The foods we eat today have higher amounts of Omega 6. Theres a ratio between omega 6 and omega 3, 3:1, 2:1 for healthy omega 6 to omega 3 balance. when Omega 6 is high it seems to correlate to autoimmune disease and allergic diseases along
> The notion that modern culinary oils containing high amounts of PUFA, particularly LA, are inflammatory is an idea that has managed to permeate virtually every diet camp imaginable. The paleo/ancestral nuts believe it. The vegan/plant-based nuts believe it. The keto/carnivore nuts believe it. Zealots belonging to Ray Peat's diet cult definitely believe it too. But is there actually evidence for this claim from human experiments?
Intrigued?
Make sure you’re not just regurgitating things to be true that you’ve merely heard repeated a thousand times online. Because that got me too not long ago.
The anti seed oil sophistry is one of the most ubiquitous nutrition misconceptions today. On social media, at least.
I don't buy any specific anti-seed-oil claims, but it generally seems like a bad idea to dramatically change where people get a high % of their calories from using a food source that has has in some cases (canola) never before been consumed in humans and in others was consumed only in much smaller quantities. The safest bet is probably to eat diets as closely resembling those of your healthy ancestors as reasonably possible. Human biology is so insanely complex that we're simply never in our lifetimes going to be able to intelligently meddle here.
That we evolved with a food doesn’t mean it’s better for us. There’s an antagonistic pleiotropic effect where our genes make trade offs for our fertile years at the incidental expense of our long term health, and that also incurs trade offs made with so called “ancestral” foods.
I also don’t see how a naturalistic fallacy is more convincing than human health outcome data. If novel foods like canola oil are worse than adapted foods like saturated fats, how come health outcomes improve when you swap saturated fat with canola oil?
In other words, if our best nutrition intervention data doesn’t meet your standard of evidence, then what is the alternative that does? Hand waving over some cozy claims about ancestral foods, evidence be damned?
Specific studies on human health outcomes for different diets show wildly varying things. I’ve seen studies that show terrible effects and studies that show positive effects for canola oil. I also know there’s a huge reproducibility crisis and that I can only critique these studies so far. You say the “best data” shows you’re right, and I’ve seen people with a lot of credentials and other studies that say they’re right that it’s bad.
But what I can do is look at the data we have for overall current human health outcomes, which are absolutely catastrophic considering the advances in medical technology. Clearly we’re eating something we shouldn’t, being exposed to something we shouldn’t, and/or doing things we shouldn’t, on a mass scale, beginning relatively recently.
These seems like as decent a culprit as any. The fact some shmuck in the 1870s London cesspool had a better life expectancy than me is disturbing. We’re clearly doing something massively wrong. I can’t control for pollutants and I get as much activity as I can, and diets the only other thing I can try to control. When we have bad outcomes and multiple changes at once, all I know to do is try to roll back the changes I have control over.
You also have to be careful about how you determine what a "negative" health outcome is. A lot of leaps are taken in the conclusions of papers about various studies.
Thanks for sharing. This is an intriguing article and I'm very impressed with the depth of research, site design, and logical debate quality of the several paragraphs I've read (so far). I've been looking for great takedowns of the anti-PUFA advice (I love fatty fish and omega 3s!) so looking forward to reading the rest.
It's worth noting that this site appears to be the same type of "extreme diet camp" that the author pokes fun at. He appears to be a vegan (https://twitter.com/TheNutrivore) and advocate for pro-vegan views. Overall he seems to have the same epistemology MO as, eg., Ray Peat -- a cranky obsessive lay-person who primarily blogs at length for topics that interest him. I picked another article off his site at random and his own biases become quite apparent (https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-systematic-appraisal-of...).
The above preamble has no bearing on the PUFA question! I personally love cranky obsessive bloggers and genuinely look forward to reading more from this site. Open and honest debate, ftw.
I don’t understand. The blog author’s epistemological standard is set at the balance of evidence that we have available to us. I don’t think you can do better than that, else you’re left with sophistry, convenient falsehoods, and zealotry.
Who cares which “camp” you reason yourself into if you actually reasoned yourself into it using real arguments and scrutinized syllogisms?
Most people don’t do anything like that. We usually just defend our creature comforts or we, for example, decide what we want to eat and then work backwards to cling on to anything that seems like it might validate us.
Meanwhile, Have you read Ray Peat? He’s the opposite of someone reasoning about the balance of evidence which is why he spends most of his time talking about the bottom of the hierarchy of evidence; anecdotes and rat studies.
It's not just seed oils, the same accusations are made about the "modern" diet in general regarding ratios of various fats. The thing about seed oil in particular seems to be a newer fad.
That study says that the risk factor is red meat consumption, not seed oils:
> The typical American and Northern European diet is high in omega-6 FAs, with the average person having an omega-6 to omega-3 FA intake ratio between 15:1 and 18:1. These populations tend to overconsume red meat and underconsume unprocessed oils and cold-water fish.
You can google what foods have high omega 6:3 ratio - plant seed oils are just one culprit of many. Livestock is largely fed corn derived feed so that’s why our meat is high in omega 6 content.
So, stick to canola oil over olive oil if you want lower omega 6 ratios. Stick to unsaturated fats over sat fats.
People who fixate on omega 6 and seed oils usually dismiss the downsides of saturated fat, as a rule. They will go on about the dangers of seed oil based on something that isn’t scientific consensus, yet the overwhelming balance of evidence against saturated fat doesn’t meet their
epistemic standard.
processed seed oils are in most foods we eat