing 50% of the reduction to cholesterol levels. But similar reductions occurred in many nations at that time, largely due to reduced smoking, improved treatment, and other changes that should not be ignored. There is no clear link to saturated fat here.
Third, it cites the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study, an observational study that didn't isolate PUFA intake, and is likely to be confounded by diet quality.
I would describe that evidence as weak-to-moderate at best.
The evidence regarding LDL is stronger, but that's a concern that should be measured and treated individually. People do not respond identically to diet, not everyone has high LDL, and there are many ways to lower it if needed. Personally, I don't worry much about saturated fat because my LDL is under 70.
This is typical Internet Nutrition Bullshit, just packaged in vaguely smart sounding words.
Should we cancel vaccines and water purification while we're at it? It's not hard to come up with vaguely plausible reasons for why those are bad as well, eg. "hygiene hypothesis", "gut microbiome", or whatever.
>But the worst part isn't refining the oil itself, but the use of these oils in ultra-processed foods along with refined sweeteners, colorings, and fillers. Even if refined seed oils themselves aren't harmful, avoiding them is likely to be beneficial because it leads to avoiding ultra-processed foods.
It's ironic you cite ultra-processed foods, another category which has questionable rigor and applicability, but people nonetheless defend because "Even if ultra processed foods themselves aren't harmful, avoiding them is likely to be beneficial because it leads to avoiding unhealthy foods."
The evidence that ultra processed foods are harmful is quite strong, much stronger than the association with saturated fat intake. Are you really suggesting that they might not be unhealthy?
>Everyone knows that greens are good for your health and red meat is not. But everyone would laugh if I were to propose that red foods are dangerous and green ones healthy. I could prove my thesis making use of a few additional rules, such as postulating that some shades of red, tomatoes and apples for instance, should not be counted as red.
>The Nova classification system, which sorts foods into four categories depending on the degree of processing they undergo, uses similar logic. There is no scientific justification for the assumption that the number of processing steps is of any relevance for the health properties of foods. Making “ultra-processed” popcorn or chips is exceedingly simple. Making “minimally processed” natural yogurt requires some 20 processes.
>Heating is the process that affects foods the most, but heating is afforded no attention in Nova. It does not neatly fit into the processed or unprocessed scheme. In some cases it is essential for public health, in others it may induce carcinogens. And in a blatant example of the arbitrariness of the Nova classification, putting a loaf of bread into a bag moves it from the minimally processed to the ultra-processed category.
>The flawed, but intuitively easy to grasp, label of ultra-processed food is a handy justification for blaming food-related health problems on profit-hungry food companies. And it enables politicians to divert funding from serious research to meaningless eye-catching interventions.
>Petr Dejmek
>Emeritus professor of food engineering
>Lund University
>Lund, Sweden
Putting a loaf of bread into a bag certainly doesn't move it from the minimally processed to the ultra-processed category. That false claim is based on the fact that most bread sold in bags is ultra-processed, but it's not the bag that makes it so.
I think that professor of food engineering may have a conflict of interest related to the foods he creates for a living.
So going back to the quote, is the potato chips vs yogurt example accurate?
>That false claim is based on the fact that most bread sold in bags is ultra-processed, but it's not the bag that makes it so.
What makes them ultra-processed then? Even the home made loaf is made from wheat that's dehusked, ground to a powder, and then chemically treated (bleaching). Making it into a dough and then baking it involves even more processing. The final product resembles the inputs almost as little as instant mash potatoes resembles potatoes. The only real difference is the use of dough conditioners and industrial sized ovens, but given all the previous steps, it seems arbitrary to draw the line of "ultra-processed" there.
Yes, the extraction of these oils is "novel" just like factory farms are novel. As the article explains, it is the ultra-processed food products that are the problem, not the seed oil ingredients.
The anti refinement process perspective is discounting that the end result is the perfect fat.
A similar thing can be said about hydrolyzed collagen with a little tryptophan added.
I don't have evidence for this specifically, but there's certainly a long and documented history of both a) influencers suddenly adopting a new party line in response to a paid campaign and b) shitty policy specifically for the influential corn industry (ethanol subsidies, e.g.)
Except they are. A refined monounsaturated fat is in the upper tier of perfect calorie. It makes a lot of sense for omega-9's to be a major part of caloric consumption. The omega-3 and omega-6 when fresh and uncooked are also unnecessary demonized by the idea that they are immediately rancid. Like many things the problems arise from the implementation or how they are used, not the chemical itself.
It has such a low boiling point, it’s heated. It all evaporates out. What’s the mechanism keeping hidden undetected hexane in the product.
How many products with seed oil also contain some form of added sugar? I don't seem to have much issue with moderating the occasional bag of cheezits or goldfish, but the moment I start getting into cookies and ice cream it's like a junkie broke into my house.