Seed Oils

37:10This is completely dis-synchronous with our evolution. we would never have been grinding soybeans up into oil. We didn't have the ability to do this. And then you can get into all of the reasons this might be doing this. But, you know, as I kind of dug into this, it gets a little bit deep in the weeds, but at a molecular level, these polyunsaturated fats, they act differently in our body. And we don't fully have this figured out. But at the level of our mitochondria, it does look like these polyunsaturated fats, this linoleic acid-rich vegetable oil, is signaling things differently. Jesus. I think it's really, there's a lot of compelling evidence to suggest that linoleic acid is driving adipocyte hypertrophy, meaning fat cells are getting bigger.

37:50Fat cells can do two things. They can get bigger or they can divide. When fat cells get big and they don't divide, they eventually start leaking out inflammatory mediators, leaking out free fatty acids. You start to see this interesting set of data that points to the fact that maybe all these excess linoleic acid is driving our fat cells to get really big, but isn't allowing them to divide the way they're supposed to. his like stock in trade is throwing a bunch of like large vocabulary words at you yes sciencey words sciencey words and at this time he's tweeting under the handle carnivore md he does have a medical degree but in psychiatry he didn't study nutrition what he does is he throws all these big words at you these things that make it seem like aha i'm like this big expert but like he doesn't actually have any training in this most of the stuff that he says is not very true he's trying to obfuscate his lack of knowledge with big words rather than just being like hey there's big words let me explain it to you we were talking earlier about um like clues to what he's doing and like who his audience might be we're finding out here that his audience is specifically joe rogan yeah yeah just like big words were and like i brought a visual aid and joe rogan's like whoa like all right the other sort of very funny epilogue to this episode is that paul saladino No, it's not even clear that he was on the carnivore diet when he went on Joe Rogan.

39:09Oh my God. He says he was only on it for a year, a year and a half. In 2022, he makes a video of like, why I'm not on the carnivore diet anymore. And he says that when he was on the carnivore diet, he says he experienced lower testosterone, sleep disturbances, heart palpitations, and muscle cramps. He also talks about how, you know that thing right before you fall asleep where you kind of jerk? Yeah, a hypnic jerk. He says like his jerks got way worse when he was on the carnivore diet so bad that he had to stop the carnivore diet. He's like, something is wrong with me. So you went on Joe Rogan for three hours.

39:46You didn't talk about one downside of the carnivore diet. You're selling a book called The Fucking Carnivore Code. Later on, you're like, oh, yeah, I like felt like shit when I was on the carnivore diet. Oh, you didn't want to tell us that? Like you didn't think, oh, there's pros and cons to this diet. What works for me might not work for you. He also, the minute, just like these fucking guys always do, the minute he goes off the carnivore diet, he then gives an interview to some like other podcaster where he's like, oh yeah, you know, being in ketosis, like, oh, it didn't work for me. And I think it's not good for other people either.

40:16So he like immediately starts like giving advice. And he's like, well, you know, the carnivore diet, a lot of that, you know, ketosis research, that's based on animals. And like you really just can't extrapolate from animal studies. I was like, you were talking about mouse studies on fucking Joe Rogan. That's like half of what you talked about was like a fat cells and fucking rats. Yeah. It just, again, like this is part of the challenge with the, like I experimented on myself and of one kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is that as you find that different practices work for you in different life phases or when you're dealing with different health conditions or when you're prioritizing different things, you are then sort of laundering your personal experience as some form of scientific knowledge that has been tested.

41:01That's all he's doing. I think it contributes to some of the weird murkiness that we have now about like people not really being able to read a scientific study without thinking that there ought to be individual instruction at the end of it and that kind of thing. So basically, right after the Joe Rogan, I got I was about to say experience right after the Joe Rogan episode. This does explode. Like you can see it in the Twitter data. It starts showing up on places like Breitbart and other right wing media sites. It's like the truth behind seed oils. Friend of the no one, Breitbart. So over the next couple of years, this spreads around into various groups.

41:36I just want to talk about a couple of the categories of people that get obsessed with seed oils. Oh, man. Can I make some guesses? You know what it's going to be. It's like different flavors. It's like a little Neapolitan of like the worst people in America. It's just it's a list of moon juice locations. yeah it's gonna be like gym bros and a bunch of these fucking jokers are gonna get caught selling beef tallow as an alternative so i'm sending you a tweet this is the first group that starts uh latching on to this this is someone named andrew torba whose username is at based torba that's the first thing i'll tell you that's how i know i don't know this guy because if i I've never seen that before.

42:22I would have really made a meal out of it. I hate these people, but I kind of love these people. It's like such parodies of themselves. What are you afraid of? Sunflowers? Based hobs. The profile picture is just you with a katana sword. Mine is at ripped podcaster. Wait, did I tell you? I got a random text from like this guy I met on the internet who I haven't seen in like six months. Randomly texted me at like nine in the morning. He's like, I don't know if I should be telling you this, but someone took your Grindr photos and uploaded them to Tumblr. It was on a Tumblr called Masculine Men. I was like, yes.

42:58So that's why my handle is at Hobbs Masculine. This is going to go right to his head. The thing is, as long as you don't see me moving or hear me speaking, I'm so masculine. As long as you don't know me in any capacity. I'm like so masculine. tune in next week when i show up on lady like women

43:20you know every time we record i text you afterwards i'm like was i mask enough on the show totally seems super mask and you also text me i'm so glad you crossed your legs at the ankle it's also funny to have that on the same day i checked our itunes reviews for uh if books could kill. And, and one of them was just, why is the woman talking so much? Yeah, the woman named Michael is talking a lot. All right, read this extremely problematic tweet. Sorry, from based Torba. Yeah, read the base Torba tweet. Kennedy banning seed oils in American food will be the most consequential policy initiative of the last century.

44:01No longer will our people be sick and chronically ill. No longer will they be jacked up on a cocktail of big pharma drugs for these diseases. People will be healthy and fit again. This will lead to family creation. This will lead to far more right wing voters. Half of the problem with liberalism is our miserable, drugged and diseased people. This single move solves it all. This one weird trick they don't want you to know about raising birth rates by eating less salad dressing one might call it based one might call this take based so this is the founder of gab which is like the mega mega right wing website one of his other uh tweets from earlier in his career is few societies have been sicker than the current year west and a large part of that sickness is due to jewish media and technology being used to psychologically and spiritually castrate its citizens.

45:00So these are not people that are doing like dog whistles. These are people that are just like whistling, like walking down the street whistling. Do the space lasers take part? Yeah, exactly. In the castration. So basically, this is like one of the transmitters of like seed oil misinformation starting after the Joe Rogan episode is just like straightforward, far right people. in 2021 and 2022, this also becomes a big thing among crypto people. Fucking of course. I'm sending you, again, kind of a good tweet from like a guy that runs like a Bitcoin exchange or something. Almost every one of these false quote unquote milks, oat, potato, pea, whatever, contains inflammatory seed oils, typically sunflower or canola.

45:46Is fleeting smugness really worth developing metabolic syndrome fuck off i sent this to every vegetarian i know

46:02speaking of being being a terrible person read his own uh reply to this wow the way these guys talk is so weird they're like they have this weird like cormac mccarthy way of doing like sick burns all the seed oil guzzlers seething in my mentions right now stay mad metabolically impaired and torpid thank you i will you can tell he had like the thesaurus open in like the other window if you think i'm not making myself a bumper sticker that says mad metabolically impaired and torpid you you got another thing coming the other group i want to talk about is I read this term in one of the academic articles that I saw and I cannot stop thinking about it.

46:49They called these people granola Nazis. You sort of know what they mean, right? The people who are, they're far right, but it's, it's the sort of almost left-wing messaging about like, we need to go back to the land. We need to have a less corporately dominated public sphere. Right. But it's also fundamentally very right-wing. Yeah. This is Liver King and all of his like quote unquote ancestral way of living stuff exactly very trad wife adjacent this whole seed oils thing it's kind of perfect right because it's like it's this ingredient that we're all eating a ton of that was invented in 1986 right like basically in a lab like it was bread it's now like a refined processed ingredient it fits really perfectly into this like modernity is killing us kind of narrative so the granola nazis really picked this up and one of the main granola Nazis that gets like super obsessed with this and just like tweets out seed oils constantly is a Twitter account called Carnivore Aurelius.

47:42I find this person very interesting as a kind of avatar of like the granola Nazi ideology. And so I spent a long time like scrolling through this guy's feed. You can find all kinds of other weird sort of sub B plot conspiracy theories. And I just want to go over them a little bit, partly because they're very funny and partly because like, I think there's like this tendency to sort of launder these people or to think like, oh, all they want is for like us to have better diets or all they want is for like Americans to be healthier. But this seed oil thing is kind of the tip of the iceberg of a bunch of just bizarre, deranged other narratives that are just not backed up by science and are oftentimes very openly reactionary.

48:23I will say just one thing. I need to close this tab, but there is a response, the next response down from all the seed oil guzzlers is uh someone responding and their response is just how has no one made a bitcoin milk yet aubrey we're done we can stop recording that's it we've reached keep granola that's a bitcoin milk sure why not someone probably fucking has for fuck's sake we live in hell It really delighted me so you can understand why I was reticent to close that tab without closing that loop first. So another thing the granola Nazis are really into is ball sunning. Sure. This is from Carnivore Aurelius.

49:12Considering throwing a dating festival for carnivore singles, steak eating, galas, good music, cow milking, bread baking, fighting, workouts, ball sunning. Good lord. This is the vision of the guerrilla Nazis. This is what we should all be doing on weekends. I love fighting. Don't forget, we're also going to be fighting. He also has one that says, wearing sunglasses in the sun makes you burn. Your body thinks you're indoors and doesn't produce your natural sunscreen, melanin. UV light striking your eyes is one of the main signals for your skin to start producing melanin. Michael. So I love there's no sunglasses truthers as well as the sunscreen truthers.

49:53Michael. He also responded to the Andrew Tate tweet where Andrew Tate was like, you people have never had real enemies. My new favorite tweet. Yeah, this might be your new new favorite tweet. This is also a very good response. Oh, I can't wait. Here is him responding to Andrew Tate. This is what seed oils do to your brain. The seed oils increase stress, disrupt hormones and lower thyroid function. despite having high tea loads of it is converting into estrogen causing balding anger and this pms i love it when the girlies are fighting it's like you guys have a blast god cis dudes accusing other cis dudes of pmsing and also the balding that like you have high tea but it is turning into estrogen due to seed oils everything about this is so funny it's because it's like little i keep thinking of the vine where that like a little like six-year-old kid is like you're messing with a future u.s army soldier like dumb little losers like play acting as like as like the rock or something it's like this is not convincing to anybody but also it's very funny to watch and i encourage it estrogen causes balding anger and this pms like you know how women are always walking around bald and angry and the thing is women are getting testosterone all the time but they're eating too much seed oils and that's what turns it into estrogen and that's the only reason we have women exactly because of the seed oils we started having women around the 50s 60s after the aha recommendations I was just getting to that part of the history.

51:37Yeah, women caused the obesity epidemic, famously. So that's kind of the way that the seed oil's panic is bouncing around on the right. There's like various different like flavors of it on the right. But then worryingly and inevitably, it also starts to bounce around the kind of more credible parts of either center right or just like center left. I am going to send you a excerpt from Chris Van Tilken's book on ultra-processed foods, which we talked about in that episode. Oil for ultra-processed food needs to be bland, plain, and flavorless so that it can be used to make any edible product. So manufacturers refine the oil by heating, using phosphoric acid to remove any gums and waxes, neutralize it with caustic soda, bleach it with a bentonite clay, and finally deodorize it using high-pressure steam.

52:32This is the process used to make soybean oil, palm oil, canola oil, and sunflower oil, four oils that make up 90 % of the global market. So in some ways he's doing the same thing that Paul Saladino is doing, where he's using a lot of like big words. He's like phosphoric acid, bentonite clay, deodorize. He's making this description of like processing seed oil as like lurid as possible. I think it's interesting that he focuses on like bleaching it and deodorizing it and not actually going like the purpose of those things is this. Right. Also, what's so interesting to me is like these people are obsessed with this idea that there's like trace elements in our food that are harming us, which, again, might actually be true.

53:14Like I'm actually open to that discussion as long as it's like evidence based. But the purpose of all of this process is to reduce the chances of that happening. Part of the reason they're doing this is to remove things like pesticides and like heavy metals, things that we don't actually want in our food supply. And it's sort of like you don't want these things, right? You're always talking about like how many particles of mercury are in the vaccines or whatever. Okay, so you don't want these trace elements. What would you like us to do about that? If you just like squeeze a, I don't want to say rapeseed because it sounds so bad, but like if you just squeeze a cottonseed and you get oil out of it, you don't want to just like be using that immediately.

53:51and also it would go rancid on the shelf relatively quickly which also poses food safety issues so like what do you actually want right people say processing and and he uses the term bleaching here and everybody always says like oh they're bleached which seems to imply that like they're adding bleach to the oils but what they actually do i mean for most of these processes if you look into it they're basically filtering it so the bleaching process is you add charcoal to the oil and charcoal loves to absorb little things like why people put charcoal on their face and like some people take like charcoal supplements you add charcoal to oil and it absorbs a bunch of these like little tiny trace materials and then you filter out the charcoal that process is called bleaching but nobody has bleached like added bleach to the oil during that right right it's not the stuff you have to put gloves on to use in your shower or whatever yeah and like you add phosphoric acid or oftentimes it's citric acid and then you like centrifuge it out so that those particles are but you're basically separating out the components of the oil but you're centrifuging it and then filtering it so you're kind of putting things in and then taking them out to make sure that you're only left with the oil maybe phosphoric acid is really bad for you maybe there's trace elements in the vegetable oil again this kind of requires actual science to show that these things are in the vegetable oils and they've been tested a million times like we just don't see large amounts in much of our life, much of culture, much of sort of the world.

55:18When there is new science, we greet that or new technology. We greet that as an advancement and an exciting evidence that we're like doing more of the right thing. And when it comes to food, we take that as like a harbinger of bad things. Right. And we take that as a frightening thing rather than going, wow, it's really cool that science has figured out how to make this oil shelf stable for a real long time and so lots of people can use it and it's pretty inexpensive and fewer people get sick from eating rancid oil and it's like not actually proven to be bad for you but if you describe it in this kind of way yeah then it will get people more to the point of being like oh yeah even before you get to presenting any evidence about it one way or the other so the only kind of part of this like ultra processed food sub narrative of seed oils that actually gave me pause was there's two ways of getting oil out of seeds.

56:13One way is to just like press them, right? This is like the cold expeller pressed, whatever you see this on labels. The other way to do it is with chemicals. So you can cut the seeds into little tiny flakes and add something called hexane to them. And hexane kind of like leeches out all of the oils. This is like super industrial. It's like, it's, it's cheaper than doing a press. It's more effective. So you get, I think it's like 80 % of the yield out of them rather than like 60%. It's much more efficient. And hexane is like straightforwardly toxic. So when people in these facilities are putting hexane on the crops, like they have to wear like hazmat suits.

56:47Like if you breathe in hexane, it's actually really bad for you. Again, this sounds terrible, right? It's like they're literally putting poison onto the seeds to extract the oil. And then like, yes, there are trace elements of hexane in vegetable oil. This is true. That is a true statement. I take it from you telling me about it. And also it is nuts to me. Like describing that in that way, we'll get a bunch of people freaked out about what they're eating, but won't get them freaked out about the safety of the workers who have to put on fucking hazmat suits. Right. The person paying the biggest price is the person doing the work to make that process happen.

57:21So when I first read about this in one of these like seed oil, anti-seed oil substacks or whatever, I was like, oh, this actually sounds pretty bad. But then I went to, there's various government reports on this. There's various academic reports on this. The first thing to know about hexane is that it evaporates at very low temperature. So they actually add hexane to seeds, get the oil out, and then they heat it up so that all of the hexane evaporates. And they actually capture the hexane and then they use it for like the next batch. You can just like keep doing this over and over. Very little is actually left in the seeds.

57:49And there's been dozens of studies on the hexane levels in vegetable oil. The fact that they're putting poison on the seeds to get the oil out is not something that like academics are not concerned about or that like the FDA is not concerned about like this is like oh yeah we should actually check like how much there is so this is an excerpt from a government report that was produced on this in studies of fully processed edible oil products carried out in the 1960s it was determined that hexane residues were generally at levels less than 10 parts per million investigations using more precise modern analysis techniques in 1987 concluded that residual hexane residues for refined food products would be less than two parts per million.

58:30If the standard assumption of 80 grams of fat consumed per person per day is made, such residual levels would be the equivalent of no more than 2.29 micrograms per kilogram per day, which is a toxologically insignificant amount. The most important phrase there is toxologically insignificant. That's me too. I'm also toxologically insignificant. There's also numerous tests on humans to just measure the amount of hexane in people's blood. So as part of the NHANES study, starting in 2009, they started testing for hexane, like how much hexane can we find in these people's tissues? And the levels were below the point where they can even detect them.

59:10According to this government report, the biggest risk of hexane exposure is actually a car exhaust. So for whatever reason, hexane is also present in car gasoline. And so if you live in an urban area, you're also getting exposed at very low levels to hexane. So the amount that you're getting in vegetable oil just isn't significant. And also there's other sources of this in the world that we're also getting exposed to at trace amounts. And we're not finding it in humans when we test them. What they're doing is they're clearly seizing on anything to say that like seed oils are poison. Like you can tell the motivated reasoning, right?

59:48They're like, how are they made? Oh, they put poison on them. Yes, there it is. But like people have been looking at this for decades. We just don't find large risks to the US population. It's a rhetoric that's relying on hanging out in your amygdala and freaking you out and not ever making its way into your frontal lobe. Now that the seed oils thing has kind of been folded into the ultra processed food issue, you find sort of articles about how bad seed oils are in like much more credible places. So this is from the Cleveland Clinic talking about like the lack of nutrients in seed oils, like all of the processing robs it of nutrients.

1:00:24So here's this. Some seed oils would be high in vitamin E and phenols if not for the refining process itself. But they're typically very processed to help with taste, color and shelf life. Quote, the processing of these oils strips the seeds of their nutrients and could potentially add harmful ingredients. The end result is oils with no real health benefits. The specific thing of like, they're being denuded of their nutrients is something you always find. Like they used to have antioxidants when they were like in the seeds, but now they don't have antioxidants. The research for this made me super pilled on vitamin E because you always hear like, oh, it strips the vitamin E out of the vegetable oil and butter is so high in vitamin E.

1:01:08If you look up vitamin E deficiency, vitamin E deficiency almost never happens in the United States. This is not something that you need to worry about. It's something that like premature babies often have a problem with absorbing fats. If you have Crohn's disease, you can have it. If you have like problems with your liver or kidney function, basically, if you have an underlying like pretty serious condition that affects your ability to absorb fat, then you need to worry about vitamin E. But dietary sources of vitamin E are just not something you need to worry about if you don't have a diagnosis of something like that.

1:01:39They're basically taking this thing that is essentially a marketing claim, like, ooh, look at all the vitamin E in this. And they're acting as if this is something you need to think about. Like you can go your whole life never thinking about your dietary sources of vitamin E. You just don't need to think about it. So the fact that something doesn't have vitamin E is just irrelevant information. It's kind of the same with the antioxidant thing. I mean, the antioxidants that are present in seed oils are present in like lots of stuff. I mean, even people who are eating at like the high end of seed oils, it's not that much of their consumption, right?

1:02:10It's like maybe a couple tablespoons a day. I mean, it is true that all of this processing that they do to oils does reduce the antioxidant count and like does reduce other nutrients. But they were never that high to begin with. You're not eating that much of them. And it just it just isn't really a meaningful contributor to your nutrient mix. There's been a similar sort of freak out over the last couple of years in like weight loss media spaces and particularly social media spaces about the idea of like cortisol face or cortisol belly or whatever. People just keep having to interview doctors going, you're talking about Cushing's syndrome.

1:02:46It's really rare and your body changes really drastically and really quickly. So like, you know, if you have it, it's not just, is this the reason why you're fatter than you want to be? like, yeah, that's not the same thing as like a medical condition. And it just feels like, you know, especially in a media landscape that includes things like the like Everly Well home food intolerance tests and that kind of thing, that we are sort of constantly muddying the water between personal practices that make you feel a little better and like health conditions that are known and treatable everyone is reaching for this way of like legitimizing whatever their dietary stuff is or health stuff is by reaching for like clinical language right which ends up further sort of blurring the line so we're sort of moving toward better and better arguments against seed oils like we started with like seed oils are destroying our birth rates from like the super far right like that's just bananas we then get to the stuff of like they're putting chemicals in it and like maybe it leaches out nutrients that's like roughly true but kind of like not meaningfully true in a way that anybody needs to worry about by far the best argument against seed oils is the balance of omega-6s versus omega-3s so i am going to send you an excerpt from a guy named mark hyman this is a doctor who do you know him just much requested we've gotten so many dr Hyman requests.

1:04:15I know. This is one of those guys, there's so many like MDs, like social media MDs. I'm so concerned about this. This is a guy who is one of the main sources of like seed oils misinformation, starting relatively early. He actually started writing about it in 2016. He's also, I believe, the founder of what he calls the Pagan diet. What is that? Paleo and vegan. Wait, so does that mean if you're paleo and raw, it's the PAW diet? let's keep going let's do this for the rest of that we've all done the same yes and we've been talking about which puns are too sweaty and which are not sweaty enough so let's just really hone in so here is mark hyman on seed oils did you know those who consume high levels of refined oils and low levels of omega-3 fats have higher rates of depression suicide and homicide People who eat seed oils have a higher rate of homicide as wild.

1:05:16In prehistoric times, our ancestors consumed omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids in the healthy ratio one to one. Since the advent of refined vegetable oils, however, most of us are eating far more omega-6s than we should. The ratio can get up to 20 to one for people who eat a lot of processed foods. This claim also shows up in the Maha report. It says, seed oils contribute to an imbalanced omega-6, omega-3 ratio, a topic of ongoing research for its potential role in inflammation. This is a very common claim about seed oils that they have too many omega-6s and this ratio of omega-6s versus omega-3s is basically causing chronic inflammation.

1:05:59It's like what is making us sick? Sort of the implication here is that foods as they are naturally produced already reflect a one to one ratio of omega sixes and omega threes. And I don't know that that's true. This omega three omega six ratio thing as an argument against seed oils is also kind of funny because canola oil is pretty high in omega threes. Canola oil is around 10 % omega threes. Olive oil is only 1 % omega threes. That's funny. I've seen debunkings of the seed oil thing that will be like, well, just because our paleolithic ancestors ate a certain way doesn't mean we have to which is true yeah however did our paleolithic ancestors eat a one-to-one ratio no michael i didn't go galaxy brain enough we've been doing this show for so long and i should have known so this claim that our ancestors ate a one to one ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s appears to have originated with like one lady so there's a researcher named Artemis Simopoulos, who is a nutrition researcher.

1:07:01She writes the omega diet in 1999. She's like early on the train of like omega-3s will fix us, omega-6s are poison. But what I've noticed in her work, I mean, she's been publishing stuff about this for like 20 years. She often cites herself. So she'll say like human beings evolved consuming a diet that contained equal omega-3s and omega-6s. And then it's like footnote 14. And you go to footnote 14 and it's Like, Simopolis, 1999. Oh, no. First of all, it's very sketchy to not just have a clear citation for something like that. Like, that's an empirical claim. When you finally follow back all of her citations, she doesn't really have any basis for saying this.

1:07:38She eventually links to a couple of anthropological reports of current hunter-gatherer societies where they do surveys of, like, caloric intake. But these surveys only include saturated versus unsaturated fats. And omega-3s and omega-6s are both unsaturated fats. So they're not really looking at that ratio. basically she is extrapolating from the amount of animal foods that these current hunter-gatherer societies are eating to say well animal foods tend to be higher in omega-3s therefore if they're eating a lot of animal foods then they're going to be getting more omega-3s than present-day humans the problem with that however is like if you actually read the literature the main thing that sticks out to you is the diversity so i mean there are like hunter-gatherer societies that are eating like 70 % of their calories from various, you know, meats and dairy kinds of products.

1:08:24But there's also some that are eating like 10%. Sure. It's just really facile to say like, well, our ancestors ate a one to one ratio. You know, we were talking earlier about like, we have these sort of filters around political misinformation and disinformation, but less so we don't exercise those in the same way when it comes to like health and wellness stuff. When a political figure harkens back to some sort of like rhetoric of nostalgia and how things used to be better. I think a lot of folks have a little more muscle memory of going, yeah, what time period are you talking about? And what are the things that were better?

1:08:58And who were they better for? Because usually that nostalgia, when it's invoked by the right is for like, Jim Crow era. Right, right. And I think there is a similar sort of set of rhetoric around like ancestral foods and eating like our ancestors and that sort of thing, without ever really reckoning with like, what was the life expectancy at that point, my guys? As long as we're doing this ancestral shit, what were the rates of trichinosis? The other claim that I want to talk about is this idea that your omega-6 versus omega-3 ratio being out of balance causes inflammation. This is something you see everywhere.

1:09:38It's like the ratio is out of whack. It used to be one to one. Now it's 20 to one. And we have all these inflammation processes in our body. This is what's making us sick. I found a super interesting article on this called the Omega 6 omega 3 ratio a critical appraisal and possible successor by William S. Harris. So in this review he basically notes that like among researchers this thing about the omega 6 omega 3 ratio that debate has been settled. This is a thing that happened in like the 90s and 2000s and like this ratio isn't really something that scientists refer to anymore. So like we publicly are reenacting a debate that scientists had like 20 years ago and like most of us just weren't paying attention to.

1:10:16So he says the increased risk for disease supposedly associated with high omega-3 omega-6 ratio is classically attributed to the omega-6 being pro-inflammatory and omega-3s being anti-inflammatory. However, this view, which might have been reasonable in the 1970s, is now far too simplistic and enjoys little to no direct support from studies in humans. When this person says it's too simplistic, do they offer some more like here's what the complexity around it looks like? Aubrey, welcome to the next hour of your life. Welcome to what we will be discussing. She's one big segue. This was like such a revelation to me and like so fun to read the literature on this because this whole field is kind of asking the question, like, what does it mean for something to be bad for you?

1:10:55Like you hear this all the time, right? You're like, a brownie is bad for you. But like metabolically, chemically, what do we really mean by that? So throughout this entire period where they're figuring out the basic science of fatty acids, they basically come up with a model by which omega-6s would cause inflammation. So this was kind of the original theory of why they're bad for you. Omega-6s contain something called linoleic acid. When you eat it, it is then converted into something called arachidonic acid inside of your body. Arachidonic acid is associated with inflammation, so that raises inflammation markers.

1:11:28And then if you're operating under a state of chronic inflammation, that does affect health outcomes later. So when you say omega-6s are bad for you, what you're really talking about is like a four-stage process. And you're talking about contributing to but not being the sole cause of that set of processes. This is also kind of like one of the funny things about this because there are countries and there are like subnational regions where people eat way more seed oils than other places. Like for whatever reason in Israel, they have a huge consumption of seed oils. And like they don't have like twice or three times or four times the amount of heart disease.

1:12:00So if we're talking about something that's like a toxic substance, like the thing the far right people are saying, it would just be really obvious. At the most, we're talking about something that is contributing, like a meaningful contributor. But we're not talking about like if you stop eating seed oils, you'll never have a heart attack. Like that just isn't really like on the table as an option, essentially. Yeah, totally. And I think it's how a lot of like popular health information gets disseminated. Right. Exactly. Is like leaving people with that, not really ever saying it out, but leaving people with the distinct impression that this is one of the only, if not the biggest contributors to like heart health issues.

1:12:36Right. So basically we originally had this model that was like, okay, omega-6s have linoleic acid that converts to arachidonic acid and then arachidonic acid causes inflammation and inflammation causes heart problems. The problem is over the course of the last couple decades, we've realized that every single step of that process is significantly more complicated. So the first thing is it's true that omega-6s contain a lot of linoleic acid, but it's not actually true that linoleic acid is converted to arachidonic acid. When you eat linoleic acid, only about 0.2 % is converted into arachidonic acid, which is allegedly like the sort of the quote-unquote bad kind of acid, right?

1:13:14So very little of it is being converted. And also they've done studies where they like massively increase people's linoleic acid consumption and their arachidonic acid levels don't change at all. The other step of this is like the question of, is arachidonic acid bad? So they've also done studies where they just give people arachidonic acid. Again, this is the kind of acid that is allegedly bad, right? This is the kind of acid that causes inflammation in your body. They give people supplements directly supplementing arachidonic acid in their bodies and their inflammation markers don't change. Okay.

1:13:46This appears to be one of those things where it's essentially the animal models breaking down that we see it in mice and rabbits. And I think there was some studies in chimps as well, but in humans, we just don't see a relationship between these acids and inflammation. What actually happens is it increases some markers of inflammation and it reduces other markers of inflammation. This is really eroding my confidence in the media literacy skills of the audience of the founder of Gab. Wait, they're not looking at the Cochrane review? They're not going straight to primary sources and reading for comprehension?

1:14:22The other kind of work that they were doing over the last couple of decades was just like looking at do people with high levels of linoleic acid and arachidonic acid have worse outcomes? And like they don't. There's a huge study in Europe where they're they're taking blood work from 68 ,000 people and then following them over time to see who has heart attacks and strokes and various other things. And like, there's no relationship between linoleic or arachidonic acid and outcomes. Okay. So I'm sending you an excerpt from a meta-analysis. This is not the Cochrane review, but there is a Cochrane review on seed oils and it doesn't find any effect.

1:14:57An analysis of 30 randomized controlled trials found that eating more linoleic acid was not linked to higher blood levels of inflammatory markers. In another analysis on data from nearly 70 ,000 people, higher blood levels of both linoleic and arachidonic acid were linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease. Great. So it's maybe making you healthier. So there's actually like some evidence that it's actually protective. So we're just careening toward a bunch of Joe Rogan listeners having worse heart health. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to like go overboard. Another thing to mention is that a lot of the cardiovascular disease risk stuff on seed oils that finds a benefit or finds no effect is based on these kind of large population studies that we're always complaining about on the show.

1:15:47Where they're just like, what do you eat? And then people can't remember stuff. And then 20 years later, you're like, how many people died of heart attacks? So I don't want to like all of a sudden say that those studies are good just because like I want to own Joe Rogan. Like I'm not going to like endorse these things. But I think what it what it shows is not necessarily seed oils are good for you. I'm not going to like make a claim like that. But what it does show is there's there's no affirmative evidence that seed oils are bad for you. Sure. The sort of the consensus is that it either doesn't do anything or it's slightly protective.

1:16:18Again, it just isn't really something that you need to think about. Which I also just think about like as a, you know, person who's had an eating disorder and as a person who continues to have like pretty profound anxiety. I also just think about like the people who pick up this messaging the most and run with it the most are people who already have real high anxiety. And this is a legitimating force for those folks. Or they already have a real disordered relationship with food. And this gives them some scientific cover to run further into that disordered relationship with food. Right. Exactly.

1:16:52I also think about, you know, a friend of mine was redoing his kitchen. he's a carpenter he called me and was like what do you think about having two bowls in the sink versus one bowl in the sink and I was like uh what I don't you know how some things are divided and there's like a separate area where the garbage disposal is and then a separate one where the drain is yeah and he was like a friend of mine is a a chef and said for food safety reasons it's really helpful to have two bowls and I was like look I'm sure your friend is right but if I'm looking at what my food safety issues are i got so many things to knock off the list before i even get down to the level of like worrying about how many compartments there are in my sink and i think that there's something similar here right that is like we all kind of know that we got bigger fish to fry you kind of know what you could work on with your own eating or exercise or whatever and usually it's shit like you didn't get enough sleep or you didn't go grocery shopping or like it's like much bigger more present issues than like right what kind of oil am i cooking with when i cook my food at home like right you're cooking food at home you're buying and making your own food you're already ahead of the game don't worry about it and here you are afraid of sunflowers this is pms like behavior Outro music

1:18:42Thank you.