Moreover, when it comes to dietary and oncology studies, mechanistic explanations by themselves are generally insufficient to draw a causal link. There are _tens of thousands_ of active mechanisms that mediate metabolism and inflammation. You would need high-quality, long-term studies linking one to the other. If anything we may have possible found one mechanism. That mechanism could be easily counteracted by a dozen others, who knows.
I wouldn't call this a nothingburger but it seems far more likely than not that this is just a continuation of bored Western researchers trying to pin the blame on seed oils for humanity's sins.
I wholeheartedly agree with the author that the effects of these oils are understudied, and that they came to have a reputation as "healthy" through an extreme oversimplification of nutrition designed as more a marketing campaign than an actual scientific inquiry into what's best for human bodies, but this type of propagandizing was wrong when the people who invented seed oils used it to gain prominence and it's wrong now that the anti-seed-oil crowd is using it to combat that prominence. Foods can't be sorted into buckets labelled "always bad and to be minimized at all costs" and "always good and to be maximized at all costs", the answer to whether something is "good for you" is always that it depends on your current situation and goals. But the only culture less ready to receive a message like that than the product-oriented culture of the last few generations is the attention-oriented culture of this and proceeding generations. No one wants "limit fat intake overall with an eye toward overall calorie consumption and try to balance different sources as a matter of principle so that you're not exposed to both known and unknown risks of a highly specialized diet", everyone wants "buy this not that" and everyone wants to feel like there's a big secret that they're in on.
Feel free to get into an edit war on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_oil_misinformation
Centrino•3mo ago