[HN Gopher] Linoleic acid-good or bad for the brain? (2020)
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Linoleic acid-good or bad for the brain? (2020)
Author : whalesalad
Score : 40 points
Date : 2023-07-10 20:05 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| kalupa wrote:
| There is no "one quick trick" that will keep you healthy. It's a
| whole plethora of habits and activities that make a difference,
| not an individual one.
| [deleted]
| slothtrop wrote:
| Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_paradox
|
| Incidentally it seems like sunflower, safflower and soybean oils
| are way more common in packaged products now, higher in omega-6,
| presumably as a sub for palm oil. Canola has a more ideal
| composition among the common vegetable oils in packaged products.
| LarsAlereon wrote:
| One note is that most of the crops grown for seed oil are "high
| oleic" varieties that produce a fat makeup more similar to
| Canola oil than you'd previously see for those crops.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| From the conclusion: "In conclusion, this review presents
| evidence that excess LA in the food supply might adversely affect
| the brain. The potential benefit of LA lowering merits detailed
| evaluation in well-designed and adequately-powered clinical
| studies, to test whether this translates into tangible reductions
| in the risk of neurodegenerative disorders and neurodevelopmental
| abnormalities at a population level."
|
| So eat more Omega 3 and not too much Soy Bean Oil... maybe. I do
| wonder about diet just being another thing for people to argue
| about on the Internet, we know so little about the interplay
| between gut microbiome, food, genetics and health and doing
| proper clinical trials (in humans) to have some certainty is
| nearly impossible.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there is no way to thread the needle. The
| center cannot hold. Nothing in excess is the best I can come up
| with for longer-lasting health.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
|
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t
| ...)
| giantbanana wrote:
| [dead]
| eyko wrote:
| Perhaps it's because English is not my first language, but I
| find it confusing to read "this is evidence that .... might
| ....". Isn't the purpose of evidence to prove a claim? If there
| is no conclusive evidence, I would expect it to be phrased
| along the lines of: "Preliminary evidence suggests that...
| might...".
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| The purpose of evidence is to provide support for a claim.
| However in colloquial speech we generally speak of someone
| having "evidence" of something when they have absolute proof.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Here is something from Dr. M. Greger. He typically has good
| research to back his articles:
|
| https://nutritionfacts.org/question/what-would-you-suggest-a...
| pinko wrote:
| broken link... I think you meant:
| https://nutritionfacts.org/questions/what-would-you-
| suggest-...
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Thanks.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| Greger is a vegan fundamentalist who ignores any evidence to
| the contrary of his chosen vegan lifestyle. That's not
| science. At all.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I believe this is an exaggeration. I have no horse in this
| race, but perhaps you are judging the person's work based
| on his vegan advocacy rather than on the merit of the
| research that he identifies.
| ra wrote:
| Any food that is disproportionately represented in our post
| hunter-gatherer diet, especially processed food, must have an
| element of "bad for you" in it.
|
| Eat whole foods and maintain a level of exercise and don't
| sweat the small stuff.
| hammock wrote:
| >Eat whole foods
|
| Vegetable oil/soybean oil/canola oil/other refined oils is
| not a whole food.
|
| Unrefined olive oil, butter/ghee, lard etc is.
| ta988 wrote:
| ghee is refined butter and you could argue butter is
| refined cream. Those definitions are all fuzzy and context-
| dependant.
| hammock wrote:
| "Refined oil" has a specific documented definition, and
| to be clear I'm talking about chemical refinement. See
| here: https://youtu.be/Cfk2IXlZdbI
|
| The distinction you are making is irrelevant and
| trollsome
| gruez wrote:
| > "Refined oil" has a specific documented definition
|
| Care to link it?
|
| > and to be clear I'm talking about chemical refinement.
| See here: https://youtu.be/Cfk2IXlZdbI
|
| What makes it "chemical"? Does the refinement process
| chemically alter the molecular structure of the lipid
| molecules?
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Olive oil isn't a whole food. Neither is butter, ghee, nor
| lard.
|
| If you extract and concentrate some fraction of a food and
| eat it disproportionately to what is present in the whole
| product, you are by definition consuming a not-whole thing.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| You can cold press canola oil. It's one of the best oils to
| consume rivaling olive oil.
|
| Though this is a good example of why the heuristic is
| nonsense. When we replace saturated fats like your "whole
| foods list" with pufas like canola oil and your "refined
| list", we see human health outcomes improve.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4744652/
| morelisp wrote:
| Any medicine that is disproportionately represented in our
| post hunter-gatherer treatment plans, especially synthesized
| chemicals, must have an element of "bad for you" in it.
|
| Drink clean water and boil willow bark and don't sweat the
| small stuff.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Why should the general population increase their intact of
| salicin via Willow Bark?
|
| What kind of advice is that?
| gruez wrote:
| I think he's satirizing the parent poster, by copying his
| logic and saying that we should eat willow bark rather
| than taking aspirin pills.
| darkerside wrote:
| Well, yeah. There's a reason these drugs all have side
| effects, and that the first principle of medicine is, Do No
| Harm.
|
| We have a long history of interventions leading to worse
| outcomes. It's just sometimes those bad outcomes are worth
| it by evading worse outcomes.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| That doesn't make sense since we ate anything we could find
| and evolution only selected for procreation, not for long
| term health. The very things we ate for most of our history
| could very well be bad for us long term, like increase our
| cardiovascular disease risk.
|
| I don't see why I would accept appeals to nature in favor of
| the balance of our best evidence.
| pengaru wrote:
| Not if you consider parents tend to care for their
| descendants -> healthier parents long-term will have more
| successful descendants, probabilistically speaking.
|
| ex: unfit parents won't be doing a great job of keeping
| their children and/or grandchildren out of the mouths of
| hyenas.
|
| Note we're talking evolutionary time scales here, this is
| hunter-gatherers in loin cloths on the savanna territory.
| atkailash wrote:
| [dead]
| ericmcer wrote:
| Things like this are so nit picky and nuanced it really isn't
| worth caring about unless you are already doing everything else
| right.
|
| People ignore low hanging fruit in their quest for health, like
| analyzing vegetable oils is pointless when you still eat tons
| of sugar, don't sleep enough, don't exercise, drink too much,
| etc.
| whalesalad wrote:
| there is low hanging fruit, sure, but a substantial amount of
| our food - even things that you might assume are 'healthy' -
| are loaded with these terrible oils.
| autism/adhd/neurodivergence is skyrocketing, as-are late-
| stage health problems like alzheimers and parkinsons. all of
| this is pretty well correlated with the rise of our race-to-
| the-bottom agricultural practices involving pesticides like
| glyphosate and mass cultivation of crops for seed oils.
|
| this should not be ignored.
| hammock wrote:
| >analyzing vegetable oils is pointless
|
| On a personal scale perhaps. On a commercial scale though -
| similar to what happened to trans fats - and given how much
| vegetable oil is in processed food, a conclusive result could
| have a monumental impact on the food supply
| [deleted]
| whalesalad wrote:
| Sort this table by LA. Use/eat oils that have the lowest amount
| possible.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linoleic_acid#Dietary_sources
|
| Coconut oil, Butter/Ghee, Olive Oil, Lard...
| gruez wrote:
| >Coconut oil, Butter/Ghee, Olive Oil, Lard...
|
| The problem is that most of them (minus olive oil) are high
| in saturated fats, which are also bad. Out of the frying pan,
| into the fire.
| whalesalad wrote:
| nah, saturated fats are not bad. that is the myth big ag
| wants you to believe.
|
| people will often look at old photos and wax poetic about
| how youthful and thin everyone was. why? they were eating
| saturated fats and not seed oils.
| gruez wrote:
| Are you confusing "fats" with "saturated fats"? Fats in
| general might have been vindicated, but the evidence for
| saturated fats being bad for you is still pretty
| strong[1]. Feel free to provide any sources to the
| contrary.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Associati
| on_with...
| whalesalad wrote:
| Anything that I say will be misconstrued as conspiracy
| theory. Suffice to say this information is incorrect, and
| there is a growing snowball of evidence to suggest so. I
| for one do not trust the American Heart Association -
| they are a bunch of crooks funded by lobbyists, big
| agriculture and massive conglomerates. They got their
| start helping Proctor and Gamble market Crisco (poison in
| a tub) as being healthier than animal fats. In the 60s
| they got in bed with the tobacco industry to prove that
| cigarettes were not bad for you. A lot of the "studies"
| we have right now which paint saturated fats in a bad
| light are not true to the mission of science.
| gruez wrote:
| >Suffice to say this information is incorrect, and there
| is a growing snowball of evidence to suggest so.
|
| Can you present some examples of this "growing snowball
| of evidence"?
|
| >A lot of the "studies" we have right now which paint
| saturated fats in a bad light are not true to the mission
| of science.
|
| What makes you think that? Is it just based on
| funding/affiliations alone? Or do you have specific
| methodological concerns about the studies that they use,
| that your studies don't have?
| BobbyJo wrote:
| 100% agree.
|
| The more specific you get about a diet, the more specific you
| need to get about the person eating it. So long as most dietary
| advice is designed and tested at population scale, it's going
| to be fuzzy and inconclusive.
|
| Even the most basic advice we can give today comes with
| asterisks.
| csdvrx wrote:
| I've read it can leech mercury from silver fillings, resulting in
| brain toxicity (the "amalgalm disease" IIRC).
|
| Is there any truth to that?
| extr wrote:
| For anyone who is confused at the significance here, I looked
| into the whole "Seed oils = bad" thing the other day and this
| claim was at the heart of it (no pun intended). Basically the
| idea that seed oils usually contain higher levels of linoleic
| acid, and butter does not, and therefore tl;dr excess
| butter/animal fat is not bad for you and does not cause heart
| disease in the way that people think it does. You can see a list
| of fats ranked by LA content here: https://www.news-
| medical.net/health/Oils-Rich-in-Linoleic-Ac...
|
| Not saying this is correct or anything, just providing the
| missing context for anyone asking why Linoleic Acid is in a
| headline.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Thanks. There are oil/fat wars going on in research to protect
| billion dollar industries, so this is not surprising. A better
| and more helpful headline would be "whole foods are healthier
| than processed foods." But everyone knows that already.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| That is a good heuristic, but the hard part for people is
| evaluating foods at the periphery of that heuristic like
| chocolate and tofu and nut milk and canola oil which improve
| human health outcomes.
|
| That said, and I'll quickly grant: most people in the west
| aren't making the mistake, say, eating too much seitan and
| nut milks and unsweetened 80% chocolate (all processed
| foods), so I won't nitpick too much.
| stevebmark wrote:
| This seems likely a garbage-y study. It's a narrative study, not
| even a meta-analysis, so it's more of proposing a hypothesis
| rather than stating a fact. The current science shows that seed
| oils, and omega 6 (aka linoleic acid) fatty acids, are either
| benign or healthy. There was a very popular hypothesis that the
| omega 6 to 3 ratio was important for health, popularized in the
| early 2000's and getting revived now by counter-culture nonsense
| people, but the science has not backed that case up.
|
| They study they link to citing neuro-development issues is
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28420388/ - which is based on a
| food intake survey, and it's not a controlled study, it's looking
| at cohorts from another study. All they checked for was linoleic
| acid intake, and unless you're specifically checking for food
| source, this usually means it comes from processed food, which is
| more likely the culprit than the 6 to 3 fatty acid ratio.
|
| There is no known effect of seed oil / omega 6 intake on
| inflammation, which is shown in quite a few controlled studies.
| Seed oil intake replacing saturated fat intake has also been
| shown to significantly reduce CVD outcomes.
| rogers12 wrote:
| I think you should try eating three teaspoons of heart-healthy
| canola oil with breakfast and document the results to dunk on
| garbage science peddlers.
| stevebmark wrote:
| This is a very good example of the type of revival I'm
| talking about! There is lots of emotion in this space, which
| dominates the discussion over science.
| rogers12 wrote:
| Yes, exactly! Science is a fantastic way to discover truths
| about reality and apply them to your own life. For example,
| putting 15 grams of canola oil in your daily breakfast
| cereal.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| What quantities are we talking about? A daily serving of tofu, or
| ???
| frankus wrote:
| About two tablespoons of store-bought ranch dressing will put
| you at the 2% number that the article suggests as the high end
| of preindustrial intake.
|
| (11g of unsaturated fat in 2 tablespoons of Hidden Valley
| Ranch, assume soybean oil because it's cheaper, which is ~50%
| LA, so about 50 calories, which is 2% of a 2500-calorie/day
| diet)
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