Are Seed Oilz Bad For Mice?
Maybe We Never Checked Because We Were Worried About Their Little Hearts?
So, I've been working under the assumption that seed oils weren't just straightforwardly bad for mice.
My bad. I am a fool. I just assumed we'd checked that.
But people (in all fairness, other anti-seed-oil nutters) are telling me that seed oils are, in fact, straightforwardly bad for mice.
Easy experiment to do:
Take some mice, split them randomly between two cages, feed one lot with food high in animal fat, feed the other lot the same food, but instead of using animal fat, use, say, heart-healthy omega-6 sunflower oil. Let the mice eat as much as they like.
Wait for a bit.
Check to see what the differences are. Obesity much?
Child could do it. I would do it myself, except I live on a boat and do not really want to share it with a couple of cages of mice for a year.
I am having a certain amount of trouble believing that no-one has checked this. What with fifty years of being told to eat polyunsaturated fats for the good of my health (which advice, in all fairness, I ignored, so no harm done).
Seems to me the sort of thing that one might want to check, before giving such a recommendation.
Imagine, for instance, that some holistic quantum nutter wanted to put vast quantities of aromatic oils derived from magic healing crystals into the food supply.
Seems like some sort of basic safety check might have been appropriate, no?
Now searching the medical literature is not a core skill of mine, and so the three studies I have so far found:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5235953/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3458187/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3889814/
which seem to bear on the question, are perhaps not the be-all-and-end-all of the relevant research.
But to my untrained eye, which is perfectly capable of misinterpreting such studies very badly, they do seem to indicate that feeding mice polyunsaturated fats might be bad for them.
Cause them, for instance, to gain a certain amount of weight.
And so, what with all three of these studies apparently pointing in the same direction, I am innocently wondering if seed oils really are just straightforwardly bad for mice.
Can anyone help? Is there a vast trove of papers showing that mice are ok with seed oils around that I have missed?
Edit:
Someone showed me this one
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26200659/
So that’s 4-0 to “PUFAs cause obesity in mice”.
Not that I’m that interested in this stupid study-counting pissing contest that people always play. Three pieces of shit and three pieces of gold don’t make a worthless pile.
If I don’t believe the results of meta-analyses in general, then I can hardly claim to believe the results of this one, however open-and-shut it seems to be.
Suffice it to say that no-one’s ever been that interested, and we don’t really know. And the question never seems to have occurred to the people who told us to eat seed oils these last seventy years.
I have always held them in contempt. It appears that I have not held them in sufficient contempt.
Perhaps this is where the pufa industry can flip to?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67548961
So I asked Lamming what his "High-fat, obesogenic Western Diet was" and it's this:
https://insights.envigo.com/hubfs/resources/data-sheets/88137.pdf
42% kcals from fat, the only fat source is "anhydrous milkfat" which clocks in at 2.3% LA of the fat part. So this diet clocks in at just under 1% kcals from LA, and should therefore NOT be obesogenic, right? Hm.
Now maybe something is messed up about "anhydrous milkfat," I looked it up and it basically only seems to be used for rodent studies.
Another theory could be that they were likely grown on a high-LA diet: that datasheet lists a "suitable control" diet as having 1.3% soybean oil by Weight. 1.3% * 60% (LA of soybean oil) * 9kcal/g of fat = 7% of kcal from LA of that diet, aka it's almost the evil 8% diet from the Norwegian study.
So it could be that, by the time these mice enter the lab, they're pre-poisoned with LA in their cells, mitochondriae, and adipose tissue. That's why there's no control arm in any of these studies unless you do what the Norwegians did, and feed the mice a low-LA diet from weaning.
Or it's something else.