It seems like the person is fighting the good fight, maybe, but who is Dynomight?

These random bloggers/influencers speaking from self-proclaimed high ground is in large part how we got in this mess. There are a gazillion people out there who know how to say the right things, to get the right minds, the click the right "follow" buttons, none of which has any bearing on truth, honesty, or accuracy.

Two things can be harmful at once.

I am curious which is worse in terms of contribution to modern chronic metabolic disease.

In the case of ultra-processed/refined oils though, there is an argument to be made that these are novel foods that humans never ate until very recently. There aren't any old people who have been eating them their whole lives in the quantities we do now. This is probably true for industrially refined sugar too, but sugar is a more complex story since people have been concentrating plant sugars for a lot longer than they've been industrially refining oil for food.

I'm not defending sugar though to be clear - I strictly avoid it and even avoid fruit juice and such. I know empirically for myself I feel terrible if I eat very much sugar. I also feel terrible if I eat much refined oil and I strictly avoid that too.

Yep. If there was one single thing that literally every person should do for their health, that is to greatly reduce or completely eliminate sugar. The evidence is overwhelming.

The evidence against seed oils is not quite as convincing. I see seed oils as a low quality food to be avoided - goes rancid too easily, requires chemical processing, etc. - but it's not strictly poison. These oils are in virtually every industrial "food product" which makes them unhealthy by association. Stop eating highly processed crap and you'll see the benefits - cutting out seed oils is a side effect.

>Seed oils probably aren't ideal

Except they are. A refined monounsaturated fat is in the upper tier of perfect calorie. It makes a lot of sense for omega-9's to be a major part of caloric consumption. The omega-3 and omega-6 when fresh and uncooked are also unnecessary demonized by the idea that they are immediately rancid. Like many things the problems arise from the implementation or how they are used, not the chemical itself.

My half-believed conspiracy theory is that "seed oils bad" is a psy-op from the corn/HFCS industries. I don't have hard data here, but it seemed like in the late 2010s people were converging on added sugar and especially HFCS as the thing which is truly messing up health. I can't help but wonder if the corn industry saw this, panicked, and began seeding (no pun intended) the seed oil meme among influencers.

I don't have evidence for this specifically, but there's certainly a long and documented history of both a) influencers suddenly adopting a new party line in response to a paid campaign and b) shitty policy specifically for the influential corn industry (ethanol subsidies, e.g.)

That study is worthless.

1. TC:LDL and LDL:HDL? Always be suspicious of nonsense ratios.

2. Trials lasted 3 to 7 weeks. Atherosclerosis shows up in decades.

3. Almost nobody even hit the high intake range of 4.19% calories, everyone was clustered at the low end.

4. It was a null finding (CI crosses zero, underpowered, just looks at surrogate markers), not evidence of no effect.

Do people who eat ruminant animals have better health outcomes in general? No, especially not better than people who, say, replace it with plant proteins. Which is why proponents try to focus on bad studies. We should be asking what is the best evidence, not cherry picking the worst evidence.

If you think this article is annoyingly hand-wavy about science, wait until you see the dietary guidelines put out by this administration!

I don't know why, but this has always tickled me in a good way. It's like the best type of poetry. Extremely well phrased for my minimalist brain.

And the opposite of Claude's commit messages. Maybe I should add this as an example in Claude.MD?

FTA:

> There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats.

> The administration that declared it is “ending the war on saturated fat” has found a cooking fat that delivers more of the exact compounds most associated with cardiovascular mortality. MAHA is road paved with artery-clogging cholesterol, and they’re calling it a health revolution.

The article seems worth reading. I found it informative. It’s not that the scariest compounds in seed oils aren’t considered dangerous, but they’re probably not in vegetable oils in significant enough levels. So that’s conspiratorial misunderstanding by the MAHA contingent.

The “seed oils” movement has grown beyond seed oils. People who follow seed oil influencers usually subscribe to a cluster of ideas. The superiority of beef tallow is one of them.

A few paragraphs into the article, the author addresses the "seed oil" misnomer; it's better to keep reading before jumping to the comments to do a knee-jerk comment to a single statement.

Much olive oil is not refined or ultra processed, but in the US market, 25%+ is.

According to https://www.imarcgroup.com/united-states-olive-oil-market

10% of olive oil in the US market is refined using the same hexane process as canola or soybean oil, and another 15% is refined using other chemical processes.

It's not a seed oil but for many people concerned about ultra processed food including refined oils, it's not the "seed" part but the "refined" part that's the issue, and specifically how it is refined.

Though there is also a concern many have about cooking unsaturated fats at very high temperatures causing oxidation/rancidity/free-radicals and thus oxidative stress which is a primary driver of disease, and seed oils tend to have a lot more unsaturated fat than animal fat. Olive oil is more saturated than seed oils but not as saturated as animal fat so it is more prone to oxidation - i.e. it degrades much easier with heat and goes rancid faster and thus is more likely to be rancid/oxidized when used since we don't usually get it fresh.

>Does the author (a purported dietician) not know this him/herself?

FTA: First, “seed oils” is a marketing term, not a nutritional category. What we’re actually talking about are vegetable oils high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats

It really isn't weird, and given the entire rest of the article clearly the author understands.

RFK and friends have health-washed tallow. While their ridiculous new food recommendations claimed to "end the war on protein", it's pretty clear by all the surrounding material that they really wanted to "end the war on saturated fats". Their recommendations are filled with saturated-fat heavy foods (while cowardly sticking to the same old guidelines on percentage of calories from the same).

"Influencers" are pushing tallow as the best oil, despite literally the entirety of the evidence completely annihilating that claim.

Social media.

Europe is not immune.

I almost never hear about it in person. It’s always on some social media site. Often the sites where people think they’re not using normal social media, like Twitter or Reddit.

Many restaurants around me have started advertising that they cook everything with beef tallow, as opposed to seed oil.

Ironically, most of them also happen to serve deep fried stuffs which are unhealthy no matter what oil you fry it with.

This could just be a function of your algorithm silo on social media.

Have you tried searching Youtube/Twitter in a euro language to check?

If you haven't already, you will. Expect supermarkets to start offering and marketing animal-based fats more frequently.

On social media.

I'm not sure of the genesis of it, but it got traction with "health-fluencers" (not to be confused with health experts) and has spread like wildfire despite no real evidence backing it up. Its just a circle of parrots repeating whatever is trending so they can get on the algo train.

Now it's starting to show up in brands and businesses because the mindless algo herd gravitates towards it.

Apparently at heart it has to do with solvents being used to extract the oil, but those solvents are trivially boiled out after processing.

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

Apparently (per the Wiki) the fad grew after 2020, when Joe Rogan (an American podcaster) interviewed Paul Saladino (an American "carnivore diet" promoter and current food supplement business owner).

The Wiki claims that this fad diet / conspiracy theory is popular on the "political right". Actually, my guess is that a better description would be that this is particularly popular among certain social media "wellness influencers" and "alternative health" promoters. Especially wellness influencers who have been pushing anti-veganism / meat-only / high-protein fad diets in the past.

There seems to be overlap between this movement and anti-vaccination movement promoters (Joseph Mercola, a key figure in the later movement, is now also promoting anti-seed oil activism).

I don't see a whole lot of influencers promoting this yet who are not American. I also don't see this fad outside social media much personally, despite being an American. The primary thing I can think of is that the fast food chain Steak N Shake is heavily touting its "beef tallow fries" on their billboards now.

Yes. RFK Jr. was corruptly placed in charge of America's healthcare by Trump in exchange for dropping out as a presidential candidate.

He is a conspiracist with no medical credeentials, and he believes, without evidence, that seed oils are response for most of the ills of mankind, Tylenol causes autism, SSRI's should not be prescribed, etc. None of his beliefs are mainstream or evidence backed, but he now has a huge megaphone.

The reason RFK resonated with people is because the highly credentialed experts were not producing favorable outcomes. Results have to matter, right? We’ll see how successful (or not) RFK’s policies are, but let’s not revise history to where things were great right before he came in and ruined everything.

> will result in a terrible price that some children will pay in the future.

I think we both agree when I say I think RFK Jr. knows nearly nothing about biology or ethics, just like squirrels, possums, insects know nearly nothing about biology or ethics, as practically all species on Earth.

I certainly don't think he comprehends the zooko's triangle between:

1) egalitarian access to healthcare (if not just privatize?)

2) the level of healthcare (as measured by deviation from non-intervention procreation statistics: if you medically could remediate a cold to the point that my cold didn't cause me to stay inside, suffering in a bed, I might have seduced a mate and procreated, natural selection works on rates, not caricatural life vs death; if my procreation statistics were unchanged by the "remedy" against the cold, it can't have been very effective, as I assure you it would have improved my procreation rate if it were, but perhaps I may be wrong and most people might actually have more successful dates with mates suffering a cold then mates not suffering a cold)

3) the fitness of future generations

you can have 2 but not all 3; we can't bypass natural selection and then say it didn't have an influence on natural selection.

The concept of socialized healthcare without depriving the future generations of as fit a genome as humans had in a pre-socialized healthcare society is effectively impossible. Every healthcare intervention just sends the grim reaper to the next generation. By what right does the current generation exploit knowledge on biology for the medical comfort of that generation, at the cost of a more vurnerable future population, precisely more vulnerable where we "succeeded" in temporarily thwarting its side effects?

so when you write

> will result in a terrible price that some children will pay in the future.

That is true, but only in a myopic sense.

While the conclusion is controversial, the premises are not. As formal verification gets picked up, not just by programmers and hardware designers, but by society at large, these insights in the form of formal scientific proofs will be publicly and unambiguously known.

How did humanity end up in this situation? "Healthcare" was rarely a true act of charity, it served the King if a baby could be secured to safety by surgically removing it from his wife, it served the King if his armies practiced medicine which boosted morale and healed its soldiers, it served the King if doctors could specialize and treat patients on a regular basis, so they would have ready knowledge and experienced stable hands (systematically located by organizing a healthcare system) would be available to treat the King when eventually the King needed such experienced help himself.

All of these directional practices originated long before awareness let alone agreement on evolution theory.

There is no ethical nor effective way to turbocharge natural selection, so as a species we should not repeat the mistakes of the Nazi's. Socialized healthcare is unethical across generations. Gated access to healthcare is unethical on egalitarian grounds. Ineffective healthcare is unethical on the grounds of quackery.

Somewhere between being born and our current age, billions of people were and still are indoctrinated about some internally inconsistent putative ethical possibility of egalitarian access to healthcare, which was never proven, and plenty of evidence speaks to the contrary!

I think we both agree when I say I think RFK Jr. knows nearly nothing about biology or ethics, just like squirrels, possums, insects know nearly nothing about biology or ethics, as practically all species on Earth.

They don't need hospitals!

So keep the spiel about what may happen to children, because egalitarian healthcare will amplify every successfully treated affliction's incidence rates in the next generations!

Nobody is singularly powerful enough to stop the healthcare madness; if healthcare disappears it won't be due to RFK Jr. it will be because it will have gone out of style, and shrouded in shame, like doing a big poo poo on the carpet, stashed away as a traumatic collective memory, somewhere between Pol Pot and the Nazi's, that is the natural endpoint for the illusion of egalitarian healthcare without consequences.

If people got 75% of their calories from plant based whole foods, a lot of health problems would probably disappear overnight.

Mammoth diet - Good good!

I work in an area that involves, among many other things, analysis of cooking oil in factories. It might be hard to pin down the terminology of "reused" frying oil, because many of the frying processes are continuous. The raw material goes through a vat of hot oil on a conveyer and comes out the other end dripping with oil

The quality of the oil is continuously monitored, and new oil goes in while old oil goes out in the fried food itself. The crunchy and salty aspects make it palatable to eat oil. The oil doesn't actually spend a long time in the vat before coming out in the product.

If that industrial prepared food switches to tallow I still have doubts about how much it is reused and what chemical changes it goes through...

> the amount of trans fat in beef tallow

Natural tallow doesn’t contain a lot of trans fat. The only way to consume trans fats in large quantities is through hydrogenated fats.

If I take my 100%-handwritten prose and hand it to a detector, it tells me it's 30% AI. Those detectors are crap and they're training people to also be crap at it. I'm not changing how I write just to sound "less AI".

It seems human written with certain paragraphs that stood out to me.

It felt like they had an ai pad for wordcount, but there was definitely organic content in there (at least from my taste)

Some HN readers are blind to this, others are obsessed with it.

ChatGPT claims 900 million active weekly users. You really think a dietician who writes for the Minnesota Reformer (whatever that is), trying to get the word out about his current "evidence-based" whatever, isn't getting a little robo-coaching along the way?

This one sure smells like a human article that went through Claude 4.6 with a "proofread, identify passive voice, increase clarity, adapt to house-style.md, and make it fit in X words" prompt. Maybe the editor did it.

The issue is the quality of the writing, which still needs work whether an LLM was involved or not. Most sources (Forbes, Business Insider) require the author to sign a waiver that indemnifies. That's the chilling effect, not the AI tells.

Zero-GPT says it's human written, with a fairly low score of 11.4% for AI. I think I should mention this, as some people seem to try to kill the piece by branding it AI-ism.

There really is this streak of blaming victims in the grift economy. Seems surreal that there's no longer anyone to blame for committing fraud and putting out bullshit medical, nutrition, etc.

All hail the grifters.

Yes, people putting effort into a "carnivore diet" can be healthy. The problem raised by the article is people continuing to follow their same eating patterns (namely, ultra-processed foods) while the fats have been swapped out.

> carnivores exist

Cats are carnivores. We’re omnivores. Like bears. If you’ve ever come across bear scat, you’ll notice it’s usually plant material.

The animals that produce that tallow are part of the global industrial food system too.

And tallow, by itself, is not something you eat, it's just moving the point of thermal and chemical alteration and production into your home.

Finally, most of this "eat as much animal offal as possible" movement is directly funded by the producers of these products battling it out with the producers of competing products.

You should listen to your doctors over influencers that talk about chemistry in a way that makes simple things sound dangerous and evil.

Sure, if you eat the tallow. People aren't doing that. They're using the tallow to make french fries etc. The problem is the french fries, not the oil choice.

Eating beef tallow is self-limiting. It's hard to eat a lot of it directly.

OTOH, it's really easy to eat a lot of French Fries.

> There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. They’re naturally occurring, present in all beef fat, and according to cardiologists, present in tallow at levels far above what’s considered safe.

"Ultra-processed" does not mean "many steps in the process of creating it". Although I assume many people are somewhat misusing the term by now, it originally comes from the "Nova" system, where part of the current definition of ultra-processed is:

Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates).

Is criticism is directly, and convincingly, addressed in the article.

> Some of what’s driving the seed oil panic isn’t wrong — it’s just misattributed. Ultra-processed food really is a problem. . . . But seed oils are not why ultra-processed food behaves that way. They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.

Cows eating grain in concentrated feedlots and then made available in separate pieces all year round at the local grocery store... is also a modern industrial invention.

sigh, yeah - makes me side-eye the entire article.

What happens is that you have to find ways to dismiss the body of evidence to take on positions like "beef tallow and butter are actually amazing for you".

e.g. Since saturated fat is well-known to increase LDL/ApoB, and these people have high blood lipids because of it, they have to dismiss the research on it to continue believing it's healthy.

It further entrenches them in a position where they can be convinced of absolutely anything because they've given up all epistemic standards which is why they overlap with all sorts of contrarian positions learned from social media and youtube videos.

"Mexican coke" a good example of American attention when it comes to health and nutrition: instead of focusing on big impact things like exercise, fiber, vegetables, saturated fat, building sidewalks, blood lipids, etc, we're stuck obsessing over food dyes, 50% vs 55% fructose, seed oils.

Probably because they let us feel like we're doing something for our health so we don't have to muster any real lifestyle change, like leaving our couch to go for a walk.

Sweetie, did you get those cookies with the butter instead of the seed oils? Oh good, thank you. I don't eat seed oils! -- "Health conscious" fat guy who just ate 12 cookies.

It would be funny, but these grifters are screwing over good people.

You didn’t miss much there was a paywall after the 3rd paragraph.

> It's such AI-written slop

How do you figure? It's not obvious to me after skipping over the heart-string-pulling introduction

the next season of natural selection just dropped. pop the corn (in olive oil, natch).

I hope your interventions help, and that you live a long and healthy life.

If you're interested in just the pure statistics and outcomes of scientific trials, I highly recommend https://nutritionfacts.org/. It's a non-profit charity featuring numerous ~5 min videos highlighting specific findings across scientific studies about nutrition, with sources read directly and linked.

"Nutrition science is absolute garbage, [so I'll base my position on something worse.]"

So, emotions and preferences?

Btw, statins show a big difference if you take them early. Even more for people who have genetically low lipids. People tend to only go on statins in middle/old age, especially after an adverse event, after decades of accumulated plaque build up which statins can't reverse.

Rosuvastatin costs $5/mo and lowers LDL/ApoB 45% in a few weeks. You should probably get on one if your genetics prevent you from getting under 100 LDL and 60 ApoB despite a high fiber plant-based diet. But something tells me that's not your diet either.

I’d rather be dead than not eat butter, red meat, and cheese.

But yeah don’t cook your vegetables in animal fat, that’s stupid.

Also worth noting, that eating the seeds themselves is super healthy! They have more nutrients, including fiber, vitamins, minerals and more protein!

thats the one thing we all have in common. we all die. that said. everything in moderation and definitely avoid a few things like sugar and maybe seed oils. but butter red meat and cheese, rather be dead.

Cladisticaly aren't all mammals a type of bony fish?

I keep reading about "inflammation" and think about things like swollen joints, bruises, etc. It must mean something else. What would I notice in my body if the oils that I consume are causing severe inflammation?

That could be a valid observation for n=1. There could be any number of reasons seed oils cause inflammation for you but do not the general populace, or not at numbers large enough to offset recommending them as a general rule.

The politicization is coming directly from the Trump administration, as the article states - making spurious claims and eliding the science that backs up the contrary conclusions. Did you have some other idea of how this is being politicized?