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This is a good idea, and the people in the comments are rightly pointing out sugar's problems. But just as problematic as sugar are vegetable oils which are in
by jeffreyrogers 6y ago
This is a good idea, and the people in the comments are rightly pointing out sugar's problems. But just as problematic as sugar are vegetable oils which are in almost every packaged product you can buy at the grocery store. They cause all sorts of health problems because the vegetable oils are extremely reactive (due to being unsaturated fats and so having double bonds that can react with other molecules inside your body). These are not called out as a health risk because the American agriculture industry makes an enormous amount of money exporting them and selling them to companies that make packaged/processed foods.
Edit: just to clarify it is the poly-unsaturated fatty acids that are the problem, not fats in general. Fats like butter (saturated) or olive oil (mono-unsaturated) do not have these problems, while canola oil, soybean oil, etc. are poly-unsaturated and highly-reactive.
Edit 2: research for these claims:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223779598_Lipid_oxidation_in_aging_and_age-dependent_disease https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223779598_Lipid_oxi...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12013175_Peroxidation_of_linoleic_acid_and_its_relation_to_aging_and_age_dependent_diseases https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12013175_Peroxidati...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5931176_The_Important_Role_of_Lipid_Peroxidation_Processes_in_Aging_and_Age_Dependent_Diseases https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5931176_The_Importa...
These are from a lipid scientist rather than from nutrition scientists, so they are focusing on internal biological processes rather than health outcomes. I have not seen good nutrition studies on poly-unsaturated fats. However, studies of fat consumption that break out fats into saturated, mono-unsaturated, and poly-unsaturated fat categories generally show worse health outcomes for people consuming high intakes of poly-unsaturated fats. I will try to find a good study.
These ingredients are not well studied, which is surprising when you consider how rapidly they've been added to the food supply (basically not at all present 100 years ago, to in every processed food today).
- thebean11 6y agoIt's a great idea in in theory, in practice I'm highly skeptical it will do anything but give police a new way to extract fines (bribes) from shopkeepers.
- devmunchies 6y ago*refined sugar, not all sugar. sugar in a whole fruit aren't bad, the fibers in the fruit help your body break down and absorb the sugar over a longer period of time. just don't eat refined food.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoAny kind of concentrated sugar product is going to be unhealthy regardless of the process that got it there. Fresh squeezed orange juice and honey aren't refined, but they're still much too sweet to be consuming large quantities of.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- partyboat1586 6y agoIf your concern is obesity and diabetes I encourage you to look up fruititarians. They consume 3000+ calories a day of fruit and loose dangerous amounts of weight. It's not healthy to consume such low fat and protein but it goes to show you can't gain weight on fruit juice. Conjecture: it's sugar and polyunsaturated fats at the same time that cause issues.
- vernon99 6y agoThe real concern is systemic inflamation caused by sugar (both high average levels and large spikes are bad)
- partyboat1586 6y agoYou mean high blood sugar as in hyperglycaemia?
- devmunchies 6y agosqueezing juice out of an orange is a level of refinement. You are reducing a whole food to separate components, much like pulling iron out of ore. It's weird to think of it as a refined food but it is to a degree. I wouldn't classify it as a processed food, but maybe that's where people conflate the terms.
- Dylan16807 6y agoThat goes against everything I've been told about the types of fats. How much evidence is there for this?
- boredpudding 6y agoOr even at least a source would be nice.
- partyboat1586 6y agoTake it for what it is: http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/unsaturated-oils.shtml http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/unsaturated-oils.shtml
- Dylan16807 6y ago> When unsaturated oils are exposed to free radicals they can create chain reactions of free radicals This seems like the most important claim and also has no citations.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- JoshuaDavid 6y agoI mean from an organic chemistry perspective it's obviously true. If you throw an electron at a C=C double bond, you get a ·C-C¯: which will then go ahead and bond with an H⁺ that's floating around, leaving you with a radical still bound to your initial molecule, so the theory is CH₃-CH=CH-CH₃ + · + ROH ⇒ CH₃-ĊH-CH₂-CH₃ + :O¯R CH₃-ĊH-CH₂-CH₃ + HOR' ⇒ CH₃-CH₂-CH₂-CH₃ + ·OR' and then the · on your ·OR' restarts the cycle, and the cycle doesn't stop until you get RO· + ·OR' ⇒ ROOR' which is gonna be some random peroxide that wouldn't normally form, or CH₃-ĊH-CH₂-CH₃ + CH₃-ĊH-CH₂-CH₃ ⇒ CH₃-CH-CH₂-CH₃ | CH₃-CH-CH₂-CH₃ which is gonna be some really random molecule with who knows what effects. Now how important this is in a biological context I have no idea. There is a plausible mechanism for it to affect cellular chemistry, but the problem is that "a plausible mechanism" and "an actual effect" are very far from the same thing, and biochemistry is complicated. The citation I'd want to see is that the chain reactions of free radicals do something biologically interesting, or, even better, that diets high and low in polyunsaturated fats lead to significant health differences in animal models.
- Rotten194 6y agoSource on harmful effects of polyunsaturated fatty acids? Had trouble finding it through Google (maybe was searching for the wrong thing)
- paul7986 6y agoAfter 40 everything once was good/tasty needs to be reduced a lot and or cut out of our diets. Our U.S. arteries are clogged no matter if your obese or not.
- xtracto 6y agoI've read that Safflower oil or Avocado oil are one of the healthiest oils to cook. Safflower oil is supposedly even good for you. As with everything, moderation is a key factor.
- flavor8 6y ago"Everything in moderation" isn't actually great diet advice. There's a paper floating around somewhere showing that people with a limited diet of healthy things fare better than people with a very wide diet that included unhealthy things. My take is that "everything in moderation" is a mental crutch that people adopt when there's some part of their diet that they know isn't _good_ but that they don't want to give up completely. It is true that we can sneak in unhealthy food here and there without hugely detrimental effects, but that doesn't mean it's a good baseline practice. The one scenario where it might be useful advice is with somebody whose diet is terrible, and you want to ease them towards a somewhat nutritionally positive diet; even in this circumstance, a more direct approach of "eat less crap and more good stuff" would be more accurate.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoMost people aren't going to stick to healthy foods only though, thus moderation is "good enough", It's better to be at 75-80% and not feel guilty rather than 10% good food and 90% junk food because you just couldn't do the 100% good all the time diet
- airstrike 6y agoThink that comes down to the different smoke points of various oils. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cooking_oils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin... You generally want to avoid smoke, so safflower oil and avocado oil are the best choices choices. But probably even better to not cook in oil at all, and just add olive oil (or your favorite source of fat) at the end
- mam2 6y agothe problem is the lack of understanding of CICO in the CULTUREof the country. Any other explanation is hiding the truth for some half-reasoning which mich the real point
- ac29 6y agoMaybe so, although CICO (calories in, calories out) is a little oversimplified. In reality not all calories are equally satiating, nor are all calories equally digestible. Additionally, measuring calories in food is done in a purely chemical fashion - the food is burned and the amount of heat energy released is measured. This of course does not actually measure how much energy your body is actually able to absorb (for example, dietary fiber burns just as well as refined sugar, but isnt absorbed the same in the body).
- mam2 6y agoIf you want a upper limit it's around 20000 calories. That's what eat people who go to the artic / antartic. Honestly i think its WAY LESS oversimplified that people say it is. True you never know what you really ate, but if you note your average calories for a month, and then do +20% or -20% calories with the same type of food and same lifestyle you will get the exact weight loss / gain predicted from regressing on the first month.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago> (due to being unsaturated fats and so having single hydrogen bonds that can react with other molecules inside your body). What do you mean by "single hydrogen bonds"? C-H bonds are always single bonds, and I am unfamiliar with any kind of "double" hydrogen (intermolecular) bonding. Unsaturated fats, by definition, have at least one double bond, between carbon atoms.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jeffreyrogers 6y agoSorry, you are correct. I fixed my comment. What I meant was the carbon-carbon double bonds replace a hydrogen atom that would otherwise be there, so the bond can be easily broken when interacting with other molecules (because the carbon-carbon bond is electron rich).
- novaRom 6y agoWhy anything containing psychoactive drug is actually legal to sell to kids? There's a lot of reports how bad is caffeine to underdeveloped brain. And look at any developing nation: everyone is hooked to Coca-Cola.
- Barrin92 6y agoI don't know what the reports are about, but I don't think there is evidence that caffeine has negative impact on adolescent brains, most of the issues seem to be caffeine pills or caffeine drinks mixed with alcohol.
- joecool1029 6y ago> There's a lot of reports how bad is caffeine to underdeveloped brain. Not going to do well on this site if you make baseless nonsensical claims like that. Paper[1] from 2009 stating that: 1. We actually use caffeine as a first-line treatment in premature infants for treating apnea and 2. Nobody has done the research on adolescents to assess any negative impact on brain development. [1] https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.01.001 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.01.001
- spanhandler 6y ago> And look at any developing nation: everyone is hooked to Coca-Cola. Everyone (more or less) is outside a few liberal, urban, health-focused pockets of the US, too. Or to sweet tea, or some other sugary caffeine drink. Unless you intended "developing nation" to cover those parts of the US, as well :-) [EDIT] Not sure what rubbed people the wrong way about this, but if it's the qualifiers then it's my understanding that both "liberal" and "urban" are, independently or together, correlated with smaller waistlines and healthier lifestyles, in the US. Almost certainly including consumption of sugary drinks (indeed, this seems to peak in the "deep red" South, in the US, from what I can find). If that's wrong I'd be interested to know about it.
- rsanek 6y ago> studies of fat consumption that break out fats into saturated, mono-unsaturated, and poly-unsaturated fat categories generally show worse health outcomes for people consuming high intakes of poly-unsaturated fats. I will try to find a good study. This is counter to any study that I am familiar with and flies in the face of all nutritional recommendations. Studies that support MUFAs and PUFAs over saturated fats can be found in the references section of https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2016/12/19/saturated-fat-regardless-of-type-found-linked-with-increased-heart-disease-risk/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2016/12/19/satu....
- jeffreyrogers 6y agoI believe this study does not control for whether the fat is hydrogenated or not. So they are really measuring the effects of trans-fats, which are already known to be bad. That is my general concern with almost all of the nutrition research on fats. They are not grouping the fats appropriately. If you group butter and hyrogenated vegetable oils together because they are both "saturated" fats and then do your analysis lumping them together then you can't distinguish whether the problems caused by saturated fats are due to the hydrogenization or due to the butter being saturated or both. Saturated fat consumption is decreasing, while unsaturated fat consumption is increasing, but people continue getting less healthy. So it seems the premise that saturated fats are that bad needs to be questioned. Or at least we need to ask if it's really saturated fats like coconut oil and butter that are bad or something that happens to the fats like canola oil when it is hydrogenated. Edit: also as anecdotal evidence, what is the one common feature of almost all food generally considered harmful? Lots of processed vegetable oils in it, often in conjunction with sugar. I have not seen a reasonable explanation of how this can be the case if poly-unsaturated fats are as healthy as they are claimed to be.
- portpecos 6y agoBut Canola oil is higher in monounsaturated fats like Olive Oil: https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000785.htm https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000785.htm Why is Canola oil bad if it has the same quantity of monounsaturated fats as Olive Oil?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoIs it the vegetable oil or the fact that processed foods come with vegetable oil? Sauteed vegetables with a drizzle of olive oil is a bit different than a TV dinner.
- pombrand 6y agoYou are wrong, there's nothing indicating that PUFAs are as problematic as sugar or even problematic at all, on the contrary the evidence we have show they are beneficial. It concerns me that your comment is the top voted, as it can lead to dangerous dietary extremism, say avoiding all PUFAs which are among other things implicated in helping the immune system "Paracrine interactions between adipose and lymphoid tissues are enhanced by diets rich in n-6 fatty acids and attentuated by fish oils. The latter improve immune function and body conformation in animals and people. The partitioning of adipose tissue in many depots, some specialised for local, paracrine interactions with other tissues, is a fundamental feature of mammals."https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15946832/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15946832/ 1. You shouldn't just throw in links to "support" your claims - to me this shows you don't understand what you're talking about, you should cite the relevant text otherwise it's just hand waiving. The studies you cite are about radicals generated from PUFAs that are naturally a part of cell membranes, not from diet, and even goes against your claim by saying that PUFAs from diet help generate antioxidants that eliminate such radicals. "Any change in the cell membrane structure activates lipoxygenases (LOX). LOX transform polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) to lipidhydroperoxide molecules (LOOHs)." i.e. cell membranes naturally have PUFAs."..."In order to remove LOO* radicals, plants and algae transform PUFAs to furan fatty acids, which are incorporated after consumption of vegetables into mammalian tissues where they act as excellent scavengers of LOO* and LO* radicals." - hey eating PUFAs help cells make radical scavengers. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17914157/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17914157/ 2. Omega-3 is a polyunsaturated fats - yes they are less stable than SFAs, but that probably does not matter at all unless you're eating rancid oils. Polyunsaturated fats are not "extremely" reactive either whatever you mean by that. Then we know that diets rich in PUFAs and MUFAs have positive effect on cholesterol ratios "We conclude that a mixed diet rich in monounsaturated fat was as effective as a diet rich in (n-6)polyunsaturated fat in lowering LDL cholesterol. " https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2761578/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2761578/