7 ms·

The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

165 points by randycupertino 5mo ago

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kayo_20211030 5mo ago
Yeah. True, I feel. The signaling and recommendations have gone both overboard and data-free. The end results might be bad.
fabian2k 5mo ago
The media and the scientific community are not set up for the situation where cranks with absurdly unscientific views are at the top of the major scientific and health authorities. RFK Jr. still gets too much benefit of the doubt for his initiatives when it is obvious that he is opposed to science and has views about health that are just outright dangerous. And we have the usual problem with this administration that there are so many different dangerous things happening that it's hard to concentrate efforts on fighting them. It got a bit quieter, probably due to some internal pushback, but RFK Jr. is still working on dismantling the US vaccination programs. And similar to the seed oil panic in the article, all the demonization of vaccines will result in a terrible price that some children will pay in the future.
- DoctorOetker 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - fabian2k 5mo ago
    Modern medicine saves lives. Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society. But you're suggesting that letting children die from preventable diseases is a bad thing. It's not.
    - DoctorOetker 5mo ago
      > Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society. It doesn't matter how authoritatively you state it, but wanting it not to matter is not the same as it not applying. It still applies modulo some distortion by "egalitarian healthcare". Every time you have a cold or whatever is a moment you are statistically less likely to reproduce. When a potential mate approaches you but sneezes all over itself, it has an influence on your attraction towards this mate. If only things were so simple as state them in a voice of authority... Is it in the interest of the group, and of future children that they inherit deficiencies at higher rates simply because we apply healthcare? What exactly is "civilized" about our healthcare behavior?
  - hombre_fatal 5mo ago
    So what? Technology gives us free lunch after free lunch. And in the not so distant future we can just gene-edit our offspring, the ultimate free lunch.
    - DoctorOetker 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - tomhow 5mo ago
        This kind of comment is unwelcome on HN. Do not comment like this here. The notion that we should withhold medical care for the sake of genetic fitness of future generations is vile, no matter how much it's dressed up to seem scientifically valid. Please take some time to read all the HN guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        DoctorOetker 5mo ago
        Are you a visitor or a maintainer at HN? Triage or comparative loss is frequently applied in medical circles. Extending the concept of triage across generations is villified? Every triage involves loss and denying medical care, not talking about it doesn't make it cleaner. To improve triage outcomes, people must be able to discuss and argue triage decisions, that necessarily involves arguing effectively against certain care. If this platform must serve as a safe space for the feeble minded, I could consider exiting it, if the maintainers insist triage becomes a taboo subject.
- ungreased0675 5mo ago
  The reason RFK resonated with people is because the highly credentialed experts were not producing favorable outcomes. Results have to matter, right? We’ll see how successful (or not) RFK’s policies are, but let’s not revise history to where things were great right before he came in and ruined everything.
  - rsynnott 5mo ago
    “We told people what not to eat based on the research, and they ignored us, so instead we should tell them what not to eat based on the ravings of random podcasters” is not a reasonable approach. There are approaches which seem to work (some combination of taxation, advertising bans, and mandatory warnings seems to basically have worked for tobacco, say), but they’d obviously be extremely unpalatable to industry. And they’re painfully slow; took decades for tobacco.
thih9 5mo ago
https://archive.is/zlSkz https://archive.is/zlSkz
phillipharris 5mo ago
[flagged]
- edaemon 5mo ago
  The author ran for city council where I live. From what I remember of him, it would be very out of character for him to use AI to write a health article.
- kstrauser 5mo ago
  #IAmVerySmart Edit: One of the few things I find more annoying than AI blogs is the gleeful rush to label everything as AI generated. It comes across as “I am so clever! You can’t fool me!” Meanwhile, that reads like a perfectly normal sounding thing for a human to have written. “This blog uses the word ‘the’ a lot. Sure sign of AI!”
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - chneu 5mo ago
    Yup. Anything someone disagrees with is now "written by ai" as if that invalidates what was written.
    - kstrauser 5mo ago
      I don’t think it’s even that. Someone could post an Emily Dickinson work and people would race to be the first to observe the number of tell-tale em dashes, pleased that they were cleverer than the other readers for not being tricked.
    - 0xDEFACED 5mo ago
      i agree with the premise of the article. i also wish the author had cared enough about such an important topic to actually write about it themselves. doing otherwise disrespects the reader
      - 5mo ago
colingauvin 5mo ago
I'm not a MAGA or MAHA person. I just hate anecdotal pontificating about science. First of all, regarding the trans-fat discussion - in general, yes, keep trans fats low. However there are a couple important things to consider. One is that not all trans fats are created equal, and trans fats from animals are generally found to be less dangerous: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4301193/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4301193/ >. We found no relationship between R-TFA intake levels of up to 4·19 % of daily energy intake (EI) and changes in cardiovascular risk factors such as TC:HDL-C and LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C):HDL-C ratios (One author is from a dairy group, but that doesn't invalidate the data. Unfortunately this is par for the course with nutritional literature, a huge amount of it is "sponsored"). Another small sidebar is that there is of course the chance that monounsaturated turn into trans fats as well, and presumably those developed by seed oils would be riskier than those found in animal fats. But the data on that are sparse-to-nonexistant. The other thing that irks me here is the typical dietitian take is to see everything through the lens of food. It makes sense when you deal with cardiovascular patients, but cardiovascular patients are already already pre-selected for genetic risk, that represents up to or even greater than 90% of the signal in CV events. CV events are way more visible than whatever supposed systemic inflammation omega-6s provide, but it doesn't meant that they should be the sole guiding factor in policy. If anything, they are over-represented relative to more chronic effects. I'm not saying that there's some easy answer, just this whole article was annoyingly hand-wavy about science that we can actually mostly track.
- hombre_fatal 5mo ago
  That study is worthless. 1. TC:LDL and LDL:HDL? Always be suspicious of nonsense ratios. 2. Trials lasted 3 to 7 weeks. Atherosclerosis shows up in decades. 3. Almost nobody even hit the high intake range of 4.19% calories, everyone was clustered at the low end. 4. It was a null finding (CI crosses zero, underpowered, just looks at surrogate markers), not evidence of no effect. Do people who eat ruminant animals have better health outcomes in general? No, especially not better than people who, say, replace it with plant proteins. Which is why proponents try to focus on bad studies. We should be asking what is the best evidence, not cherry picking the worst evidence.
- 5mo ago
llm_nerd 5mo ago
"The food industry reformation underway isn’t making chips healthier; it’s swapping one fat for another inside the same ultra-processed product while everything else stays the same. " The same ignorance is driving the push to replace HFCS with sucrose. Vendors selling garbage products saw renewed life as now they can pretend they've made a change for good, and now it's somehow healthy. Like, people legitimately think a food is healthy if it has cane sugar. Both HFCS and sucrose are trash to consume. When bucolic, seemingly holistic "cane sugar" is added to an acidic cola it rapidly decomposes to glucose and fructose, in very similar ratios to HFCS. Not that it matters much as your enzymes cracks sucrose into those same components almost immediately after consumption anyways. And FWIW, when the anti-seed oil people need to refer to evidence, they always point to some old studies back when seed oils often came in trans-fat laden forms (an unenlightened period when sadly trans-fat filled margarines were wrongly seen as an improvement), during a period when we thought that was better than saturated fats. Since then there have been countless studies that not only demonstrate how incontestably better oils like canola[^note] are compared to animal fats, even some of the mythical claimed downsides like inflammation are not supported by the evidence whatsoever. [^note]: Bunching seed oils as one thing has always been ignorant. An oil like canola has an excellent omega 3 to 6 ratio. Other "seed" oils aren't as good in "raw" form, though they're better when used in high-heat situations. They all beat saturated fats in every real study.
- blowscum 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- hombre_fatal 5mo ago
  "Mexican coke" a good example of American attention when it comes to health and nutrition: instead of focusing on big impact things like exercise, fiber, vegetables, saturated fat, building sidewalks, blood lipids, etc, we're stuck obsessing over food dyes, 50% vs 55% fructose, seed oils. Probably because they let us feel like we're doing something for our health so we don't have to muster any real lifestyle change, like leaving our couch to go for a walk. Sweetie, did you get those cookies with the butter instead of the seed oils? Oh good, thank you. I don't eat seed oils! -- "Health conscious" fat guy who just ate 12 cookies. It would be funny, but these grifters are screwing over good people.
declan_roberts 5mo ago
> Back in the hospital, my patients are replacing olive oil with beef tallow This is a weird thing to call out since olive oil isn't a seed oil. Is the point that patients are confused? Does the author (a purported dietitian) not know this himself/herself?
- Cthulhu_ 5mo ago
  A few paragraphs into the article, the author addresses the "seed oil" misnomer; it's better to keep reading before jumping to the comments to do a knee-jerk comment to a single statement.
  - knollimar 5mo ago
    I read it and still was confused. The author flips back and forth on what they're purporting their patients think are bad
- kryogen1c 5mo ago
  >Does the author (a purported dietician) not know this him/herself? FTA: First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category. What we’re actually talking about are vegetable oils high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats
  - EnigmaCurry 5mo ago
    That may have been the dumbest line in the article, the oils in question, are made out of seeds.
    - anon84873628 5mo ago
      Olives are a fruit and yet they are disfavored by the movement. Coconuts are a seed but they are considered acceptable. And within seeds, maíz, soy, and safflower are all very different botanically.
      - 5mo ago
vjsrinivas 5mo ago
I feel like its another symptom of dying health institutions. These kinds of beliefs also lead people down other ridiculous roads. I've seen the thought process of someone go from: - replacing seed oils with animal-based oils - arguing against the role of LDL in increased CVD and events - building a more animal-centric and meat-heavy diet - using "looks-maxxing" terminology to describe their diet and associated beliefs around that diet - digging deeper into that subculture and believing our ancestors only ate meat - why do we eat plants or "goy-slop"? well because of [x] - extreme pseduo-science about other topics From a technological prespective, we all know that social media accelerates this thought pipeline by feeding people certain content. I also feel like Instagram orders comments in a certain way to specifically engage an individual user. Like making sure they see either a statement they'd agree with OR vehemently disagree with. This is regardless of the number of likes.
- hombre_fatal 5mo ago
  What happens is that you have to find ways to dismiss the body of evidence to take on positions like "beef tallow and butter are actually amazing for you". e.g. Since saturated fat is well-known to increase LDL/ApoB, and these people have high blood lipids because of it, they have to dismiss the research on it to continue believing it's healthy. It further entrenches them in a position where they can be convinced of absolutely anything because they've given up all epistemic standards which is why they overlap with all sorts of contrarian positions learned from social media and youtube videos.
  - vjsrinivas 5mo ago
    Exactly what I was getting at. Social media doesn't help since these algorithms can cocoon somebody from content that might challenge their notions.
Spide_r 5mo ago
This has a lot of ai-isms, wish they would share the pre-rewrite draft at this point.
- beej71 5mo ago
  If I take my 100%-handwritten prose and hand it to a detector, it tells me it's 30% AI. Those detectors are crap and they're training people to also be crap at it. I'm not changing how I write just to sound "less AI".
  - djmips 5mo ago
    That's something an AI would say.
    - beej71 5mo ago
      :-D
- sinuhe69 5mo ago
  Zero-GPT says it's human written, with a fairly low score of 11.4% for AI. I think I should mention this, as some people seem to try to kill the piece by branding it AI-ism.
  - knollimar 5mo ago
    [dead]
- knollimar 5mo ago
  It seems human written with certain paragraphs that stood out to me. It felt like they had an ai pad for wordcount, but there was definitely organic content in there (at least from my taste)
- badlibrarian 5mo ago
  Some HN readers are blind to this, others are obsessed with it. ChatGPT claims 900 million active weekly users. You really think a dietician who writes for the Minnesota Reformer (whatever that is), trying to get the word out about his current "evidence-based" whatever, isn't getting a little robo-coaching along the way? This one sure smells like a human article that went through Claude 4.6 with a "proofread, identify passive voice, increase clarity, adapt to house-style.md, and make it fit in X words" prompt. Maybe the editor did it. The issue is the quality of the writing, which still needs work whether an LLM was involved or not. Most sources (Forbes, Business Insider) require the author to sign a waiver that indemnifies. That's the chilling effect, not the AI tells.
InMice 5mo ago
I try to take the middle road: Making 50-75%+ of my calories come from refined, powderized carbs and sugar (original food pyramid) - Bad Eating whole foods, lightly cooked. Whole food starch sources, often retrograde starch. avoid high heat fried foods, eat mostly leaner meats - Good Declaring plants and seed oils evil, nothing but lard, tallow and red meat and a dozen eggs a day - Bad Two meals day with no snacking works for me. 3 meals a day feels like im stuffing myself.
- lopis 5mo ago
  If people got 75% of their calories from plant based whole foods, a lot of health problems would probably disappear overnight.
  - InMice 5mo ago
    I would agree
  - onion2k 5mo ago
    Is that even possible with the current food supply chain though?
    - Incipient 5mo ago
      It absolutely is in Australia, and I suspect Europe (from when I went 5 or so years ago). Even mostly possible in Houston when I was there 15 years ago. The US is even more cooked than I thought if you can get a bunch of fresh veggies from a grocery store.
      - cogman10 5mo ago
        > The US is even more cooked than I thought if you can get a bunch of fresh veggies from a grocery store. Depends entirely on where someone is. I'd say the majority of the population can get to fresh veg. But there are people, particularly in rural and poor communities, who are isolated from fresh or frozen veg. We have "dollar stores" which go up in the poorest communities and are usually a sure sign of a food desert. I'd say that anyone with a car can probably access fresh veg. They might have to travel some distance to do that.
alkonaut 5mo ago
Where is this panic? In the US? I don’t hear anything about it (in Europe).
- rsynnott 5mo ago
  It’s largely an American thing, but I’ve occasionally heard it from conspiracy-theory-prone (antivax etc) types in Ireland.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  Social media. Europe is not immune. I almost never hear about it in person. It’s always on some social media site. Often the sites where people think they’re not using normal social media, like Twitter or Reddit.
- atollk 5mo ago
  If you haven't already, you will. Expect supermarkets to start offering and marketing animal-based fats more frequently.
  - Esophagus4 5mo ago
    I was aware of the panic, but what I learned from this article is that food-makers are actually responding to it by changing their offerings.
  - watwut 5mo ago
    Local stores I go to had animal based fats the whole time. They are fairly cheap and easy to buy in big buckets. Sunflower oil is somewhat cheaper. But, I cant think of a single time I would had issue to buy animal fat (accross 4 different countries).
- mapontosevenths 5mo ago
  Yes. RFK Jr. was corruptly placed in charge of America's healthcare by Trump in exchange for dropping out as a presidential candidate. He is a conspiracist with no medical credeentials, and he believes, without evidence, that seed oils are response for most of the ills of mankind, Tylenol causes autism, SSRI's should not be prescribed, etc. None of his beliefs are mainstream or evidence backed, but he now has a huge megaphone.
zzzeek 5mo ago
I'd recommend https://myticker.com/ https://myticker.com/ which was shared here some time ago. I followed the advice on this site and actually got very bad news. But the good news would be, that I'm on a strict medication regimen now and maybe I'll live to see my son's graduation. RFK is killing people. it's what he does.
- debo_ 5mo ago
  I hope your interventions help, and that you live a long and healthy life.
  - zzzeek 5mo ago
    thanks, me too!
elchief 5mo ago
"eat less ultra-processed food" well, how do you think Canola Oil is made exactly? it's cracked, cooked, pressed, washed in hexane and acid, neutralized with caustic soda, bleached, deodorized on what planet is that not ultra processed? so, i should avoid ultra-processed food, except oils that are ultra-processed? whereas tallow, is...cut from meat i'm not suggesting you should only eat tallow, I'm just saying it's not ultra-processed.
- anon84873628 5mo ago
  Cows eating grain in concentrated feedlots and then made available in separate pieces all year round at the local grocery store... is also a modern industrial invention.
- bryanlarsen 5mo ago
  Sure, if you eat the tallow. People aren't doing that. They're using the tallow to make french fries etc. The problem is the french fries, not the oil choice. Eating beef tallow is self-limiting. It's hard to eat a lot of it directly. OTOH, it's really easy to eat a lot of French Fries.
  - starkparker 5mo ago
    > They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.
  - atollk 5mo ago
    No, that's just as wrong. French fries deep fried in Sunflower oil are also unhealthy. Adding a spoon of tallow to your tomato soup is also unhealthy.
- striking 5mo ago
  > There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. They’re naturally occurring, present in all beef fat, and according to cardiologists, present in tallow at levels far above what’s considered safe.
erelong 5mo ago
It seems like carnivores exist and have done things like lost weight and have good medical tests to see the impact of the diet in relation to their health, hence there has been a push to experiment with more animal products in the diet over seed oils / veggies at times
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > carnivores exist Cats are carnivores. We’re omnivores. Like bears. If you’ve ever come across bear scat, you’ll notice it’s usually plant material.
- anon84873628 5mo ago
  Yes, people putting effort into a "carnivore diet" can be healthy. The problem raised by the article is people continuing to follow their same eating patterns (namely, ultra-processed foods) while the fats have been swapped out.
  - vjsrinivas 5mo ago
    Externally "healthy". Any heavy red meat and high saturated fat diet can lead to CVD.
PowerElectronix 5mo ago
It seems ignorance is harder to cure than a heart condition.
- cyanydeez 5mo ago
  There really is this streak of blaming victims in the grift economy. Seems surreal that there's no longer anyone to blame for committing fraud and putting out bullshit medical, nutrition, etc. All hail the grifters.
  - thedougd 5mo ago
    When it goes all the way to the top, their question isn’t how should we stop them, it’s how can we get in on this?
avazhi 5mo ago
[flagged]
- swasheck 5mo ago
  the next season of natural selection just dropped. pop the corn (in olive oil, natch).
pessimizer 5mo ago
> A 2020 Cochrane meta-analysis of roughly 59,000 participants across 15 randomized controlled trials found that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced combined cardiovascular events by 21%. Cardiologists note that the risk reduction from this dietary substitution is comparable to the benefits of statin medications. We don’t make a habit of telling statin patients to stop their medication because of something they heard on a podcast. So what it found is a tiny difference, just like it did with statins, when all of the financing and an enormous amount of money was behind finding enough of a difference to justify the billions that get spent on statins and the category of marketing that relies on replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat. Additionally, the reason he chooses to focus on "combined cardiovascular events" is because that's the only place that any supportive number could be found. Mortality? Nah. Quality of life? Nah. Saturated fat vs. unsaturated fat was one of those things that seemed obvious when you looked at them naïvely, and made an intuitive guess about what their respective effects would be. The same as how we intuitively thought about salt's effect on blood pressure because of how cell walls work. It is sick how much of medical "research" is being targeted towards justifying interventions with 50-100 year old origins and whose scientific foundations have completely disappeared in the interim, but that careers, fortunes, and entire segments of the economy now rely on. Headline: "Intervention X doesn't work how we thought it does, but it still works!* (* based on study completed before we told you that the foundation for it had disappeared.)" Nothing I love more than dumb emotional manipulation delivered as an argument from authority, from a site called statnews. Just give me the goddamn statistics, and if studies about specific claims haven't been made, give me a non-insidious reason why no one would have bothered to check in decades. Especially when the checking costs millions, and the industries are worth hundreds of billions. I don't have an opinion on seed oils, other than that cheap ones destroy pans, countertops and appliances, and seem absolutely foul. Nutrition science is absolute garbage and mostly quackery, though. You might as well have a degree in old wives tales.
- mjamesaustin 5mo ago
  If you're interested in just the pure statistics and outcomes of scientific trials, I highly recommend https://nutritionfacts.org/ https://nutritionfacts.org/. It's a non-profit charity featuring numerous ~5 min videos highlighting specific findings across scientific studies about nutrition, with sources read directly and linked.
dj68k 5mo ago
I was into the second paragraph before I gave up. It's such AI-written slop that it makes me question any "science" this supposed "clinical dietitian" is trying to convince me of.
- icameron 5mo ago
  You didn’t miss much there was a paywall after the 3rd paragraph.
- bonsai_spool 5mo ago
  > It's such AI-written slop How do you figure? It's not obvious to me after skipping over the heart-string-pulling introduction
mmaunder 5mo ago
Fish, tree nuts, avocados and olive oil. Avoid butter, red meat and cheese. It’ll save your life.
- selectodude 5mo ago
  I’d rather be dead than not eat butter, red meat, and cheese. But yeah don’t cook your vegetables in animal fat, that’s stupid.
  - ElijahLynn 5mo ago
    Many people say that until they almost die. 350,000 people died of heart attacks in the US in 2025. A very preventable situation. Many more almost died. In many of those said they'd rather be dead than not eat butter, red meat and cheese.
    - hombre_fatal 5mo ago
      And if heart attack / stroke doesn't scare you, you can also think about atherosclerosis in your dick.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - selectodude 5mo ago
      Eh, I have a suicide attempt under my belt. I very sincerely mean it when I say give me steak and coke zero or give me death.
  - wwweston 5mo ago
    I absolutely said that about cheese. Then something happened I probably should have died from (80-90% of people don't make it). High blood pressure turned out to be a contributing factor. High salt consumption much of it from my favorite cheeses turned out to contribute to the high blood pressure. I learned to like swiss. And be modest in my consumption of tastier saltier cheeses. I no longer glibly tell people someday I'll be found dead of dairy poisoning with a smile. I would probably request cheese in a known last meal situation though. We should all enjoy things, and many of us can still stand to be more restrained in how we enjoy. And what.
aliasxneo 5mo ago
Seed oils tend to cause severe inflammation in my body like most other ultra-processed foods. This is more than conjecture, due to existing health conditions, I keep a very strict diet with a food journal. I was excluding them long before RFK Jr. came around with the MAHA stuff. Yet another thing thats been politicized I guess.
- flatline 5mo ago
  That could be a valid observation for n=1. There could be any number of reasons seed oils cause inflammation for you but do not the general populace, or not at numbers large enough to offset recommending them as a general rule. The politicization is coming directly from the Trump administration, as the article states - making spurious claims and eliding the science that backs up the contrary conclusions. Did you have some other idea of how this is being politicized?
  - aliasxneo 5mo ago
    I wouldn't pose it as anything more than n=1. I'm more empathizing with those being caught up in the politicization who may have more nuanced reasons they are being impacted beyond what the media puts out. > The politicization is coming directly from the Trump administration, as the article states - making spurious claims and eliding the science that backs up the contrary conclusions. Did you have some other idea of how this is being politicized? I read this a couple of times, but I'm still not really understanding the question. I directly attributed the politicization to RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement. So I'm not sure why you're asking if I had other ideas.
    - flatline 5mo ago
      I also think this is an interesting topic of research. I have had lifelong issues with chronic pain and always felt like diet influenced it, but I’ve never been able to isolate a single factor. I’be stopped cooking with low smoke point oils but it’s all guesswork at this point. Your phrasing about politics was potentially ambiguous, so I asked for clarification. People can mean many different things when they say something is political.
bob1029 5mo ago
Seed oils probably aren't ideal, but I also worry how much this narrative is distracting from the bigger problem of sugar consumption. Humans only have so much attention and discipline. It would be a shame to focus all that energy on a "no seed oil" diet only to wind up even more unhealthy. How many products with seed oil also contain some form of added sugar? I don't seem to have much issue with moderating the occasional bag of cheezits or goldfish, but the moment I start getting into cookies and ice cream it's like a junkie broke into my house.
- lithocarpus 5mo ago
  Two things can be harmful at once. I am curious which is worse in terms of contribution to modern chronic metabolic disease. In the case of ultra-processed/refined oils though, there is an argument to be made that these are novel foods that humans never ate until very recently. There aren't any old people who have been eating them their whole lives in the quantities we do now. This is probably true for industrially refined sugar too, but sugar is a more complex story since people have been concentrating plant sugars for a lot longer than they've been industrially refining oil for food. I'm not defending sugar though to be clear - I strictly avoid it and even avoid fruit juice and such. I know empirically for myself I feel terrible if I eat very much sugar. I also feel terrible if I eat much refined oil and I strictly avoid that too.
  - brippalcharrid 5mo ago
    They can also tend to be harmful in combination, such as in the case of relatively unstable unsaturated fatty acids going on to be glycated in the presence of sugars (some moreso than others); it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were examples such as this which fuelled a significant proportion of all "diseases of civilization".
  - sinuhe69 5mo ago
    Really? I don't know exactly how long people have been eating oil from olive, flax seed, sesame, coconut or palm nut, but I believe not under 6000–7000 years. But yeah, not the stuff we eat today.
sinuhe69 5mo ago
The US is probably the only country in the world where they put an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracy theorist with no-qualification whatsoever in charge of the public health.
kleton 5mo ago
> First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category. "Seed oils" (commonly used cooking oils extracted from plant seeds excluding coconut) are as valid of a construct as "reptiles" (quadrupeds excluding aves and mammals) or "fish" (vertebrates excluding quadrupeds)
- galangalalgol 5mo ago
  Cladisticaly aren't all mammals a type of bony fish?
  - kleton 5mo ago
    Yes. We are cladistically more related to a goldfish than it is to a shark.
andyjohnson0 5mo ago
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." - Michael Pollan
- flowerthoughts 5mo ago
  I don't know why, but this has always tickled me in a good way. It's like the best type of poetry. Extremely well phrased for my minimalist brain. And the opposite of Claude's commit messages. Maybe I should add this as an example in Claude.MD?
  - andyjohnson0 5mo ago
    > Extremely well phrased for my minimalist brain. Yes, short and to the point. And the most important part of the message is in the first phrase: eat food - not edible stuff that isn't food.
- macartain 5mo ago
  100% - have always loved Mr Pollan's pithy summary. I also like Alan Goldhamer's (I am paraphrasing): "There are two types of cardiologist; vegans, and the ones who haven't studied the data yet."
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
jdthedisciple 5mo ago
> The food industry reformation underway isn’t making chips healthier; it’s swapping one fat for another > A movement that threw out 421 pages of scientific recommendations... isn’t a revolt. It’s a rebrand > 20 counts of em-dashes in a single article Sorry but the usage of AI is too evident.
- djmips 5mo ago
  sigh, yeah - makes me side-eye the entire article.
yankee_dodge 5mo ago
The scariest part of this well-reasoned piece is the amount of trans fat in beef tallow. Trans fat is unbelievably destructive. A review in the New England Journal of Medicine 20 years ago [0] sent that message well. I doubt there has been any significant revision to the understanding of the physiology. [0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra054035 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra054035
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > the amount of trans fat in beef tallow Natural tallow doesn’t contain a lot of trans fat. The only way to consume trans fats in large quantities is through hydrogenated fats.
  - yankee_dodge 5mo ago
    True -- trans fat is 5-10% of beef fat [1] BUT "a lot" is not the standard when it comes to trans fat. The NEJM article makes the point that trans fat is damaging even in small quantities, like a single gram. It was a great day when trans fat was required to be listed on the Nutrition Facts Label. It spurred snack manufacturers to get it (mostly) out of their products. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6356151/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6356151/
lithocarpus 5mo ago
> There’s a secondary argument about oxidation — seed oils go rancid at high heat, producing potentially harmful compounds. This idea is chemically real and worth being thoughtful about (don’t reuse frying oil repeatedly). But the evidence that oxidation at home-cooking levels causes measurable harm in humans isn’t there. Even if oxidation at home-cooking levels doesn't cause harm, which I suspect that it does though to a lesser degree, two thirds of seed oil market in the US is industrial or prepared food, much of which does go rancid or is reused frying oil.
- anon84873628 5mo ago
  If that industrial prepared food switches to tallow I still have doubts about how much it is reused and what chemical changes it goes through...
  - lithocarpus 5mo ago
    Absolutely agree. I don't think I'd want industrially prepared stuff fried in tallow either. There is a chemical distinction in that tallow is mostly saturated fat which doesn't oxidize nearly as easily, so it might be less bad to fry with or re-fry with. But still.
    - nielsbot 5mo ago
      saturated fat is bad however: > A 2020 Cochrane meta-analysis of roughly 59,000 participants across 15 randomized controlled trials found that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced combined cardiovascular events by 21%. …about same difference as taking statins (per the article)
- analog31 5mo ago
  I work in an area that involves, among many other things, analysis of cooking oil in factories. It might be hard to pin down the terminology of "reused" frying oil, because many of the frying processes are continuous. The raw material goes through a vat of hot oil on a conveyer and comes out the other end dripping with oil The quality of the oil is continuously monitored, and new oil goes in while old oil goes out in the fried food itself. The crunchy and salty aspects make it palatable to eat oil. The oil doesn't actually spend a long time in the vat before coming out in the product.
JTbane 5mo ago
The seed oil panic is quite possibly the dumbest health craze of the decade- I saw a chef saying beef tallow was healthy!
cogogo 5mo ago
I was always under the impression that canola oil was mildly poisonous. It is sort of true in that it has euric acid but far below levels that can hurt you. I think I was confusing things with an event where industrial rapeseed oil in spain was sold as olive oil in the 80s and many people were poisoned. Also, TIL that canola is a portmandeu of canada and oil. All the above reference here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil
- eudamoniac 5mo ago
  Erucic acid being bad is a myth actually, look it up. Pretty much the entirety of China cooks with normal rapeseed oil with the high acid levels and they're just fine.
morgengold 5mo ago
Just kicking out seed oils replacing them with animal fat while still having a shitty diet is for sure of no help. But what I would like to know: how bad is having a lot of beef steak in the context of a mostly unprocessed food context? Like basically berries, nuts, eggs, vegetables, fruits + beef.
- nielsbot 5mo ago
  FTA: > There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. > The administration that declared it is “ending the war on saturated fat” has found a cooking fat that delivers more of the exact compounds most associated with cardiovascular mortality. MAHA is road paved with artery-clogging cholesterol, and they’re calling it a health revolution. The article seems worth reading. I found it informative. It’s not that the scariest compounds in seed oils aren’t considered dangerous, but they’re probably not in vegetable oils in significant enough levels. So that’s conspiratorial misunderstanding by the MAHA contingent.
  - leereeves 5mo ago
    Some recent research says that natural trans fats are not as dangerous as the industrial kind. https://www.reading.ac.uk/news/2026/Research-News/Natural-trans-fats-in-dairy-do-not-raise-heart-disease-risk https://www.reading.ac.uk/news/2026/Research-News/Natural-tr... https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nutres.2026.03.009 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nutres.2026.03.009
raintrees 5mo ago
I wonder where avocado oil lands?
stefantalpalaru 5mo ago
[dead]
port11 5mo ago
> My real worry about seed oil theory is that it’s a distraction. If you want to be healthier, we know ways you can change your diet that will help: Increase your overall diet “quality”. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Avoid processed food. Especially avoid processed meats. Eat food with low caloric density. Avoid added sugar. Avoid alcohol. Avoid processed food. > I know this is hard. You could even argue it’s unrealistic. That wouldn’t make it wrong. > Look, I wish strong seed oil theory were true. That would be great. All we’d have to do is reformulate our Cheetos with different oil, and then we could go on merrily eating Cheetos. Western diet without Western disease! Sadly, I think this is very unlikely. Dynomight has written an excellent article on seed oils. We have examples in our families of people with very bad diets, favouring tons of butter because ‘at least it’s not processed’. The research doesn't back this up. As the quote above suggests, we need to stop thinking of ‘magic bullets’ that’ll get us out of eating better. Added sugar and trans-fats might be the only true bullets. https://dynomight.net/seed-oil/ https://dynomight.net/seed-oil/
- WarmWash 5mo ago
  It seems like the person is fighting the good fight, maybe, but who is Dynomight? These random bloggers/influencers speaking from self-proclaimed high ground is in large part how we got in this mess. There are a gazillion people out there who know how to say the right things, to get the right minds, the click the right "follow" buttons, none of which has any bearing on truth, honesty, or accuracy.
  - stogot 5mo ago
    Bloggers quoting bloggers quoting instagrammers quoting TikTok
  - gruez 5mo ago
    >These random bloggers/influencers speaking from self-proclaimed high ground is in large part how we got in this mess. There are a gazillion people out there who know how to say the right things, to get the right minds, the click the right "follow" buttons, none of which has any bearing on truth, honesty, or accuracy. Did you get to the end? He addresses that. >I’ll just be honest. I think this view is completely indefensible. I feel embarrassed when I see people promoting it. You’re sure? How? I don’t see any way to get to this conclusion other than heavily filtering the evidence—ignoring the flaws in everything that supports a predetermined view while scrambling to find flaws in everything that contradicts it. >Again, I’m sure you can send me long lists of random citations. (You don’t need to send them; it’s OK; I’ve seen them already.) But for anything that’s been studied in detail, there’s always lots of evidence to support any semi-plausible view. Do you have any idea how much evidence people can produce for UFOs or chronic Lyme or colloidal silver?
johnea 5mo ago
The maniverse, "wellness", MAHA, microbe denial, vaccine denial, and wing-nut politics in general are never going to be good for health care outcomes. The worst aspect being the closure of healthcare providers in rural areas, since they don't provide enough profit. See this later post: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02474-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02474-9 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260331
drukenemo 5mo ago
The advice that surfaces here when a healthy-eating article is posted always leave me surprised. “Don’t eat added sugars, or only very rarely”. Have you looked around and seen the infinite amount of delicious food available literally everywhere? Sure, make an effort to reduce those, but to me cutting out those is akin to recommending someone to be celibate or not to ever commit a sin. Those ultra virtuous (and maybe boring) people who can live 100% on a perfect diet of fish and vegetables are like catholic priests advising everyone to join them in their renouncing of the wonders of life. Sugar (in all its forms) in moderation is probably a net positive in life quality than living an ideal life and rejecting a cake at your nephew’s birthday party because “you don’t eat poison”. Relax a bit people, eat nutritious meals most of the time, watch your caloric intake and enjoy your life.
- eudamoniac 5mo ago
  The thing is, once you have a healthy diet, those sickly sweet things don't taste very delicious anymore. Like, on the rare occasion I have a soda now, it literally tastes like an extremely sweet syrup that I cannot easily drink much of. You kind of sound like a porn addict glorifying extreme BDSM porn while denigrating those boring people who just have sex with their wives. What you have is an acquired taste, one that can also be disacquired without much loss.
johnea 5mo ago
The comments here have some of the highest bullshit content of any I've read on HN in recent memory. The author's frustration is palpable in the article. People being misled by some twitverse influenza, while ignoring a long history of clinical trial data. To me the solution seems simple: let people do whatever stupid-ass thing they want to do. Calmly inform them of the proven risks, then let them make their own choices. If they suffer chronic heart disease, and/or die younger, that was their choice and they suffered the consequences. As the old hippie chicks used to say: Beans and Greens are all you need.

165 points by randycupertino 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

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kayo_20211030 5mo ago

Yeah. True, I feel. The signaling and recommendations have gone both overboard and data-free. The end results might be bad.

fabian2k 5mo ago

The media and the scientific community are not set up for the situation where cranks with absurdly unscientific views are at the top of the major scientific and health authorities. RFK Jr. still gets too much benefit of the doubt for his initiatives when it is obvious that he is opposed to science and has views about health that are just outright dangerous. And we have the usual problem with this administration that there are so many different dangerous things happening that it's hard to concentrate efforts on fighting them. It got a bit quieter, probably due to some internal pushback, but RFK Jr. is still working on dismantling the US vaccination programs. And similar to the seed oil panic in the article, all the demonization of vaccines will result in a terrible price that some children will pay in the future.

DoctorOetker 5mo ago
[flagged]
- fabian2k 5mo ago
  Modern medicine saves lives. Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society. But you're suggesting that letting children die from preventable diseases is a bad thing. It's not.
  - DoctorOetker 5mo ago
    > Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society. It doesn't matter how authoritatively you state it, but wanting it not to matter is not the same as it not applying. It still applies modulo some distortion by "egalitarian healthcare". Every time you have a cold or whatever is a moment you are statistically less likely to reproduce. When a potential mate approaches you but sneezes all over itself, it has an influence on your attraction towards this mate. If only things were so simple as state them in a voice of authority... Is it in the interest of the group, and of future children that they inherit deficiencies at higher rates simply because we apply healthcare? What exactly is "civilized" about our healthcare behavior?
- hombre_fatal 5mo ago
  So what? Technology gives us free lunch after free lunch. And in the not so distant future we can just gene-edit our offspring, the ultimate free lunch.
  - DoctorOetker 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tomhow 5mo ago
      This kind of comment is unwelcome on HN. Do not comment like this here. The notion that we should withhold medical care for the sake of genetic fitness of future generations is vile, no matter how much it's dressed up to seem scientifically valid. Please take some time to read all the HN guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - DoctorOetker 5mo ago
        Are you a visitor or a maintainer at HN? Triage or comparative loss is frequently applied in medical circles. Extending the concept of triage across generations is villified? Every triage involves loss and denying medical care, not talking about it doesn't make it cleaner. To improve triage outcomes, people must be able to discuss and argue triage decisions, that necessarily involves arguing effectively against certain care. If this platform must serve as a safe space for the feeble minded, I could consider exiting it, if the maintainers insist triage becomes a taboo subject.
ungreased0675 5mo ago
The reason RFK resonated with people is because the highly credentialed experts were not producing favorable outcomes. Results have to matter, right? We’ll see how successful (or not) RFK’s policies are, but let’s not revise history to where things were great right before he came in and ruined everything.
- rsynnott 5mo ago
  “We told people what not to eat based on the research, and they ignored us, so instead we should tell them what not to eat based on the ravings of random podcasters” is not a reasonable approach. There are approaches which seem to work (some combination of taxation, advertising bans, and mandatory warnings seems to basically have worked for tobacco, say), but they’d obviously be extremely unpalatable to industry. And they’re painfully slow; took decades for tobacco.

thih9 5mo ago

https://archive.is/zlSkz https://archive.is/zlSkz

phillipharris 5mo ago

[flagged]

edaemon 5mo ago
The author ran for city council where I live. From what I remember of him, it would be very out of character for him to use AI to write a health article.
kstrauser 5mo ago
#IAmVerySmart Edit: One of the few things I find more annoying than AI blogs is the gleeful rush to label everything as AI generated. It comes across as “I am so clever! You can’t fool me!” Meanwhile, that reads like a perfectly normal sounding thing for a human to have written. “This blog uses the word ‘the’ a lot. Sure sign of AI!”
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- chneu 5mo ago
  Yup. Anything someone disagrees with is now "written by ai" as if that invalidates what was written.
  - kstrauser 5mo ago
    I don’t think it’s even that. Someone could post an Emily Dickinson work and people would race to be the first to observe the number of tell-tale em dashes, pleased that they were cleverer than the other readers for not being tricked.
  - 0xDEFACED 5mo ago
    i agree with the premise of the article. i also wish the author had cared enough about such an important topic to actually write about it themselves. doing otherwise disrespects the reader
    - 5mo ago

colingauvin 5mo ago

I'm not a MAGA or MAHA person. I just hate anecdotal pontificating about science. First of all, regarding the trans-fat discussion - in general, yes, keep trans fats low. However there are a couple important things to consider. One is that not all trans fats are created equal, and trans fats from animals are generally found to be less dangerous: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4301193/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4301193/ >. We found no relationship between R-TFA intake levels of up to 4·19 % of daily energy intake (EI) and changes in cardiovascular risk factors such as TC:HDL-C and LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C):HDL-C ratios (One author is from a dairy group, but that doesn't invalidate the data. Unfortunately this is par for the course with nutritional literature, a huge amount of it is "sponsored"). Another small sidebar is that there is of course the chance that monounsaturated turn into trans fats as well, and presumably those developed by seed oils would be riskier than those found in animal fats. But the data on that are sparse-to-nonexistant. The other thing that irks me here is the typical dietitian take is to see everything through the lens of food. It makes sense when you deal with cardiovascular patients, but cardiovascular patients are already already pre-selected for genetic risk, that represents up to or even greater than 90% of the signal in CV events. CV events are way more visible than whatever supposed systemic inflammation omega-6s provide, but it doesn't meant that they should be the sole guiding factor in policy. If anything, they are over-represented relative to more chronic effects. I'm not saying that there's some easy answer, just this whole article was annoyingly hand-wavy about science that we can actually mostly track.

hombre_fatal 5mo ago
That study is worthless. 1. TC:LDL and LDL:HDL? Always be suspicious of nonsense ratios. 2. Trials lasted 3 to 7 weeks. Atherosclerosis shows up in decades. 3. Almost nobody even hit the high intake range of 4.19% calories, everyone was clustered at the low end. 4. It was a null finding (CI crosses zero, underpowered, just looks at surrogate markers), not evidence of no effect. Do people who eat ruminant animals have better health outcomes in general? No, especially not better than people who, say, replace it with plant proteins. Which is why proponents try to focus on bad studies. We should be asking what is the best evidence, not cherry picking the worst evidence.
5mo ago

llm_nerd 5mo ago

"The food industry reformation underway isn’t making chips healthier; it’s swapping one fat for another inside the same ultra-processed product while everything else stays the same. " The same ignorance is driving the push to replace HFCS with sucrose. Vendors selling garbage products saw renewed life as now they can pretend they've made a change for good, and now it's somehow healthy. Like, people legitimately think a food is healthy if it has cane sugar. Both HFCS and sucrose are trash to consume. When bucolic, seemingly holistic "cane sugar" is added to an acidic cola it rapidly decomposes to glucose and fructose, in very similar ratios to HFCS. Not that it matters much as your enzymes cracks sucrose into those same components almost immediately after consumption anyways. And FWIW, when the anti-seed oil people need to refer to evidence, they always point to some old studies back when seed oils often came in trans-fat laden forms (an unenlightened period when sadly trans-fat filled margarines were wrongly seen as an improvement), during a period when we thought that was better than saturated fats. Since then there have been countless studies that not only demonstrate how incontestably better oils like canola[^note] are compared to animal fats, even some of the mythical claimed downsides like inflammation are not supported by the evidence whatsoever. [^note]: Bunching seed oils as one thing has always been ignorant. An oil like canola has an excellent omega 3 to 6 ratio. Other "seed" oils aren't as good in "raw" form, though they're better when used in high-heat situations. They all beat saturated fats in every real study.

blowscum 5mo ago
[flagged]
hombre_fatal 5mo ago
"Mexican coke" a good example of American attention when it comes to health and nutrition: instead of focusing on big impact things like exercise, fiber, vegetables, saturated fat, building sidewalks, blood lipids, etc, we're stuck obsessing over food dyes, 50% vs 55% fructose, seed oils. Probably because they let us feel like we're doing something for our health so we don't have to muster any real lifestyle change, like leaving our couch to go for a walk. Sweetie, did you get those cookies with the butter instead of the seed oils? Oh good, thank you. I don't eat seed oils! -- "Health conscious" fat guy who just ate 12 cookies. It would be funny, but these grifters are screwing over good people.

declan_roberts 5mo ago

> Back in the hospital, my patients are replacing olive oil with beef tallow This is a weird thing to call out since olive oil isn't a seed oil. Is the point that patients are confused? Does the author (a purported dietitian) not know this himself/herself?

Cthulhu_ 5mo ago
A few paragraphs into the article, the author addresses the "seed oil" misnomer; it's better to keep reading before jumping to the comments to do a knee-jerk comment to a single statement.
- knollimar 5mo ago
  I read it and still was confused. The author flips back and forth on what they're purporting their patients think are bad
kryogen1c 5mo ago
>Does the author (a purported dietician) not know this him/herself? FTA: First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category. What we’re actually talking about are vegetable oils high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats
- EnigmaCurry 5mo ago
  That may have been the dumbest line in the article, the oils in question, are made out of seeds.
  - anon84873628 5mo ago
    Olives are a fruit and yet they are disfavored by the movement. Coconuts are a seed but they are considered acceptable. And within seeds, maíz, soy, and safflower are all very different botanically.
    - 5mo ago

vjsrinivas 5mo ago

I feel like its another symptom of dying health institutions. These kinds of beliefs also lead people down other ridiculous roads. I've seen the thought process of someone go from: - replacing seed oils with animal-based oils - arguing against the role of LDL in increased CVD and events - building a more animal-centric and meat-heavy diet - using "looks-maxxing" terminology to describe their diet and associated beliefs around that diet - digging deeper into that subculture and believing our ancestors only ate meat - why do we eat plants or "goy-slop"? well because of [x] - extreme pseduo-science about other topics From a technological prespective, we all know that social media accelerates this thought pipeline by feeding people certain content. I also feel like Instagram orders comments in a certain way to specifically engage an individual user. Like making sure they see either a statement they'd agree with OR vehemently disagree with. This is regardless of the number of likes.

hombre_fatal 5mo ago
What happens is that you have to find ways to dismiss the body of evidence to take on positions like "beef tallow and butter are actually amazing for you". e.g. Since saturated fat is well-known to increase LDL/ApoB, and these people have high blood lipids because of it, they have to dismiss the research on it to continue believing it's healthy. It further entrenches them in a position where they can be convinced of absolutely anything because they've given up all epistemic standards which is why they overlap with all sorts of contrarian positions learned from social media and youtube videos.
- vjsrinivas 5mo ago
  Exactly what I was getting at. Social media doesn't help since these algorithms can cocoon somebody from content that might challenge their notions.

Spide_r 5mo ago

This has a lot of ai-isms, wish they would share the pre-rewrite draft at this point.

beej71 5mo ago
If I take my 100%-handwritten prose and hand it to a detector, it tells me it's 30% AI. Those detectors are crap and they're training people to also be crap at it. I'm not changing how I write just to sound "less AI".
- djmips 5mo ago
  That's something an AI would say.
  - beej71 5mo ago
    :-D
sinuhe69 5mo ago
Zero-GPT says it's human written, with a fairly low score of 11.4% for AI. I think I should mention this, as some people seem to try to kill the piece by branding it AI-ism.
- knollimar 5mo ago
  [dead]
knollimar 5mo ago
It seems human written with certain paragraphs that stood out to me. It felt like they had an ai pad for wordcount, but there was definitely organic content in there (at least from my taste)
badlibrarian 5mo ago
Some HN readers are blind to this, others are obsessed with it. ChatGPT claims 900 million active weekly users. You really think a dietician who writes for the Minnesota Reformer (whatever that is), trying to get the word out about his current "evidence-based" whatever, isn't getting a little robo-coaching along the way? This one sure smells like a human article that went through Claude 4.6 with a "proofread, identify passive voice, increase clarity, adapt to house-style.md, and make it fit in X words" prompt. Maybe the editor did it. The issue is the quality of the writing, which still needs work whether an LLM was involved or not. Most sources (Forbes, Business Insider) require the author to sign a waiver that indemnifies. That's the chilling effect, not the AI tells.

InMice 5mo ago

I try to take the middle road: Making 50-75%+ of my calories come from refined, powderized carbs and sugar (original food pyramid) - Bad Eating whole foods, lightly cooked. Whole food starch sources, often retrograde starch. avoid high heat fried foods, eat mostly leaner meats - Good Declaring plants and seed oils evil, nothing but lard, tallow and red meat and a dozen eggs a day - Bad Two meals day with no snacking works for me. 3 meals a day feels like im stuffing myself.

lopis 5mo ago
If people got 75% of their calories from plant based whole foods, a lot of health problems would probably disappear overnight.
- InMice 5mo ago
  I would agree
- onion2k 5mo ago
  Is that even possible with the current food supply chain though?
  - Incipient 5mo ago
    It absolutely is in Australia, and I suspect Europe (from when I went 5 or so years ago). Even mostly possible in Houston when I was there 15 years ago. The US is even more cooked than I thought if you can get a bunch of fresh veggies from a grocery store.
    - cogman10 5mo ago
      > The US is even more cooked than I thought if you can get a bunch of fresh veggies from a grocery store. Depends entirely on where someone is. I'd say the majority of the population can get to fresh veg. But there are people, particularly in rural and poor communities, who are isolated from fresh or frozen veg. We have "dollar stores" which go up in the poorest communities and are usually a sure sign of a food desert. I'd say that anyone with a car can probably access fresh veg. They might have to travel some distance to do that.

alkonaut 5mo ago

Where is this panic? In the US? I don’t hear anything about it (in Europe).

rsynnott 5mo ago
It’s largely an American thing, but I’ve occasionally heard it from conspiracy-theory-prone (antivax etc) types in Ireland.
Aurornis 5mo ago
Social media. Europe is not immune. I almost never hear about it in person. It’s always on some social media site. Often the sites where people think they’re not using normal social media, like Twitter or Reddit.
atollk 5mo ago
If you haven't already, you will. Expect supermarkets to start offering and marketing animal-based fats more frequently.
- Esophagus4 5mo ago
  I was aware of the panic, but what I learned from this article is that food-makers are actually responding to it by changing their offerings.
- watwut 5mo ago
  Local stores I go to had animal based fats the whole time. They are fairly cheap and easy to buy in big buckets. Sunflower oil is somewhat cheaper. But, I cant think of a single time I would had issue to buy animal fat (accross 4 different countries).
mapontosevenths 5mo ago
Yes. RFK Jr. was corruptly placed in charge of America's healthcare by Trump in exchange for dropping out as a presidential candidate. He is a conspiracist with no medical credeentials, and he believes, without evidence, that seed oils are response for most of the ills of mankind, Tylenol causes autism, SSRI's should not be prescribed, etc. None of his beliefs are mainstream or evidence backed, but he now has a huge megaphone.

zzzeek 5mo ago

I'd recommend https://myticker.com/ https://myticker.com/ which was shared here some time ago. I followed the advice on this site and actually got very bad news. But the good news would be, that I'm on a strict medication regimen now and maybe I'll live to see my son's graduation. RFK is killing people. it's what he does.

debo_ 5mo ago
I hope your interventions help, and that you live a long and healthy life.
- zzzeek 5mo ago
  thanks, me too!

elchief 5mo ago

"eat less ultra-processed food" well, how do you think Canola Oil is made exactly? it's cracked, cooked, pressed, washed in hexane and acid, neutralized with caustic soda, bleached, deodorized on what planet is that not ultra processed? so, i should avoid ultra-processed food, except oils that are ultra-processed? whereas tallow, is...cut from meat i'm not suggesting you should only eat tallow, I'm just saying it's not ultra-processed.

anon84873628 5mo ago
Cows eating grain in concentrated feedlots and then made available in separate pieces all year round at the local grocery store... is also a modern industrial invention.
bryanlarsen 5mo ago
Sure, if you eat the tallow. People aren't doing that. They're using the tallow to make french fries etc. The problem is the french fries, not the oil choice. Eating beef tallow is self-limiting. It's hard to eat a lot of it directly. OTOH, it's really easy to eat a lot of French Fries.
- starkparker 5mo ago
  > They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.
- atollk 5mo ago
  No, that's just as wrong. French fries deep fried in Sunflower oil are also unhealthy. Adding a spoon of tallow to your tomato soup is also unhealthy.
striking 5mo ago
> There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. They’re naturally occurring, present in all beef fat, and according to cardiologists, present in tallow at levels far above what’s considered safe.

erelong 5mo ago

It seems like carnivores exist and have done things like lost weight and have good medical tests to see the impact of the diet in relation to their health, hence there has been a push to experiment with more animal products in the diet over seed oils / veggies at times

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> carnivores exist Cats are carnivores. We’re omnivores. Like bears. If you’ve ever come across bear scat, you’ll notice it’s usually plant material.
anon84873628 5mo ago
Yes, people putting effort into a "carnivore diet" can be healthy. The problem raised by the article is people continuing to follow their same eating patterns (namely, ultra-processed foods) while the fats have been swapped out.
- vjsrinivas 5mo ago
  Externally "healthy". Any heavy red meat and high saturated fat diet can lead to CVD.

PowerElectronix 5mo ago

It seems ignorance is harder to cure than a heart condition.

cyanydeez 5mo ago
There really is this streak of blaming victims in the grift economy. Seems surreal that there's no longer anyone to blame for committing fraud and putting out bullshit medical, nutrition, etc. All hail the grifters.
- thedougd 5mo ago
  When it goes all the way to the top, their question isn’t how should we stop them, it’s how can we get in on this?

avazhi 5mo ago

[flagged]

swasheck 5mo ago
the next season of natural selection just dropped. pop the corn (in olive oil, natch).

pessimizer 5mo ago

> A 2020 Cochrane meta-analysis of roughly 59,000 participants across 15 randomized controlled trials found that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced combined cardiovascular events by 21%. Cardiologists note that the risk reduction from this dietary substitution is comparable to the benefits of statin medications. We don’t make a habit of telling statin patients to stop their medication because of something they heard on a podcast. So what it found is a tiny difference, just like it did with statins, when all of the financing and an enormous amount of money was behind finding enough of a difference to justify the billions that get spent on statins and the category of marketing that relies on replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat. Additionally, the reason he chooses to focus on "combined cardiovascular events" is because that's the only place that any supportive number could be found. Mortality? Nah. Quality of life? Nah. Saturated fat vs. unsaturated fat was one of those things that seemed obvious when you looked at them naïvely, and made an intuitive guess about what their respective effects would be. The same as how we intuitively thought about salt's effect on blood pressure because of how cell walls work. It is sick how much of medical "research" is being targeted towards justifying interventions with 50-100 year old origins and whose scientific foundations have completely disappeared in the interim, but that careers, fortunes, and entire segments of the economy now rely on. Headline: "Intervention X doesn't work how we thought it does, but it still works!* (* based on study completed before we told you that the foundation for it had disappeared.)" Nothing I love more than dumb emotional manipulation delivered as an argument from authority, from a site called statnews. Just give me the goddamn statistics, and if studies about specific claims haven't been made, give me a non-insidious reason why no one would have bothered to check in decades. Especially when the checking costs millions, and the industries are worth hundreds of billions. I don't have an opinion on seed oils, other than that cheap ones destroy pans, countertops and appliances, and seem absolutely foul. Nutrition science is absolute garbage and mostly quackery, though. You might as well have a degree in old wives tales.

mjamesaustin 5mo ago
If you're interested in just the pure statistics and outcomes of scientific trials, I highly recommend https://nutritionfacts.org/ https://nutritionfacts.org/. It's a non-profit charity featuring numerous ~5 min videos highlighting specific findings across scientific studies about nutrition, with sources read directly and linked.

dj68k 5mo ago

I was into the second paragraph before I gave up. It's such AI-written slop that it makes me question any "science" this supposed "clinical dietitian" is trying to convince me of.

icameron 5mo ago
You didn’t miss much there was a paywall after the 3rd paragraph.
bonsai_spool 5mo ago
> It's such AI-written slop How do you figure? It's not obvious to me after skipping over the heart-string-pulling introduction

mmaunder 5mo ago

Fish, tree nuts, avocados and olive oil. Avoid butter, red meat and cheese. It’ll save your life.

selectodude 5mo ago
I’d rather be dead than not eat butter, red meat, and cheese. But yeah don’t cook your vegetables in animal fat, that’s stupid.
- ElijahLynn 5mo ago
  Many people say that until they almost die. 350,000 people died of heart attacks in the US in 2025. A very preventable situation. Many more almost died. In many of those said they'd rather be dead than not eat butter, red meat and cheese.
  - hombre_fatal 5mo ago
    And if heart attack / stroke doesn't scare you, you can also think about atherosclerosis in your dick.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - selectodude 5mo ago
    Eh, I have a suicide attempt under my belt. I very sincerely mean it when I say give me steak and coke zero or give me death.
- wwweston 5mo ago
  I absolutely said that about cheese. Then something happened I probably should have died from (80-90% of people don't make it). High blood pressure turned out to be a contributing factor. High salt consumption much of it from my favorite cheeses turned out to contribute to the high blood pressure. I learned to like swiss. And be modest in my consumption of tastier saltier cheeses. I no longer glibly tell people someday I'll be found dead of dairy poisoning with a smile. I would probably request cheese in a known last meal situation though. We should all enjoy things, and many of us can still stand to be more restrained in how we enjoy. And what.

aliasxneo 5mo ago

Seed oils tend to cause severe inflammation in my body like most other ultra-processed foods. This is more than conjecture, due to existing health conditions, I keep a very strict diet with a food journal. I was excluding them long before RFK Jr. came around with the MAHA stuff. Yet another thing thats been politicized I guess.

flatline 5mo ago
That could be a valid observation for n=1. There could be any number of reasons seed oils cause inflammation for you but do not the general populace, or not at numbers large enough to offset recommending them as a general rule. The politicization is coming directly from the Trump administration, as the article states - making spurious claims and eliding the science that backs up the contrary conclusions. Did you have some other idea of how this is being politicized?
- aliasxneo 5mo ago
  I wouldn't pose it as anything more than n=1. I'm more empathizing with those being caught up in the politicization who may have more nuanced reasons they are being impacted beyond what the media puts out. > The politicization is coming directly from the Trump administration, as the article states - making spurious claims and eliding the science that backs up the contrary conclusions. Did you have some other idea of how this is being politicized? I read this a couple of times, but I'm still not really understanding the question. I directly attributed the politicization to RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement. So I'm not sure why you're asking if I had other ideas.
  - flatline 5mo ago
    I also think this is an interesting topic of research. I have had lifelong issues with chronic pain and always felt like diet influenced it, but I’ve never been able to isolate a single factor. I’be stopped cooking with low smoke point oils but it’s all guesswork at this point. Your phrasing about politics was potentially ambiguous, so I asked for clarification. People can mean many different things when they say something is political.

bob1029 5mo ago

Seed oils probably aren't ideal, but I also worry how much this narrative is distracting from the bigger problem of sugar consumption. Humans only have so much attention and discipline. It would be a shame to focus all that energy on a "no seed oil" diet only to wind up even more unhealthy. How many products with seed oil also contain some form of added sugar? I don't seem to have much issue with moderating the occasional bag of cheezits or goldfish, but the moment I start getting into cookies and ice cream it's like a junkie broke into my house.

lithocarpus 5mo ago
Two things can be harmful at once. I am curious which is worse in terms of contribution to modern chronic metabolic disease. In the case of ultra-processed/refined oils though, there is an argument to be made that these are novel foods that humans never ate until very recently. There aren't any old people who have been eating them their whole lives in the quantities we do now. This is probably true for industrially refined sugar too, but sugar is a more complex story since people have been concentrating plant sugars for a lot longer than they've been industrially refining oil for food. I'm not defending sugar though to be clear - I strictly avoid it and even avoid fruit juice and such. I know empirically for myself I feel terrible if I eat very much sugar. I also feel terrible if I eat much refined oil and I strictly avoid that too.
- brippalcharrid 5mo ago
  They can also tend to be harmful in combination, such as in the case of relatively unstable unsaturated fatty acids going on to be glycated in the presence of sugars (some moreso than others); it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were examples such as this which fuelled a significant proportion of all "diseases of civilization".
- sinuhe69 5mo ago
  Really? I don't know exactly how long people have been eating oil from olive, flax seed, sesame, coconut or palm nut, but I believe not under 6000–7000 years. But yeah, not the stuff we eat today.

sinuhe69 5mo ago

The US is probably the only country in the world where they put an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracy theorist with no-qualification whatsoever in charge of the public health.

kleton 5mo ago

> First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category. "Seed oils" (commonly used cooking oils extracted from plant seeds excluding coconut) are as valid of a construct as "reptiles" (quadrupeds excluding aves and mammals) or "fish" (vertebrates excluding quadrupeds)

galangalalgol 5mo ago
Cladisticaly aren't all mammals a type of bony fish?
- kleton 5mo ago
  Yes. We are cladistically more related to a goldfish than it is to a shark.

andyjohnson0 5mo ago

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." - Michael Pollan

flowerthoughts 5mo ago
I don't know why, but this has always tickled me in a good way. It's like the best type of poetry. Extremely well phrased for my minimalist brain. And the opposite of Claude's commit messages. Maybe I should add this as an example in Claude.MD?
- andyjohnson0 5mo ago
  > Extremely well phrased for my minimalist brain. Yes, short and to the point. And the most important part of the message is in the first phrase: eat food - not edible stuff that isn't food.
macartain 5mo ago
100% - have always loved Mr Pollan's pithy summary. I also like Alan Goldhamer's (I am paraphrasing): "There are two types of cardiologist; vegans, and the ones who haven't studied the data yet."

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

jdthedisciple 5mo ago

> The food industry reformation underway isn’t making chips healthier; it’s swapping one fat for another > A movement that threw out 421 pages of scientific recommendations... isn’t a revolt. It’s a rebrand > 20 counts of em-dashes in a single article Sorry but the usage of AI is too evident.

djmips 5mo ago
sigh, yeah - makes me side-eye the entire article.

yankee_dodge 5mo ago

The scariest part of this well-reasoned piece is the amount of trans fat in beef tallow. Trans fat is unbelievably destructive. A review in the New England Journal of Medicine 20 years ago [0] sent that message well. I doubt there has been any significant revision to the understanding of the physiology. [0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra054035 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra054035

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> the amount of trans fat in beef tallow Natural tallow doesn’t contain a lot of trans fat. The only way to consume trans fats in large quantities is through hydrogenated fats.
- yankee_dodge 5mo ago
  True -- trans fat is 5-10% of beef fat [1] BUT "a lot" is not the standard when it comes to trans fat. The NEJM article makes the point that trans fat is damaging even in small quantities, like a single gram. It was a great day when trans fat was required to be listed on the Nutrition Facts Label. It spurred snack manufacturers to get it (mostly) out of their products. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6356151/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6356151/

lithocarpus 5mo ago

> There’s a secondary argument about oxidation — seed oils go rancid at high heat, producing potentially harmful compounds. This idea is chemically real and worth being thoughtful about (don’t reuse frying oil repeatedly). But the evidence that oxidation at home-cooking levels causes measurable harm in humans isn’t there. Even if oxidation at home-cooking levels doesn't cause harm, which I suspect that it does though to a lesser degree, two thirds of seed oil market in the US is industrial or prepared food, much of which does go rancid or is reused frying oil.

anon84873628 5mo ago
If that industrial prepared food switches to tallow I still have doubts about how much it is reused and what chemical changes it goes through...
- lithocarpus 5mo ago
  Absolutely agree. I don't think I'd want industrially prepared stuff fried in tallow either. There is a chemical distinction in that tallow is mostly saturated fat which doesn't oxidize nearly as easily, so it might be less bad to fry with or re-fry with. But still.
  - nielsbot 5mo ago
    saturated fat is bad however: > A 2020 Cochrane meta-analysis of roughly 59,000 participants across 15 randomized controlled trials found that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced combined cardiovascular events by 21%. …about same difference as taking statins (per the article)
analog31 5mo ago
I work in an area that involves, among many other things, analysis of cooking oil in factories. It might be hard to pin down the terminology of "reused" frying oil, because many of the frying processes are continuous. The raw material goes through a vat of hot oil on a conveyer and comes out the other end dripping with oil The quality of the oil is continuously monitored, and new oil goes in while old oil goes out in the fried food itself. The crunchy and salty aspects make it palatable to eat oil. The oil doesn't actually spend a long time in the vat before coming out in the product.

JTbane 5mo ago

The seed oil panic is quite possibly the dumbest health craze of the decade- I saw a chef saying beef tallow was healthy!

cogogo 5mo ago

I was always under the impression that canola oil was mildly poisonous. It is sort of true in that it has euric acid but far below levels that can hurt you. I think I was confusing things with an event where industrial rapeseed oil in spain was sold as olive oil in the 80s and many people were poisoned. Also, TIL that canola is a portmandeu of canada and oil. All the above reference here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil

eudamoniac 5mo ago
Erucic acid being bad is a myth actually, look it up. Pretty much the entirety of China cooks with normal rapeseed oil with the high acid levels and they're just fine.

morgengold 5mo ago

Just kicking out seed oils replacing them with animal fat while still having a shitty diet is for sure of no help. But what I would like to know: how bad is having a lot of beef steak in the context of a mostly unprocessed food context? Like basically berries, nuts, eggs, vegetables, fruits + beef.

nielsbot 5mo ago
FTA: > There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. > The administration that declared it is “ending the war on saturated fat” has found a cooking fat that delivers more of the exact compounds most associated with cardiovascular mortality. MAHA is road paved with artery-clogging cholesterol, and they’re calling it a health revolution. The article seems worth reading. I found it informative. It’s not that the scariest compounds in seed oils aren’t considered dangerous, but they’re probably not in vegetable oils in significant enough levels. So that’s conspiratorial misunderstanding by the MAHA contingent.
- leereeves 5mo ago
  Some recent research says that natural trans fats are not as dangerous as the industrial kind. https://www.reading.ac.uk/news/2026/Research-News/Natural-trans-fats-in-dairy-do-not-raise-heart-disease-risk https://www.reading.ac.uk/news/2026/Research-News/Natural-tr... https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nutres.2026.03.009 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nutres.2026.03.009

raintrees 5mo ago

I wonder where avocado oil lands?

stefantalpalaru 5mo ago

[dead]

port11 5mo ago

> My real worry about seed oil theory is that it’s a distraction. If you want to be healthier, we know ways you can change your diet that will help: Increase your overall diet “quality”. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Avoid processed food. Especially avoid processed meats. Eat food with low caloric density. Avoid added sugar. Avoid alcohol. Avoid processed food. > I know this is hard. You could even argue it’s unrealistic. That wouldn’t make it wrong. > Look, I wish strong seed oil theory were true. That would be great. All we’d have to do is reformulate our Cheetos with different oil, and then we could go on merrily eating Cheetos. Western diet without Western disease! Sadly, I think this is very unlikely. Dynomight has written an excellent article on seed oils. We have examples in our families of people with very bad diets, favouring tons of butter because ‘at least it’s not processed’. The research doesn't back this up. As the quote above suggests, we need to stop thinking of ‘magic bullets’ that’ll get us out of eating better. Added sugar and trans-fats might be the only true bullets. https://dynomight.net/seed-oil/ https://dynomight.net/seed-oil/

WarmWash 5mo ago
It seems like the person is fighting the good fight, maybe, but who is Dynomight? These random bloggers/influencers speaking from self-proclaimed high ground is in large part how we got in this mess. There are a gazillion people out there who know how to say the right things, to get the right minds, the click the right "follow" buttons, none of which has any bearing on truth, honesty, or accuracy.
- stogot 5mo ago
  Bloggers quoting bloggers quoting instagrammers quoting TikTok
- gruez 5mo ago
  >These random bloggers/influencers speaking from self-proclaimed high ground is in large part how we got in this mess. There are a gazillion people out there who know how to say the right things, to get the right minds, the click the right "follow" buttons, none of which has any bearing on truth, honesty, or accuracy. Did you get to the end? He addresses that. >I’ll just be honest. I think this view is completely indefensible. I feel embarrassed when I see people promoting it. You’re sure? How? I don’t see any way to get to this conclusion other than heavily filtering the evidence—ignoring the flaws in everything that supports a predetermined view while scrambling to find flaws in everything that contradicts it. >Again, I’m sure you can send me long lists of random citations. (You don’t need to send them; it’s OK; I’ve seen them already.) But for anything that’s been studied in detail, there’s always lots of evidence to support any semi-plausible view. Do you have any idea how much evidence people can produce for UFOs or chronic Lyme or colloidal silver?

johnea 5mo ago

The maniverse, "wellness", MAHA, microbe denial, vaccine denial, and wing-nut politics in general are never going to be good for health care outcomes. The worst aspect being the closure of healthcare providers in rural areas, since they don't provide enough profit. See this later post: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02474-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02474-9 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260331

drukenemo 5mo ago

The advice that surfaces here when a healthy-eating article is posted always leave me surprised. “Don’t eat added sugars, or only very rarely”. Have you looked around and seen the infinite amount of delicious food available literally everywhere? Sure, make an effort to reduce those, but to me cutting out those is akin to recommending someone to be celibate or not to ever commit a sin. Those ultra virtuous (and maybe boring) people who can live 100% on a perfect diet of fish and vegetables are like catholic priests advising everyone to join them in their renouncing of the wonders of life. Sugar (in all its forms) in moderation is probably a net positive in life quality than living an ideal life and rejecting a cake at your nephew’s birthday party because “you don’t eat poison”. Relax a bit people, eat nutritious meals most of the time, watch your caloric intake and enjoy your life.

eudamoniac 5mo ago
The thing is, once you have a healthy diet, those sickly sweet things don't taste very delicious anymore. Like, on the rare occasion I have a soda now, it literally tastes like an extremely sweet syrup that I cannot easily drink much of. You kind of sound like a porn addict glorifying extreme BDSM porn while denigrating those boring people who just have sex with their wives. What you have is an acquired taste, one that can also be disacquired without much loss.

johnea 5mo ago

The comments here have some of the highest bullshit content of any I've read on HN in recent memory. The author's frustration is palpable in the article. People being misled by some twitverse influenza, while ignoring a long history of clinical trial data. To me the solution seems simple: let people do whatever stupid-ass thing they want to do. Calmly inform them of the proven risks, then let them make their own choices. If they suffer chronic heart disease, and/or die younger, that was their choice and they suffered the consequences. As the old hippie chicks used to say: Beans and Greens are all you need.