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The $100 Billion Dollar Ingredient making your Food Toxic

What I've Learned · Youtube · 15 HN points · 11 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention What I've Learned's video "The $100 Billion Dollar Ingredient making your Food Toxic".
Youtube Summary
First 200 people to use this link https://brilliant.org/WIL can get 20% off an annual premium subscription to Brilliant!

▼Newsletter signup: https://mailchi.mp/a58275fd1906/josepheverettwil
▲Patreon: www.patreon.com/WILearned
▲Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeverettlearned
▲IG: www.instagram.com/jeverett.whativelearned/

0:00 - The Switcheroo
1:52 - History of Vegetable Oils
3:50 - Enter the American Heart Association
5:27 - The Massive Increase in Vegetable Oil Consumption
6:06 - Is Vegetable Oil Bad or Benign?
6:55 - Why do some animals live longer than others?
7:51 - Vegetable Oil is stays in your body for years
9:11 - Hidden Data
12:08 - Vegetable Oils are in EVERYTHING
13:07 - Why Vegetable Oils are bad for Health
15:04 - The Toxic Oxidation Products
16:28 - How Vegetable Oils are made
18:33 - Are Vegetable Oils linked to Alzheimer’s?
20:06 - Mitochondria, The Powerhouse of the Cell
24:35 - Most Studies on Vegetable Oils aren’t long enough
26:04 - Why aren’t more people talking about this?

Make sure and check out Nina Teicholz - https://twitter.com/bigfatsurprise , author of the best selling book "The Big Fat Surprise"
Nina deserves a lot more accreditation on this video, she was one of the first people to shed light on the problems with seed oils and the history of how they came to be.
Check out her presentation on this topic here: https://youtu.be/Q2UnOryQiIY

For business inquiries: [email protected]
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
less[1]. this video[2] is not the best reference but a very good summary on the industrialized oils and they alternatives

[1] https://openheart.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000898

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k

I started on this path when I was trying to nurish myself back to health over a decade ago when I suddenly got fat. I thought science was the way to go... but was robbed of that notion a couple of years into it when I discovered that the path to health was in the opposite direction of what the science tells us.

Turns out the food industry fully controls the science of food and nutrition. You can start by reading Unsavory Truth or Food Politics by Marion Nestle for better understanding of why that is the way it is.

Having said that, Marion Nestle doesn't really explore one side of it... which is that because of ethical reasons, we'll never have proper human experiments, thus nutrition science will always be limited and incomplete, which leaves a lot of room for manipulation, which the industry is happy to do for profits. This has been covered very well by the YouTube channel What I've Learned: https://youtu.be/xRAw7yeDO-c

The same channel has several other videos on food and nutrition, one of the most important ones imo being the one on seed oils: https://youtu.be/rQmqVVmMB3k

Nutrition and Physical Degenaration by Weston A. Price as described in this thread is one of the best works in support of indigenous foods.

The Hidden Life of Trees is a great book on plant intelligence.

Other than those resources, we have to piece these things together, take long term views... like should we trust a diet that kept a culture of people alive and well for 100s of years over several generations or do we trust studies with couple of dozen subjects done over a few weeks funded by the food industry?

spaghetti1535
The “What I’ve learned” channel has been a big contributor to why I’m interested in learning more about nutrition. Thank you for the references!
taurusnoises
First, I want to ask you to write up a 101/how-to for this diet (and include one for pescatarians like me). Cuz this is great.

Second, my friends and I (years and tears ago) got really into Price and the (recipe /cook) book based on his work, Nourishing Traditions. I recommend this work to anyone into the above. Was this book a part of you coming to these conclusions?

These should cover some of it:

- Book: Food Politics by Marion Nestle

- Book: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price

- YouTube Video: The $100 Billion Dollar Ingredient making your Food Toxic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k (28 minutes)

For me it's enough to look at the process of making vegetable oils (acid wash, oxidation caused by high temperatures, bleaching, deodorization, degumming, etc.) to conclude ultraprocessed oils are not healthy for you.

https://youtu.be/rQmqVVmMB3k?t=988

From personal experience, my health significantly improved after replacing vegetable oils with butter, coconut and olive oil.

> Soybean oil

I saw this video about seed oils a few months back.[1] Some of the information there tracked stuff I have been reading for a while. Decided to switch over completely to coconut oil and ghee (clarified butter).

A comment on the video that matches my view on the subject:

> If you want to be healthy just do the exact opposite of everything we were told about nutrition by mainstream experts for decades

[1] The $100 Billion Dollar Ingredient making your Food Toxic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k)

cleancoder0
Who ever told anyone to drink soybean oil?

On the other hand, I consume massive amounts of flaxseed oil (insane amounts of omega3), olive oil, sunflower seed oil every single day. I have no issues with weight, no heart or blood vessel issues, blockages.

Ingredient isolation studies of foods are a complete disservice to scientific method.

Any particular food can be part of a healthy diet and lifestyle, absolutely any.

People today are sedentary, just look at natives living in wilderness across the world. They gorge on honey, occasionally eat meat and have insanely strong skeletons and muscles. Look at others that eat only meat, milk and blood, have massive amounts of atherosclerotic plaque, but given their lifestyle in the wilderness, their blood vessels expand and are insanely flexible, only a few unlucky ones die of heart attack very young.

The RDA for Calcium in Western world is so high due to sedentary lifestyle not promoting usage of calcium by the body. There are healthy populations, consuming half the amount and have even less bone fractures.

heavyset_go
Coconut oils are high in lauric and palmitic acids, both of which have tomes of evidence pointing to them causing and exacerbating cardiovascular disease. The MCTs in coconut oil might have some positive health effects alone, but research on the consumption of coconut oil itself suggest that it increases risks of CVD.
sinyug
> pointing to them causing and exacerbating cardiovascular disease

Unless the studies include tens of thousands of people from South India (particularly Kerala) and Sri Lanka where the coconut and its oil have been used in large quantities in the diet for thousands of years, I don't consider them to be relevant. It is possible that the West has no tolerance for the stuff.

You should try to eat what your ancestors did. We Indians became obese and incidences of lifestyle diseases like diabetes and heart disease increased heavily after we shifted to seed oils and started consuming sugar, refined flours and processed flours in massive quantities since the late 1970s/ early 1980s.

blindmute
Yep, it's weird how the "boomer" types who said to eat butter, steak and potatoes, ended up having healthier diets than almost anyone does today. Personally I just eat like an ancient Greek and leave it at that. They didn't have Doritos, so I can do without them too.
mrob
>ghee

Cholesterol oxides in Indian ghee: possible cause of unexplained high risk of atherosclerosis in Indian immigrant populations:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2887943/

"Substantial amounts of cholesterol oxides were found in ghee (12.3% of sterols), but not in fresh butter"

loudtieblahblah
Cholesterol is more than just fat consumption. You can't talk cholesterol without talking about carbohydrates.

All fat oxidizes, some oxidize easier than others. Some are more inflammatory tahn others (omega6s are way more so than saturated fats). Carb intake has complex interactions kicking off the oxidation of fats too.

sinyug
> Indian ghee

We have been using ghee in India for thousands of years. If immigrant Indians are having problems, they should look into what changed in their diet and lifestyle after they immigrated.

namdnay
> We have been using ghee in India for thousands of years

That in of itself is not a particularly good argument. What has been the life expectancy for those thousands of years?

kortilla
> We have been using ghee in India for thousands of years.

Doing something unhealthy for “thousands of years” does not make it healthy.

sinyug
> unhealthy

There is no concrete evidence that ghee is unhealthy. Even the linked study is only talking about a "possible cause," that too in Indians who are not even in India. Indians adopt western habits when they immigrate. Who knows what they have been eating once they assimilated into English and West Indian societies.

lotsofpulp
Indians in India have skyrocketing diabetes and obesity numbers in recent decades. 20+ years ago you would struggle to see a single non thin person.

Drastic increase in quantity of ghee (and sugar since a lot of Indian tests are a lot of ghee and sugar) consumed and reduction in labor (trading strenuous, perspiring work for air conditioned, sitting work) could be relevant factors that make ghee consumption from the previous thousand years not comparable to today.

sinyug
> Indians in India have skyrocketing diabetes and obesity numbers in recent decades. 20+ years ago you would struggle to see a single non thin person.

I have noticed that. I have also noticed that youngsters started adopting Western habits and diets and consumption patterns over the same time period.

> Drastic increase in quantity of ghee

Unless you are rich or belong to the upper middle class, ghee is generally consumed in moderate quantities because the family would not be able to afford it.

Today, ghee is between Rs. 500-600/kg. Seed oils are about Rs. 125/kg.

lotsofpulp
Presumably, the Indian immigrant populations discussed above would belong to upper middle classes, by virtue of being able to immigrate at all. But also, the sheer scale of Indian population can mean we are talking about a couple hundred million people easy in India whose lifestyle is no longer conducive to the amount of ghee they were used to eating.
8ytecoder
Yup. Rich/Upper Class people used to consume a lot of Ghee (rich people - they can afford it. Upper class - usually because they're connected to temple food preparation and ghee is abundant there). The rest of us used a tiny amount at the very end for flavor. Peanut oil & Coconut oil were common in our household. Followed by sunflower oil.
GordonS
> Indians in India have skyrocketing diabetes and obesity numbers in recent decades

About a decade ago, my Indian colleagues told me that Indians had been encouraged to switch away from ghee, based on health concerns. I forget which oil most moved to, but I think it was palm, vegetable or sunflower oil. In addition, they said consumption of refined sugar had skyrocketed, where palm sugar had previously been used.

Ghee has been consumed for centuries (at least) in India - I wonder if it's these ghee alternatives and refined sugar are the main causes of increased diabetes and obesity.

sinyug
> I wonder if it's these ghee alternatives and refined sugar are the main causes of increased diabetes and obesity.

This is the most likely cause. People in India are consuming way more sugar, refined flours and seed oils than they used to three decades back. That is when all these colas/biscuits/chocolates/chips/pizzas and oils started being advertised heavily on television.[1]

[1] Sundrop super-refined sunflower oil: the healthy oil for healthy people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI-39Wxd5U8)

[2] Saffola: refined Kardi/Safflower oil (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTaMTD3taVc)

valarauko
People in India are consuming way more of everything, including ghee, than they did three decades ago. Ghee was a luxury then and carefully portioned out. Growing up I ate a lot more Dalda than ghee, simply as a matter of what we could afford. Traditionally ghee was even more of a luxury than in my time. Outside the traditional cowbelt areas, ghee was substantially more expensive relative to other goods prior to Operation Flood. So while Indians have been eating ghee for millennia, they probably ate a tiny fraction of how much we eat it now.
lotsofpulp
> Ghee has been consumed for centuries (at least) in India - I wonder if it's these ghee alternatives and refined sugar are the main causes of increased diabetes and obesity.

Yes, carbohydrates like sugar are of course a huge part of the problem, but the health crisis has many factors and my intention was to convey that ghee has downsides. Saturated fats are saturated fats regardless of how many thousand years they have been used.

pigeonhole123
There are thousands of possible explanations. Indians may just tolerate the western lifestyle worse than westerners do. This study seems to look at a single chemical compound that is suspected of some connection with atherosclerosis, which is pretty thin.
sarma912
In Grad school (and as someone who had no idea about the western diet or macros for that matter at the time), pizza everyday seemed like a low cost option. I got fat. I've spent the last 5 year undoing all that damage.
The $100 Billion Dollar Ingredient making your Food Toxic - What I've Learned

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k

https://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/DietNutrition/50978

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A472KZtxI5M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k

TLDR: omega-6 fat ratio to omega-3 used to be 1:1 now it's 15:1. And there are many indications that this is the cause of many modern diseases as rise of diseases correlates with rise of seed oils not industrializations.

"It has been estimated that in developed countries, the ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s is closer to 15:1"

"It has been claimed that among hunter-gatherer populations, omega-6 fats and omega-3 fats are typically consumed in roughly a 1:1 ratio"

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

also

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/is-canola-oil-healthy

baybal2
> cause of many modern diseases as rise of diseases correlates with rise of seed oils not industrializations.

I think the rise of "modern diseases* really correlates with a certain nation getting really severely obese, and this is by far the most believable, and obvious explanation.

lifeplusplus
WHICH could also be fully or partially explained by use of seed oils.. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4808858/
Infernal
Or Lithium! https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/08/18/a-chemical-hunger-i...
lifeplusplus
https://fireinabottle.net/the-scd1-theory-of-obesity-part-1-...
tfehring
Worth mentioning that canola oil apparently has a much lower omega-6 to omega-3 ratio than butter, lard, olive oil, or coconut oil, not to mention other industrial seed oils. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_acid_ratio_in_food#Oils
lifeplusplus
That's true, but as one of the links mentions oil is used in large quantity and is the top contributor even though its ratio is fairly better than other items. So if you use butter or coconut oil, you're getting around 400 vs 2.6k omega-6. So if you eat something that has better omega-3 ratio you'd need to eat lots of that to balance it out. When you switch to butter from canola you are essentially trading omega-6 for monosaturated/saturated fat.
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

anthk
The Southern Europe have cook with olive oil since centuries. The North and the US, with butter, which is far worse.
Nov 01, 2021 · 1 points, 2 comments · submitted by paltman
1cvmask
I wonder how much is causation versus correlation of obesity and vegetable oil. The same time also coincided with a huge increase in sugary drinks and increases in caloric amount. It also coincided with an increase in cellphone usage and commercial jet travel.
paltman
That's addressed in the video.
Sep 22, 2021 · 10 points, 0 comments · submitted by mgh2
Sep 21, 2021 · 4 points, 5 comments · submitted by bronzecarnage
sidcool
What are the substitute for vegetable oil?
vaxcoin
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vaxcoin
coder4life
I stay away from animal fats. I lost 70 pounds eschewing animal fat which nothing else ever did in my 53 years. "and these are just anecdotes, so just move on" <-- the video

Heart attacks - everybody also started smoking like mad and the industrial revolution was in full swing, at the same time.

I think it was the light bulb/extra light at night. no wait, it was plastics! no, it was computers.

Hydrogenated vegetable oils are crap. Oils high in polyunsaturates aren't good either. Soybean oil is crap

Get N-3s fatty acids, get plenty of monounsaturated fats. Don't heat them if you can avoid it.

Read this, it's been around forever

https://www.amazon.com/Fats-That-Heal-Kill-Cholesterol/dp/09...

PubMed > YouTube. 2016 - "Olive Oil and the Hallmarks of Aging" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26840281/

djmips
Losing 70 pounds doesn't mean you will live longer though.
coder4life
Being younger also doesn't guarantee that death isn't around the corner next week.

Smoking doesn't necessarily mean you'll live a shorter life either

Losing 70 pounds increased my chances

bronzecarnage
Thanks for the recommendation.

What is also fascinating is the marketing and advertisement influence in all this.

In villages here a couple of generations ago, they would dry coconuts and make the oils at home. No industrial refinement, heating, and deodorization. But a few years ago there was a huge push against coconut oil, probably from the other segments of the cooking oil industry. Now there are studies saying coconut oil is actually better than most seed oils.

It's the same thing with sugar/fat and cigarettes.

And that brings us to the underlying problem: How does the public form an informed opinion when industry-funded research skews results one way and also has the "propaganda" benefit?

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