My sunburn story is almost exactly the same as yours! Except that it used to take a week to be able to sleep on the burned area. That alone was worth any inconvenience in eating. In restaurants, not at home. Joint stiffness and a general improvement in physical well being is too vague for proper evidence, but it has very much improved my life. Also I believe removing seed oils 10 years ago short-circuited and removed a slow moving weight gain I was struggling with. I’m very grateful, especially to Tucker Goodrich and Peter Dobromylskyj for all their work and help.
Hi! Thanks! I’ve seen your comments and questions and have always appreciated them! I need all the help I can get when reading Peter’s posts, so thanks for your help!
Awesome! Hi Cave! I don’t have a handle over there as I have never commented. I almost did once and found the answer to what I was wondering about in the comment section. So I didn’t have to join the conversation with all the smart people. You have had some great questions and observations! I really appreciate your input and the great conversations that come from it.
Yea, there's still some PUFAs. And I'm not entirely immune (yet), I still get a little pink eventually. But it's much, much better.
Beef does have quite a bit of monounsaturated fat, but very little polyunsaturated. Even commercial grain-fed beef only has about 2-3% PUFAs, whereas chicken/pork can have 15-30% depending. Ruminants make their own fatty acids, which is a natural filter.
I looked up the saturated/unsaturated content of beef fat. 1 cup (205 g) has 102.09 g total saturated fatty acids. It has 8.2 g total polyunsaturated fatty acids and 85.69 g total monounsaturated fatty acids. So it is close but still more saturated than unsaturated.
It depends a little on the type of fat, e.g. suet (liver fat) is more saturated than most of the other beef fat. But typically, the SFA and MUFA are supposed to be at least roughly equal, if not better (like you say) and importantly PUFA is quite low even in cheap beef.
I like to think evolutionarily. We evolved eating game, so whatever proportion of fats it contains should be OK. Domesticated animals can have unnatural fat profiles depending on what they're fed, especially monogastrics like pigs, or poultry. I try to stick to ruminants.
There have been some interesting analyses of the fat profile in Siberian frozen mammoths.
It's commonly said that within just a few thousand years of the arrival of homo sapiens on any substantial landmass, all the megafauna disappears. I think the last place I read about that was Jared Diamond.
Yea I think this is actually big. Modern cattle is basically too big to thrive in the tropics, not enough surface area to vent off the heat. Now imagine a mammoth! It would probably HAVE to live in arctic conditions.
There is a chance that cutting seed oils recently made me like, twice as sensitive to caffeine compared to before. It's either that or some probiotics I took for 5 days.
I used to not feel much from one monster (~150mg caffeine), now with just half I feel some kind of small high.
Huh, interesting. If anything I'd say it's done the opposite for me - I can now seemingly not get any effect from caffeine, no matter how much I drink lol.
But I've definitely noticed differences in the past, e.g. when I fast I suspect my tolerance for caffeine goes way down. It's also a common issue that people go keto and become drunk much more easily, maybe something similar is happening with caffeine for you?
Seed oils first became available in the late 1800s when they figured out how to detoxify cottonseed oil and began using it to adulterate lard. So it would be interesting to find out how prevalent severe sunburn was before this time.
Great article! The NZ "natural experiment" is pretty cool. You do kind of wonder, how did peoples live in the American West their entire lives, exposed to brutal sun all day long, without all dying of melanoma?!
Exactly. Unfortunately the New Zealand story is World War II, so much after the introduction of seed oils, although presumably not nearly as extensive as in the modern diet.
This is an amazingly informative piece, thank you. The table of of regeneration time for different tissues is golden. I work with a diagnostic tech that can measure oxidative stress and mucosal damage very quickly, and it’s amazing how rapidly this indicator has gone up over the last five years across population demographics. The cascade effect on the microbiome is particularly harmful, and will take up to a year to fix with an optimal approach, and definitely won’t happen if the seed oils continue to seep into the diet since they’re everywhere now, even top restaurants
Yea, the gut lining and intestinal lining are kind of the bulwark I think, if you manage to swallow something, that's where it'll do damage first. Plus they regenerate extremely fast (days) and are under constant attack from all the nonsense you shouldn't have eaten.
> oxidized PUFAs will be incorporated by your unknowing body into all sorts of cell membranes, for any cell that is up for regeneration.
Do you have any recommended reading/sources about this? I've been trying to find more information on this specific mechanism but haven't been able to find much yet.
I used to get prickly heat, red rashes on my arms and head in the summer. It was getting a bit worse every year and was very painful on my head. I switched to carnivore one winter just beef eggs and cheese .When the summer came, I had very little rash. The next summer no rash at all and no sunburn, none, and I live in Spain.
So I kept up with carnivore, on year 5 I started eating of pork and the rash started to come back as did the sunburn. So I gave up pork and it all went away again.
I don't think it is just seed oils, but excess omega 6 generally.
Nice, yea everything heat/light/friction the skin seems much better at now. Your point about pork is right, interesting that you noticed it even in Spain! I'd expected pigs there to be lower in linoleic acid.
is there any room to update priors on this? i find it hard to square this report with the epidemiological and ward study findings on PUFA elimination/substitution with SFA.
I've steadily lost weight all this year on a combination of the Shangri-La Diet (a little under 1 Tbsp/day of MCT oil taken in the specific way required by that diet) and using CGMs for the first half of the year. Since July, it's just been the MCT oil and no CGM, and still losing 1 lb/mo steadily. I'm not making any conscious effort to reduce seed oils, just following my usual low-carb diet but with this one thing added.
Going with your hypothesis here: does the saturated fat of MCT oil somehow "displace" the PUFAs, in the way that the potato people think potassium offsets or undoes sodium?
MCTs are "special" oils that get metabolized in the liver directly, I think, so it's hard to say.
I'm not sure if MCTs (6-12 chain length I think) are used in phospholipid membranes whatsoever - my OmegaQuant doesn't list any fatty acids under 14 (Myristic acid). But I don't know if they just don't measure it or if there really aren't any to speak of.
A bunch of people believe MCTs have very beneficial metabolic effects that could be unrelated to this phospholipid phenomenon, though. So it could be that.
I think the original Shangri-La diet prescribes extra light (=unflavored) olive oil, not MCTs? Presumably, if that worked just as well, it wasn't the saturated/MCT effect, since olive oil is mostly unsaturated.
I just went back and looked at my copy of the Seth Roberts book. He says to select oils that have a low ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. Ahead of his time!
About thirty years ago, my father developed high blood pressure. He's made a real point of avoiding saturated fats and salt ever since. He's now 84, and his health is finally starting to fail, but even ten years ago he was in considerably better shape than me in my forties, and he's not overweight.
On various theoretical grounds I'm very very suspicious of polyunsaturated fats, but they really don't seem to have done Dad much harm, at least for the first twenty years.
He thinks my high-salt, high-animal fat diet is going to kill me. I think this unlikely, again on entirely theoretical grounds, but I'm keeping an open mind.
Some greens and ''celery'' extract has more nitrate than ''bacon'' added nitrates.
Higher sodium intake 4-6g/day was associated with lower mortality.
Even Asian diets with their soy sauce in the past, and the fermented kimchi (5000mg) have no issue before the introduction of seed oils, fried foods, and excess carbs.
You need sodium/potassium for your ion-gated channels and whatnot. High animal fat is not going to kill you. My mother fed me white rice, pork belly, cow blood, liver/fish, chicken, broth/legume water, beef and whatnot my entire childhood. I was the tallest in class in childhood and still (also) earliest in puberty though dropped to 93% height in high school.
Either way, I was not obese. There was a huge dramatic difference in the years I ate only 'skipthedishes' vs eat-at-home foods without snacks and with snacks. I don't have brain fog, lost 20-30lbs and do not need to go to the bathroom as often, feel better and whatnot with a combination of OMAD/IF and just eating whole foods and limiting to a bowl of rice with occasional citrus, and avoiding all snacks, boxed foods.
I suppose blood is slightly alkaline and the acidity of certain foods do contribute to uric acid increase possibly, octogenarians however have low glucose levels, high cholesterol and low uric acid levels.
You mention your eyesight improved - as someone with very poor long distance vision I'm curious what kind of issues you had and how dramatic the improvement was?
Another n=1 for sunburn. I lay out in small increments-usually 15 minutes per side in the morning sun. I have an amazing tan and I no longer burn. I'm 3 years in for almost no PUFAs. My dental hygenist also has been commenting for the last 1.5 years that my gums aren't bleeding at all. I used to floss like crazy and then found Dr Ellie Phillips on youtube and stopped flossing (mostly) I still get some plaque but Im working on that.
My sunburn story is almost exactly the same as yours! Except that it used to take a week to be able to sleep on the burned area. That alone was worth any inconvenience in eating. In restaurants, not at home. Joint stiffness and a general improvement in physical well being is too vague for proper evidence, but it has very much improved my life. Also I believe removing seed oils 10 years ago short-circuited and removed a slow moving weight gain I was struggling with. I’m very grateful, especially to Tucker Goodrich and Peter Dobromylskyj for all their work and help.
Loving the Stack! Thanks!
Yes I've learned a lot from those guys as well :)
Hyperlipid is my favorite blog, and where I first learned about Tucker.
Hi! Thanks! I’ve seen your comments and questions and have always appreciated them! I need all the help I can get when reading Peter’s posts, so thanks for your help!
I struggle to understand them too, having only high school chemistry, and inorganic at that! My handle over there is different...
Oh, sorry. I remember you from somewhere else then. Probably over here. 🤦♀️🤦♀️
cavenewt
Awesome! Hi Cave! I don’t have a handle over there as I have never commented. I almost did once and found the answer to what I was wondering about in the comment section. So I didn’t have to join the conversation with all the smart people. You have had some great questions and observations! I really appreciate your input and the great conversations that come from it.
Like you after going ketogenic and cutting out seed oils I too have greatly increased my tolerance to the sun.
You cannot completely cut out the PUFAS as there is an amount is in other fats we eat.
I've read that beef actually has more unsaturated than saturated fat. At least that should hopefully not be rancid/oxidised at the time we eat it.
Yea, there's still some PUFAs. And I'm not entirely immune (yet), I still get a little pink eventually. But it's much, much better.
Beef does have quite a bit of monounsaturated fat, but very little polyunsaturated. Even commercial grain-fed beef only has about 2-3% PUFAs, whereas chicken/pork can have 15-30% depending. Ruminants make their own fatty acids, which is a natural filter.
I looked up the saturated/unsaturated content of beef fat. 1 cup (205 g) has 102.09 g total saturated fatty acids. It has 8.2 g total polyunsaturated fatty acids and 85.69 g total monounsaturated fatty acids. So it is close but still more saturated than unsaturated.
It depends a little on the type of fat, e.g. suet (liver fat) is more saturated than most of the other beef fat. But typically, the SFA and MUFA are supposed to be at least roughly equal, if not better (like you say) and importantly PUFA is quite low even in cheap beef.
I like to think evolutionarily. We evolved eating game, so whatever proportion of fats it contains should be OK. Domesticated animals can have unnatural fat profiles depending on what they're fed, especially monogastrics like pigs, or poultry. I try to stick to ruminants.
Many believe that we evolved eating very large animals Mammoths etc and that that may have helped with their extinction.
These were believe to have a large amount of fat.
I don't recall seeing any drawings of small game or vegetables in the cave paintings our ancestors made.
I agree with you about the fat profile.
There have been some interesting analyses of the fat profile in Siberian frozen mammoths.
It's commonly said that within just a few thousand years of the arrival of homo sapiens on any substantial landmass, all the megafauna disappears. I think the last place I read about that was Jared Diamond.
A change in the climate may also have helped in their demise.
Yea I think this is actually big. Modern cattle is basically too big to thrive in the tropics, not enough surface area to vent off the heat. Now imagine a mammoth! It would probably HAVE to live in arctic conditions.
It was very interesting to learn the precise mechanism by which all these disorders may happen. Fascinating, keep up the good work !
I think testing makes sense. Make a plan, write it down, and see if the results match up to your hypothesis. Citizen science with our own gut biomes.
Good luck, and keep at it. You've been an inspiration to me to keep at what I'm doing, and I'm both happier and healthier than I've ever been.
There is a chance that cutting seed oils recently made me like, twice as sensitive to caffeine compared to before. It's either that or some probiotics I took for 5 days.
I used to not feel much from one monster (~150mg caffeine), now with just half I feel some kind of small high.
Huh, interesting. If anything I'd say it's done the opposite for me - I can now seemingly not get any effect from caffeine, no matter how much I drink lol.
But I've definitely noticed differences in the past, e.g. when I fast I suspect my tolerance for caffeine goes way down. It's also a common issue that people go keto and become drunk much more easily, maybe something similar is happening with caffeine for you?
Yeah could be. Maybe it's something like, each of those interventions has a change of helping the gut and thus increasing caffeine absorption.
Seed oils first became available in the late 1800s when they figured out how to detoxify cottonseed oil and began using it to adulterate lard. So it would be interesting to find out how prevalent severe sunburn was before this time.
WRT sunburn, I noticed the same thing. I used to sunburn very easily. Eight years ago I moved to the Utah desert which has very fierce summertime son. Despite not using sunscreen anymore, or avoiding the sun, I haven't yet had a real sunburn. https://hopefulgeranium.blogspot.com/2019/01/dont-drink-oil-and-fry-in-sun-link.html
Great article! The NZ "natural experiment" is pretty cool. You do kind of wonder, how did peoples live in the American West their entire lives, exposed to brutal sun all day long, without all dying of melanoma?!
Exactly. Unfortunately the New Zealand story is World War II, so much after the introduction of seed oils, although presumably not nearly as extensive as in the modern diet.
This is an amazingly informative piece, thank you. The table of of regeneration time for different tissues is golden. I work with a diagnostic tech that can measure oxidative stress and mucosal damage very quickly, and it’s amazing how rapidly this indicator has gone up over the last five years across population demographics. The cascade effect on the microbiome is particularly harmful, and will take up to a year to fix with an optimal approach, and definitely won’t happen if the seed oils continue to seep into the diet since they’re everywhere now, even top restaurants
Yea, the gut lining and intestinal lining are kind of the bulwark I think, if you manage to swallow something, that's where it'll do damage first. Plus they regenerate extremely fast (days) and are under constant attack from all the nonsense you shouldn't have eaten.
So somewhat of a canary in the coal mine.
> oxidized PUFAs will be incorporated by your unknowing body into all sorts of cell membranes, for any cell that is up for regeneration.
Do you have any recommended reading/sources about this? I've been trying to find more information on this specific mechanism but haven't been able to find much yet.
I'd recommend you read the blogs I mention at the end of this post:
https://exfatloss.substack.com/p/seed-oils-explain-the-8-mysteries
That's pretty much all I have besides my own, meandering experience.
I used to get prickly heat, red rashes on my arms and head in the summer. It was getting a bit worse every year and was very painful on my head. I switched to carnivore one winter just beef eggs and cheese .When the summer came, I had very little rash. The next summer no rash at all and no sunburn, none, and I live in Spain.
So I kept up with carnivore, on year 5 I started eating of pork and the rash started to come back as did the sunburn. So I gave up pork and it all went away again.
I don't think it is just seed oils, but excess omega 6 generally.
Nice, yea everything heat/light/friction the skin seems much better at now. Your point about pork is right, interesting that you noticed it even in Spain! I'd expected pigs there to be lower in linoleic acid.
is there any room to update priors on this? i find it hard to square this report with the epidemiological and ward study findings on PUFA elimination/substitution with SFA.
https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-to-seed-oil-sophistry
I consider Nutrivore a bad-faith interlocutor after having interacted with him on Twitter. Here's a rebuttal: https://yelling-stop.blogspot.com/2021/12/thoughts-on-nick-hieberts-comprehensive.html
Most of what I've read of the article myself isn't even wrong - he simply misses the point, probably on purpose.
ah wow thanks for providing this
I've steadily lost weight all this year on a combination of the Shangri-La Diet (a little under 1 Tbsp/day of MCT oil taken in the specific way required by that diet) and using CGMs for the first half of the year. Since July, it's just been the MCT oil and no CGM, and still losing 1 lb/mo steadily. I'm not making any conscious effort to reduce seed oils, just following my usual low-carb diet but with this one thing added.
Going with your hypothesis here: does the saturated fat of MCT oil somehow "displace" the PUFAs, in the way that the potato people think potassium offsets or undoes sodium?
MCTs are "special" oils that get metabolized in the liver directly, I think, so it's hard to say.
I'm not sure if MCTs (6-12 chain length I think) are used in phospholipid membranes whatsoever - my OmegaQuant doesn't list any fatty acids under 14 (Myristic acid). But I don't know if they just don't measure it or if there really aren't any to speak of.
A bunch of people believe MCTs have very beneficial metabolic effects that could be unrelated to this phospholipid phenomenon, though. So it could be that.
I think the original Shangri-La diet prescribes extra light (=unflavored) olive oil, not MCTs? Presumably, if that worked just as well, it wasn't the saturated/MCT effect, since olive oil is mostly unsaturated.
I just went back and looked at my copy of the Seth Roberts book. He says to select oils that have a low ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. Ahead of his time!
I really do wonder how that oil shot thing works. Bringing up FFAs in the blood before the meal, pre-triggering satiety?
About thirty years ago, my father developed high blood pressure. He's made a real point of avoiding saturated fats and salt ever since. He's now 84, and his health is finally starting to fail, but even ten years ago he was in considerably better shape than me in my forties, and he's not overweight.
On various theoretical grounds I'm very very suspicious of polyunsaturated fats, but they really don't seem to have done Dad much harm, at least for the first twenty years.
He thinks my high-salt, high-animal fat diet is going to kill me. I think this unlikely, again on entirely theoretical grounds, but I'm keeping an open mind.
Why is he avoiding salt?
Some greens and ''celery'' extract has more nitrate than ''bacon'' added nitrates.
Higher sodium intake 4-6g/day was associated with lower mortality.
Even Asian diets with their soy sauce in the past, and the fermented kimchi (5000mg) have no issue before the introduction of seed oils, fried foods, and excess carbs.
You need sodium/potassium for your ion-gated channels and whatnot. High animal fat is not going to kill you. My mother fed me white rice, pork belly, cow blood, liver/fish, chicken, broth/legume water, beef and whatnot my entire childhood. I was the tallest in class in childhood and still (also) earliest in puberty though dropped to 93% height in high school.
Either way, I was not obese. There was a huge dramatic difference in the years I ate only 'skipthedishes' vs eat-at-home foods without snacks and with snacks. I don't have brain fog, lost 20-30lbs and do not need to go to the bathroom as often, feel better and whatnot with a combination of OMAD/IF and just eating whole foods and limiting to a bowl of rice with occasional citrus, and avoiding all snacks, boxed foods.
I suppose blood is slightly alkaline and the acidity of certain foods do contribute to uric acid increase possibly, octogenarians however have low glucose levels, high cholesterol and low uric acid levels.
Preaching to the converted here old boy! I'm all about the salt and animal fat. Renounce the polyunsaturated evil, oh my brethren.
My father is avoiding salt and saturated fat because that's what his doctor told him to do.
And he's right, I think. For most people, most of the time, it's a better idea to listen to your doctor than your crackpot son.
You mention your eyesight improved - as someone with very poor long distance vision I'm curious what kind of issues you had and how dramatic the improvement was?
It was never bad, but my eyes would get tired and then be unable to focus quite 100% and it would be blurry. I haven't had that in months now.
Another n=1 for sunburn. I lay out in small increments-usually 15 minutes per side in the morning sun. I have an amazing tan and I no longer burn. I'm 3 years in for almost no PUFAs. My dental hygenist also has been commenting for the last 1.5 years that my gums aren't bleeding at all. I used to floss like crazy and then found Dr Ellie Phillips on youtube and stopped flossing (mostly) I still get some plaque but Im working on that.
For plaque, have you tried xylitol? Here's one report (with recommended dose):
https://www.cda.org/portals/0/pdfs/fact_sheets/xylitol_english.pdf