5 ms·

I find it deeply weird that seed oils have become a culture war topics and a tabula rasa onto which people projects all manner of societal ills.

PaulHoule 2y ago
The John Birch society was into weird ideas about health since the 1960s, I had a friend in the 1980s whose parents were Amway distributors and selling supplements who were introducing my family to anti-abortion and school voucher activists. In Ithaca though we have a population of hypochondriacs who are notoriously left wing. Alternative ideas about the healthiness of fats have circulated a long time https://www.amazon.com/Fats-That-Heal-Kill-Cholesterol/dp/0920470386 https://www.amazon.com/Fats-That-Heal-Kill-Cholesterol/dp/09... is the first one I saw against ‘seed oils’, certainly alternative ideas about the healthiness of cholesterol and saturated fats have been circulating a long time. What is different is the polarization of the post-COVID environment but the polarization is such that you find people who don’t think we are post COVID.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  People really love the idea of a quick, easy fix; a single solveable problem that explains a vast swath of issues.
  - like_any_other 2y ago
    Like vitamin C to fix everything that goes wrong on long sea voyages, or removing lead and mercury from diets, avoiding alcohol and thalidomide during pregnancy, abstaining from cigarettes, removing cocaine from Coca Cola, or any number of other additives that are perhaps less clear cut: https://time.com/7210717/food-additives-us-fda-banned-europe/ https://time.com/7210717/food-additives-us-fda-banned-europe... Avoiding poison is a "quick, easy fix" to the consequences of that poison (or the opposite in the case of vitamin deficiency). Whether there's any reason to believe seed oils are harmful, I have no clue, but the idea that we could be en-masse consuming something harmful has dozens of precedents.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      Those mostly each fix one specific thing with a clear mechanism. Seed oil theorists will tell you they cause... a lot more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_oil_misinformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_oil_misinformation > The theme of the misinformation is that seed oils are the root cause of most diseases of affluence, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and liver spots.
      - like_any_other 2y ago
        Vitamin C theorists would also have told you it cured the common cold, cardiovascular disease, cancer, HIV, and ameliorated the effects of chemotherapy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#History_of_large_dose_therapies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#History_of_large_dos...
    - guyzero 2y ago
      I do not think it takes a decade-long longitudinal study to conclude that seed oils are not mercury or thalidomide.
      - dzhiurgis 2y ago
        "I do not think" is precisely when you need a study...
- roughly 2y ago
  Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger is an absolutely brilliant read on why you see this kind of consonance between the fringe left & right (although fringe may not be the right word anymore): https://bookshop.org/p/books/doppelganger-a-trip-into-the-mirror-world-naomi-klein/20025222 https://bookshop.org/p/books/doppelganger-a-trip-into-the-mi...
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    One of the things that cuts the Democrats off at the knees is that the far left is even hungrier for “change” and “shaking things up” than Trump supporters are and doesn’t get any emotional satisfaction out of supporting the party of “status quo at any cost” other than the behavioral sink of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” European politics is itself in a death spiral of the center left and center right forming an emotionally false coalition whereas the AfD looks emotionally truer by the day.
    - roughly 2y ago
      A hundred percent, yes. The GOP learned they needed to activate their base during the Obama years - that led to the Trump takeover and a lot of the issues we're seeing right now, but the MAGA movement's fundamental allure is they're actually talking about problems in the country that are pretty apparent to people outside the professional class (there's an interesting civil war happening inside the GOP right now between the MAGA true believers and the people who thought they were riding the tiger, instead of just holding its tail). The Democrats still haven't had that "come to Jesus" moment, as evidence by both the treatment of Bernie in 2016 and Kamala's total unwillingness to talk about any of the populist parts of Biden's economic policy (antitrust, pro-labor, stronger regulation, etc), and it's what's cost them the 2016 and 2024 elections - neoliberalism has failed, and the longer the Democrats pretend that's not the case, the longer they're going to be out in the electoral cold.
  - guyzero 2y ago
    Ha, poor Naomi Klein getting confused with the other Naomi... I guess it was inevitable she'd write a book about it.
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  > the polarization is such that you find people who don’t think we are post COVID. What does the phrase "post-covid" even mean in a population with actively circulating covid? I don't think such a concept is even possible at this point.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Accurately, post a set of cultural changes. Some variant of that virus will be going around until, maybe, there is a severe lockdown because of another virus but that won’t happen for another half-generation at least even if the new virus is The Andromeda Strain. There is a population of people today though who have internalized the threat of COVID as a core part of their identity such as one of those Ithaca hypochondriacs that doesn’t get invited to parties because the only thing she’s wanted to talk about since 2021 is face masks.
    - ForTheKidz 2y ago
      > There is a population of people today though who have internalized the threat of COVID as a core part of their identity I imagine if you have a reason to be that scared of covid (e.g. immunocompromised or -adjacent) to propose that someone exclude a threat to their physical health from their identity seems like an impossible ask. The risk isn't imaginary, and it's notably higher than the pre-covid world. There is no going back. Not sure why it's so hard to grasp that COVID allowed certain demographics to see how little society actually has regard for them.
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        I have a lot of discussions of my wife where I take position closer to your side and she takes the other side. My son lost two years of in-personal schooling which contributed to some serious problems he's had getting launched into adult life. The models that the education-industrial complex users, which I don't believe [1] tend to take the position that you can't get back what you lose when you lose something. My son is getting a lot of help from myself and others and I think he's going to do OK but you can't make the case that lockdowns were free or that people who had mental health vulnerabilities didn't take their own lives because of the effects of the lockdowns. You'd better believe that many people think that people like yourself have very little regard for them. It's pretty easy to grasp if you understand just how poisonous political polarization is. [1] ... or don't believe in letting apply to myself and my family
- orwin 2y ago
  > In Ithaca though we have a population of hypochondriacs who are notoriously left wing. I had the same group of people living and doing yoga in a castle near my mother's home, that i would have described as left-wing hypocondriacs, extremely skeptics of modern medecine. A majority voted "right-wing" at the last european elections. So using left-wing or right-wing is not a good way to describe this kind of group. They clearly have a minority habitus that could push them to vote "left-wing" (as long a they are not in power), but also share an anti-science sentiment that can push tehm easily towards a populist right (populist != bad in my eyes, i do think populism in politics is necessary.
  - seec 2y ago
    Yes I know the type. First and foremost, they are contrarian and "alternative". They always try to oppose whatever the majority is doing, even when it clearly is the correct thing (they are often anti-vax as well). They usually are left-wing because they are often parasites who always take more than they give. They like being in a group or community but it rarely lasts and work over time because of how exploitative and dishonest they usually are. I know some very interesting specimens and my mother is one of them; not entirely because she made a decent amount of money in a public career, but now that she is retired it has become a lot more apparent. Those people are not left because of values/principle, they just go with whatever is the most extreme version of something that looks like it will benefit them. Which is why they will gladly vote far-right, if they can see the benefits. The rise of far-right populists that try to sell a version of collectivism not far removed from the far left-version is why it is happening.
bediger4000 2y ago
A lot of the culture war topics seem deeply weird. mRNA vaccines that absolutely do work and are safe somehow get all kinds of things ascribed to them. Prayer in schools, which has passed out of the Gartner Culture War hype cycle, seems like another one of those head scratchers.
- relaxing 2y ago
  Everyone likes God, God wants you to pray. It’s quite easy to whip up opposition to anyone who gets in the way of that. Although frankly, with the way the propaganda machine is well oiled and constantly running, it’s easy to whip up opposition to anything.
kurthr 2y ago
But since I stopped eating seed oils I haven't been mauled by a lion. Also, I ate seed oils in middle age and gained a bunch of weight, then I got healthy started exercising, spent money on a trainer and a diet, and stopped eating seed oils in fast food and lost weight! Pick something almost everyone does and then claim that it is the source of the current great social ill... social media... profit! For bonus points use the phrases "cleanse", "detox", "inflammation", "processed", "all-natural" bereft of meaning. I mean, it's not like the health effects of an oil would depend on what seed, or what quantity, or how you cook, or what other activities you do, is it? p.s. all the silicon in your computer was inorganically grown!
rce 2y ago
Why? My understanding of the argument against seed oils is that they have a high omega 6 to omega 3 ratio, which does not align with historical intake and leads to inflammation. While I'm not a nutritionist, this seems like a perfectly reasonable argument
- guyzero 2y ago
  Americans eat 12.51 million metric tons of it a year, so it is clearly not exactly poisonous. And "inflammation" is very vague... most people would be better off just increasing their dietary fiber intake and not worry about swapping one fat for another. It doesn't require thousands of people with no education in the area creating social media content about it.
  - jacamera 2y ago
    This is the first time I've heard anyone argue that a food product must be good for you because Americans are consuming a large amount of it. How on earth could you come to that conclusion given how unhealthy our population is?
    - guyzero 2y ago
      "good for you" and "not meaningfully harmful" are different things. Please don't move the goalpost.
  - seec 2y ago
    Americans are not the healthiest population on average so if anything, it proves the reverse point that you are trying to make... Also, fiber advice is complete nonsense. There are now plenty of studies showing that fiber causes more problems, especially for people who get easily constipated. The fiber bullshit comes precisely from bad science, that is directed by wants and political opinions, especially those of women in that case. Fiber advice has come around because for some reason, it was thought that defecating more often is better and women like to "work" on their transit because of them wanting to look as fin as possible at all times. So, they make you eat very low energy (and nutriments) food to make you shit more often, just because.
foxyv 2y ago
We're deeply wired to avoid and attach to things based on extremely simple heuristics. Avoid the strange man with the pointy stick, attach to the tree that makes tasty fruit, avoid the crocodile pond, attach to the thing that makes women flock to you. Marketing departments and politicians are very good at using this to their advantage.
sct202 2y ago
It is especially fitting that another front page topic today is "The Origin of the Pork Taboo"

PaulHoule 2y ago

The John Birch society was into weird ideas about health since the 1960s, I had a friend in the 1980s whose parents were Amway distributors and selling supplements who were introducing my family to anti-abortion and school voucher activists. In Ithaca though we have a population of hypochondriacs who are notoriously left wing. Alternative ideas about the healthiness of fats have circulated a long time https://www.amazon.com/Fats-That-Heal-Kill-Cholesterol/dp/0920470386 https://www.amazon.com/Fats-That-Heal-Kill-Cholesterol/dp/09... is the first one I saw against ‘seed oils’, certainly alternative ideas about the healthiness of cholesterol and saturated fats have been circulating a long time. What is different is the polarization of the post-COVID environment but the polarization is such that you find people who don’t think we are post COVID.

ceejayoz 2y ago
People really love the idea of a quick, easy fix; a single solveable problem that explains a vast swath of issues.
- like_any_other 2y ago
  Like vitamin C to fix everything that goes wrong on long sea voyages, or removing lead and mercury from diets, avoiding alcohol and thalidomide during pregnancy, abstaining from cigarettes, removing cocaine from Coca Cola, or any number of other additives that are perhaps less clear cut: https://time.com/7210717/food-additives-us-fda-banned-europe/ https://time.com/7210717/food-additives-us-fda-banned-europe... Avoiding poison is a "quick, easy fix" to the consequences of that poison (or the opposite in the case of vitamin deficiency). Whether there's any reason to believe seed oils are harmful, I have no clue, but the idea that we could be en-masse consuming something harmful has dozens of precedents.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    Those mostly each fix one specific thing with a clear mechanism. Seed oil theorists will tell you they cause... a lot more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_oil_misinformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_oil_misinformation > The theme of the misinformation is that seed oils are the root cause of most diseases of affluence, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and liver spots.
    - like_any_other 2y ago
      Vitamin C theorists would also have told you it cured the common cold, cardiovascular disease, cancer, HIV, and ameliorated the effects of chemotherapy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#History_of_large_dose_therapies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#History_of_large_dos...
  - guyzero 2y ago
    I do not think it takes a decade-long longitudinal study to conclude that seed oils are not mercury or thalidomide.
    - dzhiurgis 2y ago
      "I do not think" is precisely when you need a study...
roughly 2y ago
Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger is an absolutely brilliant read on why you see this kind of consonance between the fringe left & right (although fringe may not be the right word anymore): https://bookshop.org/p/books/doppelganger-a-trip-into-the-mirror-world-naomi-klein/20025222 https://bookshop.org/p/books/doppelganger-a-trip-into-the-mi...
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  One of the things that cuts the Democrats off at the knees is that the far left is even hungrier for “change” and “shaking things up” than Trump supporters are and doesn’t get any emotional satisfaction out of supporting the party of “status quo at any cost” other than the behavioral sink of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” European politics is itself in a death spiral of the center left and center right forming an emotionally false coalition whereas the AfD looks emotionally truer by the day.
  - roughly 2y ago
    A hundred percent, yes. The GOP learned they needed to activate their base during the Obama years - that led to the Trump takeover and a lot of the issues we're seeing right now, but the MAGA movement's fundamental allure is they're actually talking about problems in the country that are pretty apparent to people outside the professional class (there's an interesting civil war happening inside the GOP right now between the MAGA true believers and the people who thought they were riding the tiger, instead of just holding its tail). The Democrats still haven't had that "come to Jesus" moment, as evidence by both the treatment of Bernie in 2016 and Kamala's total unwillingness to talk about any of the populist parts of Biden's economic policy (antitrust, pro-labor, stronger regulation, etc), and it's what's cost them the 2016 and 2024 elections - neoliberalism has failed, and the longer the Democrats pretend that's not the case, the longer they're going to be out in the electoral cold.
- guyzero 2y ago
  Ha, poor Naomi Klein getting confused with the other Naomi... I guess it was inevitable she'd write a book about it.
ForTheKidz 2y ago
> the polarization is such that you find people who don’t think we are post COVID. What does the phrase "post-covid" even mean in a population with actively circulating covid? I don't think such a concept is even possible at this point.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Accurately, post a set of cultural changes. Some variant of that virus will be going around until, maybe, there is a severe lockdown because of another virus but that won’t happen for another half-generation at least even if the new virus is The Andromeda Strain. There is a population of people today though who have internalized the threat of COVID as a core part of their identity such as one of those Ithaca hypochondriacs that doesn’t get invited to parties because the only thing she’s wanted to talk about since 2021 is face masks.
  - ForTheKidz 2y ago
    > There is a population of people today though who have internalized the threat of COVID as a core part of their identity I imagine if you have a reason to be that scared of covid (e.g. immunocompromised or -adjacent) to propose that someone exclude a threat to their physical health from their identity seems like an impossible ask. The risk isn't imaginary, and it's notably higher than the pre-covid world. There is no going back. Not sure why it's so hard to grasp that COVID allowed certain demographics to see how little society actually has regard for them.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      I have a lot of discussions of my wife where I take position closer to your side and she takes the other side. My son lost two years of in-personal schooling which contributed to some serious problems he's had getting launched into adult life. The models that the education-industrial complex users, which I don't believe [1] tend to take the position that you can't get back what you lose when you lose something. My son is getting a lot of help from myself and others and I think he's going to do OK but you can't make the case that lockdowns were free or that people who had mental health vulnerabilities didn't take their own lives because of the effects of the lockdowns. You'd better believe that many people think that people like yourself have very little regard for them. It's pretty easy to grasp if you understand just how poisonous political polarization is. [1] ... or don't believe in letting apply to myself and my family
orwin 2y ago
> In Ithaca though we have a population of hypochondriacs who are notoriously left wing. I had the same group of people living and doing yoga in a castle near my mother's home, that i would have described as left-wing hypocondriacs, extremely skeptics of modern medecine. A majority voted "right-wing" at the last european elections. So using left-wing or right-wing is not a good way to describe this kind of group. They clearly have a minority habitus that could push them to vote "left-wing" (as long a they are not in power), but also share an anti-science sentiment that can push tehm easily towards a populist right (populist != bad in my eyes, i do think populism in politics is necessary.
- seec 2y ago
  Yes I know the type. First and foremost, they are contrarian and "alternative". They always try to oppose whatever the majority is doing, even when it clearly is the correct thing (they are often anti-vax as well). They usually are left-wing because they are often parasites who always take more than they give. They like being in a group or community but it rarely lasts and work over time because of how exploitative and dishonest they usually are. I know some very interesting specimens and my mother is one of them; not entirely because she made a decent amount of money in a public career, but now that she is retired it has become a lot more apparent. Those people are not left because of values/principle, they just go with whatever is the most extreme version of something that looks like it will benefit them. Which is why they will gladly vote far-right, if they can see the benefits. The rise of far-right populists that try to sell a version of collectivism not far removed from the far left-version is why it is happening.

bediger4000 2y ago

A lot of the culture war topics seem deeply weird. mRNA vaccines that absolutely do work and are safe somehow get all kinds of things ascribed to them. Prayer in schools, which has passed out of the Gartner Culture War hype cycle, seems like another one of those head scratchers.

relaxing 2y ago
Everyone likes God, God wants you to pray. It’s quite easy to whip up opposition to anyone who gets in the way of that. Although frankly, with the way the propaganda machine is well oiled and constantly running, it’s easy to whip up opposition to anything.

kurthr 2y ago

But since I stopped eating seed oils I haven't been mauled by a lion. Also, I ate seed oils in middle age and gained a bunch of weight, then I got healthy started exercising, spent money on a trainer and a diet, and stopped eating seed oils in fast food and lost weight! Pick something almost everyone does and then claim that it is the source of the current great social ill... social media... profit! For bonus points use the phrases "cleanse", "detox", "inflammation", "processed", "all-natural" bereft of meaning. I mean, it's not like the health effects of an oil would depend on what seed, or what quantity, or how you cook, or what other activities you do, is it? p.s. all the silicon in your computer was inorganically grown!

rce 2y ago

Why? My understanding of the argument against seed oils is that they have a high omega 6 to omega 3 ratio, which does not align with historical intake and leads to inflammation. While I'm not a nutritionist, this seems like a perfectly reasonable argument

guyzero 2y ago
Americans eat 12.51 million metric tons of it a year, so it is clearly not exactly poisonous. And "inflammation" is very vague... most people would be better off just increasing their dietary fiber intake and not worry about swapping one fat for another. It doesn't require thousands of people with no education in the area creating social media content about it.
- jacamera 2y ago
  This is the first time I've heard anyone argue that a food product must be good for you because Americans are consuming a large amount of it. How on earth could you come to that conclusion given how unhealthy our population is?
  - guyzero 2y ago
    "good for you" and "not meaningfully harmful" are different things. Please don't move the goalpost.
- seec 2y ago
  Americans are not the healthiest population on average so if anything, it proves the reverse point that you are trying to make... Also, fiber advice is complete nonsense. There are now plenty of studies showing that fiber causes more problems, especially for people who get easily constipated. The fiber bullshit comes precisely from bad science, that is directed by wants and political opinions, especially those of women in that case. Fiber advice has come around because for some reason, it was thought that defecating more often is better and women like to "work" on their transit because of them wanting to look as fin as possible at all times. So, they make you eat very low energy (and nutriments) food to make you shit more often, just because.

foxyv 2y ago

We're deeply wired to avoid and attach to things based on extremely simple heuristics. Avoid the strange man with the pointy stick, attach to the tree that makes tasty fruit, avoid the crocodile pond, attach to the thing that makes women flock to you. Marketing departments and politicians are very good at using this to their advantage.

sct202 2y ago

It is especially fitting that another front page topic today is "The Origin of the Pork Taboo"