The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

https://www.statnews.com/2026/05/22/seed-oils-healthy-fats-tallow-fact-check-cardiac-health/

by randycupertino • 2 months ago

165 229 2 months ago

kayo_20211030• 2 months ago

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

fabian2k2• 2 months ago

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.

DoctorOetker2• 2 months ago

[flagged]

fabian2k2• 2 months ago

Modern medicine saves lives. Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society. But you're suggesting that letting children die from preventable diseases is a bad thing. It's not.

hombre_fatal7• 2 months ago

So what? Technology gives us free lunch after free lunch. And in the not so distant future we can just gene-edit our offspring, the ultimate free lunch.

ungreased0675• 2 months ago

The reason RFK resonated with people is because the highly credentialed experts were not producing favorable outcomes. Results have to matter, right? We’ll see how successful (or not) RFK’s policies are, but let’s not revise history to where things were great right before he came in and ruined everything.

rsynnott5• 2 months ago

“We told people what not to eat based on the research, and they ignored us, so instead we should tell them what not to eat based on the ravings of random podcasters” is not a reasonable approach.

There are approaches which seem to work (some combination of taxation, advertising bans, and mandatory warnings seems to basically have worked for tobacco, say), but they’d obviously be extremely unpalatable to industry. And they’re painfully slow; took decades for tobacco.

thih9• 2 months ago

https://archive.is/zlSkz

colingauvin• 2 months ago

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.

hombre_fatal7• 2 months ago

That study is worthless.

1. TC:LDL and LDL:HDL? Always be suspicious of nonsense ratios.

2. Trials lasted 3 to 7 weeks. Atherosclerosis shows up in decades.

3. Almost nobody even hit the high intake range of 4.19% calories, everyone was clustered at the low end.

4. It was a null finding (CI crosses zero, underpowered, just looks at surrogate markers), not evidence of no effect.

Do people who eat ruminant animals have better health outcomes in general? No, especially not better than people who, say, replace it with plant proteins. Which is why proponents try to focus on bad studies. We should be asking what is the best evidence, not cherry picking the worst evidence.

anon848736286• 2 months ago

If you think this article is annoyingly hand-wavy about science, wait until you see the dietary guidelines put out by this administration!

llm_nerd2• 2 months ago

"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 in "raw" form, though they're better when used in high-heat situations. They all beat saturated fats in every real study.

hombre_fatal7• 2 months ago

"Mexican coke" a good example of American attention when it comes to health and nutrition: instead of focusing on big impact things like exercise, fiber, vegetables, saturated fat, building sidewalks, blood lipids, etc, we're stuck obsessing over food dyes, 50% vs 55% fructose, seed oils.

Probably because they let us feel like we're doing something for our health so we don't have to muster any real lifestyle change, like leaving our couch to go for a walk.

Sweetie, did you get those cookies with the butter instead of the seed oils? Oh good, thank you. I don't eat seed oils! -- "Health conscious" fat guy who just ate 12 cookies.

It would be funny, but these grifters are screwing over good people.

declan_roberts• 2 months ago

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?

Cthulhu_• 2 months ago

A few paragraphs into the article, the author addresses the "seed oil" misnomer; it's better to keep reading before jumping to the comments to do a knee-jerk comment to a single statement.

knollimar3• 2 months ago

I read it and still was confused. The author flips back and forth on what they're purporting their patients think are bad

kryogen1c• 2 months ago

Does the author (a purported dietician) not know this him/herself?

FTA: First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category. What we’re actually talking about are vegetable oils high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats

EnigmaCurry• 2 months ago

That may have been the dumbest line in the article, the oils in question, are made out of seeds.

llm_nerd2• 2 months ago

It really isn't weird, and given the entire rest of the article clearly the author understands.

RFK and friends have health-washed tallow. While their ridiculous new food recommendations claimed to "end the war on protein", it's pretty clear by all the surrounding material that they really wanted to "end the war on saturated fats". Their recommendations are filled with saturated-fat heavy foods (while cowardly sticking to the same old guidelines on percentage of calories from the same).

"Influencers" are pushing tallow as the best oil, despite literally the entirety of the evidence completely annihilating that claim.

galangalalgol2• 2 months ago

I read about book called "the big fat lie" years and years ago. There are some indisputable problems specifically with how canola and flaxseed oils went from being an industrial product that was in excess in the post war economy, to being on everyone's table at every meal. There are meta studies that show benefits from animal fats from healthy naturally fed animals, which of course is not a qualification in the guidance RFK provides. The truth is that separating the most calorically dense part of a whole food and adding it to other foods is never a good idea. Not with tallow, not with canola, not with white rice, or orange juice and really not even with olive oil, just put some olives in there!

pstuart• 2 months ago

Nutritional science has failed us before -- the low fat movement and the panic over salt. And then there's ye olde Food Pyramid which was marketing for Big Ag.

Another one was the concern of soy phytoestrogens, and claiming that only fermented soy was safe.

Much of this had some scientific basis, but science isn't perfect and evolves.

On the other hand, there's ideology and it rejects any scientific reporting that falsifies its beliefs. Science is about being falsifiable -- so when confronted with compelling evidence that earlier understanding is rejected and replaced with new knowledge.

RFK Jr. is an ideologue and is the worst person to be in the role he is. He may get some things right (food dyes, etc), but that's the broken clock effect.

Aurornis2• 2 months ago

The “seed oils” movement has grown beyond seed oils. People who follow seed oil influencers usually subscribe to a cluster of ideas. The superiority of beef tallow is one of them.

Loughla• 2 months ago

I mean, cooking with beef tallow is better though. It makes everything taste awesome.

rsynnott5• 2 months ago

People who follow seed oil influencers

“And what do you do?” [mutters] “What?” [shamefaced] “Misinformation about cooking oil on tiktok”

Like, honestly, how could anyone think this was a reasonable way to make a living?

lithocarpus12• 2 months ago

Much olive oil is not refined or ultra processed, but in the US market, 25%+ is.

According to https://www.imarcgroup.com/united-states-olive-oil-market

10% of olive oil in the US market is refined using the same hexane process as canola or soybean oil, and another 15% is refined using other chemical processes.

It's not a seed oil but for many people concerned about ultra processed food including refined oils, it's not the "seed" part but the "refined" part that's the issue, and specifically how it is refined.

Though there is also a concern many have about cooking unsaturated fats at very high temperatures causing oxidation/rancidity/free-radicals and thus oxidative stress which is a primary driver of disease, and seed oils tend to have a lot more unsaturated fat than animal fat. Olive oil is more saturated than seed oils but not as saturated as animal fat so it is more prone to oxidation - i.e. it degrades much easier with heat and goes rancid faster and thus is more likely to be rancid/oxidized when used since we don't usually get it fresh.

SoftTalker2• 2 months ago

Avocado oil is good for high temperature sautéing,

Is there anything to look for on the label to tell what refining process is used for an olive oil? There are so many different brands now that I suspect some of them are just different labels on the same product.

vjsrinivas3• 2 months ago

I feel like its another symptom of dying 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.

hombre_fatal7• 2 months ago

What happens is that you have to find ways to dismiss the body of evidence to take on positions like "beef tallow and butter are actually amazing for you".

e.g. Since saturated fat is well-known to increase LDL/ApoB, and these people have high blood lipids because of it, they have to dismiss the research on it to continue believing it's healthy.

It further entrenches them in a position where they can be convinced of absolutely anything because they've given up all epistemic standards which is why they overlap with all sorts of contrarian positions learned from social media and youtube videos.

vjsrinivas3• 2 months ago

Exactly what I was getting at. Social media doesn't help since these algorithms can cocoon somebody from content that might challenge their notions.

Spide_r• 2 months ago

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

beej712• 2 months ago

If I take my 100%-handwritten prose and hand it to a detector, it tells me it's 30% AI. Those detectors are crap and they're training people to also be crap at it. I'm not changing how I write just to sound "less AI".

djmips2• 2 months ago

That's something an AI would say.

sinuhe693• 2 months ago

Zero-GPT says it's human written, with a fairly low score of 11.4% for AI. I think I should mention this, as some people seem to try to kill the piece by branding it AI-ism.

knollimar3• 2 months ago

It seems human written with certain paragraphs that stood out to me.

It felt like they had an ai pad for wordcount, but there was definitely organic content in there (at least from my taste)

badlibrarian• 2 months ago

Some HN readers are blind to this, others are obsessed with it.

ChatGPT claims 900 million active weekly users. You really think a dietician who writes for the Minnesota Reformer (whatever that is), trying to get the word out about his current "evidence-based" whatever, isn't getting a little robo-coaching along the way?

This one sure smells like a human article that went through Claude 4.6 with a "proofread, identify passive voice, increase clarity, adapt to house-style.md, and make it fit in X words" prompt. Maybe the editor did it.

The issue is the quality of the writing, which still needs work whether an LLM was involved or not. Most sources (Forbes, Business Insider) require the author to sign a waiver that indemnifies. That's the chilling effect, not the AI tells.

InMice2• 2 months ago

I try to take the middle road:

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

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

lopis3• 2 months ago

If people got 75% of their calories from plant based whole foods, a lot of health problems would probably disappear overnight.

InMice2• 2 months ago

I would agree

onion2k• 2 months ago

Is that even possible with the current food supply chain though?

andai• 2 months ago

Mammoth diet - Good good!

WickyNilliams• 2 months ago

Curious why you categorize lightly cooked as good but high heat as bad? Do you mean deep fried specifically? Or any high heat?

alkonaut• 2 months ago

Where is this panic? In the US? I don’t hear anything about it (in Europe).

Aurornis2• 2 months ago

Social media.

Europe is not immune.

I almost never hear about it in person. It’s always on some social media site. Often the sites where people think they’re not using normal social media, like Twitter or Reddit.

mapontosevenths• 2 months ago

Yes. RFK Jr. was corruptly placed in charge of America's healthcare by Trump in exchange for dropping out as a presidential candidate.

He is a conspiracist with no medical credeentials, and he believes, without evidence, that seed oils are response for most of the ills of mankind, Tylenol causes autism, SSRI's should not be prescribed, etc. None of his beliefs are mainstream or evidence backed, but he now has a huge megaphone.

atollk3• 2 months ago

If you haven't already, you will. Expect supermarkets to start offering and marketing animal-based fats more frequently.

Esophagus4• 2 months ago

I was aware of the panic, but what I learned from this article is that food-makers are actually responding to it by changing their offerings.

watwut2• 2 months ago

Local stores I go to had animal based fats the whole time. They are fairly cheap and easy to buy in big buckets. Sunflower oil is somewhat cheaper.

But, I cant think of a single time I would had issue to buy animal fat (accross 4 different countries).

WarmWash3• 2 months ago

On social media.

I'm not sure of the genesis of it, but it got traction with "health-fluencers" (not to be confused with health experts) and has spread like wildfire despite no real evidence backing it up. Its just a circle of parrots repeating whatever is trending so they can get on the algo train.

Now it's starting to show up in brands and businesses because the mindless algo herd gravitates towards it.

Apparently at heart it has to do with solvents being used to extract the oil, but those solvents are trivially boiled out after processing.

hombre_fatal7• 2 months ago

This could just be a function of your algorithm silo on social media.

Have you tried searching Youtube/Twitter in a euro language to check?

pibaker• 2 months ago

Many restaurants around me have started advertising that they cook everything with beef tallow, as opposed to seed oil.

Ironically, most of them also happen to serve deep fried stuffs which are unhealthy no matter what oil you fry it with.

te_234304059• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_oil_misinformation

Apparently (per the Wiki) the fad grew after 2020, when Joe Rogan (an American podcaster) interviewed Paul Saladino (an American "carnivore diet" promoter and current food supplement business owner).

The Wiki claims that this fad diet / conspiracy theory is popular on the "political right". Actually, my guess is that a better description would be that this is particularly popular among certain social media "wellness influencers" and "alternative health" promoters. Especially wellness influencers who have been pushing anti-veganism / meat-only / high-protein fad diets in the past.

There seems to be overlap between this movement and anti-vaccination movement promoters (Joseph Mercola, a key figure in the later movement, is now also promoting anti-seed oil activism).

I don't see a whole lot of influencers promoting this yet who are not American. I also don't see this fad outside social media much personally, despite being an American. The primary thing I can think of is that the fast food chain Steak N Shake is heavily touting its "beef tallow fries" on their billboards now.

rsynnott5• 2 months ago

It’s largely an American thing, but I’ve occasionally heard it from conspiracy-theory-prone (antivax etc) types in Ireland.

zzzeek2• 2 months ago

I'd recommend https://myticker.com/ which was shared here some time ago.

I followed the advice on this site and actually got very bad news. But the good news would be, that I'm on a strict medication regimen now and maybe I'll live to see my son's graduation.

RFK is killing people. it's what he does.

debo_• 2 months ago

I hope your interventions help, and that you live a long and healthy life.

zzzeek2• 2 months ago

thanks, me too!

elchief• 2 months ago

"eat less ultra-processed food"

well, how do you think Canola Oil is made exactly?

it's cracked, cooked, pressed, washed in hexane and acid, neutralized with caustic soda, bleached, deodorized

on what planet is that not ultra processed?

so, i should avoid ultra-processed food, except oils that are ultra-processed?

whereas tallow, is...cut from meat

i'm not suggesting you should only eat tallow, I'm just saying it's not ultra-processed.

bryanlarsen2• 2 months ago

Sure, if you eat the tallow. People aren't doing that. They're using the tallow to make french fries etc. The problem is the french fries, not the oil choice.

Eating beef tallow is self-limiting. It's hard to eat a lot of it directly.

OTOH, it's really easy to eat a lot of French Fries.

starkparker• 2 months ago

They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.

atollk3• 2 months ago

No, that's just as wrong. French fries deep fried in Sunflower oil are also unhealthy. Adding a spoon of tallow to your tomato soup is also unhealthy.

striking• 2 months ago

There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. They’re naturally occurring, present in all beef fat, and according to cardiologists, present in tallow at levels far above what’s considered safe.

lkey• 2 months ago

The animals that produce that tallow are part of the global industrial food system too.

And tallow, by itself, is not something you eat, it's just moving the point of thermal and chemical alteration and production into your home.

Finally, most of this "eat as much animal offal as possible" movement is directly funded by the producers of these products battling it out with the producers of competing products.

You should listen to your doctors over influencers that talk about chemistry in a way that makes simple things sound dangerous and evil.

medler• 2 months ago

Is criticism is directly, and convincingly, addressed in the article.

Some of what’s driving the seed oil panic isn’t wrong — it’s just misattributed. Ultra-processed food really is a problem. . . . But seed oils are not why ultra-processed food behaves that way. They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.

pessimizer2• 2 months ago

Absolutely a PR campaign. People started getting upset about the array of bizarre chemicals in their foods and the minimal standards and regulations about introducing new ones (or disclosing completely the ones that you are using.)

The response has been to try to convert it into a moral campaign - actually the foods packed with bizarre barely regulated chemicals are also sometimes fatty and sweet, and you should stop indulging yourself and show some self-control.

Meanwhile, 20-somethings are starting to get a ton of colon cancer.

atollk3• 2 months ago

"Ultra-processed" does not mean "many steps in the process of creating it". Although I assume many people are somewhat misusing the term by now, it originally comes from the "Nova" system, where part of the current definition of ultra-processed is:

Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates).

nekzn3• 2 months ago

Hexane, acid, caustic soda, bleach, and deodorisers have no or rare culinary use.

lithocarpus12• 2 months ago

Any isolation of certain compounds from whole food from other compounds would be part of what I refer to as processed. In the case of refined oils, I'd call it ultra processed just because of how much is removed - even before considering the chemical contaminants.

anon848736286• 2 months ago

Cows eating grain in concentrated feedlots and then made available in separate pieces all year round at the local grocery store... is also a modern industrial invention.

erelong• 2 months ago

It seems like carnivores exist and have done things like lost weight and have good medical tests to see the impact of the diet in relation to their health, hence there has been a push to experiment with more animal products in the diet over seed oils / veggies at times

JumpCrisscross5• 2 months ago

carnivores exist

Cats are carnivores. We’re omnivores. Like bears. If you’ve ever come across bear scat, you’ll notice it’s usually plant material.

anon848736286• 2 months ago

Yes, people putting effort into a "carnivore diet" can be healthy. The problem raised by the article is people continuing to follow their same eating patterns (namely, ultra-processed foods) while the fats have been swapped out.

vjsrinivas3• 2 months ago

Externally "healthy". Any heavy red meat and high saturated fat diet can lead to CVD.

PowerElectronix• 2 months ago

It seems ignorance is harder to cure than a heart condition.

cyanydeez• 2 months ago

There really is this streak of blaming victims in the grift economy. Seems surreal that there's no longer anyone to blame for committing fraud and putting out bullshit medical, nutrition, etc.

All hail the grifters.

thedougd• 2 months ago

When it goes all the way to the top, their question isn’t how should we stop them, it’s how can we get in on this?

pessimizer2• 2 months ago

A 2020 Cochrane meta-analysis of roughly 59,000 participants across 15 randomized controlled trials found that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced combined cardiovascular events by 21%. Cardiologists note that the risk reduction from this dietary substitution is comparable to the benefits of statin medications. We don’t make a habit of telling statin patients to stop their medication because of something they heard on a podcast.

So what it found is a tiny difference, just like it did with statins, when all of the financing and an enormous amount of money was behind finding enough of a difference to justify the billions that get spent on statins and the category of marketing that relies on replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat. Additionally, the reason he chooses to focus on "combined cardiovascular events" is because that's the only place that any supportive number could be found. Mortality? Nah. Quality of life? Nah.

Saturated fat vs. unsaturated fat was one of those things that seemed obvious when you looked at them naïvely, and made an intuitive guess about what their respective effects would be. The same as how we intuitively thought about salt's effect on blood pressure because of how cell walls work.

It is sick how much of medical "research" is being targeted towards justifying interventions with 50-100 year old origins and whose scientific foundations have completely disappeared in the interim, but that careers, fortunes, and entire segments of the economy now rely on.

Headline: "Intervention X doesn't work how we thought it does, but it still works!* (* based on study completed before we told you that the foundation for it had disappeared.)"

Nothing I love more than dumb emotional manipulation delivered as an argument from authority, from a site called statnews. Just give me the goddamn statistics, and if studies about specific claims haven't been made, give me a non-insidious reason why no one would have bothered to check in decades. Especially when the checking costs millions, and the industries are worth hundreds of billions.

I don't have an opinion on seed oils, other than that cheap ones destroy pans, countertops and appliances, and seem absolutely foul. Nutrition science is absolute garbage and mostly quackery, though. You might as well have a degree in old wives tales.

mjamesaustin• 2 months ago

If you're interested in just the pure statistics and outcomes of scientific trials, I highly recommend https://nutritionfacts.org/. It's a non-profit charity featuring numerous ~5 min videos highlighting specific findings across scientific studies about nutrition, with sources read directly and linked.

Tylast• 2 months ago

+1 for this!

hombre_fatal7• 2 months ago

"Nutrition science is absolute garbage, [so I'll base my position on something worse.]"

So, emotions and preferences?

Btw, statins show a big difference if you take them early. Even more for people who have genetically low lipids. People tend to only go on statins in middle/old age, especially after an adverse event, after decades of accumulated plaque build up which statins can't reverse.

Rosuvastatin costs $5/mo and lowers LDL/ApoB 45% in a few weeks. You should probably get on one if your genetics prevent you from getting under 100 LDL and 60 ApoB despite a high fiber plant-based diet. But something tells me that's not your diet either.

kstrauser• 2 months ago

Yep. A friend’s a cardiologist who told me about attending a lecture on statins at a conference. The speaker asked how many doctors in the audience started taking statins even before having indications that they should take them. Nearly everyone in the audience raised their hand.

What that tells me is that people who do this for a living, who study the actual science, who make a career of this very specific thing, all believe in statins enough to self-medicate.

That didn’t make me seek them out. What it did do was make me say yes the moment my own doc raised the idea.

dj68k• 2 months ago

I was into the second paragraph before I gave up. It's such AI-written slop that it makes me question any "science" this supposed "clinical dietitian" is trying to convince me of.

icameron• 2 months ago

You didn’t miss much there was a paywall after the 3rd paragraph.

bonsai_spool• 2 months ago

It's such AI-written slop

How do you figure? It's not obvious to me after skipping over the heart-string-pulling introduction

mmaunder2• 2 months ago

Fish, tree nuts, avocados and olive oil. Avoid butter, red meat and cheese. It’ll save your life.

selectodude2• 2 months ago

I’d rather be dead than not eat butter, red meat, and cheese.

But yeah don’t cook your vegetables in animal fat, that’s stupid.

ElijahLynn2• 2 months ago

Many people say that until they almost die. 350,000 people died of heart attacks in the US in 2025. A very preventable situation. Many more almost died. In many of those said they'd rather be dead than not eat butter, red meat and cheese.

wwweston• 2 months ago

I absolutely said that about cheese.

Then something happened I probably should have died from (80-90% of people don't make it). High blood pressure turned out to be a contributing factor. High salt consumption much of it from my favorite cheeses turned out to contribute to the high blood pressure.

I learned to like swiss. And be modest in my consumption of tastier saltier cheeses. I no longer glibly tell people someday I'll be found dead of dairy poisoning with a smile.

I would probably request cheese in a known last meal situation though.

We should all enjoy things, and many of us can still stand to be more restrained in how we enjoy. And what.

bawolff3• 2 months ago

Honestly, all this you must 100% do x is tiresome. Just use moderation and you'll be fine.

mmaunder2• 2 months ago

You’re under 50 and haven’t seen the results of a stroke. There are states worse than death.

ElijahLynn2• 2 months ago

Also worth noting, that eating the seeds themselves is super healthy! They have more nutrients, including fiber, vitamins, minerals and more protein!

dackdel• 2 months ago

thats the one thing we all have in common. we all die. that said. everything in moderation and definitely avoid a few things like sugar and maybe seed oils. but butter red meat and cheese, rather be dead.

aliasxneo3• 2 months ago

Seed oils tend to cause severe inflammation in my body like most other ultra-processed foods. This is more than conjecture, due to existing health conditions, I keep a very strict diet with a food journal. I was excluding them long before RFK Jr. came around with the MAHA stuff. Yet another thing thats been politicized I guess.

flatline2• 2 months ago

That could be a valid observation for n=1. There could be any number of reasons seed oils cause inflammation for you but do not the general populace, or not at numbers large enough to offset recommending them as a general rule.

The politicization is coming directly from the Trump administration, as the article states - making spurious claims and eliding the science that backs up the contrary conclusions. Did you have some other idea of how this is being politicized?

aliasxneo3• 2 months ago

I wouldn't pose it as anything more than n=1. I'm more empathizing with those being caught up in the politicization who may have more nuanced reasons they are being impacted beyond what the media puts out.

The politicization is coming directly from the Trump administration, as the article states - making spurious claims and eliding the science that backs up the contrary conclusions. Did you have some other idea of how this is being politicized?

I read this a couple of times, but I'm still not really understanding the question. I directly attributed the politicization to RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement. So I'm not sure why you're asking if I had other ideas.

analog312• 2 months ago

I keep reading about "inflammation" and think about things like swollen joints, bruises, etc. It must mean something else. What would I notice in my body if the oils that I consume are causing severe inflammation?

lithocarpus12• 2 months ago

There are tons of possible symptoms because systemic inflammation including from dietary causes basically damages the entire body. But here's a list of some common symptoms from one source:

persistent pain, chronic fatigue or insomnia, joint stiffness, skin problems, elevated blood markers (such as C-reactive protein), gastrointestinal issues (constipation, diarrhoea, acid reflux), depression, anxiety and mood disorders, unintended weight gain or loss, frequent colds or flu.

https://stories.uq.edu.au/research/2023/9-signs-you-have-inf...

For myself, when I eat processed food I mostly feel fatigue and low energy and gastrointestinal pain. But it's been extremely rare for me to eat these things in the last 10 years.

Most of the US population are systemically inflamed including from diet basically all the time, and most of the US population are suffering from several of the above symptoms chronically. (Not to claim that it's definitely or only because of food, but I'd bet it's a big part of it.)

dualvariable• 2 months ago

I notice that my allergies get worse, and a theory is that systemic low-grade inflammation and histamine response may be due to diet. I don't have a lot of other conditions, but people with autoimmune conditions (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis) might see it get better/worse with dietary changes.

When I'm eating beans+rice and a bit of protein that I cook myself, my allergies are a lot lower.

When I cheat and eat "crap" I tend to start sneezing and rubbing my eyes.

There are a lot of variables, though, and cheat foods tend to be highly processed, high in gluten, with a lot of additives and made with seed oils, and hidden sugars, and are much higher glycemic index with higher glycemic loading, amongst other things. Plus seasonal allergies are just variable day-to-day which is another confounding factor. So I don't really know what the X factor is. I get similar effects on an atkins-style high fat beef, butter and cheese kind of diet, because it also cuts out most of those things.

bob1029• 2 months ago

Seed oils probably aren't ideal, but I also worry how much this narrative is distracting from the bigger problem of sugar consumption. Humans only have so much attention and discipline. It would be a shame to focus all that energy on a "no seed oil" diet only to wind up even more unhealthy.

How many products with seed oil also contain some form of added sugar? I don't seem to have much issue with moderating the occasional bag of cheezits or goldfish, but the moment I start getting into cookies and ice cream it's like a junkie broke into my house.

lithocarpus12• 2 months ago

Two things can be harmful at once.

I am curious which is worse in terms of contribution to modern chronic metabolic disease.

In the case of ultra-processed/refined oils though, there is an argument to be made that these are novel foods that humans never ate until very recently. There aren't any old people who have been eating them their whole lives in the quantities we do now. This is probably true for industrially refined sugar too, but sugar is a more complex story since people have been concentrating plant sugars for a lot longer than they've been industrially refining oil for food.

I'm not defending sugar though to be clear - I strictly avoid it and even avoid fruit juice and such. I know empirically for myself I feel terrible if I eat very much sugar. I also feel terrible if I eat much refined oil and I strictly avoid that too.

brippalcharrid• 2 months ago

They can also tend to be harmful in combination, such as in the case of relatively unstable unsaturated fatty acids going on to be glycated in the presence of sugars (some moreso than others); it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were examples such as this which fuelled a significant proportion of all "diseases of civilization".

sinuhe693• 2 months ago

Really? I don't know exactly how long people have been eating oil from olive, flax seed, sesame, coconut or palm nut, but I believe not under 6000–7000 years. But yeah, not the stuff we eat today.

perrygeo2• 2 months ago

Yep. If there was one single thing that literally every person should do for their health, that is to greatly reduce or completely eliminate sugar. The evidence is overwhelming.

The evidence against seed oils is not quite as convincing. I see seed oils as a low quality food to be avoided - goes rancid too easily, requires chemical processing, etc. - but it's not strictly poison. These oils are in virtually every industrial "food product" which makes them unhealthy by association. Stop eating highly processed crap and you'll see the benefits - cutting out seed oils is a side effect.

stringfood• 2 months ago

wonder which is worse sugar or alcohol, 2 drinks a day vs 2 cans of coke a day

dukeyukey2• 2 months ago

Added sugar? I really don't think giving up all fruits and vegetables is a good idea.

Analemma_• 2 months ago

My half-believed conspiracy theory is that "seed oils bad" is a psy-op from the corn/HFCS industries. I don't have hard data here, but it seemed like in the late 2010s people were converging on added sugar and especially HFCS as the thing which is truly messing up health. I can't help but wonder if the corn industry saw this, panicked, and began seeding (no pun intended) the seed oil meme among influencers.

I don't have evidence for this specifically, but there's certainly a long and documented history of both a) influencers suddenly adopting a new party line in response to a paid campaign and b) shitty policy specifically for the influential corn industry (ethanol subsidies, e.g.)

robertlagrant• 2 months ago

I was reading things[0] about sugar a lot earlier than that - maybe 2007? And it made a lot of sense back then.

[0] https://nosdiet.com

basch3• 2 months ago

Seed oils probably aren't ideal

Except they are. A refined monounsaturated fat is in the upper tier of perfect calorie. It makes a lot of sense for omega-9's to be a major part of caloric consumption. The omega-3 and omega-6 when fresh and uncooked are also unnecessary demonized by the idea that they are immediately rancid. Like many things the problems arise from the implementation or how they are used, not the chemical itself.

ballenf• 2 months ago

Ideally, yes. But the failure modes in seed oil manufacturing are what scare me. How many accidental hexane exposures would it take to outweigh a lifetime of the benefits of seed oils over more natural, but less healthy, oils?

sinuhe693• 2 months ago

The US is probably the only country in the world where they put an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracy theorist with no-qualification whatsoever in charge of the public health.

kleton2• 2 months ago

First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category.

"Seed oils" (commonly used cooking oils extracted from plant seeds excluding coconut) are as valid of a construct as "reptiles" (quadrupeds excluding aves and mammals) or "fish" (vertebrates excluding quadrupeds)

galangalalgol2• 2 months ago

Cladisticaly aren't all mammals a type of bony fish?

kleton2• 2 months ago

Yes. We are cladistically more related to a goldfish than it is to a shark.

andyjohnson02• 2 months ago

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

- Michael Pollan

flowerthoughts• 2 months ago

I don't know why, but this has always tickled me in a good way. It's like the best type of poetry. Extremely well phrased for my minimalist brain.

And the opposite of Claude's commit messages. Maybe I should add this as an example in Claude.MD?

andyjohnson02• 2 months ago

Extremely well phrased for my minimalist brain.

Yes, short and to the point.

And the most important part of the message is in the first phrase: eat food - not edible stuff that isn't food.

macartain• 2 months ago

100% - have always loved Mr Pollan's pithy summary. I also like Alan Goldhamer's (I am paraphrasing): "There are two types of cardiologist; vegans, and the ones who haven't studied the data yet."

jdthedisciple• 2 months ago

The food industry reformation underway isn’t making chips healthier; it’s swapping one fat for another
A movement that threw out 421 pages of scientific recommendations... isn’t a revolt. It’s a rebrand
20 counts of em-dashes in a single article

Sorry but the usage of AI is too evident.

djmips2• 2 months ago

sigh, yeah - makes me side-eye the entire article.

yankee_dodge2• 2 months ago

The scariest part of this well-reasoned piece is the amount of trans fat in beef tallow. Trans fat is unbelievably destructive. A review in the New England Journal of Medicine 20 years ago [0] sent that message well. I doubt there has been any significant revision to the understanding of the physiology.

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra054035

JumpCrisscross5• 2 months ago

the amount of trans fat in beef tallow

Natural tallow doesn’t contain a lot of trans fat. The only way to consume trans fats in large quantities is through hydrogenated fats.

yankee_dodge2• 2 months ago

True -- trans fat is 5-10% of beef fat [1] BUT "a lot" is not the standard when it comes to trans fat. The NEJM article makes the point that trans fat is damaging even in small quantities, like a single gram. It was a great day when trans fat was required to be listed on the Nutrition Facts Label. It spurred snack manufacturers to get it (mostly) out of their products.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6356151/

lithocarpus12• 2 months ago

There’s a secondary argument about oxidation — seed oils go rancid at high heat, producing potentially harmful compounds. This idea is chemically real and worth being thoughtful about (don’t reuse frying oil repeatedly). But the evidence that oxidation at home-cooking levels causes measurable harm in humans isn’t there.

Even if oxidation at home-cooking levels doesn't cause harm, which I suspect that it does though to a lesser degree, two thirds of seed oil market in the US is industrial or prepared food, much of which does go rancid or is reused frying oil.

anon848736286• 2 months ago

If that industrial prepared food switches to tallow I still have doubts about how much it is reused and what chemical changes it goes through...

lithocarpus12• 2 months ago

Absolutely agree. I don't think I'd want industrially prepared stuff fried in tallow either.

There is a chemical distinction in that tallow is mostly saturated fat which doesn't oxidize nearly as easily, so it might be less bad to fry with or re-fry with. But still.

analog312• 2 months ago

I work in an area that involves, among many other things, analysis of cooking oil in factories. It might be hard to pin down the terminology of "reused" frying oil, because many of the frying processes are continuous. The raw material goes through a vat of hot oil on a conveyer and comes out the other end dripping with oil

The quality of the oil is continuously monitored, and new oil goes in while old oil goes out in the fried food itself. The crunchy and salty aspects make it palatable to eat oil. The oil doesn't actually spend a long time in the vat before coming out in the product.

lithocarpus12• 2 months ago

That's interesting and nice to know.

Good point that industrial use might not strictly be "reusing" - that might apply more to restaurants where they have big vats of frying oil and keep dipping food in it for multiple days. Even worse I've seen small scale home fryers where people neglect to change the oil for who knows how long - but that's probably not super common.

jandrewrogers2• 2 months ago

Analogous is the label on vodkas that says “distilled N times”, as if they were making it in batches using pot stills.

Vodka is made almost exclusively in industrial-scale continuous fractionating columns. The concept of it being “distilled N times” is farcical. (But technically defensible because you can map the output of the fractionating column to any arbitrary N via equivalence relationships.)

JTbane• 2 months ago

The seed oil panic is quite possibly the dumbest health craze of the decade- I saw a chef saying beef tallow was healthy!

cogogo• 2 months ago

I was always under the impression that canola oil was mildly poisonous. It is sort of true in that it has euric acid but far below levels that can hurt you. I think I was confusing things with an event where industrial rapeseed oil in spain was sold as olive oil in the 80s and many people were poisoned.

Also, TIL that canola is a portmandeu of canada and oil.

All the above reference here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapeseed_oil

eudamoniac4• 2 months ago

Erucic acid being bad is a myth actually, look it up. Pretty much the entirety of China cooks with normal rapeseed oil with the high acid levels and they're just fine.

morgengold• 2 months ago

Just kicking out seed oils replacing them with animal fat while still having a shitty diet is for sure of no help. But what I would like to know: how bad is having a lot of beef steak in the context of a mostly unprocessed food context? Like basically berries, nuts, eggs, vegetables, fruits + beef.

nielsbot2• 2 months ago

FTA:

There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats.
The administration that declared it is “ending the war on saturated fat” has found a cooking fat that delivers more of the exact compounds most associated with cardiovascular mortality. MAHA is road paved with artery-clogging cholesterol, and they’re calling it a health revolution.

The article seems worth reading. I found it informative. It’s not that the scariest compounds in seed oils aren’t considered dangerous, but they’re probably not in vegetable oils in significant enough levels. So that’s conspiratorial misunderstanding by the MAHA contingent.

leereeves7• 2 months ago

Some recent research says that natural trans fats are not as dangerous as the industrial kind.

https://www.reading.ac.uk/news/2026/Research-News/Natural-tr...

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nutres.2026.03.009

raintrees• 2 months ago

I wonder where avocado oil lands?

port113• 2 months ago

My real worry about seed oil theory is that it’s a distraction. If you want to be healthier, we know ways you can change your diet that will help: Increase your overall diet “quality”. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Avoid processed food. Especially avoid processed meats. Eat food with low caloric density. Avoid added sugar. Avoid alcohol. Avoid processed food.
I know this is hard. You could even argue it’s unrealistic. That wouldn’t make it wrong.
Look, I wish strong seed oil theory were true. That would be great. All we’d have to do is reformulate our Cheetos with different oil, and then we could go on merrily eating Cheetos. Western diet without Western disease! Sadly, I think this is very unlikely.

Dynomight has written an excellent article on seed oils. We have examples in our families of people with very bad diets, favouring tons of butter because ‘at least it’s not processed’.

The research doesn't back this up. As the quote above suggests, we need to stop thinking of ‘magic bullets’ that’ll get us out of eating better. Added sugar and trans-fats might be the only true bullets.

https://dynomight.net/seed-oil/

WarmWash3• 2 months ago

It seems like the person is fighting the good fight, maybe, but who is Dynomight?

These random bloggers/influencers speaking from self-proclaimed high ground is in large part how we got in this mess. There are a gazillion people out there who know how to say the right things, to get the right minds, the click the right "follow" buttons, none of which has any bearing on truth, honesty, or accuracy.

gruez4• 2 months ago

These random bloggers/influencers speaking from self-proclaimed high ground is in large part how we got in this mess. There are a gazillion people out there who know how to say the right things, to get the right minds, the click the right "follow" buttons, none of which has any bearing on truth, honesty, or accuracy.

Did you get to the end? He addresses that.

I’ll just be honest. I think this view is completely indefensible. I feel embarrassed when I see people promoting it. You’re sure? How? I don’t see any way to get to this conclusion other than heavily filtering the evidence—ignoring the flaws in everything that supports a predetermined view while scrambling to find flaws in everything that contradicts it.
Again, I’m sure you can send me long lists of random citations. (You don’t need to send them; it’s OK; I’ve seen them already.) But for anything that’s been studied in detail, there’s always lots of evidence to support any semi-plausible view. Do you have any idea how much evidence people can produce for UFOs or chronic Lyme or colloidal silver?

stogot• 2 months ago

Bloggers quoting bloggers quoting instagrammers quoting TikTok

ndsipa_pomu4• 2 months ago

we need to stop thinking of ‘magic bullets’ that’ll get us out of eating better

I daresay that dietary fibre is likely the only 'magic bullet' that would improve people's diets and health. Or at least, non-processed fibre as some "food products" have cellulose/sawdust added to bump up the fibre figure.

port113• 2 months ago

And yet, increase consumption too much too quickly and you end up with influencers that talk about constipation and haemorrhoids, and how fibre causes IBS.

(I agree with your points btw.)

johnea2• 2 months ago

The maniverse, "wellness", MAHA, microbe denial, vaccine denial, and wing-nut politics in general are never going to be good for health care outcomes.

The worst aspect being the closure of healthcare providers in rural areas, since they don't provide enough profit.

See this later post:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02474-9

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260331

drukenemo• 2 months ago

The advice that surfaces here when a healthy-eating article is posted always leave me surprised. “Don’t eat added sugars, or only very rarely”. Have you looked around and seen the infinite amount of delicious food available literally everywhere? Sure, make an effort to reduce those, but to me cutting out those is akin to recommending someone to be celibate or not to ever commit a sin. Those ultra virtuous (and maybe boring) people who can live 100% on a perfect diet of fish and vegetables are like catholic priests advising everyone to join them in their renouncing of the wonders of life. Sugar (in all its forms) in moderation is probably a net positive in life quality than living an ideal life and rejecting a cake at your nephew’s birthday party because “you don’t eat poison”. Relax a bit people, eat nutritious meals most of the time, watch your caloric intake and enjoy your life.

eudamoniac4• 2 months ago

The thing is, once you have a healthy diet, those sickly sweet things don't taste very delicious anymore. Like, on the rare occasion I have a soda now, it literally tastes like an extremely sweet syrup that I cannot easily drink much of. You kind of sound like a porn addict glorifying extreme BDSM porn while denigrating those boring people who just have sex with their wives. What you have is an acquired taste, one that can also be disacquired without much loss.

johnea2• 2 months ago

The comments here have some of the highest bullshit content of any I've read on HN in recent memory.

The author's frustration is palpable in the article. People being misled by some twitverse influenza, while ignoring a long history of clinical trial data.

To me the solution seems simple: let people do whatever stupid-ass thing they want to do.

Calmly inform them of the proven risks, then let them make their own choices.

If they suffer chronic heart disease, and/or die younger, that was their choice and they suffered the consequences.

As the old hippie chicks used to say: Beans and Greens are all you need.

The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

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