"Take a look at the explosion in things like autism, the explosion in chronic health, and [we want to] be able to ask the question, ‘well, what's causing this?"
Couldn't be the pesticides and hormones in our food, or the microplastics we ingest, or the pollution we breath 24/7. Nope, can't be that. Must be seed oils and vaccines.
Also contributing could be changes in our culture that have made those on the spectrum stand out in higher relief. Not directly related: While ADHD is a legit diagnosis, given a gradual decrease in recess and other outlets for physical activity in school, some aspects of boys' regular energy may also have become pathologized and lumped in with ADHD.
Questions of this flavor were being asked 35 years ago relative to pediatric cancer clusters. With the ultimate question being "What is responsible for the observed phenomenon?".
I worked as a chaplain at a major children's hospital, and a fellow chaplain and I mapped out where kids we were serving lived. Unmistakable geographic clusters. Not scientific, of course, but still.
Shocker, RFK Jr. is on the case: he still claims there are no peer reviewed studies to prove autism isn’t caused by the MMR vaccines. I guess he missed the 160 peer reviewed studies including Denmark’s, which was a decades long study with over 650,000 participants and considered the gold standard of autism studies.
Instead we are to rely on the word of Dr. Wakefield, who made the baseless claims and provided a study of his own; it was doctored and fraudulent, leading to Wakefield losing his medical license in the UK.
I wonder who provided the peer reviewed studies for this “seed” oil nonsense? This is the first I’m hearing about it, but it screams RFK Jr., Dr. Oz, Matt Taibbi, JD Vance and Rosanne Barr.
No worries America, if Trump wins I may not be able to tell you if we will even have an FDA, USDA or an Education Department next year; however, I’m 100% sure we won’t be eating “cats” and “dogs”! Okay, I’m pretty sure about the “cats,” don’t quote on the dogs. After all, RFK Jr., was pretty impressed with his rare South Korean dish a few years back. Not to mention, he still has a few bear carcasses in his freezer; leftover from his drug fueled “hallucination” days!…:)
BBbut he's so passionate! And he's a Kennedy!! And he worked on behalf of the environment. He must know everything about everything! This worship of individuals based on an aura of righteous conviction is contributing to our downfall.
I am a life-long Democrat, and he may be a Kennedy, but that doesn’t make him any less of a crackpot. I am also guessing that his father and uncles all rolled over in their graves when he endorsed TFG.
I'll take egotistical if the person knows wtf they're talking about. Or has real subject matter expertise. But RFK Jr has a cult-like following. Just from his book, "The Real Anthony Fauci..." a whole swath of people who should know better think Anthony Fauci and Bill gates are guilty of crimes against humanity (aided and abetted by a National Review article authored by Matthew Scully). According to Wiki, Michael Osterholm says that Kennedy's anti-vaccine disinformation is effective “because it’s portrayed to the public with graphs and figures and what appears to be scientific data. He has perfected the art of illusion of fact.”
Can you give a hint about this personal experience? In any case, I wonder if RFK resembles those dime store mystics who have talked to physicists; and used their ideas about what happens on very small or very large scale to make what they think are groundbreaking pronouncements about what happens at human scale.
Yes. He joined the Riverkeepers Alliance and one of his projects was attacking hog farms for polluting rivers in North Carolina, even though hog farms were under stricter restrictions than the municipal sewage treatment plants.
I was managing a large family owned hog farm at the time and had taken lots of classes on hog farm regulations dealing with waste, plus had a state issued license (required for farm managers).
The owner of the farm was always into new technology and on one of our finisher farms (60lb pigs in, 260 lb pigs to market in 6 months), we had an environmental engineering student build a lagoon water treatment system, basically a concrete swamp, planted with cat tails and other grasses designed to take up the nitrogen. You could actually drink the water that came out the other end.
It was pretty amazing, to be frank.
The local hog farmers had a meeting with the Riverkeeper people (RFK and a couple of staffers), and we invited them to come and tour the farm and the treatment system. We showed them the regulations and the paperwork we had to keep up with and the lack of waste going into the rivers, as RFK claimed.
We showed statistics of how many of the local sewage treatment plants dumped raw sewage into the rivers if we got more than 5 inches of rain.
We had a presentation of the number of golf courses (17 between Raleigh and SE NC) and how much nitrogen they sprayed on the greens (10 x the recommended amount), much of which ran off into the rivers.
Not only was RFK completely bored with the presentations, he was not interested in seeing any of the work we were doing and ended the meeting and walked out without answering any questions from the reporters there.
In another month, he moved on to another project and we never heard from him again.
"he still claims there are no peer reviewed studies to prove autism isn’t caused by the MMR vaccines". The wonderful thing about being a conspiracy nut is that it's almost impossible to prove a negative. All that's needed is an anecdote to breath new life into the false claim.
Well, we live in a world that is full of toxic chemicals that are relatively new (herbicides, pesticides, etc.) many of which remain inadequately researched for safety and others that are known to be hazardous to our health (e.g. paraquat, glyphosate). We have been coping with, not just lead (which is still around), but PFAS, PFOAS, microplastics... the stuff is everywhere. All of this is relatively new, i.e. mostly since the 20th century. To me, that makes more sense as a reason for the explosion in health problems then things like 'seed oils'. In addition, the ubiquitous use of antibiotics in factory farming, antibacterial soaps, etc. could have something to do with the rise in autoimmune disorders. Kids need some dirt in their lives in order to develop strong immune systems. On the other hand, I will definitely agree with these right-wing cranks about Big Ag. Industrial farming, factory farming, and ultraprocessed foods are NOT good for people, farm animals, or the environment!
He is just... so.... gross!! I genuinely don't understand the women who like him and vote for him. I'm full after eating one Whataburger with cheese, jalapeños, and extra pickles.
But my favorite hypocrites are the ones who railed against the covid vaccine and now take Ozempic lol.
Well, the "fish sandwiches" are probably mostly breading, highly processed to remove unwanted and dangerous fiber which could regroup and become balled up tangles of fiber.
I would point you to a Cleveland Clinic article that does speak about the harmful effects of seed oils, mainly because of the way they are processed and because of the foods they are generally used to make, fast food or ultra processed food.
I know the noise on this is full of idiocy, but I think it best for the Bulwark to not contribute to that. Polyphenols in these oils are largely removed during their processing and what is left is something that is inflammatory to the body. So your reference to the NIH 2022 study is misleading. The actual study you reference looked at the relationship between polyphenols in fruits and vegetables and ADHD, not seed oils. There should be an effort made to address the reality that eating foods containing these oils, and all the other crap in them is in effect harmful to human health. If you cannot allocate the time, which I totally get, you should not contribute to the misinformation as you have in this article.
I’m a Bulwark member because I trust you all to bring a nuanced and educated approach to these topics, otherwise we just get people screaming at each other or hiding in their corner and eating red meat all day long 😊. Full disclosure, I’m not a fan of Mr. Johnson, Rogan, Musk, Trump, Vance etc… they make things so much worse because they don’t understand the research either and/or they know they gain by riling up their base on stuff like this.
Yes RFK is a crank. But eating whole food / real food, and cutting back on sugar & ‘aggressively processed seed oils’ CAN improve metabolic health (including hypertension, T2 diabetes, obesity, & IBS)
And for some of us with serious treatment resistant medical conditions - the nutritional therapies that improved our overall metabolic health have also put debilitating symptoms into remission and made our lives worth living again.
What we eat is a personal choice, but this Bulwark member finds your attitude offensive.
Dude here with celiac disease, had SIBO and a whole host of issues.
Seed oils...the question is really one of omega-6 v. omega-3 fatty acids. We had pretty solid, legit, medical research that we consume too much 6 > 3. That's not exactly great long-term for your health, BUT the problem is it's not cause of seed oils exclusively.
We don't eat enough vegetables, whole grains, fatty fish, etc. Basically: balanced diet. We eat way too many fried things, high sodium, booze, saturated fat rich, red meat, high fructose corn syrup.
Seed oils are 'meh' on their own, bad in processed food - but that's mostly due to all the other shit in there.
This is what pisses me off so much about the "woo-woo caucus" led by RFK Jr. and the legion of nuts: there's a legit thing to discuss in here. They narrow in on the point that resonates the most with them instead of actually exploring things in detail and offering nuance. Meanwhile, they denigrate vaccination, you have allied weirdos like Peterson going on about carnivore diets curing injuries (wtf), and then hard pivots into censorship and the "medical deep state".
Sigh...launch me into the fucking sun please. I'm not sure I want to share a planet with these people :(
Seed oils are not bad for your health. In fact the data shows that substituting seed oils for saturated fats is good for your health. Seed oils are also not the reason that cheap snack food is bad for your health. Cheap snack food is bad for your health because it's engineered to induce overeating (i.e. excess calorie intake) and because it displaces more nutritious food from your diet. Canola oil is an excellent source of omega-3s and monounsaturated fats as well as being extremely low in saturated fatty acids.
Yes. Hyper-processed calorically dense food devoid of fiber and antioxidants is the problem. All of it contains seed oils. I have no qualms about stir-frying a veggie filled dinner with seed oil or using seed oil to dress a salad.
Seed oils probably aren't the greatest thing to eat. Part of the problem is how they're used; usually to fry something. Part of the problem is that they are a processed food, where you strip out the fiber and a lot of the good stuff in the seed to make it, and the result is a concentrated fat without a ton of nutritional content. Eating the whole food is certainly healthier than eating the oil. But connecting it to autism is pretty bonkers.
Quality health and nutritional information is really hard to find, because there are tons of studies out there, they often conflict with one another, and the results can often be predicted based on who's funding the study. So, it's tough. And we are the fattest nation in the world, spend by far the most on healthcare with little return on our investment, so we're doing a whole lot wrong when it comes to nutrition.
Excellent comment. Intracellular metabolism is incredibly complex, never mind adding in the complexity of inter-cellular biomolecule communication mediated by receptors on cellular membranes in different tissues. We're not at the stage yet of saying any given molecule, never mind its metabolites, is responsible for a given systemic condition. That's why it's so infuriating that politicians and celebrities with zero basic biology knowledge jump onto any published article to push a narrative, as THESE days, the internet allows anything to pass through with no evaluation or editing whatsoever. These are not intelligent people, even if they possess a law degree or an MBA.
I've been in the throes of "chronic health" my entire 77 years, 9 months, 6 days and counting. Sometimes that "chronic health" was under the weather to a greater or lesser degree, but mostly it has been in the good-to-excellent category. And this is so in spite of my near-daily use of canola (rapeseed) oil and my protein coming primarily from chicken, pork and fish, with an occasional eye of round beef roast. I guess I'll be in chronic health 'til the day I finally just run plumb out of health.
I am probably missing something about seed oils but my question is do the anti seed oil groups eat sunflower seeds and chia seeds and other nuts that are full of oils but the nut is the seed in most cases. Do they explain why that is ok? And if people get duped into these weird diets because they chose to believe an online crank instead of the nutrition studies done by experts who understand the complex system they will eventually pay with poor health. But think if these are the people that are put in our government because they are loyal. Egad!
"but my question is do the anti seed oil groups eat sunflower seeds and chia seeds and other nuts that are full of oils but the nut is the seed in most cases. Do they explain why that is ok?"
Oddly enough, yes?
Chia seeds and some other nuts and seeds have relatively favorable Ω6:Ω3 ratios.
From a nutritionist at a mainstream institution (Cleveland Clinic):
"And keep in mind, too, that you want to try to increase your omega-3 intake and limit your omega-6s.
"'Omega-3s are so important for overall heath that we really need to make the effort to get them into our diets,' Zumpano says. 'Omega-6s, on the other hand, are in abundance in Western diets.'
"The omega-6 to omega-3 ratio should be ideally 2:1 or 1:1, but for most Americans, the ratio is actually a whopping 10:1 or even 20:1."
Can this be overhyped? Sure. Should tinkering with Ω6:Ω3 be most people's dietary priority? Probably not. But it's not unreasonable for people seeking improved health who've already tried other recommended lifestyle changes and failed (either because they couldn't stick to the changes or they could, but they didn't help) to try it at some point.
Right, but if you look up dietary guidelines for reducing inflammation, they'll often include whole nuts and seeds, and olive oil, but exclude seed oils – or exclude all seed oils but canola. And, with sentences like, "The overconsumption of linoleic acid, mainly from industrial omega-6 seed oils, and the lack of long-chain omega-3s in the diet creates a pro-inflammatory, pro-allergic, pro-thrombotic state" published by mainstream researchers, it *is* hard to remember "but canola is different".
Of course, the usual gist of these guidelines is to avoid adding much pure oil at all to our food, except maybe olive oil (something something monounsaturated Ω9). After all, most of us are likely to eat enough naturally-fatty whole foods – if highly processed stuff isn't already crowding out whole foods in our diet (which everyone, mainstream and cranks alike, seems to agree is unhealthy).
And, when balancing health and flavor, there's something to be said for choosing a flavorful fat, which you'll at least enjoy, over a flavorless one. Cheese, or more flavorless seed oil in my sauteed veggies? Whole nuts and seeds I enjoy eating, or flavorless oil? Why add fat that doesn't add flavor? Purveyors of processed foods have reason to – controlling cost, flavor, texture and shelf life to a degree unattainable to home cooks. But why add it at home yourself? More than the merest smear of flavorless fat is rarely called for in home cooking that aspires to be "healthy" (not, say, deep frying or brownies – especially not deep-fried brownies, a foodstuff which not only exists, but is distressingly nicknamed "Beaver Balls").
Heck, some mainstream sources speculate that even olive oil may worsen some inflammatory conditions (oops!) – with other mainstream sources suggesting the opposite.
I'm not surprised the welter of confusing and sometimes-conflicting info gets simplified down to, "Whole nuts and seeds OK, but seed oils evil."
Most (all?) carnivore/keto cranks fear the "lectins" in nuts, seeds, grains and vegetables. Lectins are a family of proteins that are literally found in every plant and animal (even their beloved beef). A few of them are poisonous (e.g. ricin, IIRC), but the vast majority of vegetables, etc. are anything but poisonous!
If Trump is elected, there is no doubt we see significantly reduction in life expectancy in America. Within a decade, we will be on parity with Russia.
MAGA is a cult, i.e., made of gullible people. Therefore MAGA is market for anything that requires credulity. Anything!
By making the MAGA market addressable via easily identifiable social media outlets and so forth Trump has opened the door for all the scammers in the world to go after "his people" - he was the first one through the door but many others are following.
If I was a scammer, I would def be going for these folks. Just like if I were a dictator hoping to be able to easily manipulate a US leader, I would really want Trump to win.
"Take a look at the explosion in things like autism, the explosion in chronic health, and [we want to] be able to ask the question, ‘well, what's causing this?"
Perhaps RonJon and RFK Jr. should look into genetically passed on auto-immune problems, possibly resulting from requiring/demanding parents keep to term fetuses with probable or even known genetic defects based upon testing while the fetus is still in the womb, as being a part of "what's causing this". Oh, wait. That requires relying on health science and believing the scientific evidence. Silly me.
It was hard to read that first article. The crackpottery is just off the charts. And America will suffer at a number of levels if these guys have any influence with respect to health. It's almost too bad that a bad diet is not a quick killer. Back to the Dark Ages for us.
It never even occurred to me that hostages could be subject tax penalties, that adds insult to injury. Seems like force majeure should get them out of the late fees on their loans and credit cards.
People do eat too much processed food; Big Ag is not sufficiently regulated; and nutritional guidelines are controversial. So I'd just say, careful how you argue this out there in the [un]real world; don't get suckered into throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Until we have some kind of consensus again on (1) what counts as evidence and (2) how to connect the dots between different evidence fragments, then we're all just going to be talking past each other. I don't know what to do about that. I hear stuff out there that is so whackadoodle that I have no idea how to respond to it. But I know we have to keep our own argument as clean and tight as a drum. Even if that isn't "fair," it's the only way to keep a foothold and hope to get back onto dry land someday.
"Take a look at the explosion in things like autism, the explosion in chronic health, and [we want to] be able to ask the question, ‘well, what's causing this?"
Couldn't be the pesticides and hormones in our food, or the microplastics we ingest, or the pollution we breath 24/7. Nope, can't be that. Must be seed oils and vaccines.
Or the expansion of awareness and assessments correcting under-diagnosed conditions even.
Also contributing could be changes in our culture that have made those on the spectrum stand out in higher relief. Not directly related: While ADHD is a legit diagnosis, given a gradual decrease in recess and other outlets for physical activity in school, some aspects of boys' regular energy may also have become pathologized and lumped in with ADHD.
Questions of this flavor were being asked 35 years ago relative to pediatric cancer clusters. With the ultimate question being "What is responsible for the observed phenomenon?".
I worked as a chaplain at a major children's hospital, and a fellow chaplain and I mapped out where kids we were serving lived. Unmistakable geographic clusters. Not scientific, of course, but still.
Spot on Larry, but I have to wonder, how come the Microwave gets no blame? :)
Where are you getting pesticides in your food? OR hormones for that matter?
Most anything you eat that isn't organic?
Do you think organic farms don't use organic pesticides, herbicides and fungicides?
https://www.agdaily.com/technology/the-list-of-pesticides-approved-for-organic-production/
Those that don't persist in the food or soil. Many things on that list don't enter the actual crop at all.
I spent several years working on certified farms.
Pesticides are all designed to break down in the sun or soil over a period of days. Even ones used on conventional farms.
That may not be correct. It seems that, generally, organics break down quicker (there are disadvantages, such as needing to be applied more often). https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/95dbec81-43ad-4e41-94a1-551210fa543a/content
Shocker, RFK Jr. is on the case: he still claims there are no peer reviewed studies to prove autism isn’t caused by the MMR vaccines. I guess he missed the 160 peer reviewed studies including Denmark’s, which was a decades long study with over 650,000 participants and considered the gold standard of autism studies.
Instead we are to rely on the word of Dr. Wakefield, who made the baseless claims and provided a study of his own; it was doctored and fraudulent, leading to Wakefield losing his medical license in the UK.
I wonder who provided the peer reviewed studies for this “seed” oil nonsense? This is the first I’m hearing about it, but it screams RFK Jr., Dr. Oz, Matt Taibbi, JD Vance and Rosanne Barr.
No worries America, if Trump wins I may not be able to tell you if we will even have an FDA, USDA or an Education Department next year; however, I’m 100% sure we won’t be eating “cats” and “dogs”! Okay, I’m pretty sure about the “cats,” don’t quote on the dogs. After all, RFK Jr., was pretty impressed with his rare South Korean dish a few years back. Not to mention, he still has a few bear carcasses in his freezer; leftover from his drug fueled “hallucination” days!…:)
BBbut he's so passionate! And he's a Kennedy!! And he worked on behalf of the environment. He must know everything about everything! This worship of individuals based on an aura of righteous conviction is contributing to our downfall.
I am a life-long Democrat, and he may be a Kennedy, but that doesn’t make him any less of a crackpot. I am also guessing that his father and uncles all rolled over in their graves when he endorsed TFG.
Even when he was "working on behalf of the environment", he was still egotistic and in it for the publicity he got.
I'll take egotistical if the person knows wtf they're talking about. Or has real subject matter expertise. But RFK Jr has a cult-like following. Just from his book, "The Real Anthony Fauci..." a whole swath of people who should know better think Anthony Fauci and Bill gates are guilty of crimes against humanity (aided and abetted by a National Review article authored by Matthew Scully). According to Wiki, Michael Osterholm says that Kennedy's anti-vaccine disinformation is effective “because it’s portrayed to the public with graphs and figures and what appears to be scientific data. He has perfected the art of illusion of fact.”
He's got a law degree and a degree in American History and Literature.
He was working with people who knew what THEY were talking about, but he did not.
I have personal experience.
Can you give a hint about this personal experience? In any case, I wonder if RFK resembles those dime store mystics who have talked to physicists; and used their ideas about what happens on very small or very large scale to make what they think are groundbreaking pronouncements about what happens at human scale.
Yes. He joined the Riverkeepers Alliance and one of his projects was attacking hog farms for polluting rivers in North Carolina, even though hog farms were under stricter restrictions than the municipal sewage treatment plants.
I was managing a large family owned hog farm at the time and had taken lots of classes on hog farm regulations dealing with waste, plus had a state issued license (required for farm managers).
The owner of the farm was always into new technology and on one of our finisher farms (60lb pigs in, 260 lb pigs to market in 6 months), we had an environmental engineering student build a lagoon water treatment system, basically a concrete swamp, planted with cat tails and other grasses designed to take up the nitrogen. You could actually drink the water that came out the other end.
It was pretty amazing, to be frank.
The local hog farmers had a meeting with the Riverkeeper people (RFK and a couple of staffers), and we invited them to come and tour the farm and the treatment system. We showed them the regulations and the paperwork we had to keep up with and the lack of waste going into the rivers, as RFK claimed.
We showed statistics of how many of the local sewage treatment plants dumped raw sewage into the rivers if we got more than 5 inches of rain.
We had a presentation of the number of golf courses (17 between Raleigh and SE NC) and how much nitrogen they sprayed on the greens (10 x the recommended amount), much of which ran off into the rivers.
Not only was RFK completely bored with the presentations, he was not interested in seeing any of the work we were doing and ended the meeting and walked out without answering any questions from the reporters there.
In another month, he moved on to another project and we never heard from him again.
Are cats red meat or white meat?
They're the OTHER other white meat.
They taste just like chicken KIDDING
Don't know how many times as a kid growing up in the South I was told rattlesnake 'tastes like chicken'. I just took those kids' word for it!
Gator: same
Gator can taste like chicken (depends on who is cooking it), but not snake. Snake was VERY tough and not very tasty.
I KNEW they were lying!
Good question?…:)
"he still claims there are no peer reviewed studies to prove autism isn’t caused by the MMR vaccines". The wonderful thing about being a conspiracy nut is that it's almost impossible to prove a negative. All that's needed is an anecdote to breath new life into the false claim.
Agreed…:)
Well, we live in a world that is full of toxic chemicals that are relatively new (herbicides, pesticides, etc.) many of which remain inadequately researched for safety and others that are known to be hazardous to our health (e.g. paraquat, glyphosate). We have been coping with, not just lead (which is still around), but PFAS, PFOAS, microplastics... the stuff is everywhere. All of this is relatively new, i.e. mostly since the 20th century. To me, that makes more sense as a reason for the explosion in health problems then things like 'seed oils'. In addition, the ubiquitous use of antibiotics in factory farming, antibacterial soaps, etc. could have something to do with the rise in autoimmune disorders. Kids need some dirt in their lives in order to develop strong immune systems. On the other hand, I will definitely agree with these right-wing cranks about Big Ag. Industrial farming, factory farming, and ultraprocessed foods are NOT good for people, farm animals, or the environment!
If these guys are big GOP donors, then they are not the problem.
Two big macs and two fish sandwiches??!
He is just... so.... gross!! I genuinely don't understand the women who like him and vote for him. I'm full after eating one Whataburger with cheese, jalapeños, and extra pickles.
But my favorite hypocrites are the ones who railed against the covid vaccine and now take Ozempic lol.
No need to understand his voter, they’re just like him, except they grew up in poverty and never got an education.
What perplexes me is the fact that this guy eats TWO BIG MACS, TWO FISH SANDWICHES, and a malted every day? How is this guy still alive??????…:)
Preservatives, Robert, preservatives
Well, the "fish sandwiches" are probably mostly breading, highly processed to remove unwanted and dangerous fiber which could regroup and become balled up tangles of fiber.
Thanks for the article Joe,
I would point you to a Cleveland Clinic article that does speak about the harmful effects of seed oils, mainly because of the way they are processed and because of the foods they are generally used to make, fast food or ultra processed food.
I know the noise on this is full of idiocy, but I think it best for the Bulwark to not contribute to that. Polyphenols in these oils are largely removed during their processing and what is left is something that is inflammatory to the body. So your reference to the NIH 2022 study is misleading. The actual study you reference looked at the relationship between polyphenols in fruits and vegetables and ADHD, not seed oils. There should be an effort made to address the reality that eating foods containing these oils, and all the other crap in them is in effect harmful to human health. If you cannot allocate the time, which I totally get, you should not contribute to the misinformation as you have in this article.
I’m a Bulwark member because I trust you all to bring a nuanced and educated approach to these topics, otherwise we just get people screaming at each other or hiding in their corner and eating red meat all day long 😊. Full disclosure, I’m not a fan of Mr. Johnson, Rogan, Musk, Trump, Vance etc… they make things so much worse because they don’t understand the research either and/or they know they gain by riling up their base on stuff like this.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/seed-oils-are-they-actually-toxic
Thank You David.
Yes RFK is a crank. But eating whole food / real food, and cutting back on sugar & ‘aggressively processed seed oils’ CAN improve metabolic health (including hypertension, T2 diabetes, obesity, & IBS)
And for some of us with serious treatment resistant medical conditions - the nutritional therapies that improved our overall metabolic health have also put debilitating symptoms into remission and made our lives worth living again.
What we eat is a personal choice, but this Bulwark member finds your attitude offensive.
Dude here with celiac disease, had SIBO and a whole host of issues.
Seed oils...the question is really one of omega-6 v. omega-3 fatty acids. We had pretty solid, legit, medical research that we consume too much 6 > 3. That's not exactly great long-term for your health, BUT the problem is it's not cause of seed oils exclusively.
We don't eat enough vegetables, whole grains, fatty fish, etc. Basically: balanced diet. We eat way too many fried things, high sodium, booze, saturated fat rich, red meat, high fructose corn syrup.
Seed oils are 'meh' on their own, bad in processed food - but that's mostly due to all the other shit in there.
This is what pisses me off so much about the "woo-woo caucus" led by RFK Jr. and the legion of nuts: there's a legit thing to discuss in here. They narrow in on the point that resonates the most with them instead of actually exploring things in detail and offering nuance. Meanwhile, they denigrate vaccination, you have allied weirdos like Peterson going on about carnivore diets curing injuries (wtf), and then hard pivots into censorship and the "medical deep state".
Sigh...launch me into the fucking sun please. I'm not sure I want to share a planet with these people :(
Seed oils are not bad for your health. In fact the data shows that substituting seed oils for saturated fats is good for your health. Seed oils are also not the reason that cheap snack food is bad for your health. Cheap snack food is bad for your health because it's engineered to induce overeating (i.e. excess calorie intake) and because it displaces more nutritious food from your diet. Canola oil is an excellent source of omega-3s and monounsaturated fats as well as being extremely low in saturated fatty acids.
Yes. Hyper-processed calorically dense food devoid of fiber and antioxidants is the problem. All of it contains seed oils. I have no qualms about stir-frying a veggie filled dinner with seed oil or using seed oil to dress a salad.
Thanks for this information.
Seed oils probably aren't the greatest thing to eat. Part of the problem is how they're used; usually to fry something. Part of the problem is that they are a processed food, where you strip out the fiber and a lot of the good stuff in the seed to make it, and the result is a concentrated fat without a ton of nutritional content. Eating the whole food is certainly healthier than eating the oil. But connecting it to autism is pretty bonkers.
Quality health and nutritional information is really hard to find, because there are tons of studies out there, they often conflict with one another, and the results can often be predicted based on who's funding the study. So, it's tough. And we are the fattest nation in the world, spend by far the most on healthcare with little return on our investment, so we're doing a whole lot wrong when it comes to nutrition.
Excellent comment. Intracellular metabolism is incredibly complex, never mind adding in the complexity of inter-cellular biomolecule communication mediated by receptors on cellular membranes in different tissues. We're not at the stage yet of saying any given molecule, never mind its metabolites, is responsible for a given systemic condition. That's why it's so infuriating that politicians and celebrities with zero basic biology knowledge jump onto any published article to push a narrative, as THESE days, the internet allows anything to pass through with no evaluation or editing whatsoever. These are not intelligent people, even if they possess a law degree or an MBA.
I've been in the throes of "chronic health" my entire 77 years, 9 months, 6 days and counting. Sometimes that "chronic health" was under the weather to a greater or lesser degree, but mostly it has been in the good-to-excellent category. And this is so in spite of my near-daily use of canola (rapeseed) oil and my protein coming primarily from chicken, pork and fish, with an occasional eye of round beef roast. I guess I'll be in chronic health 'til the day I finally just run plumb out of health.
I am probably missing something about seed oils but my question is do the anti seed oil groups eat sunflower seeds and chia seeds and other nuts that are full of oils but the nut is the seed in most cases. Do they explain why that is ok? And if people get duped into these weird diets because they chose to believe an online crank instead of the nutrition studies done by experts who understand the complex system they will eventually pay with poor health. But think if these are the people that are put in our government because they are loyal. Egad!
"but my question is do the anti seed oil groups eat sunflower seeds and chia seeds and other nuts that are full of oils but the nut is the seed in most cases. Do they explain why that is ok?"
Oddly enough, yes?
Chia seeds and some other nuts and seeds have relatively favorable Ω6:Ω3 ratios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_acid_ratio_in_food#Nuts_and_seeds
From a nutritionist at a mainstream institution (Cleveland Clinic):
"And keep in mind, too, that you want to try to increase your omega-3 intake and limit your omega-6s.
"'Omega-3s are so important for overall heath that we really need to make the effort to get them into our diets,' Zumpano says. 'Omega-6s, on the other hand, are in abundance in Western diets.'
"The omega-6 to omega-3 ratio should be ideally 2:1 or 1:1, but for most Americans, the ratio is actually a whopping 10:1 or even 20:1."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_acid_ratio_in_food#Nuts_and_seeds
Can this be overhyped? Sure. Should tinkering with Ω6:Ω3 be most people's dietary priority? Probably not. But it's not unreasonable for people seeking improved health who've already tried other recommended lifestyle changes and failed (either because they couldn't stick to the changes or they could, but they didn't help) to try it at some point.
Do you know what product has a 2:1 omega-6:omega-3 ratio? Canola oil!
Right, but if you look up dietary guidelines for reducing inflammation, they'll often include whole nuts and seeds, and olive oil, but exclude seed oils – or exclude all seed oils but canola. And, with sentences like, "The overconsumption of linoleic acid, mainly from industrial omega-6 seed oils, and the lack of long-chain omega-3s in the diet creates a pro-inflammatory, pro-allergic, pro-thrombotic state" published by mainstream researchers, it *is* hard to remember "but canola is different".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8504498/
Of course, the usual gist of these guidelines is to avoid adding much pure oil at all to our food, except maybe olive oil (something something monounsaturated Ω9). After all, most of us are likely to eat enough naturally-fatty whole foods – if highly processed stuff isn't already crowding out whole foods in our diet (which everyone, mainstream and cranks alike, seems to agree is unhealthy).
And, when balancing health and flavor, there's something to be said for choosing a flavorful fat, which you'll at least enjoy, over a flavorless one. Cheese, or more flavorless seed oil in my sauteed veggies? Whole nuts and seeds I enjoy eating, or flavorless oil? Why add fat that doesn't add flavor? Purveyors of processed foods have reason to – controlling cost, flavor, texture and shelf life to a degree unattainable to home cooks. But why add it at home yourself? More than the merest smear of flavorless fat is rarely called for in home cooking that aspires to be "healthy" (not, say, deep frying or brownies – especially not deep-fried brownies, a foodstuff which not only exists, but is distressingly nicknamed "Beaver Balls").
Heck, some mainstream sources speculate that even olive oil may worsen some inflammatory conditions (oops!) – with other mainstream sources suggesting the opposite.
I'm not surprised the welter of confusing and sometimes-conflicting info gets simplified down to, "Whole nuts and seeds OK, but seed oils evil."
Most (all?) carnivore/keto cranks fear the "lectins" in nuts, seeds, grains and vegetables. Lectins are a family of proteins that are literally found in every plant and animal (even their beloved beef). A few of them are poisonous (e.g. ricin, IIRC), but the vast majority of vegetables, etc. are anything but poisonous!
If Trump is elected, there is no doubt we see significantly reduction in life expectancy in America. Within a decade, we will be on parity with Russia.
MAGA is a cult, i.e., made of gullible people. Therefore MAGA is market for anything that requires credulity. Anything!
By making the MAGA market addressable via easily identifiable social media outlets and so forth Trump has opened the door for all the scammers in the world to go after "his people" - he was the first one through the door but many others are following.
If I was a scammer, I would def be going for these folks. Just like if I were a dictator hoping to be able to easily manipulate a US leader, I would really want Trump to win.
"Take a look at the explosion in things like autism, the explosion in chronic health, and [we want to] be able to ask the question, ‘well, what's causing this?"
Perhaps RonJon and RFK Jr. should look into genetically passed on auto-immune problems, possibly resulting from requiring/demanding parents keep to term fetuses with probable or even known genetic defects based upon testing while the fetus is still in the womb, as being a part of "what's causing this". Oh, wait. That requires relying on health science and believing the scientific evidence. Silly me.
It was hard to read that first article. The crackpottery is just off the charts. And America will suffer at a number of levels if these guys have any influence with respect to health. It's almost too bad that a bad diet is not a quick killer. Back to the Dark Ages for us.
The price of admission to right-wing cultural heights is embracing crackpottery, or, even better, generating crackpottery.
Per JD Vance, “I’m plugged into a lot of weird right-wing subcultures,”... Yes, yes, you are, and happily so, it would appear.
Yes, that admission from JD was quite startling, no? 🤣
I know! Talk about saying the quiet part out loud. Not sure it's something to be proud of.
It never even occurred to me that hostages could be subject tax penalties, that adds insult to injury. Seems like force majeure should get them out of the late fees on their loans and credit cards.
Very much agree.
Honestly I want to laugh how insane these people are. Then I realize that these people write policy. My god are Republican voters complete idiots
People do eat too much processed food; Big Ag is not sufficiently regulated; and nutritional guidelines are controversial. So I'd just say, careful how you argue this out there in the [un]real world; don't get suckered into throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Until we have some kind of consensus again on (1) what counts as evidence and (2) how to connect the dots between different evidence fragments, then we're all just going to be talking past each other. I don't know what to do about that. I hear stuff out there that is so whackadoodle that I have no idea how to respond to it. But I know we have to keep our own argument as clean and tight as a drum. Even if that isn't "fair," it's the only way to keep a foothold and hope to get back onto dry land someday.
I have a lot of problems with these people. This ranks pretty low among them.