It's not that seed oils are inherently bad, it is the industrial processing that makes them bad for you. If you are fine with consuming trace amounts of hexane then go for it. I will stick with olive and avocado oil.
A recent study shown trace hexane in most French milk because we feed a lot of our livestock with de-oiled soy which is the other side of the extraction process.
The same traces are found in de-cafeined coffee and many d’avoir extracts.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others have said that seed oils are poisoning Americans. The medical community mostly rejects those claims, but they are causing problems for farmers.
If you look at the top of HN, the top posts are usually not ones containing "scientific information". Why does this one need to meet that standard, especially when the claim it's debunking isn't based on scientific information either?
which actually not only mentions scientific papers including big meta-studies, but actually links to them. That's rare these days. Maybe the consumer reports article should be the main article, though.
Foods with high amounts of seed oils tend to be cheap unhealthy garbage. Fried fast food, sugary crap, etc. I suppose these health concerns are a simple matter of correlation vs causation.
While it’s true that many foods that use seed oils—such as packaged snacks and french fries—are unhealthy, they also tend to be high in refined carbohydrates, sodium, and sugar. “Sure, if you cut back on these foods, chances are you’re going to feel better,” Crosby said. But these other components, not the seed oils themselves, are the culprit behind weight gain and other negative health outcomes.
~ from the main article.
That said, the title really should be "Scientist dismisses claims ..." (singular) as it's a press release that quotes a single scientist who no longer works for Harvard and who asserts that no scientific papers find the seed oils to have health risks.
He may well be correct in that assertion, but that has to be taken as hearsay.
He's a Harvard professor and scientist who spent years studying it. I'll just take his word for it, unless you have better credentials or proof to the contrary.
I have scientific credentials of my own and I report scientific and technical data for a living. Please reread what I wrote and correct any mistakes I made.
To clarify further, factually,
* in 2022 he was reported as being adjunct associate of nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
* Today he is unlisted on the staff rolls of Harvard.
* In 2022 he was reported to have made a statement that "scientific evidence does not support these claims, according to experts" where the claims in question were reported to be that "that seed oils such as canola and soy are “toxic,”".
While I personally have no belief that seed oils are in any way toxic I will strongly note, and urge you to see for yourself, that there is ample room for the opposite to slip through,
* whoever reported the statement claimed to have been made by Guy Crosby may have made an error in presenting a claim for Crosby for comment or in reporting back Crosby's response.
* of all the papers that Crosby has read he may have not read one or several that reveal a toxin (yes, this is unlikely but possible, no human has read their complete field).
> I'll just take his word for it,
"His word" in this press release is hearsay. The text of the press release was not written by him. It is not uncommon for people quoted in press releases to take issue with how their actual position has been reported.
You arent wrong to note the deficiencies in the linked source. Still, did you click through to read the consumer reports article this blog post acrually about?
It itemizes the claims of seed oil opponents, then links to peer reviewed studies to refute most of them. All seem to be from reputable journals. None of the linked papers note that they've been retracted. Nobody is citing Facebook here, unlike some proponents of the theory that seed oil is the number one cause of "inflamation" or whatever.
That's pretty solid reporting, and exceeds my standard of evidence when it comes to health reporting for the most part.
Admittedly, linking to the blog instead of the actual article was silly.
This wasn't published in an academic journal. It was published on the News page of Harvard's School of Public Health. It's PR/publicity for the school. The purpose of the post wasn't to appease industry donors, but to call attention to a Consumer Reports article that quoted someone from Harvard. The news post is just about bragging rights for the school. The Consumer Reports article seems to be a high-quality article, though still written for the general public rather than an academic journal.
Universities publishing media summaries of work done by their faculty is extremely common. If you want details, you are expected to click through and read the real thing.
"Hey look at this neat thing one of faculty did" is not some nefarious thing.
In my experience, in all of academia, Harvard dietary research is the shoddiest and the most biased, given their historical strong ties to Seventh Day Adventists which are notoriously pro-vegetarianism and pro-veganism.
Dietary science is as rigorous as astrology, and then there's commercial and religious interests to consider. The same institute can post research showing how a particular diet is better against another, and months later, publish the exact opposite. Given it's all tantamount to bullshit, N=1 anecdotes have greater validity than anything that's posted in press releases.
Wikipedia suffers from the same bias problem in dietary matters. It still defines low carb as a "fad", for heaven's sake.
(LOL at flagging OP's comment - what's going on these days that anything slightly disagreeing with the hivemind is worth being shadow-banned?)
> with the supposed goal of appeasing industry donors
I've literally no clue why this strange thing fell out of the sky coming from seemingly nowhere. Are you angry Harvard doesn't comply with your imaginary goal posts? I don't get it.
Did you click on any of those links aside from the final one to the Consumer Reports article? All the other links are merely to listings of blog posts with the given tag. There's nothing specific or even human-curated about where those links point. They add no value to the article.
Anyone who believes this- have the same product- popcorn- dip- wrap or whatever- in a seed oil variety and a non seed oil variety. Test it yourself. I feel incredibly sluggish and irritable after seed oil additives.
I know a number of people who claim how bad MSG is for them, and humanity. The effect vanishes or reverses when you do a proper double-blind test. In other words, the effect seems to depend on the suggestion. Source: Wikipedia.
The MSG-scam, the alleged link between autism and vaccination and the seed oil craze each go back to single persons who published claims that for some reason went viral.
In my limited experience, claims like these (flat Earth, Moon Hoax, chemtrails...) went viral because they were outlandish, unsupportable claims not backed by science and sometimes even contradicting personal observation. Some people (and I'd say it's more likely to be scientifically not very literate persons) have a predisposition to latch onto bull crap. Let's call people with this trait '(social(ly)) influenceables' because they're frequently the audience to whatever social influencers choose to spew out.
You could present an influenceable with a multiple choice test where possible or plausible theories are presented as answers next to a highly improbable or impossible one, and they sure as hell will agree with the improbable one.
So this (if my impression is not skewed, which is very possible) would suggest that while not very scientifically literate, influenceable persons still have an acute sense for what counts as generally accepted and what counts as fringe theory. They don't have to, and they wouldn't (apart from the ongoing background activity of rumors that always float through the hearsay space). But we're not living in ordinary times, our society is in deep crisis, and for some reason, as in the 1930s, fringe theories and mysticism seem to have become attractive again.
Well, apparently attractive enough for the U.S. government to peddle outlandish health-related theories.
Gotta protect those precious greasy canola seed dollars, right? Seriously, does anyone even believe this?? I'm guessing High Fructose Corn Syrup doesn't cause diabetes either... As soon as some health investigator has a look at one of their profitable products, a squad of "scientists" rush to the scene to officially deboink the myth that it gives you heart disease. What a joke. And a sad one at that.
The specific claim being debunked is that seed oils are particularly bad ("toxic") for you compared to other oils. Which is not supported by evidence.
As you note, there's plenty of evidence that a high fat diet causes assorted health issues. Seed oils specifically are not a disproportionately strong culprit.
