[HN Gopher] Fatty acid found in palm oil linked to spread of cancer
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Fatty acid found in palm oil linked to spread of cancer
Author : lonelyasacloud
Score : 115 points
Date : 2021-11-10 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| Kessler83 wrote:
| Nature is a world leading journal with a very rigorous review
| process. They publish less than a tenth of the (proper)
| submissions they get. So the science here is likely to have high
| quality.
|
| As for the Guardian article, there are some pretty heavy direct
| quotes in there, in case you don't trust the journalist's
| assessment (I don't see any strong reason why you wouldn't).
| robbedpeter wrote:
| At this point, it's well known that journals are broken. The
| whole replication crisis is a product of journals like Nature
| and NEJM.
|
| Their authority has always been a sham, and will continue to
| be, because "Science" is not about gatekeeping. These journals
| are rent seeking, avaricious entities profiting by selling the
| illusion of quality and exclusivity to universities and
| research institutions that should know better.
|
| Science is not about publish or perish. It's not about making
| the most money from patents and royalties and residuals. It is
| process which research papers contribute to, but those papers
| are just like any other arbitrary metric imposed on groups of
| people - when the metric becomes the goal, the output will be
| exploited and gamified. The people playing by the rules will
| lose when everyone else is cheating, and the cheating among
| science journals has been going on for more than 3 decades.
|
| Trusting any paper is a naive thing to do, but trusting a paper
| because of the supposed reputation of the journal is just
| silly.
|
| Trust collections of research that uses reproducible
| experimentation and rigorous scientific methodology that
| reinforces ideas over a broad spectrum of literature. These
| journals are a toxic influence and the sooner they die off the
| better.
| fasteo wrote:
| This maybe one of the mechanistic cause of cancer progression,
| but let's take a step back and see what would cause an excess PA
| concentration in our bodies [1], that is, other than force
| feeding mice with an enormous amount of dietary PA.
|
| >>> in presence of other factors such as positive energy balance,
| excessive intake of carbohydrates (in particular mono and
| disaccharides), and a sedentary lifestyle, the mechanisms to
| maintain a steady state of PA concentration may be disrupted
| leading to an over accumulation of tissue PA ...
|
| Business as usual.
|
| [1] Palmitic Acid: Physiological Role, Metabolism and Nutritional
| Implications (https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2017.00902)
| zwieback wrote:
| The interesting part, to me as a outsider, is that they used
| human cancer cells, exposed them to PA and then those cells had
| some kind of "memory" after being transplanted into mice.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| This kind of smells of bad science reporting, the paper itself
| does not seem to be bad science, but I haven't read the paper yet
| (DOI 10.1038/s41586-021-04075-0); a quote from the abstract
| basically, indicates they were force-fed unrealistically high
| palmitic acid content combined with the standard lab mouse fake
| feed diet. It also indicates the palmitic acid did not cause the
| cancer, but only increased its growth.
|
| "Here we show that dietary palmitic acid (PA), but not oleic acid
| or linoleic acid, promotes metastasis in oral carcinomas and
| melanoma in mice. Tumours from mice that were fed a short-term
| palm-oil-rich diet (PA), or tumour cells that were briefly
| exposed to PA in vitro, remained highly metastatic even after
| being serially transplanted (without further exposure to high
| levels of PA)."
|
| Mammals produce palmitic acid as the primary fatty acid during de
| novo lipogenesis (humans are estimated to have about 1/3rd of
| their body fat stored as palmitic, possibly more in strict
| vegetarians than everyone else), and palmitic acid is _required_
| for building the membranes of cells and subcellular structures
| (palmitoylation, a process that is used in the production of
| several thousand chemicals in the body).
|
| Fundamentally, if they would have _not_ had this outcome, then it
| would indicate we don 't understand something fundamental about
| biochemistry. If you put fuel on a fire, the fire will grow. If
| you feed a cancer the ingredients it requires, then it will grow.
| Cancer does not really do anything special that any other cell
| doesn't already do (the form of "high copper" anaerobic
| metabolism it uses not withstanding); palmitic acids, and
| saturated fatty acids in general, are required for cellular
| growth, hormone construction, energy production, and an otherwise
| endless list of functions required for life.
|
| The paper isn't saying "don't eat palmitic acid rich diets",
| which the science news seems to be trying to imply the paper
| says, and if it had said so, would be bad science in of itself;
| what it's saying is we should look into short term low palmitic
| acid diets as an adjunct therapy for cancer treatment.
|
| That said, if you're looking into keeping cancer from starting in
| the first place, the semi-traditional human diet of one meal a
| day, sometimes with intermittent fasting thrown on top, seems to
| make sure cancer is kept at bay with our normal apoptosis cycle;
| apoptosis in humans only can re-engage after the postprandial
| insulin spike after 12 to 24 hours, depending on the individual.
| Saturated fats, including palmitic acid, are required to keep an
| individual functioning without being hungry all day long, but
| also to replace damaged cells garbage collected by apoptosis and
| also drive apoptosis itself.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| There are lots of reasons why palm oil is a bad idea, but mouse
| data isn't high on my list.
| pvarangot wrote:
| Yeah this is more of a cancer study than a nutrition study,
| everyone in nutrition agrees ingesting palmitic oil is stupid
| as our body makes palmitic acid out of excess carbs so it's
| just fat to store without the extra steps, and hence bad for
| cardiovascular health. It's the main reason why excess coconut
| products and olive oil are not recommended on a vegan diet if
| you are doing it for the life extension and cancer-protective
| benefits.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Some quick googling tells me this is in nearly all of American
| food.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > Some quick googling tells me this is in nearly all of
| American food.
|
| Presumably you mean "processed food".
|
| It isn't in any natural food in America or the rest of the
| world unless the chef adds it in.
| lcfcjs wrote:
| It is naturally present in butter, cheese, milk, and meat, as
| well as cocoa butter, soybean oil, and sunflower oil.
| marpstar wrote:
| This and soybean oil.
| gremloni wrote:
| Pretty much every oil except olive oil is supposed to be bad
| for you. Looks like we're getting to a point where we have to
| reevaluate all of our traditional foods, even those that have
| been around for millennia.
| handrous wrote:
| We'll need to bring back animal fat, butter, lard, et c.,
| then. AFAIK avoiding those (because science said they were
| bad, at one time) is why we've got all these other fats in
| our diet to begin with.
| goldforever wrote:
| Dumb comment.
| bavell wrote:
| IIRC, vegetable oils (unsaturated fats) exploded in
| popularity in the middle of last century when chemical
| companies figured out how to mass produce them. Prior to
| that, we got most of our fats from saturated fats.
|
| Very interesting video about this and more from What I've
| Learned: https://youtu.be/rQmqVVmMB3k
| pvarangot wrote:
| Olive oil is not not bad as much as it has good essential
| aminos, but it still has a lot of palmitic oil. Another not
| not bad oil commonly sold as a health product is coconut
| butter, which also has a lot of palmitic oil.
|
| There's a lot of evidence that any fat and any cholesterol
| is worse than none at all. That means you just have to
| choose the lesser evil if you want to eat fat, and
| according to most big population studies that's just eating
| it raw from plants, like seeds and fruits. The main problem
| is getting the essential aminos other than ALA, those are
| found in seaweed or you need to supplement them.
| [deleted]
| timwaagh wrote:
| What I find pretty interesting is that this stuff is in most of
| those 'natural' foods that aren't considered healthy. And it's
| already listed as a potential heart health hazard. Now add this
| cancer evidence on top of it and it really doesn't look too good
| for this stuff. But I guess more research is necessary.
| goda90 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmitic_acid
|
| Seems like a common saturated fatty acid in animal based fats too
| isbn wrote:
| > _Palmitic acid is the first fatty acid produced during fatty
| acid synthesis and is the precursor to longer fatty acids. As a
| consequence, palmitic acid is a major body component of
| animals. In humans, one analysis found it to make up 21-30%
| (molar) of human depot fat, and it is a major, but highly
| variable, lipid component of human breast milk._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmitic_acid#Biochemistry
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| I don't really trust this kind of science reporting. The link to
| the nature article doesn't even link to it for me:
| https://10.0.4.14/s41586-021-04075-0, the real link is:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04075-0#citeas
|
| I also cannot access the study on SciHub, but one should keep
| eyebrows raised with alarmist reporting like this. Palmitic acid
| is in everything. Ask questions like:
|
| 1. What's the strength of effect? Is it 50x more likely to see
| metastasis? 15%?
|
| 2. Is the diet a _realistic_ diet? Are the mice or rats eating a
| significant amount more of palmitic acid than what would be
| reasonable in a human participant?
|
| 3. How does the mouse model differ from humans?
|
| 4. What are the systemic effects? People don't eat fatty acids
| alone, they eat them as (ideally) part of a diet composed of
| whole foods. Might the effect hold in a realistic diet with more
| palmitic acid?
|
| ... and so on and so forth. Without access to the actual article
| and some folks' willingness to critically look at methodology,
| this kind of writing just encourages people to draw simplistic
| conclusions about incredibly complex systems.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I never know how to interpret the phrase "linked to" in various
| news headlines.
|
| Is it just shorthand for some relationship that's truly
| significant and meaningful in the context of the article?
|
| Or is it a weasel-phrase to click-bait people into reading a
| less significant finding and/or to impute guilt by association?
| gregwebs wrote:
| In 99% of the news headlines you hear about the underlying
| study does not contain causal evidence in humans. It is
| almost always correlational in humans or a mouse model. So
| yes.
|
| Generally weak evidence that can conform to some existing
| view an organization holds is cherry-picked into the news.
| Although sometimes it is just in the news because it is
| odd/interesting.
| koprulusector wrote:
| It's embarrassing The Guardian posted a link to a 10. Address.
|
| :facepalm
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I wonder how that is even possible. I just checked, they have
| different parent companies.
|
| Maybe that is an internal proxy/cache address? Possibly for
| getting around the paywall?
|
| Or maybe they paid/arranged for an internally proxied SAML
| connection?
| r00fus wrote:
| It's clearly a mistake - either the article was downloaded
| onto the author's network (and internal link provided) or
| simply the wrong URL.
| frgtpsswrdlame wrote:
| Your rules are good but this:
|
| >Palmitic acid is in everything.
|
| Should have no effect on our judgement regarding its safety.
| Probably the story of our times seen from the future will be
| how we failed to account for extremely widespread use of very
| minorly dangerous products. See stuff like microplastics which
| took a couple decades to go from research to ban. Take the
| famous example from Fight Club:
|
| >The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now,
| should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the
| field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply
| by the average out-of-court settlement, C. ... If X is less
| than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
|
| Except we've moved even one degree from that now, think of a
| variable Y which is the cost to even figure out what B is. If
| you're a company selling a dangerous product you don't just
| have to consider X, you can also factor in Y as a proxy for
| long/hard entities will have to fight just to figure out the
| harm you're doing. So we should think about both sides of the
| coin, that the research is good enough to show there is an
| effect but also that we're not increasing Y to completely
| unreasonable amounts.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Good context rules. However, what always concerns me about 1
| and 2 is that in our environment there are toxins of all types.
| Yeah, a penny here, a dime there, a nickle here again. Those
| all add up.
|
| And since there's no way to sort that out, each of those
| individual toxins gets a free pass for being an insignificant
| amount. Unfortunately, we can to be mindful of the sum of those
| toxins being greater than the individual parts.
|
| So now what? Is it reasonable and safe to ignore that context?
| And if we have kids?
| Ginden wrote:
| > What's the strength of effect?
|
| You are acting like _anyone_ cares about effect sizes. As
| civilization, we transcended past such nuances, you can write
| alarmistic abstract about 3% effect size, as long magic _p_ <
| 0.05.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| My favorite in the breathless overreporting genre is when
| debate wins are described as "evisceration."
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| Study on mice found palmitic acid promoted metastasis in mouth
| and skin cancers ...
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