The Nutrivore

An Attack in Good Faith

I want to give a plug to Nick Hiebert, https://www.the-nutrivore.com/

Although I think Nick would probably hate me and everything I’ve come to believe over the last year, I actually think we'd agree on quite a lot of things.

In particular, although I'm quite comfortable with the sort of farming I grew up around, where content-looking sheep and cows seemed to be mainly living their best lives in beautiful green fields, and beautiful healthy chickens didn’t really seem to mind us stealing their eggs much and were happy to eat out of our hands, I probably hate factory farming every bit as much as he does.

I have no problem with killing living things, or eating them. I have a very serious problem with causing lifelong misery to innocent animals. I actually think that people who eat the products of factory farming deserve what I think they get as a result. And you don't want to think about what I'd do to the people who own, operate, and work in the factory farms if I could.

Vegans are often saintly people. I am not saintly. I believe in revenge as a terminal value. Debts should be paid in full.

If you can't afford ethically farmed food, just don't eat the damned stuff. The only thing you need that you can't get from plants is a source of vitamin B12.

As a militant vegan with training in nutrition, Nick's in an almost ideal position to come up with counter-arguments to "PUFAs bad", and I've really enjoyed these three articles (one of which is a review of a book I've never read, mainly because I think I can guess what's in it pretty well) in particular:

https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-to-seed-oil-sophistry

https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/the-big-fat-surprise-a-critical-review

https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/should-we-eat-like-hunter-gatherers

If we're going to believe that "PUFAs bad", then we need to be able to answer arguments like these, and I can't.

I can see some holes in some of them. Some others I can imagine that if I put quite a lot of time into thinking and fact checking I might be able to refute. Some of his arguments I'm sure are correct.

But if you're tempted to follow along with this blog, cheering my unsubstantiated intuitive flights of fancy and imagining that I've actually done more research than I'm talking about explicitly, you should read these articles and see what you think.

Can you answer Nick?

If his arguments don't at least worry you, then you have no business 'thinking for yourself', and should probably just Trust Pretend Science™ and the medical consensus. That's almost always the right move for most people.

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One thing I would like to say to Nick is that the truth of "PUFAs bad?" is actually much more important to the vegan cause than to the cause of traditional diet and ethical farming partisans like me.

I actually don't much care if swapping saturated fats for polyunsaturates causes barely detectable improvements in heart attack rates or vice versa. Although it's very counterintuitive, either could be true even if PUFAs are the principal cause of heart disease as I have argued.

I can't imagine anything I could see now that would make me go back to eating processed food or chips fried in vegetable oil on a regular basis.

And I know that eating in a more traditional style won't do me much harm because it never did anyone much harm before the 20th century. That's what I call epidemiological evidence.

But for a vegan, whom I basically see as some sort of modern saint sacrificing their health and their social life to avoid the slaughter and the torture of innocents, with a terribly limited set of food choices¹, the question of whether a major plant-derived macronutrient is a deadly slow poison or not is crucial.

And even if the answer's not what Nick thinks it is, if polyunsaturated fats are in fact as bad as I think they might be, it wouldn't be fatal for veganism.

The polyunsaturated fats we get from seeds are easily transformed into saturated fats.

Once you've realised that trans-fats are a problem, it shouldn't be too hard to get rid of them. If necessary you can fully hydrogenate vegetable oils to make pure saturated fat, and then use enzymes to desaturate them back to a perfect ancestral-type mixture that exactly mimics the animal fat that we're designed to eat at a molecular level.

At that point I'd probably be happy to eat it myself.

I know chemical engineers. I think a plan for doing this well, cheaply and at scale would be an undergraduate project.

And if "PUFAs bad", this would not only enable us to produce very cheap very high quality food without involving animals much at all, it would also very greatly improve the health of vegans, who always seem to be suffering for their saintliness at least a little in my eyes.

It would in fact make it much easier for meat-eaters to become vegans, if they did not think that they would suffer for it.

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I would invite Nick to join us, to use his admirable skills not to argue against us, but to help us decide the question on its technical merits.

"PUFAs bad?" is a simple question of fact.

If it's true, and we come to realise it's true, and act accordingly, then that will improve the health and the happiness of everyone in the world a great deal. And that includes vegans, who stand to benefit from healthy vegetable oils much more than meat-eaters do.

If it's false, and we can come up with good reasons why it's false, and make that obvious, then we can forget about it and keep looking for the real cause of the apocalypse of obesity and illness that is overwhelming what should be the healthiest and happiest people to have ever lived.

It is not about arguing to win, or even about winning a victory over the other side at all.

Victory here, for everyone involved, consists in getting the right answer, and getting it as quickly as possible. And making the answer so overwhelmingly obvious that no-one need ever think about it again.

And that’s true whatever the answer is.

1. I bought a vegan girl dinner once, in the nineties. Not an easy task.