This was great. Agree with most of this. The one thing I can’t figure out is how much PUFA is too much. While avoiding them seems to have been relatively easy for you, if you can’t cook all your meals it is pretty tough. Lots of reasons why someone might not be able to do that. I’ve been in a season of my life where I’ve been able to, but I struggle thinking about how someone could implement a version of this that isn’t quite as strict as everyone on Reddit. Which I think is key to making this go mainstream, which itself will be necessary to getting restaurants etc. to switch.
Yea it's pretty much impossible for me to eat at normal restaurants, lol, and I rarely ever do. You just have no idea what's in there.
If this is just about grabbing a bite while at work, there are some options: McDonald's burger patties are grilled in their own juices (due to allergy reasons) so if you opt for just the patties, and make for carnivore, that's an option I often do on road trips.
But if you have to have lunch with clients or something like that, yea, that probably won't do.
I do agree, it needs to become much easier, but first we have to demonstrate that it even works :)
1. It works very well
2. It's easy
If we can't even show people that it works, they won't care if it's easy haha. I think.
“What have I got to lose?” Yep. The anti-seed oil people have messed with my life for sure. Eating out sucks. And maybe I miss KFC. But my payout is relative immunity from sunburn(used to burn in 20 minutes), much reduced joint aches, correction of mild but accelerating weight issues, and now 10 years later the realization I can eat carbs mostly at will. It has totally been worth it. If you could prove to me it wasn’t seed oils, I still wouldn’t eat them. Why would I eat a modern product produced in a factory with hydraulic presses, solvents, and bleaches and deodorizers? They smell and taste bad as too. Just can’t beat butter!
Glad your life is looking up, Ex. Hope it continues!
What i'm expecting to see in my lifetime is first a better explanation of why PUFAs are deleterious, and only later an explanation for why olive oil historically was fine despite being 3x higher PUFA than, say, butter.
Another interesting Mediterranean question is how ancient aristocrats got fat at all in the first place. John Chrysostom, if I remember correctly, tried to explain this with the idea that the adipose tissue of fattened animals was indigestible, and therefore collected in the bodies of those who ate them. It's possible that eating fattened animals (especially pigs) only accidentally correlates with human obesity -- the Greeks highly prized walnuts, which are high in PUFAs. However, the standard fattening feed for pigs at the time was acorns, which are moderately high in PUFAs, and a 2021 study from Poland praises feeding acorns to pigs as a way of making them fatter, especially increasing MUFA and PUFA concentrations in their body fat. Walnuts and acorn-lard together might have been the culprit.
I hadn't heard of the greek/nuts theory, thanks for mentioning! Some nuts are indeed so full of PUFAs that Brad's "winter is coming" hypothesis is making more and more sense. That's probably why they're so "delicious" too, they induce hyperphagia :)
Edit: I hadn't listened to Brad and Paul on olive oil (podcast published two weeks ago) yet. My suspicion now, after the comment about how extra virgin olive oil has the 'cure' to the M/PUFA it also contains is that historical cultivars hadn't yet been successfully turned into such high oil producers, and had a different ratio.
What benefit would it have to know why some ancient aristocrats may have been fat? There just isn't enough data and the food environment was entirely different.
If PUFAs were uniquely the culprit and also were something created in a lab in 1950, there would be no history of obesity.prior to that. Knowing that our ancestors may have a history with them sheds light on our relationship with them now.
Jan 25·edited Jan 26Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
I think there probably isn't a lot of population level data on anything the further back you go. I think the only thing you can really look at is if there is an unusual number of young men unsuitable for conscription into military service due to obesity or other diseases. In fairly modern times those records are probably the only situation where data like height and body weight was even recorded at least once in a male persons adult life. Most of our ancestors are long forgotten.
Edit: Linoleic Acid was first discovered in 1844. PUFA have of course always existed. I think populations that historically consumed a lot of PUFA usually consumed more Omega-3 from marine sources, e.g. fish, seals, whales. Extraction of seed-oil using solvents was invented in the 1870s. I think the extraction of oil from seeds goes back a lot further but wasn't really feasible for large scale use (e.g. extract oil just to waste it on deep frying).
Like I said before ketones are magical. You have done measurements showing that this diet has more ketones then your old keto diet. That should be a hypothesis you mention.
Do we know what the Amish eat? I suspect Amish obesity rates are lower than non-Amish. This could be another data point in favor of the seed oil theory if it is true that the Amish mostly eat food they themselves produce.
I don't know what they eat, but if it's even slightly more old fashioned than the SAD, I'd agree with your conclusion.
I actually brought this up as a joke once when trying to figure out how many people in the U.S. are not actually metabolically impaired. Meaning not overweight, not prediabetic, not hypertensive, and so on. Turns out the % is incredibly small. Bigger than the Amish population, but IIRC not by an order of magnitude. So it could just be, I joked, that the only healthy people in the U.S. are old Chinese grandmas who're still eating what they ate in the 70s when they came here, and the Amish.
But Brad from Fire in a Bottle said he knows quite a few Amish, and they use a lot of seed oils. Maybe that's still better than seed oils + the seed oils hidden in junk food that they presumably don't eat? Dunno.
Do you have thoughts about microbiomic changes from traditional diets? I have seen lots of data suggesting that gut microbe populations may play a big role in obesity and depression, and that, like PUFAs, our microbiomes are very different from what they were ancestrally. But it seems like there are a lot of unknowns there as well, and that mouse models only go so far comparing with human digestion. I'm wondering if microbes are on your radar at all?
Most of what I've heard of microbiome are that it's really important, and we know it changes with our diet, but that's really it.
I suppose some people have received fecal transplants like Tim Ferris lol.
My suspicion is that if you're not putting any toxic stuff into your body, your microbiome will just adapt to your diet and you'll be fine. E.g. eat more fiber, the fiber bacteria grow and help you deal with it. Eat less fiber, they die and other ones take their place.
Could be that PUFAs are just as bad for the bacteria that eat them as they are for us, and therefore they mess up the microbiome. No idea though.
Has anyone ever tested PUFAs on mice? I'd be surprised if not.
It seems like a lab could get genetically identical mice, divide them in half, feed one group "the chow that fattens" (assuming this including seed oils) and the other group "an exact replica of the chow that fattens except without seed oils" and see if outcomes differ over the mice's life cycles. Hold fixed the mice's physical activity levels (or observe if one group naturally has more energy than the other, etc.).
Wouldn't this be strong evidence in favor of seed oils driving negative metabolic health outcomes?
It looks like some work has been done here, but the published papers don't exactly seem to be asking the right questions. From a cursory search on Elicit.com:
"Several studies have investigated the effects of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) on metabolic health in mice. Lee (2014) found that short-term dietary supplementation with botanical oil (BO) and fish oil (FO) improved biomarkers associated with type-2 diabetes/metabolic syndrome. However, Miranda (2013) reported that dietary supplementation of pomegranate seed oil, which contains PUFAs, did not lead to decreased fat accumulation or improved glycemic control in rats fed an obesogenic diet. Nuernberg (2011) observed that a high-fat diet rich in n-3 PUFAs led to increased body fat in mice selected for high body weight, but enhanced insulin sensitivity in mice selected for high treadmill performance. These findings suggest that the effects of PUFAs on metabolic health may be influenced by factors such as the specific type of PUFA and the genetic background of the mice."
“I worked at a testing lab for years. One of our clients wanted to test frying pans.
“And the test was something along the lines of 100ml of canola oil until it reaches flashing point. For a cycle of over 1000 for each pan.
“The absolute rank, tar like, disgusting residue canola oil additives left on the pan after every 1 cycle. Yes 1 cycle, made the entire lab not eat anything cooked in Canola oil ever again.
It was still by far the worst thing l've witnessed in a test lab. We had to wear level B gas masks after 500 or so cycles.”
When reading food labels I sometimes fantasize about people writing letters to food manufacturers: "You know what really would make this great? Canola oil!". In my country that shit is literally everything, though only minuscule amounts. I don't get it, why put it in at all?
also my food scientist wife tells me that seed oils result in much better shelf stability and also have a much milder flavor which ups their versatility.
Hydrogenated just saturates double bonds and makes UFAs into SFAs. So yea, hydrogenating sure makes (by definition unsaturated) fats more stable by making them saturated.
The flavor thing could just be because they're heavily cleaned and deodorized. I suppose you don't want coconut or butter or tallow flavor in everything. But at least with tallow I know you can make it ultra clean pretty easily, with tech a stone-age man would've had, I've done it myself. The resulting product is so odorless and flavorless you can use it for candles or lip balm/skin care products.
Rapeseed oil has no discernible flavor I think. One advantage of those seed oils is that they are liquid at low temperatures, so it might just be to fix the stickiness of some products.
This is excellent thank you. The extra details about pufa that have really impacted me are:
1. Just how bad pork can be in this context.
2. What fire in a bottle explains about the scd1 positive feedback loop. Ie when you’re mostly pufa, you’ll even turn your highly saturated fat diet into mufa. This feels like such a cruel twist, and a big part of the problem.
Yea exactly, pork + chicken. I would eat tons of bacon every weekend, and roast chicken from Costco or similar probably every other week. Including the skin, of course! Best part!
Plus I didn't realize how little PUFA will mess you up. 1 commercial soybean oil dressing from a restaurant 1x per week is enough.
Jan 24·edited Jan 24Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
This is where I need help understanding. I *think* I'm cutting it out, but if even that kind of tiny amounts are going to mess me up, I bet I'm not really achieving that. What's the solution for someone who wants to actually eat out from time to time? Can I really not eat chicken or bacon again?
Yea, unfortunately pretty much :-( You can assume everything in a restaurant is cooked in seed oils, definitely everything that's fried. But even your steak and vegetables are likely cooked in seed oils. Almost all the salad dressings will be made nearly entirely out of seed oils.
So like Shelly says you can either go extremely low fat when eating out, or what I do the rare time I eat out now, get things that look like they won't need much oil and not much of it will stick.
E.g. your steak might be cooked in seed oil, but how much oil is really going to cling to it? Not as much as e.g. leafy vegetables would soak up.
Probably still can't avoid it entirely, but we only need to get <2% on average, not to 0%. So if you eat out rarely enough and avoid "creamy" sauces/salad dressings and anything deep fried, that's probably fine.
But I would eat at a restaurant maybe every week or every other week, get the salad with "ranch" dressing. That's about an ounce of soybean oil right there..
Chicken you can do, but avoid the fatty bits. Chicken breast has nearly no fat in it. It'll likely be cooked in seed oils, but not much will stick to it necessarily.
Sadly, my solution is to eat as fat free as possible in a restaurant. Since all fat is suspect. Or I’ll take my chances and eat a burger patty and a bowl of undressed lettuce. I’m the weirdo at the table. Especially when everyone knows full well I’m not the low fat type. It is what it is. If I’m still hungry I can have a nice creamy scratch made hot cocoa. Cream...yum...
Burger patty is actually a staple of mine too. I know McDonald's cooks theirs in the juices only, so those are safe to eat.
But even normal restaurants, who probably will cook your patties in some seed oils, you're still getting way less than if you were to eat the bun and the sauce.
One terrible thing I noticed is that one small chain of steakhouses has sour cream with rapeseed oil in it - so the baked potato is out too. I usually just go low-carb, assuming the steak is grilled and skip the salad dressing.
I think it's mostly about price, milk fat being more expensive. Of course some of this stuff is sold as "healthier" and thus more expensive in the supermarket, my favorite perhaps is margarine rebranded as "vegan butter" at a higher price than real butter.
I don't think a small amount once in a while will mess you up, it might set you back a little but having a little once in a while shouldn't be too big of a problem. Just don't waste your PUFA cheat-meal on shitty food, especially things where a butter/tallow alternative exists as would be for anything (deep) fried.
Sure, but I'm trying to also understand general definitions of "small" and "once in awhile" and "set me back." Specifically questions like, we have generic, grocery-store bought chicken breast and 2-3 slices of bacon usually each 1-2 times a week around the house. I'm otherwise following the general exfatloss (high dairy fat) and low-PUFA recommendations, but still eating generally "normal" foods at home and at restaurants. Is this "setting me back" enough that I won't see the benefits of cutting out PUFAs, (are there threshold effects?) or should I order some of the fancy no-PUFA meat online?
I'd say chicken breast is lean enough to not be an issue. Bacon I'd stay away from. 2-3 slices might not cause issues 1-2 a week, but they also might. I'd say 3 slices/day is definitely too much. So personally I think that's skating too close to the sun (mixing my metaphors here) and I just avoid all bacon.
You can get "beef bacon" or "canadian bacon" (which is nearly fat-free ham) that are somewhat similar.
Jan 27·edited Jan 27Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
For me it's not really possible to stop after just 1-3 slices, so I wouldn't keep the stuff in the house - even worse when I don't have to do the cooking like a hotel breakfast buffet or the like. Same with nuts or potato chips or whatever.
There has to be a good reason for the PUFA. I think eggs bring a lot to the table nutrition wise. Or it might just be a social thing. Otherwise I believe it can be a slippery slope.
It's difficult to say since it may be different between people, the capacity to detox PUFA and is probably also influenced by the amount of stored PUFA. I've heard of 8g as the upper limit for linoleic acid. Still allows an egg or two. I think there are some risk factors with restaurant foods and other hidden PUFA, for example even if they use butter it might be adulterated, the same goes for dairy products. For me what helped most was ditching pork and olive oil. I might try giving up eggs for a while too since I'm plateauing.
Giving up eggs, pork/chicken and olive oil is gonna be tough. Am I imagining things, or did I see somewhere there's a test/lab I can get that shows my current PUFA stored-ness? Maybe "omegaquant" or something?
Oh yeah, I forgot about that experiment! That's another piece of evidence pointing towards the low protein hypothesis, I think. Although I think we need some more testing for where that boundary is.
“It’s important to note that the hexane used in [seed oil production] processes is typically a special grade with high purity, suitable for food production. The oil industry is subject to strict regulations regarding hexane residue in the final product, ensuring that any remaining traces are below harmful levels. The use of hexane in food production, including seed oil extraction, has been reviewed and deemed safe by regulatory agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), provided the residues are within the permitted limits.”
I feel so much better! 😒 Especially regarding the part about “any remaining traces being below harmful levels”
This was great. Agree with most of this. The one thing I can’t figure out is how much PUFA is too much. While avoiding them seems to have been relatively easy for you, if you can’t cook all your meals it is pretty tough. Lots of reasons why someone might not be able to do that. I’ve been in a season of my life where I’ve been able to, but I struggle thinking about how someone could implement a version of this that isn’t quite as strict as everyone on Reddit. Which I think is key to making this go mainstream, which itself will be necessary to getting restaurants etc. to switch.
Yea it's pretty much impossible for me to eat at normal restaurants, lol, and I rarely ever do. You just have no idea what's in there.
If this is just about grabbing a bite while at work, there are some options: McDonald's burger patties are grilled in their own juices (due to allergy reasons) so if you opt for just the patties, and make for carnivore, that's an option I often do on road trips.
But if you have to have lunch with clients or something like that, yea, that probably won't do.
I do agree, it needs to become much easier, but first we have to demonstrate that it even works :)
1. It works very well
2. It's easy
If we can't even show people that it works, they won't care if it's easy haha. I think.
“What have I got to lose?” Yep. The anti-seed oil people have messed with my life for sure. Eating out sucks. And maybe I miss KFC. But my payout is relative immunity from sunburn(used to burn in 20 minutes), much reduced joint aches, correction of mild but accelerating weight issues, and now 10 years later the realization I can eat carbs mostly at will. It has totally been worth it. If you could prove to me it wasn’t seed oils, I still wouldn’t eat them. Why would I eat a modern product produced in a factory with hydraulic presses, solvents, and bleaches and deodorizers? They smell and taste bad as too. Just can’t beat butter!
Glad your life is looking up, Ex. Hope it continues!
Thanks, and glad you saw so many benefits too!
What i'm expecting to see in my lifetime is first a better explanation of why PUFAs are deleterious, and only later an explanation for why olive oil historically was fine despite being 3x higher PUFA than, say, butter.
Another interesting Mediterranean question is how ancient aristocrats got fat at all in the first place. John Chrysostom, if I remember correctly, tried to explain this with the idea that the adipose tissue of fattened animals was indigestible, and therefore collected in the bodies of those who ate them. It's possible that eating fattened animals (especially pigs) only accidentally correlates with human obesity -- the Greeks highly prized walnuts, which are high in PUFAs. However, the standard fattening feed for pigs at the time was acorns, which are moderately high in PUFAs, and a 2021 study from Poland praises feeding acorns to pigs as a way of making them fatter, especially increasing MUFA and PUFA concentrations in their body fat. Walnuts and acorn-lard together might have been the culprit.
Acorns might be less LA than other nuts, but still 20% of the fat and 10% of the carolies:
https://foods.exfatloss.com/food/170157
Of course walnuts are 60%/50%...
I hadn't heard of the greek/nuts theory, thanks for mentioning! Some nuts are indeed so full of PUFAs that Brad's "winter is coming" hypothesis is making more and more sense. That's probably why they're so "delicious" too, they induce hyperphagia :)
Edit: I hadn't listened to Brad and Paul on olive oil (podcast published two weeks ago) yet. My suspicion now, after the comment about how extra virgin olive oil has the 'cure' to the M/PUFA it also contains is that historical cultivars hadn't yet been successfully turned into such high oil producers, and had a different ratio.
What benefit would it have to know why some ancient aristocrats may have been fat? There just isn't enough data and the food environment was entirely different.
If PUFAs were uniquely the culprit and also were something created in a lab in 1950, there would be no history of obesity.prior to that. Knowing that our ancestors may have a history with them sheds light on our relationship with them now.
I think there probably isn't a lot of population level data on anything the further back you go. I think the only thing you can really look at is if there is an unusual number of young men unsuitable for conscription into military service due to obesity or other diseases. In fairly modern times those records are probably the only situation where data like height and body weight was even recorded at least once in a male persons adult life. Most of our ancestors are long forgotten.
Edit: Linoleic Acid was first discovered in 1844. PUFA have of course always existed. I think populations that historically consumed a lot of PUFA usually consumed more Omega-3 from marine sources, e.g. fish, seals, whales. Extraction of seed-oil using solvents was invented in the 1870s. I think the extraction of oil from seeds goes back a lot further but wasn't really feasible for large scale use (e.g. extract oil just to waste it on deep frying).
I think you're failing to understand what I find interesting about this.
Maybe - my problem really isn't with your interest, rather with the possibility to find out anything with any level of confidence.
😘
It's an interesting anecdote. Just like "Huh, cream diet works for this one guy" isn't proof of much, but it's a thread to pull on.
Like I said before ketones are magical. You have done measurements showing that this diet has more ketones then your old keto diet. That should be a hypothesis you mention.
Many people eating lots of carbs but cutting out seed oils report similar results though.
Do we know what the Amish eat? I suspect Amish obesity rates are lower than non-Amish. This could be another data point in favor of the seed oil theory if it is true that the Amish mostly eat food they themselves produce.
This study has a nice overview of various Amish health studies: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8857275/
(Apparently in one community in Ontario the obesity rate was 4%.)
I wonder if lower levels of autism among Amish can also be explained by lower seed oil consumption. (See this “mystery” essay published by SMTM last year: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/07/17/your-mystery-why-is-autism-rare-among-the-amish/
I don't know what they eat, but if it's even slightly more old fashioned than the SAD, I'd agree with your conclusion.
I actually brought this up as a joke once when trying to figure out how many people in the U.S. are not actually metabolically impaired. Meaning not overweight, not prediabetic, not hypertensive, and so on. Turns out the % is incredibly small. Bigger than the Amish population, but IIRC not by an order of magnitude. So it could just be, I joked, that the only healthy people in the U.S. are old Chinese grandmas who're still eating what they ate in the 70s when they came here, and the Amish.
But Brad from Fire in a Bottle said he knows quite a few Amish, and they use a lot of seed oils. Maybe that's still better than seed oils + the seed oils hidden in junk food that they presumably don't eat? Dunno.
I doubt the Amish are personally manufacturing said seed oils, though. 😄
Very unlikely, I think their charter specifically prohibits use of hexane :D
Do you have thoughts about microbiomic changes from traditional diets? I have seen lots of data suggesting that gut microbe populations may play a big role in obesity and depression, and that, like PUFAs, our microbiomes are very different from what they were ancestrally. But it seems like there are a lot of unknowns there as well, and that mouse models only go so far comparing with human digestion. I'm wondering if microbes are on your radar at all?
Most of what I've heard of microbiome are that it's really important, and we know it changes with our diet, but that's really it.
I suppose some people have received fecal transplants like Tim Ferris lol.
My suspicion is that if you're not putting any toxic stuff into your body, your microbiome will just adapt to your diet and you'll be fine. E.g. eat more fiber, the fiber bacteria grow and help you deal with it. Eat less fiber, they die and other ones take their place.
Could be that PUFAs are just as bad for the bacteria that eat them as they are for us, and therefore they mess up the microbiome. No idea though.
Has anyone ever tested PUFAs on mice? I'd be surprised if not.
It seems like a lab could get genetically identical mice, divide them in half, feed one group "the chow that fattens" (assuming this including seed oils) and the other group "an exact replica of the chow that fattens except without seed oils" and see if outcomes differ over the mice's life cycles. Hold fixed the mice's physical activity levels (or observe if one group naturally has more energy than the other, etc.).
Wouldn't this be strong evidence in favor of seed oils driving negative metabolic health outcomes?
It looks like some work has been done here, but the published papers don't exactly seem to be asking the right questions. From a cursory search on Elicit.com:
"Several studies have investigated the effects of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) on metabolic health in mice. Lee (2014) found that short-term dietary supplementation with botanical oil (BO) and fish oil (FO) improved biomarkers associated with type-2 diabetes/metabolic syndrome. However, Miranda (2013) reported that dietary supplementation of pomegranate seed oil, which contains PUFAs, did not lead to decreased fat accumulation or improved glycemic control in rats fed an obesogenic diet. Nuernberg (2011) observed that a high-fat diet rich in n-3 PUFAs led to increased body fat in mice selected for high body weight, but enhanced insulin sensitivity in mice selected for high treadmill performance. These findings suggest that the effects of PUFAs on metabolic health may be influenced by factors such as the specific type of PUFA and the genetic background of the mice."
Lee et al. (2014) - https://doi.org/10.1186/1476-511X-13-196
Miranda et al. (2013) - https://doi.org/10.1021/jf305076v
Nuernber et al. (2011) - https://doi.org/10.1186/1743-7075-8-56
https://tuckergoodrich.substack.com/p/does-linoleic-acid-induce-obesity
Thanks! Exactly what I was looking for
In case anyone else is wonder how canola oil is made: https://youtu.be/Cfk2IXlZdbI?si=Wkz1JcpujaYFaPt9
I think I liked the “canola cakes” part the best.
I honestly can't tell if this is a real old-timey "how it's made" or some kind of spoof.
Like the 1 comment says, it goes from "Heart healthy" to "and now we mix the toxic sludge with HEXANE" in 2 minutes.
Haha, you're right! Certainly the video made its way to YouTube as a way to paint seed oils in an unflattering light.
I'm guessing it's based on an actual episode, though I'm not confident it wasn't doctored.
Also enjoyable to just read all of the satirical comments.
Like this one:
“I worked at a testing lab for years. One of our clients wanted to test frying pans.
“And the test was something along the lines of 100ml of canola oil until it reaches flashing point. For a cycle of over 1000 for each pan.
“The absolute rank, tar like, disgusting residue canola oil additives left on the pan after every 1 cycle. Yes 1 cycle, made the entire lab not eat anything cooked in Canola oil ever again.
It was still by far the worst thing l've witnessed in a test lab. We had to wear level B gas masks after 500 or so cycles.”
Haha gold :)
When reading food labels I sometimes fantasize about people writing letters to food manufacturers: "You know what really would make this great? Canola oil!". In my country that shit is literally everything, though only minuscule amounts. I don't get it, why put it in at all?
I suspect that basically any calorie you replace with seed oils saves them 1c in production cost..
Yes, it’s definitely about massive-scale production economics.
also my food scientist wife tells me that seed oils result in much better shelf stability and also have a much milder flavor which ups their versatility.
It’s a lot of momentum to try and halt!
In some cases at least it probably also makes things not stick to each other.
Seed oils should be much less shelf stable because they oxidize so rapidly. PUFAs have, by definition, more double bonds than MUFAs or SFAs.
Then it must be more about the flavor and/or if what they combine with is more shelf-stable and/or if they are hydrogenated. But I'm no chemist.
Hydrogenated just saturates double bonds and makes UFAs into SFAs. So yea, hydrogenating sure makes (by definition unsaturated) fats more stable by making them saturated.
The flavor thing could just be because they're heavily cleaned and deodorized. I suppose you don't want coconut or butter or tallow flavor in everything. But at least with tallow I know you can make it ultra clean pretty easily, with tech a stone-age man would've had, I've done it myself. The resulting product is so odorless and flavorless you can use it for candles or lip balm/skin care products.
But it might still be more expensive.
Rapeseed oil has no discernible flavor I think. One advantage of those seed oils is that they are liquid at low temperatures, so it might just be to fix the stickiness of some products.
This is excellent thank you. The extra details about pufa that have really impacted me are:
1. Just how bad pork can be in this context.
2. What fire in a bottle explains about the scd1 positive feedback loop. Ie when you’re mostly pufa, you’ll even turn your highly saturated fat diet into mufa. This feels like such a cruel twist, and a big part of the problem.
Yea exactly, pork + chicken. I would eat tons of bacon every weekend, and roast chicken from Costco or similar probably every other week. Including the skin, of course! Best part!
Plus I didn't realize how little PUFA will mess you up. 1 commercial soybean oil dressing from a restaurant 1x per week is enough.
This is where I need help understanding. I *think* I'm cutting it out, but if even that kind of tiny amounts are going to mess me up, I bet I'm not really achieving that. What's the solution for someone who wants to actually eat out from time to time? Can I really not eat chicken or bacon again?
Yea, unfortunately pretty much :-( You can assume everything in a restaurant is cooked in seed oils, definitely everything that's fried. But even your steak and vegetables are likely cooked in seed oils. Almost all the salad dressings will be made nearly entirely out of seed oils.
So like Shelly says you can either go extremely low fat when eating out, or what I do the rare time I eat out now, get things that look like they won't need much oil and not much of it will stick.
E.g. your steak might be cooked in seed oil, but how much oil is really going to cling to it? Not as much as e.g. leafy vegetables would soak up.
Probably still can't avoid it entirely, but we only need to get <2% on average, not to 0%. So if you eat out rarely enough and avoid "creamy" sauces/salad dressings and anything deep fried, that's probably fine.
But I would eat at a restaurant maybe every week or every other week, get the salad with "ranch" dressing. That's about an ounce of soybean oil right there..
Chicken you can do, but avoid the fatty bits. Chicken breast has nearly no fat in it. It'll likely be cooked in seed oils, but not much will stick to it necessarily.
Bacon... yea. Unless you knew the pig by name...
Thanks for the tips!
Sadly, my solution is to eat as fat free as possible in a restaurant. Since all fat is suspect. Or I’ll take my chances and eat a burger patty and a bowl of undressed lettuce. I’m the weirdo at the table. Especially when everyone knows full well I’m not the low fat type. It is what it is. If I’m still hungry I can have a nice creamy scratch made hot cocoa. Cream...yum...
Burger patty is actually a staple of mine too. I know McDonald's cooks theirs in the juices only, so those are safe to eat.
But even normal restaurants, who probably will cook your patties in some seed oils, you're still getting way less than if you were to eat the bun and the sauce.
One terrible thing I noticed is that one small chain of steakhouses has sour cream with rapeseed oil in it - so the baked potato is out too. I usually just go low-carb, assuming the steak is grilled and skip the salad dressing.
Yea they put seed oils in a ton of "manufactured" dairy foods now, to thicken them up I guess... ugh.
I think it's mostly about price, milk fat being more expensive. Of course some of this stuff is sold as "healthier" and thus more expensive in the supermarket, my favorite perhaps is margarine rebranded as "vegan butter" at a higher price than real butter.
I don't think a small amount once in a while will mess you up, it might set you back a little but having a little once in a while shouldn't be too big of a problem. Just don't waste your PUFA cheat-meal on shitty food, especially things where a butter/tallow alternative exists as would be for anything (deep) fried.
It probably really depends on 1. "small amount" 2. "once in a while" and 3. the person.
Sure, but I'm trying to also understand general definitions of "small" and "once in awhile" and "set me back." Specifically questions like, we have generic, grocery-store bought chicken breast and 2-3 slices of bacon usually each 1-2 times a week around the house. I'm otherwise following the general exfatloss (high dairy fat) and low-PUFA recommendations, but still eating generally "normal" foods at home and at restaurants. Is this "setting me back" enough that I won't see the benefits of cutting out PUFAs, (are there threshold effects?) or should I order some of the fancy no-PUFA meat online?
Haha you read my mind ('small" "a while").
I'd say chicken breast is lean enough to not be an issue. Bacon I'd stay away from. 2-3 slices might not cause issues 1-2 a week, but they also might. I'd say 3 slices/day is definitely too much. So personally I think that's skating too close to the sun (mixing my metaphors here) and I just avoid all bacon.
You can get "beef bacon" or "canadian bacon" (which is nearly fat-free ham) that are somewhat similar.
For me it's not really possible to stop after just 1-3 slices, so I wouldn't keep the stuff in the house - even worse when I don't have to do the cooking like a hotel breakfast buffet or the like. Same with nuts or potato chips or whatever.
There has to be a good reason for the PUFA. I think eggs bring a lot to the table nutrition wise. Or it might just be a social thing. Otherwise I believe it can be a slippery slope.
It's difficult to say since it may be different between people, the capacity to detox PUFA and is probably also influenced by the amount of stored PUFA. I've heard of 8g as the upper limit for linoleic acid. Still allows an egg or two. I think there are some risk factors with restaurant foods and other hidden PUFA, for example even if they use butter it might be adulterated, the same goes for dairy products. For me what helped most was ditching pork and olive oil. I might try giving up eggs for a while too since I'm plateauing.
Giving up eggs, pork/chicken and olive oil is gonna be tough. Am I imagining things, or did I see somewhere there's a test/lab I can get that shows my current PUFA stored-ness? Maybe "omegaquant" or something?
What I really want to know is what kind of breakfast meat I can swap it out for. Am I stuck with just shaved steak or what?
I did a whole experiment using only deli meats from the store, worked just as well:
https://www.exfatloss.com/p/ex150deli-mod-review-still-losing
Oh yeah, I forgot about that experiment! That's another piece of evidence pointing towards the low protein hypothesis, I think. Although I think we need some more testing for where that boundary is.
GPT-4 helpfully reminds me:
“It’s important to note that the hexane used in [seed oil production] processes is typically a special grade with high purity, suitable for food production. The oil industry is subject to strict regulations regarding hexane residue in the final product, ensuring that any remaining traces are below harmful levels. The use of hexane in food production, including seed oil extraction, has been reviewed and deemed safe by regulatory agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), provided the residues are within the permitted limits.”
I feel so much better! 😒 Especially regarding the part about “any remaining traces being below harmful levels”