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

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.

"In the quiet space between us, there wasn’t room left to argue."

AI writing^

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/

>. 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.

"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, though they still beat saturated fats in every real study.

> 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?

I feel like its another symptom in the decay of trust in 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.

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

I try to take the middle road:

Making 50-75%+ of my calories come from refined, powderized carbs (original food pyramid) - Bad

Eating whole foods, lightly cooked. Whole food starch sources, often retrograde starch. avoid high heat fried foods, eat 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.