8 ms·
Linoleic acid–good or bad for the brain? (2020)
- andy_ppp 3y agoFrom the conclusion: "In conclusion, this review presents evidence that excess LA in the food supply might adversely affect the brain. The potential benefit of LA lowering merits detailed evaluation in well-designed and adequately-powered clinical studies, to test whether this translates into tangible reductions in the risk of neurodegenerative disorders and neurodevelopmental abnormalities at a population level." So eat more Omega 3 and not too much Soy Bean Oil... maybe. I do wonder about diet just being another thing for people to argue about on the Internet, we know so little about the interplay between gut microbiome, food, genetics and health and doing proper clinical trials (in humans) to have some certainty is nearly impossible.
- SubiculumCode 3y agoI'm pretty sure there is no way to thread the needle. The center cannot hold. Nothing in excess is the best I can come up with for longer-lasting health.
- KarlKemp 3y ago“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t...)
- giantbanana 3y ago[dead]
- jschveibinz 3y agoHere is something from Dr. M. Greger. He typically has good research to back his articles: https://nutritionfacts.org/question/what-would-you-suggest-as-an-ideal-omega-369/ https://nutritionfacts.org/question/what-would-you-suggest-a...
- pinko 3y agobroken link... I think you meant: https://nutritionfacts.org/questions/what-would-you-suggest-as-an-ideal-omega-369/ https://nutritionfacts.org/questions/what-would-you-suggest-...
- jschveibinz 3y agoThanks.
- didgeoridoo 3y agoGreger is a vegan fundamentalist who ignores any evidence to the contrary of his chosen vegan lifestyle. That’s not science. At all.
- jschveibinz 3y agoI believe this is an exaggeration. I have no horse in this race, but perhaps you are judging the person’s work based on his vegan advocacy rather than on the merit of the research that he identifies.
- ra 3y agoAny food that is disproportionately represented in our post hunter-gatherer diet, especially processed food, must have an element of "bad for you" in it. Eat whole foods and maintain a level of exercise and don't sweat the small stuff.
- morelisp 3y agoAny medicine that is disproportionately represented in our post hunter-gatherer treatment plans, especially synthesized chemicals, must have an element of "bad for you" in it. Drink clean water and boil willow bark and don't sweat the small stuff.
- darkerside 3y agoWell, yeah. There's a reason these drugs all have side effects, and that the first principle of medicine is, Do No Harm. We have a long history of interventions leading to worse outcomes. It's just sometimes those bad outcomes are worth it by evading worse outcomes.
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y agoWhy should the general population increase their intact of salicin via Willow Bark? What kind of advice is that?
- gruez 3y agoI think he's satirizing the parent poster, by copying his logic and saying that we should eat willow bark rather than taking aspirin pills.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoThat doesn't make sense since we ate anything we could find and evolution only selected for procreation, not for long term health. The very things we ate for most of our history could very well be bad for us long term, like increase our cardiovascular disease risk. I don't see why I would accept appeals to nature in favor of the balance of our best evidence.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ericmcer 3y agoThings like this are so nit picky and nuanced it really isn’t worth caring about unless you are already doing everything else right. People ignore low hanging fruit in their quest for health, like analyzing vegetable oils is pointless when you still eat tons of sugar, don’t sleep enough, don’t exercise, drink too much, etc.
- hammock 3y ago>analyzing vegetable oils is pointless On a personal scale perhaps. On a commercial scale though - similar to what happened to trans fats - and given how much vegetable oil is in processed food, a conclusive result could have a monumental impact on the food supply
- whalesalad 3y agothere is low hanging fruit, sure, but a substantial amount of our food - even things that you might assume are 'healthy' - are loaded with these terrible oils. autism/adhd/neurodivergence is skyrocketing, as-are late-stage health problems like alzheimers and parkinsons. all of this is pretty well correlated with the rise of our race-to-the-bottom agricultural practices involving pesticides like glyphosate and mass cultivation of crops for seed oils. this should not be ignored.
- liminvorous 3y agoThere have been some studies recently screening older people who grew up with more restrictive diagnostic criteria for autism that suggest that increasing rates of autism diagnosis are likely purely the result of changing diagnostic criteria and increased awareness rather than increased prevalence of austism.
- explorer83 3y agopolio affected 8-37 out of 100000 people between 1940 and 1950 and everyone remembers it. CDC has identird 11 communities with 1 out of 36 8 year old children have been diagnosed with autism in 2020. Estimates place roughly 1/3 of those have less than 70 IQ. So let's say 1 out of 108 children.
- whalesalad 3y agoSort this table by LA. Use/eat oils that have the lowest amount possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linoleic_acid#Dietary_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linoleic_acid#Dietary_sources Coconut oil, Butter/Ghee, Olive Oil, Lard...
- gruez 3y ago>Coconut oil, Butter/Ghee, Olive Oil, Lard... The problem is that most of them (minus olive oil) are high in saturated fats, which are also bad. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
- whalesalad 3y agonah, saturated fats are not bad. that is the myth big ag wants you to believe. people will often look at old photos and wax poetic about how youthful and thin everyone was. why? they were eating saturated fats and not seed oils.
- gruez 3y agoAre you confusing "fats" with "saturated fats"? Fats in general might have been vindicated, but the evidence for saturated fats being bad for you is still pretty strong[1]. Feel free to provide any sources to the contrary. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with_diseases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with...
- whalesalad 3y agoAnything that I say will be misconstrued as conspiracy theory. Suffice to say this information is incorrect, and there is a growing snowball of evidence to suggest so. I for one do not trust the American Heart Association - they are a bunch of crooks funded by lobbyists, big agriculture and massive conglomerates. They got their start helping Proctor and Gamble market Crisco (poison in a tub) as being healthier than animal fats. In the 60s they got in bed with the tobacco industry to prove that cigarettes were not bad for you. A lot of the "studies" we have right now which paint saturated fats in a bad light are not true to the mission of science.
- eyko 3y agoPerhaps it's because English is not my first language, but I find it confusing to read "this is evidence that .... might ....". Isn't the purpose of evidence to prove a claim? If there is no conclusive evidence, I would expect it to be phrased along the lines of: "Preliminary evidence suggests that... might...".
- __blockcipher__ 3y agoThe purpose of evidence is to provide support for a claim. However in colloquial speech we generally speak of someone having "evidence" of something when they have absolute proof.
- BobbyJo 3y ago100% agree. The more specific you get about a diet, the more specific you need to get about the person eating it. So long as most dietary advice is designed and tested at population scale, it's going to be fuzzy and inconclusive. Even the most basic advice we can give today comes with asterisks.
- andy_ppp 3y agoNutritional studies, as stated above, always turn into people being massive certain about their positions (saturated fat vs omega 3 vs omega 6 fanboys!). I'd just assume that pretty much nothing in nutrition is proved beyond a reasonable doubt... For what it's worth my guess is that having the wrong stomach bacteria can make all nutrition better or worse for you. And your genetics, birth mechanism, and even epigenetics all play too big a part to make blanket statements about anything. Fibre for the bugs will be the biggest thing people are missing and blunt all the supposed bad health effects of things like linoleic acid.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- slothtrop 3y agoAlso see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_paradox Incidentally it seems like sunflower, safflower and soybean oils are way more common in packaged products now, higher in omega-6, presumably as a sub for palm oil. Canola has a more ideal composition among the common vegetable oils in packaged products.
- LarsAlereon 3y agoOne note is that most of the crops grown for seed oil are "high oleic" varieties that produce a fat makeup more similar to Canola oil than you'd previously see for those crops.
- slothtrop 3y agoMany, but notwithstanding crops, they will be identified as such in the package ingredients. Anecdotally, I still see bog standard sunflower oil more often than the high-oleic variant.
- csdvrx 3y agoI've read it can leech mercury from silver fillings, resulting in brain toxicity (the "amalgalm disease" IIRC). Is there any truth to that?
- extr 3y agoFor anyone who is confused at the significance here, I looked into the whole "Seed oils = bad" thing the other day and this claim was at the heart of it (no pun intended). Basically the idea that seed oils usually contain higher levels of linoleic acid, and butter does not, and therefore tl;dr excess butter/animal fat is not bad for you and does not cause heart disease in the way that people think it does. You can see a list of fats ranked by LA content here: https://www.news-medical.net/health/Oils-Rich-in-Linoleic-Acid.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/health/Oils-Rich-in-Linoleic-Ac... Not saying this is correct or anything, just providing the missing context for anyone asking why Linoleic Acid is in a headline.
- jschveibinz 3y agoThanks. There are oil/fat wars going on in research to protect billion dollar industries, so this is not surprising. A better and more helpful headline would be “whole foods are healthier than processed foods.” But everyone knows that already.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoThat is a good heuristic, but the hard part for people is evaluating foods at the periphery of that heuristic like chocolate and tofu and nut milk and canola oil which improve human health outcomes. That said, and I'll quickly grant: most people in the west aren't making the mistake, say, eating too much seitan and nut milks and unsweetened 80% chocolate (all processed foods), so I won't nitpick too much.
- slothtrop 3y agoThis is a false dilemma as not all oils are high in linoleic acid or omega 6. Olive oil is the least likely to oxidize.
- stevebmark 3y agoThis seems likely a garbage-y study. It's a narrative study, not even a meta-analysis, so it's more of proposing a hypothesis rather than stating a fact. The current science shows that seed oils, and omega 6 (aka linoleic acid) fatty acids, are either benign or healthy. There was a very popular hypothesis that the omega 6 to 3 ratio was important for health, popularized in the early 2000's and getting revived now by counter-culture nonsense people, but the science has not backed that case up. They study they link to citing neuro-development issues is https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28420388/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28420388/ - which is based on a food intake survey, and it's not a controlled study, it's looking at cohorts from another study. All they checked for was linoleic acid intake, and unless you're specifically checking for food source, this usually means it comes from processed food, which is more likely the culprit than the 6 to 3 fatty acid ratio. There is no known effect of seed oil / omega 6 intake on inflammation, which is shown in quite a few controlled studies. Seed oil intake replacing saturated fat intake has also been shown to significantly reduce CVD outcomes.
- rogers12 3y agoI think you should try eating three teaspoons of heart-healthy canola oil with breakfast and document the results to dunk on garbage science peddlers.
- stevebmark 3y agoThis is a very good example of the type of revival I'm talking about! There is lots of emotion in this space, which dominates the discussion over science.
- rogers12 3y agoYes, exactly! Science is a fantastic way to discover truths about reality and apply them to your own life. For example, putting 15 grams of canola oil in your daily breakfast cereal.
- stevebmark 3y ago
- jonnycomputer 3y agoWhat quantities are we talking about? A daily serving of tofu, or ???
- frankus 3y agoAbout two tablespoons of store-bought ranch dressing will put you at the 2% number that the article suggests as the high end of preindustrial intake. (11g of unsaturated fat in 2 tablespoons of Hidden Valley Ranch, assume soybean oil because it's cheaper, which is ~50% LA, so about 50 calories, which is 2% of a 2500-calorie/day diet)
- kalupa 3y agoThere is no "one quick trick" that will keep you healthy. It's a whole plethora of habits and activities that make a difference, not an individual one.
- elric 3y agoWell, yes, but that's beside the point. Processed food often contains lots of cheap seed oil which is rich in linoleic acid. People consume this stuff in vast quantities. It's worth figuring out what is or isn't poisoning people.