I'm going to raise you on this. It's not just the obesity epidemic, it's the whole 'epidemic of hypothyroidism that doesn't show up on thyroid tests' that's been going on since about 1970 (which is when they changed from diagnosis by symptoms to diagnosis by TSH test)
I think these wretched polyunsaturated things gum up your metabolism somehow, and lower your body temperature and run you out of energy for all your systems. If part of that is that they break satiety signals at the same time that gives you obesity, going along with CFS, fibromyalgia, depression, IBS, and all the other stuff that looks just like hypothyroidism.
Nice! Very good writeup. Largely agreed. I've added a link at the bottom of my post.
Interesting especially is the PUFA vs. SFA thing. I gained 100lbs eating VERY HIGH saturated fat while I wasn't cutting out PUFAs. So clearly, it doesn't matter how much SFA you eat if some other factors (e.g. high PUFA, or maybe in my case also high protein) are in place. It might even "make it worse" in the sense that eating anything will mess you up once you're afflicted. Adding more butter to the SAD doesn't prove anything.
It's also interesting how that aside of "wild animals" vs "human-adjacent animals" completely turns the environmental thing vs. dietary thing around, isn't it?
The good news: I really think there's no downside to eliminating PUFAs from your diet. They don't do anything positive. The only potential upside is, if you believe all the saturated fat/CVD hype, they are not saturated. Since I don't believe that, it's easy for me to just eliminate them completely. They're not necessary beyond the tiny trace amounts you find even in meat/dairy/vegetables, they don't taste good, they don't make the food you cook in them taste good. They don't have a good consistency or texture for making anything (unlike e.g. the saturated fats in cream/butter/chocolate).
So it's really only a question of convenience/effort.
We don't have a mechanism to block the mm... absorption(?) of PUFAs, right? Because if they are really in everything then you could never eat at a restaurant (if you want to not be exposed to high levels of PUFAs) and that would be sad. Also as you mentioned with the nails and hammer. It might also be a good idea to restaurate with SFA, because if you just elimine PUFAs it might not resolve all the problems?
AFAIK we don't have a way to block the absorption. I think there used to be a drug that did it, but it also made people suicidal and so they pulled it lol.
Yea, restaurants are super tricky. You kind of get better at thinking about it, but you can't eat 95%, yea. :-( Basically, hamburger patties and steak.
Haha I've read that, yea. I kind of don't get the hate for their theory. They're clearly just spitballing and thinking out loud about different ideas, but people get really mad over some technicality or misreading.
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.
Jul 22, 2023·edited Jul 22, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
"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."
Jul 23, 2023·edited Jul 23, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
"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."
Jul 22, 2023·edited Jul 22, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
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.
"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.
What about countries that have decades of PUFA under their belt, and a robustly healthy population? Southeast Asians use a lot of palm, peanut and soybean oil (not palm kernel)
Then there's obese countries like Nigeria which largely cook in coconut oil.
Jul 24, 2023·edited Jul 24, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
I have been wondering about this problem specifically -- that Asian people seem to consume a lot more vegetable oils than we do while remaining healthy and that it puts the seed oils theory at jeopardy.
But this all makes me think of something else: is there a missing ingredient? Could it be the interaction between PUFAs and something else that wrecks our metabolism?
Anecdotally, I don't think there's a mystery. I lived in various countries in Asia for years. While they might use "vegetable" oils, a lot of that was historically palm or coconut oil. Yes, the LA oils have gone up (like canola and sunflower and even soybean) but only in the last few decades, it seems, and they've quickly caught up on diseases and obesity since then.
Nuts? Not really, where I've been. They do sell them, but I was the only one there (due to keto) eating nuts regularly. They put them in some dishes, but more like a spice. You'll find a handful of crushed up peanuts in a typical "peanut" dish.
Incidentally, they also eat extremely low protein, which might be why "keto" worked for me there and didn't here :)
I think one of the differences is, in the US the seed oils are in EVERYTHING. You can't pick up a loaf of bread without it having some soybean oil in it.
In most other places, while they probably do consume seed oils, I suspect they're more limited to what we'd call "processed/junk food."
So while junk-food consumers in Asia or Europe might get the effects, "normal" people eating "regular, whole" food might not.
In the US, that's not easily possible: if you make salad with commercial salad dressing, or buy regular store-bought bread, it'll be containing seed oils. You have to go very extreme. Plus, probably their pork/chicken isn't as contaminated.
Palm oil is actually nearly 50% saturated, and only 9% PUFA. So it's one of the better options I'd say, if maybe not perfect. Could be that the huge amount of SFAs is balancing out the PUFAs relatively well.
I'm not sure about soybean oil use in SEA. I'm sure it's on the rise (as it is everywhere), but these countries are also seeing a slow but steady increase in obesity and related problems, as do the (traditionally considered super healthy) Japanese.
But you know what IS established? Patterns of exposure to chemicals. Naphthalenes, cadmium and arsenic are significantly obesogenic. Highway pollutants and soil rich with heavy metal toxicants is common for industrialized countries more uniformly than PUFA intake.
I don't know. I'm not even gonna see what sticks. You've said hunger signaling was bonkers with protein rich, but that's what it does and it's certainly bonkers in trying a HCLF, at least as long as I've been able to endure it.
But if the premise is that calories out has gone down, and that's why we're fattening up, it shouldn't matter how hungry for meat/rice we are, we should just be slim because the extra food in would self regulate weight (calories out) and appetite. And it's not.
I think the premise is that fuel partitioning has been made dysfunctional. That means almost no matter how much you eat, you'll never be satisfied, because a large % of the substrates will be converted into body fat and will therefore be unusable by your metabolism.
Seems like the Hungarians are ahead? But yea, I don't know. Epidemiology. Maybe there are a few Slovaks who eat a TON of LA, but a lot of them don't eat any. Or maybe they balance it out with butter. Or maybe the way this stuff is measured isn't great. E.g., are they measuring the LA in pork and chicken? I suspect Slovakian pork and chicken have a much more saturated fatty acid profile.
Pork industry feed is grain based, maize and rapeseed with some soya. Chicken combinates haven't changed much from soviet era, wheat, soybean, rapeseed and fish meal. The broiler feed is largely formulated now but other than using a little LESS antibiotics, the cornerstones are oilseeds and grain.
This hypothesis seems really easy to test across many different diets. i.e. There should be "no-seed-oil" and "high-seed-oil" versions of keto, paleo, low-fat, Mediterranean, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, intermittent fasting, Nordic, dairy-free, etc. If all of the "no-seed-oil" versions or all of the "high-seed-oil" versions systematically did or didn't work, that would be convincing evidence.
The crux here, I think, is that it would be imperative to find a group of people with very similar levels of baseline PUFAs since there apparently is an accumulation effect going on in the background. (Or, if the experiment has a big enough sample, be sure to adjust for baseline PUFA levels when analyzing the treatment effects.)
The problem is that the feedback loop is so long. The half life of fatty acids in the body is about 2 years, so you'd need at least 4, likely 7, years to A/B test this.
We can run barely run 30 day trials, almost all nutrition research is shorter or isn't controlled at all - simply sending people home with a survey what they eat every day.
Yea I've seen those critiques. Most of them I find less offensive than you do. At the very least, I think the series is very thought-provoking. Even if not all the points are 100% researched (e.g. the wild vs. lab animals).
Personally I don't think it's lithium. But I think that a serious theory of obesity has to explain the mysteries, and that the way of thinking about this in new ways is inspiring.
What do you think the cause of the obesity epidemic is, if you have a hypothesis?
An additional theory about the noticeable uptick in obesity during the 70s is the other insidious factor of modern life that is everywhere: artificial light at night. The 70s was the beginning of 24 hour TV.
Artificial light is even more pervasive than soybean oil, and harder to avoid. I have avoided seed oils for 25 years, and I am healthy, but definitely not thin. Rising with the sun and sleeping when it's dark is something that needs to be taken more seriously for weight loss, I think.
I wonder what a time zone overlay on this county map would look like? Colorado and Vermont are also on the eastern sides of their time zones- people on the eastern sides of time zones tend to wake up earlier, and go to sleep earlier.
Very good point! I've actually looked into the time zones thing for sleep, and yea being in the east of your time zone is definitely a huge advantage that way.
Vaguely. Many of the PUFA people I talk to talk about Peat as well. I don't really have a great grasp of his overall paradigm, but I'm confused by "eat as much sugar as possible!" and "keto is terrible!" both of which seem to be positions he held at one time :)
Ray Peat intentionally avoided ever giving specific diets or health protocols, but tried to get people thinking and understanding the importance of metabolic function in health. A high sugar intake can be a powerful tool to get your metabolism to rev up in the right context- because it fills liver glycogen, which encourages the liver to produce T3, the main regulator of metabolism, while simultaneously providing a substrate for the cells to burn. This only makes sense in the context where that happens to be the limiting factor.
Aug 10, 2023·edited Aug 10, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
That's your choice, but I have found it more than worth it- things that boil down to tips/guidelines usually don't have enough nuance to be valuable in this space. I am an academic PI that researches metabolism, and his ideas have been paradigm shifting for me.
This is explicitly intentional on his part- one needs deep understanding and context to solve problems, not generic authoritarian protocols applied inappropriately. He would tell you that if you want that, go do a medical doctor, charlatan fad diet guru, etc. but don't expect it to actually help. Biology is complex, and real problems are not solved in that way.
Here is a full quote on from an interview where he explains why he does this:
I start with trying to make a context clear, because everyone’s context is different, and meanings change when they are learned. Ideally, things should make no sense until they make the right sense. People often tell me their diagnosis, and want to know what they should do for it; they want to set the context. Very often, the most important thing is to diagnose the diagnostician. When people used to come to my house for consultations, they would mention how they heard about me. When the medical society would send their agents posing as people with health problems, the people they chose were cultural clichés, who wanted “a diagnosis and a prescription.” I would tell them they should see a doctor if that was what they wanted. Sometimes they would record my classes, and the things they took out of context didn’t mean anything. Since the contextuality of communication is always in the foreground when I talk or write, you know that someone is confusing me with an authority when they talk about my “protocol” for something. Context is everything, and it’s individual and empirical.
Anyways, I am enjoying your blog and experiments, thanks!
There are angry people in the comments. It's fun. I have a hopefully non-controversial question.
If you eat a high fat diet will you get pimples? Because in my own experience if I eat a lot of chocolate (for example) I get a couple of pimples on my face.
The explanation I've been given is that it happens because of the fat. But dunno, maybe it also depends if it's SFA, MUFA, or PUFA? :o
Personally I don't get pimples, but then I've never had many pimples even as a teen. So if you're susceptible, that might happen to you. Is it the fat in the chocolate? Chocolate is also high in some other compounds, e.g. oxalates, so maybe that could be it.
If you're interested in trying high (saturated)-fat but aren't sure about the chocolate, try some other high-fat source, e.g. heavy cream, coconut oil, butter, beef..
That makes sense. Try different types of fat and see if they have the same effect. I also don't usually get pimples, only when I've eaten ungodly amounts of chocolate 😆
I will say, eating ungodly amounts of dark chocolate, on the order of a 100g bar per day, was a habit of mine for years. Never had pimples. Potato diet gave me a bad rash within days (I usually never get rashes). So maybe everybody is predisposed to something different?
The few times I've had pimples from chocolate was from the milky kind, never tried eating lots of dark chocolate. Sounds delicious tho. Also after like 3 days of the potato diet I stopped because I felt like there was acid in my esophagus. But yeah, it stands to reason that there would be a set of different predispositions to a given food.
Jul 22, 2023·edited Jul 22, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
I don't think it's simple. I do not think that the answer to "why my chins?" is going to be any one thing. The answer "it's seed oils" also doesn't go the next step: Why is it seed oils?
They're ubiquitous. Why? They're cheap, as they are inexpensive to mass-produce (which you do touch on).
Look at your map again. What are two things correlate that with those figures? Economic development and population density. Areas like the San Luis Valley in Colorado are hot spots of underdevelopment (so I guess "cold spots" would be more appropriate). I'm quickly skimming over a few entries on Redfin, but I can easily find lots of *35 acres* for around $25k. I live in suburban NJ, and that would buy you less than a quarter acre in my county.
It's not like it's entirely sticks and rocks out there, but it's a place where people spend their last few thousand dollars to get some land and haul their truck and a trailer to go and live off of well water -- or else rely on filling water tanks every week. Lots of those homes don't have electricity or plumbing.
An outreach program called La Puente regularly sends a pickup truck out to various houses & trailers just to drop off firewood to people, among other services. Some of those folks refuse the help simply because they don't want the government, in any of its forms, or any organization to know about them -- hardly a strong base upon which to build useful statistics.
The American South, to shift over to economic development specifically, is one of the poorest parts of the US if not the poorest. I would wager by eyeballing your map that 70-80% of those deep red counties are in states that receive more money from the federal government than what they send to it (which is liable to get into a "makers vs. takers" argument that I won't be a part of). Plenty of these communities are in food deserts, which means they're more likely to be consuming seed oils.
I'd be willing to bet that every other aspect of the seven other mysteries of "why my ass big, tho?" is similarly more complex. As a jumping off point, we've transitioned from a society that makes things (manufacturing) to a society that does things (services), which limits how much physical activity people naturally get as part of a work day.
If I work a normal day in my clinic, moving room to room and helping our doctors see patient after patient, I can hit 2k calories of energy expenditure by around 1430 consistently. I spent a day this week just cleaning out old messages and requests in our computer system (bugbear that it is), and I had around 1,700 calories burnt by that time. Simply sitting on my tuckus for part of the work day was limiting on what I burned. Bodies are lazy, because brains are lazy.
God, brains are lazy.
To sum it up: I think seed oil is but one factor. It's not just that. "[S]omewhat complex causality graph" is a muscular part of this post for all of the lifting that it's doing.
Two asides: If a kid kicks a ball into a street and someone swerves their car to avoid it, hitting a mailbox, the parents/guardians are at fault. That's law. Bad metaphor, amigo.
If 30% or less of the population is obese, I think that means a healthy person is not, by definition, an outlier. That defies both the definition of healthy as "what is metabolically normal" and how we would colloquially define normal ("what most of [subject] is/are like").
It's over 40% now, and that is not fat/overweight - that is clinically obese by BMI. I think overweight is in the 70s.
In 2000, the median male U.S. BMI was 29. Overweight is >25. That means if you put all American men in a line, sorted by BMI, the one in the middle was very nearly obese. And that was nearly 25 years ago.
So the healthy person is very much an outlier, I would say.
Americans are also exercising more than ever. Plus, research by e.g. Pontzer shows that moving more doesn't actually burn many calories, the body simply downregulates RMR.
I don't disagree with the economic argument. But it didn't use to be that the poor people were teh fat people. It used to be the other way around. Was it because all the poor people were working on farms? I'm not so convinced.
If they're poor and therefore buy cheap food which contains LA which makes them obese, that doesn't mean LA didn't do it.
Jul 23, 2023·edited Jul 23, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
Yeah, I think you're on to something with the linoleic acid. I don't discount that at all, I think the answer and, thus, solution will involve several factors.
It used to be that rich folks were the chubsters, but that flipped when e.g. cheap foods started being so damned salt-laden and fat-laden. Linoleic is likely at least one of the culprits.
And, yes, moving and actual exercise burn a lot less than people think they each do. It's the accumulation that matters. Being consistent is the key to fat loss (like a consistent diet such as yours).
You have me on the outlier point, that's, uh, a lotta lotta extra body fat that we're all carrying around. Hell, I'm supposedly sitting around 26 BMI even with definite muscle definition on each limb and my torso.
If I knew a way to reliably and consistently track it at home solo I would love to. Do you know anything that works well?
Jul 23, 2023·edited Jul 23, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
Yeah, body fat percentage. I'll look into those, thanks.
Question: Given how long you've been doing these experiments with saturated fat, how long would you say it takes a person to resaturate their body fat? And, how would you theorize that it actually works?
Funny you should ask! I saw a study yesterday that says the half-life of PUFAs in adipose tissues is... 680 days. Ugh! Nearly 2 years just to cut it in 1/2?! So presumably, if this study is correct, 4 years for 1/4th, 6 years for 1/8th, and so on.
How would it work? I think that you burn fatty acids (sometimes) for energy. And when you burn PUFAs, and you don't replace them with new PUFAs, the PUFA % goes down. I think you can also get rid of FAs without oxidizing them for energy, which would likely avoid the downside of oxidizing PUFA. If you do oxidize them, you should probably have high other-FA intake (SFA especially? Not sure) to balance the ratio of oxidized FAs.
Jul 23, 2023·edited Jul 23, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
So, the ideal would be to simultaneously increase saturated intake and burn fatty acids in general. Makes sense.
As it turns out, chicken and pork tend to be the cheapest meats available and are usually given those soybean oils. I would guess that wild caught fish would be a really great source, since they aren't farm-raised. Anyone know what farmed fish are raised on, diet-wise?
I love this, this is fascinating!
Edit: Not great, Bob!
"Dr. Colombo: 'The ingredients can vary, what is most important is that the nutrients in the ingredients meet the requirements of the fish. So, the ingredient itself is not as important as the nutrient it supplies. For example, Atlantic salmon need about 50% protein and 25% fat. This can come from different ingredients, but, some of the most common ingredients are based from corn, poultry, canola, soy, wheat and fish.”
The abstract from a 2009 Polish study paints a wide band for what different ranges are. In particular, PUFA usage at a specific farm ranged from ~18-52%.
Come to think of it, it reminds me of a well known murder mystery story where it in the end it’s revealed it was *everybody* present, not a single murderer. And the detective in charge, to make matters easier (and for moral reasons as the victim was a child murderer), simply suggests to blame it on an unknown assassin that came and went in the darkest hour of the night.
Seed oils feel like that kind of scapegoat. Yes they are easy to blame, yes they may be problematic, but we aren’t telling the truth if we blame it all on them. Especially when there’s the possibility they aren’t the actual problem in many cases, but rather innocent bystanders.
To me, modern science is doing the Orient Express magic trick. They can't admit that they did it, that they don't have a clue what it really was, and so they blame everyone and everything and nebulous concepts like "ultra-processed foods."
At the very least, we have to throw out all modern science since Keys, as it's clearly been corrupted beyond repair. Then we can talk. Until then, I'm n=1ing the shit out of this.
Jul 22, 2023·edited Jul 22, 2023Liked by Experimental Fat Loss
But then we have two problems: a disgust for what 'modern science' supposedly did, and a non- or pseudo-scientific ("if I put this graph next to this graph they look a lot alike") approach to the issue. How is that any better? To me both are backwards to solving the issue, which is to improve science like we have always have done to learn, retry/research, find out and repeat. Pointing fingers isn't part of that.
Btw I consider it a straw man fallacy to say science blamed everything on on ultra-processed foods, I never observed such a claim and what is communicated as blanked statements are the guidelines for 'living healthy', not so much an explanatory claim on what caused what.
"At the very least, we have to throw out all modern science since Keys, as it's clearly been corrupted beyond repair. Then we can talk. Until then, I'm n=1ing the shit out of this." That's all fine and dandy but you know just as well as I do that making such demands is like saying the rest should all find a big hole to sink in, it's not how society works. In the end we have to find a way to improve as a society, not find our own n=1 islands and then eventually die saying 'well this worked for me'. We're back in the prehistoric age that way.
I have a solution. I just don't know what part of it is the active compound. That's more than Big Science can say; as you posted above, Kevin Hall doesn't even have a useful definition of success ("restricting calories" :rofl.gif:)
Sure, it's not how Big Science works. That's why I'm not holding my breath for them to solve obesity, I'm trying things myself. And so far, I seem to have better success than anyone on the official recommended guidelines ever has.
If you have to choose between prehistoric n=1 and obesity, I choose prehistoric n=1. I don't care about the lab coats and the fancy degrees. I just wanted to not be 300lbs.
I'm going to raise you on this. It's not just the obesity epidemic, it's the whole 'epidemic of hypothyroidism that doesn't show up on thyroid tests' that's been going on since about 1970 (which is when they changed from diagnosis by symptoms to diagnosis by TSH test)
I think these wretched polyunsaturated things gum up your metabolism somehow, and lower your body temperature and run you out of energy for all your systems. If part of that is that they break satiety signals at the same time that gives you obesity, going along with CFS, fibromyalgia, depression, IBS, and all the other stuff that looks just like hypothyroidism.
Alzheimer's, CVD, strokes, circadian rhythm conditions, ADHD, ..
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FqHN9cWWcjC9qMMo/a-response-to-a-contamination-theory-of-the-obesity-epidemic
lol beat you to it
Nice! Very good writeup. Largely agreed. I've added a link at the bottom of my post.
Interesting especially is the PUFA vs. SFA thing. I gained 100lbs eating VERY HIGH saturated fat while I wasn't cutting out PUFAs. So clearly, it doesn't matter how much SFA you eat if some other factors (e.g. high PUFA, or maybe in my case also high protein) are in place. It might even "make it worse" in the sense that eating anything will mess you up once you're afflicted. Adding more butter to the SAD doesn't prove anything.
It's also interesting how that aside of "wild animals" vs "human-adjacent animals" completely turns the environmental thing vs. dietary thing around, isn't it?
So the most important thing would be reducing PUFAs?
Pretty much.
The bad news: it's in everything.
The good news: I really think there's no downside to eliminating PUFAs from your diet. They don't do anything positive. The only potential upside is, if you believe all the saturated fat/CVD hype, they are not saturated. Since I don't believe that, it's easy for me to just eliminate them completely. They're not necessary beyond the tiny trace amounts you find even in meat/dairy/vegetables, they don't taste good, they don't make the food you cook in them taste good. They don't have a good consistency or texture for making anything (unlike e.g. the saturated fats in cream/butter/chocolate).
So it's really only a question of convenience/effort.
We don't have a mechanism to block the mm... absorption(?) of PUFAs, right? Because if they are really in everything then you could never eat at a restaurant (if you want to not be exposed to high levels of PUFAs) and that would be sad. Also as you mentioned with the nails and hammer. It might also be a good idea to restaurate with SFA, because if you just elimine PUFAs it might not resolve all the problems?
AFAIK we don't have a way to block the absorption. I think there used to be a drug that did it, but it also made people suicidal and so they pulled it lol.
Yea, restaurants are super tricky. You kind of get better at thinking about it, but you can't eat 95%, yea. :-( Basically, hamburger patties and steak.
Also what's up with Japan? Do they never use PUFAs in their food/restaurants? 🤔
Damn, okok :(
This one has am angry tone but raises some good points I think. The comments also recommended: https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/slowly-parsing-smtms-lithium-obesity
Haha I've read that, yea. I kind of don't get the hate for their theory. They're clearly just spitballing and thinking out loud about different ideas, but people get really mad over some technicality or misreading.
Ha, thanks, I'll check it out :)
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'.
"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.
What about countries that have decades of PUFA under their belt, and a robustly healthy population? Southeast Asians use a lot of palm, peanut and soybean oil (not palm kernel)
Then there's obese countries like Nigeria which largely cook in coconut oil.
I have been wondering about this problem specifically -- that Asian people seem to consume a lot more vegetable oils than we do while remaining healthy and that it puts the seed oils theory at jeopardy.
They do seem to consume, if not lots of oil necessarily, lots of nuts. They also do seem to cook with sesame oil (queen of LA oils) and canola oil, although they are both behind olive oil (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276090/japan-popular-cooking-oil-type/). We're still seeing very weird trends in the lipid profile of Asian people (like this 20-y HDL spike among almost everybody, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6005226/).
But this all makes me think of something else: is there a missing ingredient? Could it be the interaction between PUFAs and something else that wrecks our metabolism?
This should really be studied more.
Anecdotally, I don't think there's a mystery. I lived in various countries in Asia for years. While they might use "vegetable" oils, a lot of that was historically palm or coconut oil. Yes, the LA oils have gone up (like canola and sunflower and even soybean) but only in the last few decades, it seems, and they've quickly caught up on diseases and obesity since then.
Nuts? Not really, where I've been. They do sell them, but I was the only one there (due to keto) eating nuts regularly. They put them in some dishes, but more like a spice. You'll find a handful of crushed up peanuts in a typical "peanut" dish.
Incidentally, they also eat extremely low protein, which might be why "keto" worked for me there and didn't here :)
Actually your impression seems correct: Asian people do not consume a lot of seed oils per capita, at least not according to the OECD stats: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/agriculture-and-food/vegetable-oil-projections-consumption-food_18d673aa-en
Still baffled by the amount consumed by americans...
I think one of the differences is, in the US the seed oils are in EVERYTHING. You can't pick up a loaf of bread without it having some soybean oil in it.
In most other places, while they probably do consume seed oils, I suspect they're more limited to what we'd call "processed/junk food."
So while junk-food consumers in Asia or Europe might get the effects, "normal" people eating "regular, whole" food might not.
In the US, that's not easily possible: if you make salad with commercial salad dressing, or buy regular store-bought bread, it'll be containing seed oils. You have to go very extreme. Plus, probably their pork/chicken isn't as contaminated.
Palm oil is actually nearly 50% saturated, and only 9% PUFA. So it's one of the better options I'd say, if maybe not perfect. Could be that the huge amount of SFAs is balancing out the PUFAs relatively well.
I'm not sure about soybean oil use in SEA. I'm sure it's on the rise (as it is everywhere), but these countries are also seeing a slow but steady increase in obesity and related problems, as do the (traditionally considered super healthy) Japanese.
Always hard to say with epidemiology.
Study showing Slovakian fat intake is heavily SFA https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889157502910756
Interesting that they say there's an upper limit of LA intake, and the Slovaks are approaching it rapidly.. wonder what that limit is to them?
https://karger.com/view-large/figure/6797871/000355437_t02.jpg linoleic acid - leading nationality by far the Slovaks - a fairly slim population despite all the LA
But you know what IS established? Patterns of exposure to chemicals. Naphthalenes, cadmium and arsenic are significantly obesogenic. Highway pollutants and soil rich with heavy metal toxicants is common for industrialized countries more uniformly than PUFA intake.
Sure, but then how did I reduce those with my diet?
I don't know. I'm not even gonna see what sticks. You've said hunger signaling was bonkers with protein rich, but that's what it does and it's certainly bonkers in trying a HCLF, at least as long as I've been able to endure it.
But if the premise is that calories out has gone down, and that's why we're fattening up, it shouldn't matter how hungry for meat/rice we are, we should just be slim because the extra food in would self regulate weight (calories out) and appetite. And it's not.
I think the premise is that fuel partitioning has been made dysfunctional. That means almost no matter how much you eat, you'll never be satisfied, because a large % of the substrates will be converted into body fat and will therefore be unusable by your metabolism.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10012331/
Seems like the Hungarians are ahead? But yea, I don't know. Epidemiology. Maybe there are a few Slovaks who eat a TON of LA, but a lot of them don't eat any. Or maybe they balance it out with butter. Or maybe the way this stuff is measured isn't great. E.g., are they measuring the LA in pork and chicken? I suspect Slovakian pork and chicken have a much more saturated fatty acid profile.
Pork industry feed is grain based, maize and rapeseed with some soya. Chicken combinates haven't changed much from soviet era, wheat, soybean, rapeseed and fish meal. The broiler feed is largely formulated now but other than using a little LESS antibiotics, the cornerstones are oilseeds and grain.
Still on a worldwide scale the PUFA intake doesn't jibe with obesity rates. The US is very average https://karger.com/view-large/figure/6797863/000355437_F02.jpg
Great summary, I was not entirely convinced of the seed oil stuff but this post raises some really good points!
Found this in your archives. Very nice post.
This hypothesis seems really easy to test across many different diets. i.e. There should be "no-seed-oil" and "high-seed-oil" versions of keto, paleo, low-fat, Mediterranean, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, intermittent fasting, Nordic, dairy-free, etc. If all of the "no-seed-oil" versions or all of the "high-seed-oil" versions systematically did or didn't work, that would be convincing evidence.
The crux here, I think, is that it would be imperative to find a group of people with very similar levels of baseline PUFAs since there apparently is an accumulation effect going on in the background. (Or, if the experiment has a big enough sample, be sure to adjust for baseline PUFA levels when analyzing the treatment effects.)
The problem is that the feedback loop is so long. The half life of fatty acids in the body is about 2 years, so you'd need at least 4, likely 7, years to A/B test this.
We can run barely run 30 day trials, almost all nutrition research is shorter or isn't controlled at all - simply sending people home with a survey what they eat every day.
Thanks for pointing this out. Makes sense.
The "A Chemical Hunger" series is not excellent, it contains factual inaccuracies and fails to appropriately consider alternative hypotheses for many of the mysteries. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRrbJJWnaSorrqvtZ/on-not-getting-contaminated-by-the-wrong-obesity-ideas, for example.
Yea I've seen those critiques. Most of them I find less offensive than you do. At the very least, I think the series is very thought-provoking. Even if not all the points are 100% researched (e.g. the wild vs. lab animals).
Personally I don't think it's lithium. But I think that a serious theory of obesity has to explain the mysteries, and that the way of thinking about this in new ways is inspiring.
What do you think the cause of the obesity epidemic is, if you have a hypothesis?
An additional theory about the noticeable uptick in obesity during the 70s is the other insidious factor of modern life that is everywhere: artificial light at night. The 70s was the beginning of 24 hour TV.
Artificial light is even more pervasive than soybean oil, and harder to avoid. I have avoided seed oils for 25 years, and I am healthy, but definitely not thin. Rising with the sun and sleeping when it's dark is something that needs to be taken more seriously for weight loss, I think.
I wonder what a time zone overlay on this county map would look like? Colorado and Vermont are also on the eastern sides of their time zones- people on the eastern sides of time zones tend to wake up earlier, and go to sleep earlier.
Very good point! I've actually looked into the time zones thing for sleep, and yea being in the east of your time zone is definitely a huge advantage that way.
Are you familiar with Ray Peat's ideas? Your thoughts about PUFA and altitude as both affecting metabolism in more or less the same way are nearly identical to his: https://raypeat.com/articles/aging/altitude-mortality.shtml
Vaguely. Many of the PUFA people I talk to talk about Peat as well. I don't really have a great grasp of his overall paradigm, but I'm confused by "eat as much sugar as possible!" and "keto is terrible!" both of which seem to be positions he held at one time :)
Ray Peat intentionally avoided ever giving specific diets or health protocols, but tried to get people thinking and understanding the importance of metabolic function in health. A high sugar intake can be a powerful tool to get your metabolism to rev up in the right context- because it fills liver glycogen, which encourages the liver to produce T3, the main regulator of metabolism, while simultaneously providing a substrate for the cells to burn. This only makes sense in the context where that happens to be the limiting factor.
I wish he had written down some tips/guidelines, cause now I'd have to read all he's ever written to get an impression of his ideas, which I won't.
That's your choice, but I have found it more than worth it- things that boil down to tips/guidelines usually don't have enough nuance to be valuable in this space. I am an academic PI that researches metabolism, and his ideas have been paradigm shifting for me.
This is explicitly intentional on his part- one needs deep understanding and context to solve problems, not generic authoritarian protocols applied inappropriately. He would tell you that if you want that, go do a medical doctor, charlatan fad diet guru, etc. but don't expect it to actually help. Biology is complex, and real problems are not solved in that way.
Here is a full quote on from an interview where he explains why he does this:
I start with trying to make a context clear, because everyone’s context is different, and meanings change when they are learned. Ideally, things should make no sense until they make the right sense. People often tell me their diagnosis, and want to know what they should do for it; they want to set the context. Very often, the most important thing is to diagnose the diagnostician. When people used to come to my house for consultations, they would mention how they heard about me. When the medical society would send their agents posing as people with health problems, the people they chose were cultural clichés, who wanted “a diagnosis and a prescription.” I would tell them they should see a doctor if that was what they wanted. Sometimes they would record my classes, and the things they took out of context didn’t mean anything. Since the contextuality of communication is always in the foreground when I talk or write, you know that someone is confusing me with an authority when they talk about my “protocol” for something. Context is everything, and it’s individual and empirical.
Anyways, I am enjoying your blog and experiments, thanks!
I assume this blew up because Adam called you a lizard par excellence.
Probably, yes :) Although I must say I feel quite hot-blooded.
There are angry people in the comments. It's fun. I have a hopefully non-controversial question.
If you eat a high fat diet will you get pimples? Because in my own experience if I eat a lot of chocolate (for example) I get a couple of pimples on my face.
The explanation I've been given is that it happens because of the fat. But dunno, maybe it also depends if it's SFA, MUFA, or PUFA? :o
Personally I don't get pimples, but then I've never had many pimples even as a teen. So if you're susceptible, that might happen to you. Is it the fat in the chocolate? Chocolate is also high in some other compounds, e.g. oxalates, so maybe that could be it.
If you're interested in trying high (saturated)-fat but aren't sure about the chocolate, try some other high-fat source, e.g. heavy cream, coconut oil, butter, beef..
That makes sense. Try different types of fat and see if they have the same effect. I also don't usually get pimples, only when I've eaten ungodly amounts of chocolate 😆
I will say, eating ungodly amounts of dark chocolate, on the order of a 100g bar per day, was a habit of mine for years. Never had pimples. Potato diet gave me a bad rash within days (I usually never get rashes). So maybe everybody is predisposed to something different?
The few times I've had pimples from chocolate was from the milky kind, never tried eating lots of dark chocolate. Sounds delicious tho. Also after like 3 days of the potato diet I stopped because I felt like there was acid in my esophagus. But yeah, it stands to reason that there would be a set of different predispositions to a given food.
You might not deal well with some part of dairy, then? Do you handle milk well?
I freaking adore cheese. And to my knowledge I've never had a problem when consuming milk 🤔
I don't think it's simple. I do not think that the answer to "why my chins?" is going to be any one thing. The answer "it's seed oils" also doesn't go the next step: Why is it seed oils?
They're ubiquitous. Why? They're cheap, as they are inexpensive to mass-produce (which you do touch on).
Look at your map again. What are two things correlate that with those figures? Economic development and population density. Areas like the San Luis Valley in Colorado are hot spots of underdevelopment (so I guess "cold spots" would be more appropriate). I'm quickly skimming over a few entries on Redfin, but I can easily find lots of *35 acres* for around $25k. I live in suburban NJ, and that would buy you less than a quarter acre in my county.
It's not like it's entirely sticks and rocks out there, but it's a place where people spend their last few thousand dollars to get some land and haul their truck and a trailer to go and live off of well water -- or else rely on filling water tanks every week. Lots of those homes don't have electricity or plumbing.
An outreach program called La Puente regularly sends a pickup truck out to various houses & trailers just to drop off firewood to people, among other services. Some of those folks refuse the help simply because they don't want the government, in any of its forms, or any organization to know about them -- hardly a strong base upon which to build useful statistics.
The American South, to shift over to economic development specifically, is one of the poorest parts of the US if not the poorest. I would wager by eyeballing your map that 70-80% of those deep red counties are in states that receive more money from the federal government than what they send to it (which is liable to get into a "makers vs. takers" argument that I won't be a part of). Plenty of these communities are in food deserts, which means they're more likely to be consuming seed oils.
I'd be willing to bet that every other aspect of the seven other mysteries of "why my ass big, tho?" is similarly more complex. As a jumping off point, we've transitioned from a society that makes things (manufacturing) to a society that does things (services), which limits how much physical activity people naturally get as part of a work day.
If I work a normal day in my clinic, moving room to room and helping our doctors see patient after patient, I can hit 2k calories of energy expenditure by around 1430 consistently. I spent a day this week just cleaning out old messages and requests in our computer system (bugbear that it is), and I had around 1,700 calories burnt by that time. Simply sitting on my tuckus for part of the work day was limiting on what I burned. Bodies are lazy, because brains are lazy.
God, brains are lazy.
To sum it up: I think seed oil is but one factor. It's not just that. "[S]omewhat complex causality graph" is a muscular part of this post for all of the lifting that it's doing.
Two asides: If a kid kicks a ball into a street and someone swerves their car to avoid it, hitting a mailbox, the parents/guardians are at fault. That's law. Bad metaphor, amigo.
If 30% or less of the population is obese, I think that means a healthy person is not, by definition, an outlier. That defies both the definition of healthy as "what is metabolically normal" and how we would colloquially define normal ("what most of [subject] is/are like").
It's over 40% now, and that is not fat/overweight - that is clinically obese by BMI. I think overweight is in the 70s.
In 2000, the median male U.S. BMI was 29. Overweight is >25. That means if you put all American men in a line, sorted by BMI, the one in the middle was very nearly obese. And that was nearly 25 years ago.
So the healthy person is very much an outlier, I would say.
Americans are also exercising more than ever. Plus, research by e.g. Pontzer shows that moving more doesn't actually burn many calories, the body simply downregulates RMR.
I don't disagree with the economic argument. But it didn't use to be that the poor people were teh fat people. It used to be the other way around. Was it because all the poor people were working on farms? I'm not so convinced.
If they're poor and therefore buy cheap food which contains LA which makes them obese, that doesn't mean LA didn't do it.
Yeah, I think you're on to something with the linoleic acid. I don't discount that at all, I think the answer and, thus, solution will involve several factors.
It used to be that rich folks were the chubsters, but that flipped when e.g. cheap foods started being so damned salt-laden and fat-laden. Linoleic is likely at least one of the culprits.
And, yes, moving and actual exercise burn a lot less than people think they each do. It's the accumulation that matters. Being consistent is the key to fat loss (like a consistent diet such as yours).
You have me on the outlier point, that's, uh, a lotta lotta extra body fat that we're all carrying around. Hell, I'm supposedly sitting around 26 BMI even with definite muscle definition on each limb and my torso.
If I knew a way to reliably and consistently track it at home solo I would love to. Do you know anything that works well?
Track body fat, you mean? I get a DEXA once in a while to get a baseline. Some people swear by waist to height (you want to be <0.5 IIRC).
Yeah, body fat percentage. I'll look into those, thanks.
Question: Given how long you've been doing these experiments with saturated fat, how long would you say it takes a person to resaturate their body fat? And, how would you theorize that it actually works?
Funny you should ask! I saw a study yesterday that says the half-life of PUFAs in adipose tissues is... 680 days. Ugh! Nearly 2 years just to cut it in 1/2?! So presumably, if this study is correct, 4 years for 1/4th, 6 years for 1/8th, and so on.
Here's the study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5900208/
How would it work? I think that you burn fatty acids (sometimes) for energy. And when you burn PUFAs, and you don't replace them with new PUFAs, the PUFA % goes down. I think you can also get rid of FAs without oxidizing them for energy, which would likely avoid the downside of oxidizing PUFA. If you do oxidize them, you should probably have high other-FA intake (SFA especially? Not sure) to balance the ratio of oxidized FAs.
So, the ideal would be to simultaneously increase saturated intake and burn fatty acids in general. Makes sense.
As it turns out, chicken and pork tend to be the cheapest meats available and are usually given those soybean oils. I would guess that wild caught fish would be a really great source, since they aren't farm-raised. Anyone know what farmed fish are raised on, diet-wise?
I love this, this is fascinating!
Edit: Not great, Bob!
"Dr. Colombo: 'The ingredients can vary, what is most important is that the nutrients in the ingredients meet the requirements of the fish. So, the ingredient itself is not as important as the nutrient it supplies. For example, Atlantic salmon need about 50% protein and 25% fat. This can come from different ingredients, but, some of the most common ingredients are based from corn, poultry, canola, soy, wheat and fish.”
https://www.bestfoodfacts.org/what-do-farmed-fish-eat/
The abstract from a 2009 Polish study paints a wide band for what different ranges are. In particular, PUFA usage at a specific farm ranged from ~18-52%.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287424208_Fatty_acid_profiles_and_fat_contents_of_commercially_important_fish_from_Vistula_Lagoon
Come to think of it, it reminds me of a well known murder mystery story where it in the end it’s revealed it was *everybody* present, not a single murderer. And the detective in charge, to make matters easier (and for moral reasons as the victim was a child murderer), simply suggests to blame it on an unknown assassin that came and went in the darkest hour of the night.
Seed oils feel like that kind of scapegoat. Yes they are easy to blame, yes they may be problematic, but we aren’t telling the truth if we blame it all on them. Especially when there’s the possibility they aren’t the actual problem in many cases, but rather innocent bystanders.
To me, modern science is doing the Orient Express magic trick. They can't admit that they did it, that they don't have a clue what it really was, and so they blame everyone and everything and nebulous concepts like "ultra-processed foods."
At the very least, we have to throw out all modern science since Keys, as it's clearly been corrupted beyond repair. Then we can talk. Until then, I'm n=1ing the shit out of this.
But then we have two problems: a disgust for what 'modern science' supposedly did, and a non- or pseudo-scientific ("if I put this graph next to this graph they look a lot alike") approach to the issue. How is that any better? To me both are backwards to solving the issue, which is to improve science like we have always have done to learn, retry/research, find out and repeat. Pointing fingers isn't part of that.
Btw I consider it a straw man fallacy to say science blamed everything on on ultra-processed foods, I never observed such a claim and what is communicated as blanked statements are the guidelines for 'living healthy', not so much an explanatory claim on what caused what.
"At the very least, we have to throw out all modern science since Keys, as it's clearly been corrupted beyond repair. Then we can talk. Until then, I'm n=1ing the shit out of this." That's all fine and dandy but you know just as well as I do that making such demands is like saying the rest should all find a big hole to sink in, it's not how society works. In the end we have to find a way to improve as a society, not find our own n=1 islands and then eventually die saying 'well this worked for me'. We're back in the prehistoric age that way.
I have a solution. I just don't know what part of it is the active compound. That's more than Big Science can say; as you posted above, Kevin Hall doesn't even have a useful definition of success ("restricting calories" :rofl.gif:)
Sure, it's not how Big Science works. That's why I'm not holding my breath for them to solve obesity, I'm trying things myself. And so far, I seem to have better success than anyone on the official recommended guidelines ever has.
If you have to choose between prehistoric n=1 and obesity, I choose prehistoric n=1. I don't care about the lab coats and the fancy degrees. I just wanted to not be 300lbs.