Seed Oils, Early-Onset Cancer and Human Metabolic Variability

Is this just pseudoscience?

Sounds an awful lot like woo. Big industry markets waste as valuable.

A reminder that the anti-seed-oil stance is heavily conspiracy-nut and supplement-grift coded: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/is-see...

Feel free to get into an edit war on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_oil_misinformation

I wanna zoom in on the "omega 6 content of seed oils vs real food" graphic. in addition to the obviously prejudicial language in "real foods", you'll notice that the comparison is between a tablespoon of seed oils and...a random amount of a completely unrelated food. Is the author suggesting that any time a recipe calls for a tablespoon of soybean oil I should instead reach for approximately 4 oz of beef? Why not compare to what an average person could reasonably use instead of seed oils?

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.

Interesting. But instead of limiting seed oil consumption, why not supplement your food with omega 3 to counterbalance the omega 6?

I read the first linked study and it looks like it is completely unrelated to linking colorectal cancer with consumption of seed oils. At the very least they should have looked into the consumption of seed oils per-capita, which I have a very hard time thinking it has drastically increased in the past decade compared to diets of the last 25 years in developed countries.

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.