The biggest mystery though, is that this can’t be replicated so far in human studies. While there are notable studies like the Veteran study by Dayton et al where they observed the opposite effect. And there are clear differential results like Kevin Hall’s processed vs unprocessed study where they didn’t need to control intake, macro rat…
The biggest mystery though, is that this can’t be replicated so far in human studies. While there are notable studies like the Veteran study by Dayton et al where they observed the opposite effect. And there are clear differential results like Kevin Hall’s processed vs unprocessed study where they didn’t need to control intake, macro ratios let alone UFA let alone seed oils to let people lose weight.
So the biggest problem I have with this theory is that it only ‘works’ via correlative generalisations and assumptions, not once you apply the actual scientific method. By the same logic, it’s electronic entertainment (radio then tv then the internet) or being less burdened by physical and physcological burdens. Yes they all fit like a round peg in a round hole, but so do the pencil and the car keys. Just trying to look for something that ‘fits’ isn’t bringing us closer to the physical causes.
It also tends to steer us towards wild goose chases for a single culprit rather than looking into the interactions between all the factors which do seem to be the biggest reason behind the epidemic. Not just a single class of ingredients or a stereotypical national diet. Which also explains why bland mono diets often work, they throw out a lot of children with the bath water. It’s then a bit fallacious to conclude that because one of them is sus, it must have been the specific reason for a very broad problem. So all in all I would only consider seed oils a potential detrimental factor, just like stress and genetics, but the thing that ‘has to be it’. It’s like trying to blame a whole cascade of murder victims on one lone wolf serial killer instead of lots of individual murderers and possibly accomplices.
Yea, it's fair that seed oil theory isn't conclusively proven. But we have a dead body with a hole in it, there's a smoking gun on the kitchen table, we have the entry logs of everybody..
And it seems kind of obvious to me that whatever the culprit behind the obesity epidemic, it would be "immune to modern science" as an idea. Otherwise, we would've proven and cured it! It's just memetic evolution, in a sense.
What is modern science? RCTs, trials of maybe 8 weeks. Averages. Statistics.
In short, modern science cannot find the culprit of the epidemic because of the way it's structured and its chosen method. That's true whether the culprit is seed oils or not. And that's why science now knows less about obesity than it did 100 years ago. (Read diet books from 100 years ago, it's fun!)
So I'm trying to prove it myself. Can I conclusively prove that cutting out seed oils is the thing that makes ex150 work in most people who've tried it so far? No. Maybe I'm throwing the seed oils out with the bathwater and it's something else.
But all the epidemiology and mechanistics heavily point toward the smoking seed oils, I believe.
"Yea, it's fair that seed oil theory isn't conclusively proven. But we have a dead body with a hole in it, there's a smoking gun on the kitchen table, we have the entry logs of everybody..", It's not just not conclusively proven, we have much more studies that find no ill effects and studies that find slight beneficial effects like lower CVD mortality. So how would there even be a scientific basis for primarily focussing on seed oils in the first place?
"And it seems kind of obvious to me that whatever the culprit behind the obesity epidemic, it would be "immune to modern science" as an idea. Otherwise, we would've proven and cured it! It's just memetic evolution, in a sense.". I don't agree, proof and cure don't just appear when science finds it possible to find them, they appear from funding and steered focus. Nowadays most funding goes to other fields, like cancer and other more severe threats to human life. Same reason (simply put) why we still have head lice and scar tissue. Our society finds it problematic but not on the same level as for example cancer (or for example Covid-19 when we needed the vaccine asap). Should we find it more problematic? Perhaps, but that's a far cry from claiming that the issue is 'immune' just because we didn't figure it out yet.
"But all the epidemiology and mechanistics heavily point toward the smoking seed oils, I believe." It points to a lot more things than just seed oils, but saying it's probably a combination of a lot of factors like behaviour, marketing, peer pressure, stress, social media and so on doesn't really motivate anyone to go on a witch hunt for something, but pinpointing a plausible witch does. Which seed oils are today, and sugar and saturated fats used to be, and there are many more examples. It's just hyped up to something it's not, and I feel it's a waste of people's time and effort to focus to that extend on that aspect and not on the combination of everything they expose themselves to in their lives. Danger is everywhere, not just the boogeyman in the closet or the crocodile under the bed.
You think there's not enough effort & funding in nutritional science & obesity? What about the Kevin Hall types? This started being a huge issue in the 50s, and still is.
All the trials I've seen didn't address the problem sufficiently, or show higher mortality (e.g. VA study, just about the only even semi-controlled/RCT style one long enough).
For the record, I think blaming marketing, personal behavior, and social media are "witch hunts."
"But what if there really is a witch?" We can always scale up the polarising labels after we found more proof. Fantasising beforehand isn't going to help the verification of the idea that seed oils are a cause or a major factor in obesity. My point being that you can start by saying "seed oils are probably a problematic factor" instead of "they are *the* issue". Just like some people in your life can be of a bad influence without being actual witches.
"For the record, I think blaming marketing, personal behavior, and social media are "witch hunts."" but just mentioning them as factors isn't promoting them to the main reason, so by definition can't be witch hunts. Nobody is posting the Aliens meme with saying "it really is the marketing". Or "It really is social media". That's my point.
How could you possibly test this theory on humans? First of all, if the hypothesis was "we think eating large amounts of linoleic acid will make a human obese and sick" who would sign up for that trial? Testing that directly on humans wouldn't be ethical.
So, we can test the counter argument, right? A low linoleic acid diet improves obesity and disease. Sounds easy! Except, you would need to conduct an extremely expensive, large population, diet controlled study over multiple years? Who is going to pay for that? Not the big food companies who profit from the use of seed oils in their products.
I believe that WE are the study. As a population, like this article demonstrates, we are eating more and more linoleic acid and simultaneously getting fatter and sicker. That's as close to actual evidence as we are probably ever going to get. It's really up to the individual to decide what they want to do with that. Are you fine risking your longterm health and lifespan on the chance that seed oils are harmless? Or would you be rather safe than sorry and make some relatively simple changes to your diet? All we are really talking about is eating unprocessed, whole foods. Does that really sound like that bad of a idea?
I think you can test it, but only in reverse form. Seed oils are in the water, so any study done on normal people eating a normal diet and ADDING anything is useless.
But what if you take obese humans and put them on a zero-seed-oil diet for a few months? Of course this would have to be extremely controlled, because like I say in the article, the "allowed" amount of LA is about 1-1.5 teaspoons per day, depending on the person. So if they sneak out and eat a single muffin, they're done for the day.
Now if these obese humans lose weight relatively effortlessly, eating ad-lib, that's a good start. By the way, this is pretty much what happened in the ex150 trial so far.
Now if you're ethically challenged, after they lost maybe 30lbs or more (just to see it's not a fluke) you then put HALF of those people back on a high-LA diet. For at least another 3-6 months. If you then see them stall or gain weight back, et voila.
The initial total PUFA-wash-out is critical. No study so far has done that, as far as I've seen, and so they're all worthless.
I find it quite surprising that you would even ask this. Kevin Hall did try such studies, also normal vs keto and unprocessed vs processed foods. Both had significant outcomes, where in the former it was shown any caloric restriction eventually worked, keto just generally worked faster, while in the latter it was shown that with ad libitum intake without any (ac)counting the unprocessed group lost weight and the processed group gained weight. And there the unprocessed group did consume seed oils too.
My point being that it wouldn't be hard to perform the same studies in the same way. And we already have the veterans study I mentioned that in the hospital canteen just swapped out the oil between the two groups, and found no weight gain in the seed oil group. So it's also not unheard of or anything, and we already have studies that looked into cooking oil replacements too. Also there are specific studies that tried various unsaturated vs saturated ratios, often in context of sport performance (as keto or merely lower carb is gaining interest in that field quickly too).
So I think it's quite weird to reason from the "we think eating large amounts of linoleic acid will make a human obese and sick" kind of hypothesis like we're in middle school, there's nothing special about just trying larger amounts high linoleic oils vs high oleic vs high stearic intake and then form hypotheses based on the outcome. Note that you would generally form the hypotheses *after* the results come in, not before. You know what you want to test (eg linoleic acid influence) but the part about 'obese and sick' is irrelevant beforehand.
If he found that "any caloric restriction works" I can already disregard the study because it must've been wrong, because that's clearly nonsense. And, in fact, I do not think Kevin Hall is a good-faith source. I've seen some stuff that just makes me shake my head.
He doesn't even have a useful definition of success (which I've written about here: https://exfatloss.substack.com/p/the-definition-of-diet-success). So he couldn't possibly find a correct answer. This is obvious from stuff like "any caloric restriction works."
Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that any caloric restriction works! It may be horrifying and pointless, and the weight lost may all come back on the minute you stop starving yourself, but if starving people don't lose weight then I'm a Dutchman.
"the weight lost may all come back the minute you stop starving yourself" exactly
That's not a success in my book. If you don't differentiate between "actual, lasting fat loss" and "we starved him for 2 weeks and he gained it all back and then some but hey science is hard amirite" then you're never going to find the solution to obesity.
Sure. But I've defined what I mean by success in fat loss (link in the other comment) and temporarily starving yourself ain't it. If that's someone's goal, they should be honest about it. I see that as failure unless you're a bodybuilder getting ready for a competition.
"If he found that "any caloric restriction works" I can already disregard the study because it must've been wrong, because that's clearly nonsense" I meant in the context of the study, not as a blanket statement of course. All the groups in the study lost weight fairly quickly, the keto group just faster.
"He doesn't even have a useful definition of success (which I've written about here: https://exfatloss.substack.com/p/the-definition-of-diet-success). So he couldn't possibly find a correct answer." But he wasn't finding an answer to begin with. He put groups in a controlled environment and measured their body stats to see what happened based on diet. I think we should be careful as to straw man certain claims on his outcomes. He never claimed that X 'works' or that 'any kind of Y works' here. I just worded it like that in the sense that he didn't find a group that maintained weight.
I really don't care to get argumentative, because I think we both understand each other's point and that there is definitely some validity to each side of the coin. However, you say the seed oil theory doesn't hold up when you apply the scientific method. In the scientific method, a hypothesis ALWAYS comes before experimentation. Furthermore, to do a diet study on humans, in today's world you must have a hypothesis and must clearly state that hypothesis to anyone you recruit for the trial. This is precisely why there are so many studies done on rodents, but not done on humans.
Lastly, to effectively do a study where the hypothesis is that a low seed oil diet improves obesity and disease, you would need that study to go for a minimum of 3 years (this article clearly explains why), the diet would need to be very tightly controlled (think metabolic ward level of control), and you'd need some kind of control group with a placebo diet. The likelihood of that ever getting funded is practically zero. If it were to get funded, who is going to volunteer 3+ years of their life to prove or disprove this theory? It would be an extremely tough sell.
The biggest mystery though, is that this can’t be replicated so far in human studies. While there are notable studies like the Veteran study by Dayton et al where they observed the opposite effect. And there are clear differential results like Kevin Hall’s processed vs unprocessed study where they didn’t need to control intake, macro ratios let alone UFA let alone seed oils to let people lose weight.
So the biggest problem I have with this theory is that it only ‘works’ via correlative generalisations and assumptions, not once you apply the actual scientific method. By the same logic, it’s electronic entertainment (radio then tv then the internet) or being less burdened by physical and physcological burdens. Yes they all fit like a round peg in a round hole, but so do the pencil and the car keys. Just trying to look for something that ‘fits’ isn’t bringing us closer to the physical causes.
It also tends to steer us towards wild goose chases for a single culprit rather than looking into the interactions between all the factors which do seem to be the biggest reason behind the epidemic. Not just a single class of ingredients or a stereotypical national diet. Which also explains why bland mono diets often work, they throw out a lot of children with the bath water. It’s then a bit fallacious to conclude that because one of them is sus, it must have been the specific reason for a very broad problem. So all in all I would only consider seed oils a potential detrimental factor, just like stress and genetics, but the thing that ‘has to be it’. It’s like trying to blame a whole cascade of murder victims on one lone wolf serial killer instead of lots of individual murderers and possibly accomplices.
Yea, it's fair that seed oil theory isn't conclusively proven. But we have a dead body with a hole in it, there's a smoking gun on the kitchen table, we have the entry logs of everybody..
And it seems kind of obvious to me that whatever the culprit behind the obesity epidemic, it would be "immune to modern science" as an idea. Otherwise, we would've proven and cured it! It's just memetic evolution, in a sense.
What is modern science? RCTs, trials of maybe 8 weeks. Averages. Statistics.
In short, modern science cannot find the culprit of the epidemic because of the way it's structured and its chosen method. That's true whether the culprit is seed oils or not. And that's why science now knows less about obesity than it did 100 years ago. (Read diet books from 100 years ago, it's fun!)
So I'm trying to prove it myself. Can I conclusively prove that cutting out seed oils is the thing that makes ex150 work in most people who've tried it so far? No. Maybe I'm throwing the seed oils out with the bathwater and it's something else.
But all the epidemiology and mechanistics heavily point toward the smoking seed oils, I believe.
"Yea, it's fair that seed oil theory isn't conclusively proven. But we have a dead body with a hole in it, there's a smoking gun on the kitchen table, we have the entry logs of everybody..", It's not just not conclusively proven, we have much more studies that find no ill effects and studies that find slight beneficial effects like lower CVD mortality. So how would there even be a scientific basis for primarily focussing on seed oils in the first place?
"And it seems kind of obvious to me that whatever the culprit behind the obesity epidemic, it would be "immune to modern science" as an idea. Otherwise, we would've proven and cured it! It's just memetic evolution, in a sense.". I don't agree, proof and cure don't just appear when science finds it possible to find them, they appear from funding and steered focus. Nowadays most funding goes to other fields, like cancer and other more severe threats to human life. Same reason (simply put) why we still have head lice and scar tissue. Our society finds it problematic but not on the same level as for example cancer (or for example Covid-19 when we needed the vaccine asap). Should we find it more problematic? Perhaps, but that's a far cry from claiming that the issue is 'immune' just because we didn't figure it out yet.
"But all the epidemiology and mechanistics heavily point toward the smoking seed oils, I believe." It points to a lot more things than just seed oils, but saying it's probably a combination of a lot of factors like behaviour, marketing, peer pressure, stress, social media and so on doesn't really motivate anyone to go on a witch hunt for something, but pinpointing a plausible witch does. Which seed oils are today, and sugar and saturated fats used to be, and there are many more examples. It's just hyped up to something it's not, and I feel it's a waste of people's time and effort to focus to that extend on that aspect and not on the combination of everything they expose themselves to in their lives. Danger is everywhere, not just the boogeyman in the closet or the crocodile under the bed.
But what if there really is a witch?
You think there's not enough effort & funding in nutritional science & obesity? What about the Kevin Hall types? This started being a huge issue in the 50s, and still is.
All the trials I've seen didn't address the problem sufficiently, or show higher mortality (e.g. VA study, just about the only even semi-controlled/RCT style one long enough).
For the record, I think blaming marketing, personal behavior, and social media are "witch hunts."
Witch hunts are in the eye of the beholder.
"But what if there really is a witch?" We can always scale up the polarising labels after we found more proof. Fantasising beforehand isn't going to help the verification of the idea that seed oils are a cause or a major factor in obesity. My point being that you can start by saying "seed oils are probably a problematic factor" instead of "they are *the* issue". Just like some people in your life can be of a bad influence without being actual witches.
"For the record, I think blaming marketing, personal behavior, and social media are "witch hunts."" but just mentioning them as factors isn't promoting them to the main reason, so by definition can't be witch hunts. Nobody is posting the Aliens meme with saying "it really is the marketing". Or "It really is social media". That's my point.
I didn't start with the "witch hunt" label, you did :)
How could you possibly test this theory on humans? First of all, if the hypothesis was "we think eating large amounts of linoleic acid will make a human obese and sick" who would sign up for that trial? Testing that directly on humans wouldn't be ethical.
So, we can test the counter argument, right? A low linoleic acid diet improves obesity and disease. Sounds easy! Except, you would need to conduct an extremely expensive, large population, diet controlled study over multiple years? Who is going to pay for that? Not the big food companies who profit from the use of seed oils in their products.
I believe that WE are the study. As a population, like this article demonstrates, we are eating more and more linoleic acid and simultaneously getting fatter and sicker. That's as close to actual evidence as we are probably ever going to get. It's really up to the individual to decide what they want to do with that. Are you fine risking your longterm health and lifespan on the chance that seed oils are harmless? Or would you be rather safe than sorry and make some relatively simple changes to your diet? All we are really talking about is eating unprocessed, whole foods. Does that really sound like that bad of a idea?
I think you can test it, but only in reverse form. Seed oils are in the water, so any study done on normal people eating a normal diet and ADDING anything is useless.
But what if you take obese humans and put them on a zero-seed-oil diet for a few months? Of course this would have to be extremely controlled, because like I say in the article, the "allowed" amount of LA is about 1-1.5 teaspoons per day, depending on the person. So if they sneak out and eat a single muffin, they're done for the day.
Now if these obese humans lose weight relatively effortlessly, eating ad-lib, that's a good start. By the way, this is pretty much what happened in the ex150 trial so far.
Now if you're ethically challenged, after they lost maybe 30lbs or more (just to see it's not a fluke) you then put HALF of those people back on a high-LA diet. For at least another 3-6 months. If you then see them stall or gain weight back, et voila.
The initial total PUFA-wash-out is critical. No study so far has done that, as far as I've seen, and so they're all worthless.
I find it quite surprising that you would even ask this. Kevin Hall did try such studies, also normal vs keto and unprocessed vs processed foods. Both had significant outcomes, where in the former it was shown any caloric restriction eventually worked, keto just generally worked faster, while in the latter it was shown that with ad libitum intake without any (ac)counting the unprocessed group lost weight and the processed group gained weight. And there the unprocessed group did consume seed oils too.
My point being that it wouldn't be hard to perform the same studies in the same way. And we already have the veterans study I mentioned that in the hospital canteen just swapped out the oil between the two groups, and found no weight gain in the seed oil group. So it's also not unheard of or anything, and we already have studies that looked into cooking oil replacements too. Also there are specific studies that tried various unsaturated vs saturated ratios, often in context of sport performance (as keto or merely lower carb is gaining interest in that field quickly too).
So I think it's quite weird to reason from the "we think eating large amounts of linoleic acid will make a human obese and sick" kind of hypothesis like we're in middle school, there's nothing special about just trying larger amounts high linoleic oils vs high oleic vs high stearic intake and then form hypotheses based on the outcome. Note that you would generally form the hypotheses *after* the results come in, not before. You know what you want to test (eg linoleic acid influence) but the part about 'obese and sick' is irrelevant beforehand.
If he found that "any caloric restriction works" I can already disregard the study because it must've been wrong, because that's clearly nonsense. And, in fact, I do not think Kevin Hall is a good-faith source. I've seen some stuff that just makes me shake my head.
He doesn't even have a useful definition of success (which I've written about here: https://exfatloss.substack.com/p/the-definition-of-diet-success). So he couldn't possibly find a correct answer. This is obvious from stuff like "any caloric restriction works."
Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that any caloric restriction works! It may be horrifying and pointless, and the weight lost may all come back on the minute you stop starving yourself, but if starving people don't lose weight then I'm a Dutchman.
"the weight lost may all come back the minute you stop starving yourself" exactly
That's not a success in my book. If you don't differentiate between "actual, lasting fat loss" and "we starved him for 2 weeks and he gained it all back and then some but hey science is hard amirite" then you're never going to find the solution to obesity.
That's true but there isn't a single kind of 'success'.
Sure. But I've defined what I mean by success in fat loss (link in the other comment) and temporarily starving yourself ain't it. If that's someone's goal, they should be honest about it. I see that as failure unless you're a bodybuilder getting ready for a competition.
"If he found that "any caloric restriction works" I can already disregard the study because it must've been wrong, because that's clearly nonsense" I meant in the context of the study, not as a blanket statement of course. All the groups in the study lost weight fairly quickly, the keto group just faster.
"He doesn't even have a useful definition of success (which I've written about here: https://exfatloss.substack.com/p/the-definition-of-diet-success). So he couldn't possibly find a correct answer." But he wasn't finding an answer to begin with. He put groups in a controlled environment and measured their body stats to see what happened based on diet. I think we should be careful as to straw man certain claims on his outcomes. He never claimed that X 'works' or that 'any kind of Y works' here. I just worded it like that in the sense that he didn't find a group that maintained weight.
I really don't care to get argumentative, because I think we both understand each other's point and that there is definitely some validity to each side of the coin. However, you say the seed oil theory doesn't hold up when you apply the scientific method. In the scientific method, a hypothesis ALWAYS comes before experimentation. Furthermore, to do a diet study on humans, in today's world you must have a hypothesis and must clearly state that hypothesis to anyone you recruit for the trial. This is precisely why there are so many studies done on rodents, but not done on humans.
Lastly, to effectively do a study where the hypothesis is that a low seed oil diet improves obesity and disease, you would need that study to go for a minimum of 3 years (this article clearly explains why), the diet would need to be very tightly controlled (think metabolic ward level of control), and you'd need some kind of control group with a placebo diet. The likelihood of that ever getting funded is practically zero. If it were to get funded, who is going to volunteer 3+ years of their life to prove or disprove this theory? It would be an extremely tough sell.