5 ms·

It's nice to see the anti seed oil discourse ramping up lately, but I'm sort of pessimistic about this. Like what is the endgame, exactly? Seed oils are in bas

It's nice to see the anti seed oil discourse ramping up lately, but I'm sort of pessimistic about this. Like what is the endgame, exactly? Seed oils are in basically everything. Trying to avoid them is like trying to avoid endocrine disruptors by not touching plastic or eating anything that has touched plastic. It's sort of an absurd thing to even attempt, it would drive you insane.

trts 5y ago
yes, they are difficult to cut out. Your options are everywhere very much narrowed. But In 90% of cases I've been able to find a satisfactory alternative. It is interesting how two simple rules (no seed oil, no corn syrup) almost entirely prevent you from putting terrible things in your body. It also repeatedly enforces a more mindful attitude towards diet. I experimented with removing seed oils for the past six months or so. Almost every year in the winter I get a lot of pain in my joints and especially where previous injuries have occurred. Halfway through this season I've had very little discomfort, and it has been a bad winter where I am. Recommend checking out this "How It's Made" segment on the process of making this stuff comestible (it involves bleach, very high temperatures and chemical refinement): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk2IXlZdbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk2IXlZdbI
- malloryerik 5y ago
  No corn syrup or seed oil sounds like a wise choice. What do you do about eating at restaurants? Just avoid dishes that are likely offenders? And soybeans themselves, as well as unfermented tofu, is OK?
  - trts 5y ago
    Whole foods, steamed or grilled vegetables, legumes, butter or olive oil, fish, eggs, or other protein that isn't fried. Fewer ingredients are generally better. Ingredients that have ingredients are worse.
scythe 5y ago
>Like what is the endgame, exactly? A clear understanding of why these oils cause these problems would be a good start, methinks.
waffle_maniac 5y ago
Oils are not an essential nutrient. But many people claim to have a cultural exemption from a decent diet nowadays.
- scythe 5y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_fatty_acid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_fatty_acid
whalesalad 5y ago
This is an avoidable problem though. We invented this by racing to the bottom and assembling “food” with substitutes for real nutrition. The goal is to educate humanity so that we can start making more conscious decisions about what we eat and move away from this.
- voldacar 5y ago
  >The goal is to educate humanity so that we can start making more conscious decisions I don't think you can educate your way out of economies of scale that make it cheap to feed people garbage. The only real solution would be to declare PUFA as unfit for human consumption but that won't happen obviously Besides, many people really will just eat whatever crispy oily sugary slop has the shiniest packaging. It is unpleasant to believe this, but it's true. Think of how health conscious or critically minded the average person is, and remember that 50% of the population is below that average. A lot of people really just go through life without making choices, just consuming whatever is directly in front of them. This can be hard to believe if (like most people on this site) you are significantly smarter and richer than average, and spend your time around others who are similarly smarter and richer than average, but it really is true. Like think of how more than 2/3 american adults are overweight. Why? Because they literally can't stop picking up food with their hands, putting it into their mouths, and chewing and swallowing it. All you have to do to not be fat is to instruct your fleshsuit to stop picking things up and placing them in your mouth. Calories cannot legally enter your body without your consent. And yet 2/3 adults are overweight. So I don't think education will do anything here.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jim-jim-jim 5y ago
    > Like think of how more than 2/3 american adults are overweight. Why? Because they literally can't stop picking up food with their hands, putting it into their mouths, and chewing and swallowing it. All you have to do to not be fat is to instruct your fleshsuit to stop picking things up and placing them in your mouth. Calories cannot legally enter your body without your consent. And yet 2/3 adults are overweight. So I don't think education will do anything here. Do you think the average American's willpower has radically plummeted since the 70s? And the rest of the developed world nosedived with them? It's gotta be calories-in/calories-out and discipline to a degree, but things have shifted so rapidly and decisively that it's worth entertaining environmental explanations. Plus there's little harm in kicking this hypothesis around. A fat person who is otherwise unmotivated by traditional health advice might perk up once you appeal to his inner conspiracy theorist and tell him he's being fed industrial waste.
SpringDrive 5y ago
As someone who's quite interested in the anti-seed oil discourse/slowly forming movement, my endgame is simply having more people aware of what's in their food. We've accepted what's been handed to us for so long, without a significant percentage of the population stopping to look at exactly what's on the plate. The more people that are stopping to read ingredients labels. analyze their diet, and think critically about their consumption, the better.
- pronlover723 5y ago
  I suspect this will lead to more people believing in bunk rather than less. I'd rather people eat cheeseburgers than seeing bottles of water advertised as "gluten free"
nebula8804 5y ago
>Trying to avoid them is like trying to avoid endocrine disruptors by not touching plastic or eating anything that has touched plastic. Is there any evidence that something transfers to you if you do touch it? This is the first I am hearing about something like this. I thought plastic was essentially a solid. I have been interested in converting much of my daily interaction of plastic to other materials. Things like converting my Zerowater water filter to a homemade ceramic pot....but the water filter itself is plastic so whats the point?
- gruez 5y ago
  >Is there any evidence that something transfers to you if you do touch it? This is the first I am haring about something like this. I thought plastic was essentially a solid. I recall a few years ago there were a few articles/studies saying that that BPA were in thermal paper (ie. receipt paper). I think the conclusion was that if you were picking up a few receipts per day, the amount was negligible, but if you worked in retail it might be a hazard.
  - pirate787 5y ago
    Also if you crumple a receipt and don't wash your hands, and touch food, its a hazard
  - SomewhatLikely 5y ago
    I believe I recall that if you used hand sanitizer and then handled a receipt the BPA transfer was significantly higher.
- istorical 5y ago
  Transfers to you? There are microparticles of plastic in every liquid you drink, floating in the air, in the digestive systems of practically every animal in the food chain. When you wash a piece of polyester or microfiber in a washing machine you are sending millions of little microscopic pieces of plastic into the water supply. Ever drink from a plastic water bottle that sat in a hot car and it tastes really funny? Enjoy your plastic. If you google "plastic in the air", "plastic in food", "plastic in animals", "plastic in water", it's pretty much impossible to not find evidence. It's incredibly depressing. It's in the Mariana trench and on Everest.
dataangel 5y ago
The end game is policy changes and regulation so they get removed from the supply chain and it ultimately becomes automatic for consumers to avoid them. You need studies demonstrating the danger is real to convince legislators.
tuckerpo 5y ago
It's actually not all that difficult to parse ingredients lists while shopping. A good rule of thumb in American grocery stores is to stick to the perimeter while shopping (produce, dairy, meat) to avoid seed oils. :^)
lazyjones 5y ago
The endgame is to avoid them where possible in order to minimize the risk. It's not absurd and very reasonable. People stick to all kinds of obscure diets and most are not going insane.
buckthundaz 5y ago
If you cook your own food, it is easy to avoid. Simply don't buy them. Use tallow, ghee, butter, coconut oilt. Note that this simple method of making what you eat will mitigate exposure to endocrine disrupting plastics too.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Coconut is a seed.
  - prvnsmpth 5y ago
    The botanical classification doesn’t matter - coconut oil is primarily saturated fat which is what makes it better for you over the PUFA that comes from seed oils.
  - WillPostForFood 5y ago
    The coconut is surprisingly complicated, a seed and more. Botanically speaking, a coconut is a fibrous one-seeded drupe, also known as a dry drupe. However, when using loose definitions, the coconut can be all three: a fruit, a nut, and a seed. Full article is worth reading: https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/item/is-a-coconut-a-fruit-nut-or-seed/#:~:text=Answer,a%20nut%2C%20and%20a%20seed https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/item/is-a-coconut-a-f....
langsoul-com 5y ago
Basically speaking, you CANNOT eat out, no sauces, only home cooked foods. Even those need to be careful checked to not contain oils. Technically, if you did the carnivore diet using 80% animal fat butter, or lard, then it'll be fine. Except, the price you pay is enormous. Can't even eat a caesar salad!
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  I’m vegan and already prepare basically all of my meals so this seems fine. I bet there are crackers and stuff I eat with this in it but I can control that. And I don’t eat caesar salad. I’m not going to worry now but I’ll keep an eye on this seed oil discourse, I hadn’t heard of it!
nobrains 5y ago
You can avoid them by buying raw single-ingredients and cooking at home. It is also cheaper.
blindmute 5y ago
I don't understand what you mean. Seed oils aren't in most things; if seed oil is in even half the food you eat, your diet is likely appalling. I'm pretty sure I haven't eaten seed oil in at least a few months. I mean yeah if you're eating Doritos, sure, but it's really not that hard to cook from whole foods. Plastic is much harder to avoid; not even remotely close I'd say.
- LtdJorge 5y ago
  If you buy anything premade in any way, to the level of white bread, it has seed oils
  - blindmute 5y ago
    I don't buy anything pre-made, generally. If it's not seed oil it's HFCS or some other garbage ingredient. I 98% just buy ingredients themselves. The bread I buy is whole wheat and I've just confirmed that it does not have seed oils. The thing is, I'd like to stress that I don't go out of my way to do this or expend much extra effort. It's not a burden to eat a potato instead of a cup ramen or something. People just don't care about their health and buy every trash food they see.
coffeecat 5y ago
On a societal level, I think the endgame should be to eliminate the subsidies which make seed oils so cheap, and to design a subsidy/tax structured to reduce the cost of healthy foods and increase the cost of unhealthy foods.
cbsmith 5y ago
They're mostly difficult to cut out because we thought they'd be fine to mix in to all kinds of stuff. If we stop thinking that, and in particular if there were to be regulatory changes that made certain seed oils less desirable as an agreement, there would be rapid change. Research like this can also help cut back on a lot of the scapegoating that goes around about the obesity crisis.

trts 5y ago

yes, they are difficult to cut out. Your options are everywhere very much narrowed. But In 90% of cases I've been able to find a satisfactory alternative. It is interesting how two simple rules (no seed oil, no corn syrup) almost entirely prevent you from putting terrible things in your body. It also repeatedly enforces a more mindful attitude towards diet. I experimented with removing seed oils for the past six months or so. Almost every year in the winter I get a lot of pain in my joints and especially where previous injuries have occurred. Halfway through this season I've had very little discomfort, and it has been a bad winter where I am. Recommend checking out this "How It's Made" segment on the process of making this stuff comestible (it involves bleach, very high temperatures and chemical refinement): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk2IXlZdbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk2IXlZdbI

malloryerik 5y ago
No corn syrup or seed oil sounds like a wise choice. What do you do about eating at restaurants? Just avoid dishes that are likely offenders? And soybeans themselves, as well as unfermented tofu, is OK?
- trts 5y ago
  Whole foods, steamed or grilled vegetables, legumes, butter or olive oil, fish, eggs, or other protein that isn't fried. Fewer ingredients are generally better. Ingredients that have ingredients are worse.

scythe 5y ago

>Like what is the endgame, exactly? A clear understanding of why these oils cause these problems would be a good start, methinks.

waffle_maniac 5y ago

Oils are not an essential nutrient. But many people claim to have a cultural exemption from a decent diet nowadays.

scythe 5y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_fatty_acid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_fatty_acid

whalesalad 5y ago

This is an avoidable problem though. We invented this by racing to the bottom and assembling “food” with substitutes for real nutrition. The goal is to educate humanity so that we can start making more conscious decisions about what we eat and move away from this.

voldacar 5y ago
>The goal is to educate humanity so that we can start making more conscious decisions I don't think you can educate your way out of economies of scale that make it cheap to feed people garbage. The only real solution would be to declare PUFA as unfit for human consumption but that won't happen obviously Besides, many people really will just eat whatever crispy oily sugary slop has the shiniest packaging. It is unpleasant to believe this, but it's true. Think of how health conscious or critically minded the average person is, and remember that 50% of the population is below that average. A lot of people really just go through life without making choices, just consuming whatever is directly in front of them. This can be hard to believe if (like most people on this site) you are significantly smarter and richer than average, and spend your time around others who are similarly smarter and richer than average, but it really is true. Like think of how more than 2/3 american adults are overweight. Why? Because they literally can't stop picking up food with their hands, putting it into their mouths, and chewing and swallowing it. All you have to do to not be fat is to instruct your fleshsuit to stop picking things up and placing them in your mouth. Calories cannot legally enter your body without your consent. And yet 2/3 adults are overweight. So I don't think education will do anything here.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jim-jim-jim 5y ago
  > Like think of how more than 2/3 american adults are overweight. Why? Because they literally can't stop picking up food with their hands, putting it into their mouths, and chewing and swallowing it. All you have to do to not be fat is to instruct your fleshsuit to stop picking things up and placing them in your mouth. Calories cannot legally enter your body without your consent. And yet 2/3 adults are overweight. So I don't think education will do anything here. Do you think the average American's willpower has radically plummeted since the 70s? And the rest of the developed world nosedived with them? It's gotta be calories-in/calories-out and discipline to a degree, but things have shifted so rapidly and decisively that it's worth entertaining environmental explanations. Plus there's little harm in kicking this hypothesis around. A fat person who is otherwise unmotivated by traditional health advice might perk up once you appeal to his inner conspiracy theorist and tell him he's being fed industrial waste.

SpringDrive 5y ago

As someone who's quite interested in the anti-seed oil discourse/slowly forming movement, my endgame is simply having more people aware of what's in their food. We've accepted what's been handed to us for so long, without a significant percentage of the population stopping to look at exactly what's on the plate. The more people that are stopping to read ingredients labels. analyze their diet, and think critically about their consumption, the better.

pronlover723 5y ago
I suspect this will lead to more people believing in bunk rather than less. I'd rather people eat cheeseburgers than seeing bottles of water advertised as "gluten free"

nebula8804 5y ago

>Trying to avoid them is like trying to avoid endocrine disruptors by not touching plastic or eating anything that has touched plastic. Is there any evidence that something transfers to you if you do touch it? This is the first I am hearing about something like this. I thought plastic was essentially a solid. I have been interested in converting much of my daily interaction of plastic to other materials. Things like converting my Zerowater water filter to a homemade ceramic pot....but the water filter itself is plastic so whats the point?

gruez 5y ago
>Is there any evidence that something transfers to you if you do touch it? This is the first I am haring about something like this. I thought plastic was essentially a solid. I recall a few years ago there were a few articles/studies saying that that BPA were in thermal paper (ie. receipt paper). I think the conclusion was that if you were picking up a few receipts per day, the amount was negligible, but if you worked in retail it might be a hazard.
- pirate787 5y ago
  Also if you crumple a receipt and don't wash your hands, and touch food, its a hazard
- SomewhatLikely 5y ago
  I believe I recall that if you used hand sanitizer and then handled a receipt the BPA transfer was significantly higher.
istorical 5y ago
Transfers to you? There are microparticles of plastic in every liquid you drink, floating in the air, in the digestive systems of practically every animal in the food chain. When you wash a piece of polyester or microfiber in a washing machine you are sending millions of little microscopic pieces of plastic into the water supply. Ever drink from a plastic water bottle that sat in a hot car and it tastes really funny? Enjoy your plastic. If you google "plastic in the air", "plastic in food", "plastic in animals", "plastic in water", it's pretty much impossible to not find evidence. It's incredibly depressing. It's in the Mariana trench and on Everest.

dataangel 5y ago

The end game is policy changes and regulation so they get removed from the supply chain and it ultimately becomes automatic for consumers to avoid them. You need studies demonstrating the danger is real to convince legislators.

tuckerpo 5y ago

It's actually not all that difficult to parse ingredients lists while shopping. A good rule of thumb in American grocery stores is to stick to the perimeter while shopping (produce, dairy, meat) to avoid seed oils. :^)

lazyjones 5y ago

The endgame is to avoid them where possible in order to minimize the risk. It's not absurd and very reasonable. People stick to all kinds of obscure diets and most are not going insane.

buckthundaz 5y ago

If you cook your own food, it is easy to avoid. Simply don't buy them. Use tallow, ghee, butter, coconut oilt. Note that this simple method of making what you eat will mitigate exposure to endocrine disrupting plastics too.

colechristensen 5y ago
Coconut is a seed.
- prvnsmpth 5y ago
  The botanical classification doesn’t matter - coconut oil is primarily saturated fat which is what makes it better for you over the PUFA that comes from seed oils.
- WillPostForFood 5y ago
  The coconut is surprisingly complicated, a seed and more. Botanically speaking, a coconut is a fibrous one-seeded drupe, also known as a dry drupe. However, when using loose definitions, the coconut can be all three: a fruit, a nut, and a seed. Full article is worth reading: https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/item/is-a-coconut-a-fruit-nut-or-seed/#:~:text=Answer,a%20nut%2C%20and%20a%20seed https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/item/is-a-coconut-a-f....

langsoul-com 5y ago

Basically speaking, you CANNOT eat out, no sauces, only home cooked foods. Even those need to be careful checked to not contain oils. Technically, if you did the carnivore diet using 80% animal fat butter, or lard, then it'll be fine. Except, the price you pay is enormous. Can't even eat a caesar salad!

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
I’m vegan and already prepare basically all of my meals so this seems fine. I bet there are crackers and stuff I eat with this in it but I can control that. And I don’t eat caesar salad. I’m not going to worry now but I’ll keep an eye on this seed oil discourse, I hadn’t heard of it!

nobrains 5y ago

You can avoid them by buying raw single-ingredients and cooking at home. It is also cheaper.

blindmute 5y ago

I don't understand what you mean. Seed oils aren't in most things; if seed oil is in even half the food you eat, your diet is likely appalling. I'm pretty sure I haven't eaten seed oil in at least a few months. I mean yeah if you're eating Doritos, sure, but it's really not that hard to cook from whole foods. Plastic is much harder to avoid; not even remotely close I'd say.

LtdJorge 5y ago
If you buy anything premade in any way, to the level of white bread, it has seed oils
- blindmute 5y ago
  I don't buy anything pre-made, generally. If it's not seed oil it's HFCS or some other garbage ingredient. I 98% just buy ingredients themselves. The bread I buy is whole wheat and I've just confirmed that it does not have seed oils. The thing is, I'd like to stress that I don't go out of my way to do this or expend much extra effort. It's not a burden to eat a potato instead of a cup ramen or something. People just don't care about their health and buy every trash food they see.

coffeecat 5y ago

On a societal level, I think the endgame should be to eliminate the subsidies which make seed oils so cheap, and to design a subsidy/tax structured to reduce the cost of healthy foods and increase the cost of unhealthy foods.

cbsmith 5y ago

They're mostly difficult to cut out because we thought they'd be fine to mix in to all kinds of stuff. If we stop thinking that, and in particular if there were to be regulatory changes that made certain seed oils less desirable as an agreement, there would be rapid change. Research like this can also help cut back on a lot of the scapegoating that goes around about the obesity crisis.