You make a lot of good points, but I have to argue with this:
"There is no Upside to Seed Oils. Avoiding them is FREE!"
No it's not. Like you said, seed oils are *everywhere*. Avoiding them requires never-ending due diligence to read the fine print on every single package, and interrogate the waiter at every restaurant and anyone who ever offers me food. It means I can no longer eat the super convenient frozen food, or the snacks from the vending machine that are the only thing available in office buildings, or the delicious fast food that's often the only thing open late at night or in remote highways. Instead I have to buy some sort of weird beef tallow thing (but make sure it's sourced from special organic farms that won't accidentally contaminate it with seed oil!) and commit to doing 100% cooking myself at home, using ingredients that are twice as expensive and much more fussy than regular supermarket ingredients.
Like, say what you will about reduced calorie diets or any other specific diet. At least that's something I can do, and *know* if I'm breaking the rules. I tried avoiding seed oils for a while and it was so hard to know. In practice it basically amounted to a reduced calorie diet because it meant I couldn't eat *anything* in most situations.
Also "nobody really uses seed oils for their great taste"
what are you talking about, anything deep fried in seed oil tastes *delicious*.
Ok, let me rephrase it this way: there is no health upside to eating seed oils. The recommendation for optimal health would be totally fine with 0g seed oils in them.
If that recommendation is easy to follow in the current world is a different question, and obviously a more difficult one.
But we should know what's actually true/healthy before we begin recommending things, I think.
I had this exact same thought. The really hard thing for me is the social aspect. Anytime I share a meal with other people and I’m not the cook, I have to pay obeisance to the seed oil gods.
Regarding deep frying, have you tried things roasted/fried in tallow? Absolutely delicious! Unclear if “deep frying” in and of itself is harmful or if “deep frying in oil” is what’s bad.
Last night I made some pork (oops!) dumplings that were fried in tallow. Absolutely delicious.
Agreed with your comment generally. On your last point, though: deep fried things in general taste delicious, but using traditional oils tastes significantly better than seed oils. Living in Belgium, I can personally attest that fries fried in tallow (traditional Belgian way) are way better than those fried in sunflower oil.
Very much appreciate "we know the correct explanation will be more complex than “eat vegetables”, or we would’ve solved it in 1950." In the real world, CICO suffers from torturous ad-hoc rationalization just as badly as any seed oil hypothesis. It seems simple and elegant until one spends approximately twelve seconds in any diet space with someone who struggles to lose weight despite "doing everything right." Suddenly, all the people who were parroting "it's simple, just eat less and move more!" start doing the Cha-Cha Slide with the goalposts.
One big eye-opener for me was this post: https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease which seems to indicate that Americans HAVE been following dietary guidelines as they've been told to. The graphs over the last few decades show "heathier" eating, less red meat, less animal fat, less added sugar, more exercise, more plant foods. There are more vegan options than ever nowadays. And yet, up goes the diabesity. So if those graphs are accurate, the "people are just too lazy and slothful to follow health advice!!" argument is just plain wrong. People are not being distracted from the real issues. People ARE doing what they are told, more than they used to. But it's still not bringing down obesity rates. Whether or not seed oil theory is true, it seems that adhering to mainstream diet advice simply does not work on a large scale. Mainstream nutrition does not, in fact, KNOW ways you can change your diet that WILL help.
I didn't see the Jeff Nobbs blog until later, but yea, basically that same data convinced me too that SOMETHING was off with fuel partitioning.
The cha-cha slide is a good analogy haha :) That's why the "serious" version of CICO, the EBM, is infinitely complex. Every time it's disproven, they just add another dimension. Which of course makes the model entirely useless, which is why nobody reverses obesity doing it.
If PUFAs oxidize into trans fats, then you’d have lots of trans fats in your fryer at a restaurant, right? If the health dept that banned trans fats comes by and measures it, would they find an illegal amount? Is “but it wasn’t trans fats when I bought it!” a sufficient alibi?
And honestly, trans fat are the least of your worries here :D
I wonder if I bought any random KFC or fries in the country, and found 25% fucking peroxides and aldehydes in it, could I not sue? How are these companies alive?
Right, I guess I meant it as just a thing that everyone agrees is Definitely Illegal, and wouldn't exist at the factory (that the food inspectors inspect) but would exist later, after Time + Chemistry. Given that it seems like e. coli developing on buffet salad would follow the same mechanism, I have a stupid question: how DO we regulate that? Is it just "because it's detected via an acute event of Everyone Who Went to Big Steve's Lettuce Buffet got sick and threw up"? What are the legally acceptable peroxide and aldehyde (again, I Am Not A Chemist) in foods? Could you actually do that?
There are sanitation requirements for commercial kitchens, I suppose that's the idea? If they detect e. coli in a salad at the restaurant, but it was NOT in the supply from the salad factory (or however salad is made lol), not sure who is "at fault?"
Not sure about the legal limits on that stuff, but I'd be surprised if there are none.
1. You haven’t done it long enough to know if it will keep itself.
2. The second you mess with the palatability of the heavy cream you start guzzling it down. Salsa made you go nuts. Coffee as well.
I really recommend experimenting with more palatable foods that still fit your requirements.
The mainstream cico hypothesis works here if you believe certain foods our body can handle better. Especially simple foods that trigger less taste buds. Heavy cream is a pretty simple food. You might like the taste but your body does not (in the sense that it doesn’t demand more)
Your prediction is that if you do this diet for 8 years it will “fix you”.
I would be willing to bet money that the second you stop this diet you will gain all the weight back in less than a year. Unless you put on a substantial amount of muscle of course.
Not coffee. I've been chugging cream & coffee for 1.5 years now, daily. And for 5+ years before that, but wasn't losing weight then! So that part hasn't changed.
Mainstream CICO is completely agnostic to palatability or taste buds. If you believe our body can handle certain foods better (which I believe) it's definitely not naive CICO.
> I would be willing to bet money that the second you stop this diet you will gain all the weight back in less than a year. Unless you put on a substantial amount of muscle of course.
Of course possible. My mental model says: it depends on my status of PUFA depletion. I.e. if I stop the diet right now, I'll immediately put the weight back on. We see this every time with my protein refeeds, no question.
But will that go away? Or am I just genetically a protein hyperresponder and will be forever? We'll find out, I guess.
I am not sure how to interpret your experience of eating salsa / hyperpalatability of certain foods.
Given your current restrictive diet, would have thought that'd be a normall response - you'd be deficient in certain vitamins / other micronutrients (if you take supplements, there's no guarantee those synthetic forms are comprehensive or processed by the body). When deficient you'd get ravenous for the food that has it for a while, until deficiency is gone. This is a well documented effect in animal studies.
The questionthen becomes - would giving into those cravings impair your progress? If so, which ones? Conscious you may not want to just give it a try, as you're intent on losing weight. Guess that's a project to do once reaching target weight - introducing food and noting how those change hunger, satiety and weight gain.
Robin Hanson reminds you that betting markets are the way forward, so I applaud your being willing to put money down. You sound pretty confident. What odds you giving?
I've gotten so good at losing weight (and bad at preventing regaining it) I do "diet bets" at healthywage.com and waybetter and have made a lot of money. But yes, you'd want some neutral party to measure for a real prediction market.
Even then, I'd fast for 3 days and then eat a huge salad, +15lbs lean mass in a day easy. If it's weight based, obviously the opposite. Maybe if you mixed the 2.. not sure.
I assume that for high stakes prediction markets there would be an 3rd party arbiter and a dexa scan and weigh ins over a week period or something. In all honesty I think this would be a great idea but the problem, like all diet claims, is “how well does the subject adhere?” And the difficulty in verifying that.
The diet bet things I’m winning all have implicit “calorie restriction” assumptions, and in fact heavily counsel you against taking any weight loss method that actually works.
I agree on the point about either making the weigh in date unknown from both parties (within some two – week range or something.) or averaging it over some number of days.
you're right that it's not conclusive evidence for the seed oil hypothesis, but if you read him talking about it, he's not saying that either.
"The mainstream cico hypothesis works here if you believe certain foods our body can handle better."
Okay, but "certain foods our body can handle better" DOES refute mainstream CICO, (if 2 foods have the same calories but are "handled" differently and therefore one makes you fat but the other doesn't) and is indeed part of the mechanism by which exfatloss says his diet is working?
Remember the debate is two separate topics: 1) long term too much PUFA -> makes people become obese more than if they didn't eat it for so long, and 2) heavy cream diet -> leads to weight loss. Certainly there's cross reference in that he claims that not having PUFA in the diet helps, but there's 2 different things there.
Also, I've only known one really seriously-overweight Jewish fellow in my life, and he smoked a ton of weed (and lost the weight when he quit). You almost certainly weigh less than exfatloss has lost total, and might secretly hate fat people.
I like this article but a big reason that the seed oil hypothesis is rejected is just because seed oil disrespecters look/sound similar to anti-vaxxers. Early criticisms of seed oils were "look at how it's processed with hexane" rather than the meaningful hypotheses that you listed in your article. And it goes against mainstream science so this also means it's coded as a right-wing belief so you also get the political tribalism to it.
Yea that's attached for sure. I honestly don't know how to get around that better than just ignoring it.
If something is true, but you don't believe it because your political opponents believe it, I don't know how to help you :) Hopefully we'll just show that "it totally works" and then people will come around their biases?
Therein lies the challenge: showing broadly and precisely that a substance with a half life of 3½ years causes the problems we think it causes.
This, to me, is the difficult thing with all of diabesityheimersclerosis (see what I did there? Gotta give heart disease its rightful due … bonus that the sclerosis can refer to lots of different sclerotic diseases)—It’s all so slowly accruing that it’s impossible to carry out valid experiments to test the necessary hypotheses.
And yea, these long term issues with funky/hidden feedback loops are terrible for "science." Same thing with global warming. We suck at things that take decades and have many confounding and complex causes/effects.
Good work on counter arguing what was a superficial opinion on which the writer had spent little time researching.
Totally agree amount your comment regarding the total lack of curiosity towards finding a solution to obesity and accepting the status quo. In fact, the fact that real curiosity and thinking is on display here and on SMTM is precisely why I follow your posts. I would add that your blog is probably the one with most intellectual honesty on display out of anything on diet related topics and would like to congratulate you for that.
Dynomight put a lot of evidence on meta-analysis, but it’s never been clear to me that the meta-analysis actually strip off the truly horrible studies. Dynomight claimed that all of the idiosyncratic biases of any given study, get averaged out over the meta-analysis, but if there is a systematic blind spot, or the same bias being repeated across all studies, then that wouldn’t be averaged out. That’s my concern with a lot of the nutrition meta-analysis.
Yea, meta-analysis is a weird one to me. It's just "reading a lot of stuff." It's like ChatGPT.
If I say "most posts on X are wrong" and you answer "ChatGPT reads a lot and it thinks the same" then I say "Duh, that just confirms what I just said."
If most studies are wrong, summarizing them doesn't add anything.
This "everything averages out" is nonsense. That works in a niche case where people are making the same errors to the left and right of the correct answer. In a multi dimensional thing like this. that doesn't happen. In fact, I'd say it's quite rare in real life.
Good article. I second the position you take - even if we cannot yet (or ever) be 100% certain that seed oil is the root cause of the obesity etc, why nonetheless would anyone elect to eat it - or to not actively avoid it ? It's a new and novel fat for most of humanity (which must raise suspicions from an evolutionary perspective), it wasn't invented with anyone's health in mind, its presence in food is all about maximising profit, it does not contribute to flavour - and there's large amount of evidence that is harmful to health in numerous other ways beyond 'diabesity'. Against that background, it would seem bit stupid to not avoid it.
As an avid long term seed oil avoider, I'm looking forward to Cate Shanahan's new book on the subject (out this summer I believe) - she deserves a lot of credit for raising the issue and citing the science (originally in Deep Nutrition) well before anyone else was talking about it.
Great article. There's something I'm wondering that maybe is already disproven: does food variety causes/makes worse obesity? My (very basic) reasoning is: 1) I find it way easier to overeat when I have more variety. 2) I assume variety/acces to variety has been increasing and continues to increase. 3) The potato diet and ex150 cream have very low variety.
As for the why, my wild guess would be that variety causes you to eat more and be less rational about how much you eat, while low variety can help seeing food/eating as something more mechanical? Maybe one reason why some people get more fat than other is that they like eating more for some reason/derive more pleasure from eating, and with modern food the pleasure ceiling is higher?
Maybe like carnivore it kind of works as an elimination diet and you get used to your main food and avoid lots of microinflammation and stuff like that? I remember reading that advanced meditator very in tune with their body find it harder and harder to eat lots of different things as they really feel each small problem food does.
It's not a great theory but it's been in the back of my mind every time I read something about the potato diet or diet with not much component. The potato diet is about potato but it's also about nothing but potato, if that makes sense.
Food variety: I think it can help you "overeat" in the short term. But in a healthy metabolism, that would just lead to more/longer satiety. Maybe you'd gain a pound of fat if you really overdid it at the buffet, but then you'd have more adipose tissue and your body would be slightly less hungry until you were in balance again.
But once your metabolism is compromised, anything "delicious" or otherwise increasing palatability, like variety, becomes the enemy: you'll put it on no matter what, and it won't just come off naturally later. So now you need to worry about all that and eat steamed vegetables and other disgusting non-foods.
I’m surprised you were so hard on Kevin Hall’s EBM diagram. I don’t think it’s so bad, although it’s clearly missing linoleic acid, endocannabinoids, 4-HNE, and cell membrane omega balance. (And probably also the BCAA stuff that I don’t really understand even after reading your post on the matter.)
Besides that, the EBM strikes me as a reasonable approximation of metabolism. And at least it’s “beyond calories in and calories out” so it’s a step in the right direction.
I think is less-obviously stupid things like the insane focus on CICO is even worse, because it sounds more scientific but still prevents finding any actual solutions.
I've always liked your work and I mostly agree with you on seed oils. But this post is mostly feelings and strong feelings often crowd out clear thinking.
Fantastic article and great comments. I do wonder if it would be possible to take the current literature and run a meta-analysis of all interventions who cut out seed oils as part of the overall diet strategy. That could at least reinforce the seed oil theory across a wide range of interventions.
I say this with absolute respect to humans: I have pets (dogs and a cat) and keep them on the same good quality food with just very few treats. And their weight management is excellent. Maybe having a set number of food choices that work for your metabolism and enjoyment is the way to go. That's what I do (not eating dog food, the limited menu!)
Lastly, I am not vegan or vegetarian but several friends are, and let me tell you all the "beyond" stuff and other veggie imitations (sausage, burgers, etc) are full of highly processed, PUFA-filled stuff. For "healthy" eating, my go-to is just unprocessed or lightly processed foods.
I was more ambitious, take peer reviewed projects (the data), and screen for dietary interventions cutting off PUFAs, and go as longitudinal as possible to see if we can cluster the results or see a pattern. The other thought I had was to look into the national survey that collects data on people losing weight permanently -I cannot remember the name- and see if there is a correlation between sustainable weight loss and reduced intake of seed oils / linoleic acid.
I realized that when I lost all the weight I did, and kept it off, I essentially eliminated oils from my diet.
It is painful to see the vast amount of data being collected but as far as I know, no systematic approach to test different hypothesis around obesity or chronic disease.
>People like to shit on “mechanistic speculation” but if you don’t have a mechanism, you don’t understand it.
I'd say that that is irrelevant, if you get the outcome you want.
Cutting out seed oils seems to cure modern diseases. Who cares why?
This "don't eat processed food" spiel is cute though. Seed oils are about the most processed food one can acquire and would be the first thing to cut. So this guy (I forgot his name already) is indirectly saying to cut out seed oils.
> I'd say that that is irrelevant, if you get the outcome you want.
The problem is, now it works until it doesn't and then you're lost.
This happened to me: I thought I knew "keto" was the magic answer. And then I gained 100lbs back on keto.
If we cut out seed oils in some current understanding, and then something else makes it into the food supply or whatever that we somehow don't consider seed oils (let's say people begin frying fries in fish oil lol) we have to start over..
You make a lot of good points, but I have to argue with this:
"There is no Upside to Seed Oils. Avoiding them is FREE!"
No it's not. Like you said, seed oils are *everywhere*. Avoiding them requires never-ending due diligence to read the fine print on every single package, and interrogate the waiter at every restaurant and anyone who ever offers me food. It means I can no longer eat the super convenient frozen food, or the snacks from the vending machine that are the only thing available in office buildings, or the delicious fast food that's often the only thing open late at night or in remote highways. Instead I have to buy some sort of weird beef tallow thing (but make sure it's sourced from special organic farms that won't accidentally contaminate it with seed oil!) and commit to doing 100% cooking myself at home, using ingredients that are twice as expensive and much more fussy than regular supermarket ingredients.
Like, say what you will about reduced calorie diets or any other specific diet. At least that's something I can do, and *know* if I'm breaking the rules. I tried avoiding seed oils for a while and it was so hard to know. In practice it basically amounted to a reduced calorie diet because it meant I couldn't eat *anything* in most situations.
Also "nobody really uses seed oils for their great taste"
what are you talking about, anything deep fried in seed oil tastes *delicious*.
Ok, let me rephrase it this way: there is no health upside to eating seed oils. The recommendation for optimal health would be totally fine with 0g seed oils in them.
If that recommendation is easy to follow in the current world is a different question, and obviously a more difficult one.
But we should know what's actually true/healthy before we begin recommending things, I think.
I had this exact same thought. The really hard thing for me is the social aspect. Anytime I share a meal with other people and I’m not the cook, I have to pay obeisance to the seed oil gods.
Regarding deep frying, have you tried things roasted/fried in tallow? Absolutely delicious! Unclear if “deep frying” in and of itself is harmful or if “deep frying in oil” is what’s bad.
Last night I made some pork (oops!) dumplings that were fried in tallow. Absolutely delicious.
Endgame is definitely the tallow fries/chips diet :D
Agreed with your comment generally. On your last point, though: deep fried things in general taste delicious, but using traditional oils tastes significantly better than seed oils. Living in Belgium, I can personally attest that fries fried in tallow (traditional Belgian way) are way better than those fried in sunflower oil.
Seed oils caused me nausea as a kid, and acne as a teen. Since cutting them their smell became revolting.
Very much appreciate "we know the correct explanation will be more complex than “eat vegetables”, or we would’ve solved it in 1950." In the real world, CICO suffers from torturous ad-hoc rationalization just as badly as any seed oil hypothesis. It seems simple and elegant until one spends approximately twelve seconds in any diet space with someone who struggles to lose weight despite "doing everything right." Suddenly, all the people who were parroting "it's simple, just eat less and move more!" start doing the Cha-Cha Slide with the goalposts.
One big eye-opener for me was this post: https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease which seems to indicate that Americans HAVE been following dietary guidelines as they've been told to. The graphs over the last few decades show "heathier" eating, less red meat, less animal fat, less added sugar, more exercise, more plant foods. There are more vegan options than ever nowadays. And yet, up goes the diabesity. So if those graphs are accurate, the "people are just too lazy and slothful to follow health advice!!" argument is just plain wrong. People are not being distracted from the real issues. People ARE doing what they are told, more than they used to. But it's still not bringing down obesity rates. Whether or not seed oil theory is true, it seems that adhering to mainstream diet advice simply does not work on a large scale. Mainstream nutrition does not, in fact, KNOW ways you can change your diet that WILL help.
I didn't see the Jeff Nobbs blog until later, but yea, basically that same data convinced me too that SOMETHING was off with fuel partitioning.
The cha-cha slide is a good analogy haha :) That's why the "serious" version of CICO, the EBM, is infinitely complex. Every time it's disproven, they just add another dimension. Which of course makes the model entirely useless, which is why nobody reverses obesity doing it.
If PUFAs oxidize into trans fats, then you’d have lots of trans fats in your fryer at a restaurant, right? If the health dept that banned trans fats comes by and measures it, would they find an illegal amount? Is “but it wasn’t trans fats when I bought it!” a sufficient alibi?
I wonder this myself. There are some studies on deep frying:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41538-022-00143-5
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878450X21001311
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11739861/
And honestly, trans fat are the least of your worries here :D
I wonder if I bought any random KFC or fries in the country, and found 25% fucking peroxides and aldehydes in it, could I not sue? How are these companies alive?
Right, I guess I meant it as just a thing that everyone agrees is Definitely Illegal, and wouldn't exist at the factory (that the food inspectors inspect) but would exist later, after Time + Chemistry. Given that it seems like e. coli developing on buffet salad would follow the same mechanism, I have a stupid question: how DO we regulate that? Is it just "because it's detected via an acute event of Everyone Who Went to Big Steve's Lettuce Buffet got sick and threw up"? What are the legally acceptable peroxide and aldehyde (again, I Am Not A Chemist) in foods? Could you actually do that?
There are sanitation requirements for commercial kitchens, I suppose that's the idea? If they detect e. coli in a salad at the restaurant, but it was NOT in the supply from the salad factory (or however salad is made lol), not sure who is "at fault?"
Not sure about the legal limits on that stuff, but I'd be surprised if there are none.
Your diet isn’t evidence for seed oil hypothesis.
1. You haven’t done it long enough to know if it will keep itself.
2. The second you mess with the palatability of the heavy cream you start guzzling it down. Salsa made you go nuts. Coffee as well.
I really recommend experimenting with more palatable foods that still fit your requirements.
The mainstream cico hypothesis works here if you believe certain foods our body can handle better. Especially simple foods that trigger less taste buds. Heavy cream is a pretty simple food. You might like the taste but your body does not (in the sense that it doesn’t demand more)
Your prediction is that if you do this diet for 8 years it will “fix you”.
I would be willing to bet money that the second you stop this diet you will gain all the weight back in less than a year. Unless you put on a substantial amount of muscle of course.
Not coffee. I've been chugging cream & coffee for 1.5 years now, daily. And for 5+ years before that, but wasn't losing weight then! So that part hasn't changed.
Mainstream CICO is completely agnostic to palatability or taste buds. If you believe our body can handle certain foods better (which I believe) it's definitely not naive CICO.
> I would be willing to bet money that the second you stop this diet you will gain all the weight back in less than a year. Unless you put on a substantial amount of muscle of course.
Of course possible. My mental model says: it depends on my status of PUFA depletion. I.e. if I stop the diet right now, I'll immediately put the weight back on. We see this every time with my protein refeeds, no question.
But will that go away? Or am I just genetically a protein hyperresponder and will be forever? We'll find out, I guess.
I am not sure how to interpret your experience of eating salsa / hyperpalatability of certain foods.
Given your current restrictive diet, would have thought that'd be a normall response - you'd be deficient in certain vitamins / other micronutrients (if you take supplements, there's no guarantee those synthetic forms are comprehensive or processed by the body). When deficient you'd get ravenous for the food that has it for a while, until deficiency is gone. This is a well documented effect in animal studies.
The questionthen becomes - would giving into those cravings impair your progress? If so, which ones? Conscious you may not want to just give it a try, as you're intent on losing weight. Guess that's a project to do once reaching target weight - introducing food and noting how those change hunger, satiety and weight gain.
The question for me, then: what's in salsa that's not in tomato sauce? Cause I've been eating tomato sauce every other day for the entire time.
Try fermenting it with some garlic and hot peppers. Should be hyperpalatable and fine
Robin Hanson reminds you that betting markets are the way forward, so I applaud your being willing to put money down. You sound pretty confident. What odds you giving?
Uhhhhh prediction markets for diets that's awesome
Easy to game though cause weight and bf% is so noisy..
I've gotten so good at losing weight (and bad at preventing regaining it) I do "diet bets" at healthywage.com and waybetter and have made a lot of money. But yes, you'd want some neutral party to measure for a real prediction market.
Even then, I'd fast for 3 days and then eat a huge salad, +15lbs lean mass in a day easy. If it's weight based, obviously the opposite. Maybe if you mixed the 2.. not sure.
I assume that for high stakes prediction markets there would be an 3rd party arbiter and a dexa scan and weigh ins over a week period or something. In all honesty I think this would be a great idea but the problem, like all diet claims, is “how well does the subject adhere?” And the difficulty in verifying that.
The diet bet things I’m winning all have implicit “calorie restriction” assumptions, and in fact heavily counsel you against taking any weight loss method that actually works.
I agree on the point about either making the weigh in date unknown from both parties (within some two – week range or something.) or averaging it over some number of days.
you're right that it's not conclusive evidence for the seed oil hypothesis, but if you read him talking about it, he's not saying that either.
"The mainstream cico hypothesis works here if you believe certain foods our body can handle better."
Okay, but "certain foods our body can handle better" DOES refute mainstream CICO, (if 2 foods have the same calories but are "handled" differently and therefore one makes you fat but the other doesn't) and is indeed part of the mechanism by which exfatloss says his diet is working?
Remember the debate is two separate topics: 1) long term too much PUFA -> makes people become obese more than if they didn't eat it for so long, and 2) heavy cream diet -> leads to weight loss. Certainly there's cross reference in that he claims that not having PUFA in the diet helps, but there's 2 different things there.
Also, I've only known one really seriously-overweight Jewish fellow in my life, and he smoked a ton of weed (and lost the weight when he quit). You almost certainly weigh less than exfatloss has lost total, and might secretly hate fat people.
I like this article but a big reason that the seed oil hypothesis is rejected is just because seed oil disrespecters look/sound similar to anti-vaxxers. Early criticisms of seed oils were "look at how it's processed with hexane" rather than the meaningful hypotheses that you listed in your article. And it goes against mainstream science so this also means it's coded as a right-wing belief so you also get the political tribalism to it.
Yea that's attached for sure. I honestly don't know how to get around that better than just ignoring it.
If something is true, but you don't believe it because your political opponents believe it, I don't know how to help you :) Hopefully we'll just show that "it totally works" and then people will come around their biases?
Therein lies the challenge: showing broadly and precisely that a substance with a half life of 3½ years causes the problems we think it causes.
This, to me, is the difficult thing with all of diabesityheimersclerosis (see what I did there? Gotta give heart disease its rightful due … bonus that the sclerosis can refer to lots of different sclerotic diseases)—It’s all so slowly accruing that it’s impossible to carry out valid experiments to test the necessary hypotheses.
cardiabesityheimersclerosis :D It's so good!
Yea and not just the half life issue, it's also omnipresent so you can't do a "control" group unless you kidnap some Tsimane or Tukisenta people.
And yea, these long term issues with funky/hidden feedback loops are terrible for "science." Same thing with global warming. We suck at things that take decades and have many confounding and complex causes/effects.
Good work on counter arguing what was a superficial opinion on which the writer had spent little time researching.
Totally agree amount your comment regarding the total lack of curiosity towards finding a solution to obesity and accepting the status quo. In fact, the fact that real curiosity and thinking is on display here and on SMTM is precisely why I follow your posts. I would add that your blog is probably the one with most intellectual honesty on display out of anything on diet related topics and would like to congratulate you for that.
Thanks!
Dynomight put a lot of evidence on meta-analysis, but it’s never been clear to me that the meta-analysis actually strip off the truly horrible studies. Dynomight claimed that all of the idiosyncratic biases of any given study, get averaged out over the meta-analysis, but if there is a systematic blind spot, or the same bias being repeated across all studies, then that wouldn’t be averaged out. That’s my concern with a lot of the nutrition meta-analysis.
Yea, meta-analysis is a weird one to me. It's just "reading a lot of stuff." It's like ChatGPT.
If I say "most posts on X are wrong" and you answer "ChatGPT reads a lot and it thinks the same" then I say "Duh, that just confirms what I just said."
If most studies are wrong, summarizing them doesn't add anything.
This "everything averages out" is nonsense. That works in a niche case where people are making the same errors to the left and right of the correct answer. In a multi dimensional thing like this. that doesn't happen. In fact, I'd say it's quite rare in real life.
Good article. I second the position you take - even if we cannot yet (or ever) be 100% certain that seed oil is the root cause of the obesity etc, why nonetheless would anyone elect to eat it - or to not actively avoid it ? It's a new and novel fat for most of humanity (which must raise suspicions from an evolutionary perspective), it wasn't invented with anyone's health in mind, its presence in food is all about maximising profit, it does not contribute to flavour - and there's large amount of evidence that is harmful to health in numerous other ways beyond 'diabesity'. Against that background, it would seem bit stupid to not avoid it.
As an avid long term seed oil avoider, I'm looking forward to Cate Shanahan's new book on the subject (out this summer I believe) - she deserves a lot of credit for raising the issue and citing the science (originally in Deep Nutrition) well before anyone else was talking about it.
Yea she seems to have been an OG - I have yet to read any of her books.
Based
Great article. There's something I'm wondering that maybe is already disproven: does food variety causes/makes worse obesity? My (very basic) reasoning is: 1) I find it way easier to overeat when I have more variety. 2) I assume variety/acces to variety has been increasing and continues to increase. 3) The potato diet and ex150 cream have very low variety.
As for the why, my wild guess would be that variety causes you to eat more and be less rational about how much you eat, while low variety can help seeing food/eating as something more mechanical? Maybe one reason why some people get more fat than other is that they like eating more for some reason/derive more pleasure from eating, and with modern food the pleasure ceiling is higher?
Maybe like carnivore it kind of works as an elimination diet and you get used to your main food and avoid lots of microinflammation and stuff like that? I remember reading that advanced meditator very in tune with their body find it harder and harder to eat lots of different things as they really feel each small problem food does.
It's not a great theory but it's been in the back of my mind every time I read something about the potato diet or diet with not much component. The potato diet is about potato but it's also about nothing but potato, if that makes sense.
Thanks!
Food variety: I think it can help you "overeat" in the short term. But in a healthy metabolism, that would just lead to more/longer satiety. Maybe you'd gain a pound of fat if you really overdid it at the buffet, but then you'd have more adipose tissue and your body would be slightly less hungry until you were in balance again.
But once your metabolism is compromised, anything "delicious" or otherwise increasing palatability, like variety, becomes the enemy: you'll put it on no matter what, and it won't just come off naturally later. So now you need to worry about all that and eat steamed vegetables and other disgusting non-foods.
Thank you, that makes a lot of sense.
I’m surprised you were so hard on Kevin Hall’s EBM diagram. I don’t think it’s so bad, although it’s clearly missing linoleic acid, endocannabinoids, 4-HNE, and cell membrane omega balance. (And probably also the BCAA stuff that I don’t really understand even after reading your post on the matter.)
Besides that, the EBM strikes me as a reasonable approximation of metabolism. And at least it’s “beyond calories in and calories out” so it’s a step in the right direction.
I think EBM is a total smoke screen at this point. You might as well put "Here be dragons."
I read it more as "We have no effing clue but CICO is still true lalala I can't hear you."
😂
And at least Hall isn’t out there saying outlandish things like “if we just solve poverty, then we’ll cut obesity in half!”
I think is less-obviously stupid things like the insane focus on CICO is even worse, because it sounds more scientific but still prevents finding any actual solutions.
🔥🔥🔥
I've always liked your work and I mostly agree with you on seed oils. But this post is mostly feelings and strong feelings often crowd out clear thinking.
Not wrong. Stuff like this makes me pretty mad.
Lol I commented with a lengthy response under his article just today... Great minds, etc.
Do you generally read him? I hadn't heard of the blog.
No, SMTM review brought me to it!
Your handle reminds me of “torpor” … is it a play on that term?
Oh not at all lol, but yeah I guess I'm torporless haha
Fantastic article and great comments. I do wonder if it would be possible to take the current literature and run a meta-analysis of all interventions who cut out seed oils as part of the overall diet strategy. That could at least reinforce the seed oil theory across a wide range of interventions.
I say this with absolute respect to humans: I have pets (dogs and a cat) and keep them on the same good quality food with just very few treats. And their weight management is excellent. Maybe having a set number of food choices that work for your metabolism and enjoyment is the way to go. That's what I do (not eating dog food, the limited menu!)
Lastly, I am not vegan or vegetarian but several friends are, and let me tell you all the "beyond" stuff and other veggie imitations (sausage, burgers, etc) are full of highly processed, PUFA-filled stuff. For "healthy" eating, my go-to is just unprocessed or lightly processed foods.
Yea the "impossible" stuff is bizarre - if you don't eat meat, don't eat meat, but this stuff is frankenfood.
By all interventions, do you mean stuff like ex150 and the potato studies?
I was more ambitious, take peer reviewed projects (the data), and screen for dietary interventions cutting off PUFAs, and go as longitudinal as possible to see if we can cluster the results or see a pattern. The other thought I had was to look into the national survey that collects data on people losing weight permanently -I cannot remember the name- and see if there is a correlation between sustainable weight loss and reduced intake of seed oils / linoleic acid.
I realized that when I lost all the weight I did, and kept it off, I essentially eliminated oils from my diet.
I didn't even know they had such a survey
Found it. It is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) Longitudinal Study. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes-ls/
It is painful to see the vast amount of data being collected but as far as I know, no systematic approach to test different hypothesis around obesity or chronic disease.
What were you eating that you never felt hungry and still lost weight? Is this the 80F/10C/10P?
>People like to shit on “mechanistic speculation” but if you don’t have a mechanism, you don’t understand it.
I'd say that that is irrelevant, if you get the outcome you want.
Cutting out seed oils seems to cure modern diseases. Who cares why?
This "don't eat processed food" spiel is cute though. Seed oils are about the most processed food one can acquire and would be the first thing to cut. So this guy (I forgot his name already) is indirectly saying to cut out seed oils.
> I'd say that that is irrelevant, if you get the outcome you want.
The problem is, now it works until it doesn't and then you're lost.
This happened to me: I thought I knew "keto" was the magic answer. And then I gained 100lbs back on keto.
If we cut out seed oils in some current understanding, and then something else makes it into the food supply or whatever that we somehow don't consider seed oils (let's say people begin frying fries in fish oil lol) we have to start over..