Seed Oil Summary

So Lazy

I’ve been trying to write an essay called “Why I am So Very Very Suspicious of Polyunsaturated Fats” for a while now.

Recently I got pointed at:

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

Dynomight is a person whose reasoning I greatly respect, and he’s pretty much summed up what I think about seed oils.

To summarize his summary:

Plenty of reasons to be suspicious, no good evidence one way or another.

I think what I’d add to his summary is that:

(1) My own deep suspicion of the soft sciences makes me largely not attach much weight to the evidence from meta-analyses of large historical trials.

That’s a very personal bias. If you’d rather trust medical “science” over some crackpots on the internet, which I think is a perfectly sound and wise thing to do, then I’d be tempted to say that those meta-analyses are pretty much curtains for the seed-oil hypothesis. Move along. Nothing to see here.

(2) I have a very strong prior against seed oils.

It seems to me that ‘eating funny chemicals that are quite like, but not exactly like the things that you were designed to eat’ is a very bad plan. If that’s not bad for you then that’s very surprising. You need strong evidence to overturn that prior.

(3) My personal experience

About a year ago I was very confused about the whole seed oil thing, and so I decided to give them up to see what happened.

I felt a lot better almost immediately, but in hindsight that was probably because I’d accidentally reduced my intake of sulphites, which do seem to be very bad for me, but are probably harmless to most people.

But nothing happened to my weight gain problem at all. And after six months I’d pretty much decided that the seed-oil thing was bunk.

And then one day I realised that I was still eating loads of peanut butter, which is very high in linoleic acid. So I gave that up too.

And at that point my weight started dropping like a stone. And even more significantly my poor broken metabolism seemed to start to heal itself fairly rapidly. In a very measurable way.

And there were visible changes too. My fingernails and toenails started growing faster and were healthier and less brittle. My hair, which had all gone white, seemed to start getting its colour back. I’m now salt-and-pepper rather than father christmas.

The weight loss has reversed itself now, so I no longer believe that seed oils are directly obviously involved in obesity. But the other changes remain, and continue.

So I’m left with a few possible causes for these good things.

Sulphites, the ex150diet, and peanut butter.

And of course, all the other changes I made or that just happened without me even noticing them.

I think if I had to guess, I’d currently guess that the weight-loss thing was to do with ex150, and the metabolic improvements are to do with cutting out sulphites.

But I’m keeping an open mind.

The peanut butter that I ate was very wholesome; all it contained was peanuts, palm oil, and salt. That’s why I didn’t think to stop eating it in the first place. I see no reason to think that salt or palm oil are particularly bad things.

I don’t think I’ll ever eat seed oils or peanut butter again. I see no possible benefit to it, and plenty of possible downsides.

I’m pretty sure dynomight would think I’m a lunatic.

I think he’s great, and I commend his article to y’all.

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A similar essay which comes to much the same conclusions is:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/

And in fact reading that was what first raised the seed oil hypothesis to my attention.

I’m pretty sure Scott would think I’m a lunatic too. Again, I think he’s great and commend his article and his ever-witty and entertaining style as highly as I can.

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To understand why I don’t trust the soft sciences as far as I can throw them, I can’t think of a better essay than this:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/

Although my soft-science suspicions date back way further than that.

I never trusted them at all. Even as a child I thought they were mostly talking rubbish.

Some of the things that I remember rhyming with my childish inchoate suspicions are:

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

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

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

But at bottom, I think it’s pretty much just that I hate priests. Just because these priests dress up as scientists doesn’t make me take them seriously.

Show me the miracles, bitches.¹

That’s what I mean by empiricism.

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P.S.

While I’m producing a list of ur-texts, I should also mention

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/

Which was what originally led me to think that obesity was a mystery looking for an explanation, rather than a mystery that was explained by sloth and gluttony.

They don’t think it’s seed oils either.

Hell, maybe it’s not seed oils.

1. OK, some really major miracles are antibiotics, vaccines, surgery, fixing vitamin deficiency diseases, and the discovery that smoking is bad.

Notice that the only one that involved ‘studies’ is the one that smoking is bad. Which is a priori obvious and no big surprise. Weak evidence is OK when it shows you that something that’s obviously true is also actually true.

I will also say that to their very great credit, the soft sciences have very recently started to take all these criticisms to heart. I hope that one day soon they will become real sciences and start performing real miracles, as a science should. I predict that I will eventually start to trust them a bit. But first, some initial test-miracles must happen.