Chips Paradox

Potatoes good, Oilz good, Chips bad

A redditor asks:

Be it french fries, potato chips or mashed potatoes made with heart-healthy™ margarine, everyone (even oil-stans) agrees its unhealthy even though widely speaking both oils and potatoes are considered healthy. Even cooking home grown organic potatoes with top quality EVOO I don’t think most people would consider that healthy, despite it just being two ingredients of “healthy” things.

Just needed to get it out of my mind. The world we live in makes no sense.

And I replied:

I’ve had a number of encounters with medical ‘science’ over the years. I think they’re generally good, honest people trying their best in a complicated world, but I stopped expecting their stuff to actually make sense a long time ago.

Generally I think there’s a big difference between the ‘hard sciences’, where everything does mostly make sense and things that don’t fit are famous conundrums that youngsters dream of being able to solve, and the ‘soft sciences’ where everyone’s just ‘doing studies’ that rarely seem to be about anything in particular and most of the conclusions have only very tenuous links to the experiments that were actually done.

There’s some sort of difference in the approaches, something about expecting the pieces to fit together, that’s different in the ‘soft sciences’. Reading their stuff is more like reading alchemists than reading chemists.

You would think that ‘potatoes are healthy’, ‘oils are healthy’, ‘potatoes fried in oil are really unhealthy’ would be a famous paradox that everyone was really interested in. It might be the frying, for instance. What exactly about the frying is causing all the modern health problems?? But no.... Nobody seems to care.

Personally I reckon that my ancestors did a lot of potato eating and frying in butter and didn’t get many of the ‘diseases of modernity’ and so potatoes fried in butter are probably fine.

In fact potatoes fried in beef dripping (either ‘chips’ or ‘roast potatoes’) were a really characteristic feature of English food even when I was a little boy and obesity was very rare. So, probably fine.

But chips fried in vegetable oil probably are bad. Studies show!

And then you’ve got to ask ‘is it something about vegetable oil, or is it something about frying in vegetable oil?’

You’d think medical ‘science’ would be obsessed with this question, especially since a lot of the medical literature refers to the pernicious effects of ‘lipid peroxidation’ as if it were the worst thing in the world. And lipid peroxidation is a thing that happens mostly to polyunsaturated fats.

I’ve also noticed that the cancer people seem to think that polyunsaturated fats block glycolysis, which is useful for treating cancers since cancers love glycolysis. (The Warburg Effect)

Glycolysis is the main metabolic pathway. Glycolysis is what most animals do all day. If polyunsaturates block the pathway, why isn’t that seen as a really important fact?

I don’t think you need to look much further than that to work out why ketogenic diets (that avoid glycolysis) seem (anecdotally) to fix all sorts of problems, at least at first.

But nobody cares. And that seems par for the course for medical ‘science’, which is why I can’t bring myself to write it without the scare quotes.