"Butter Bad, Seed Oils Good" - Analysis of a Study

(Central Florida Bob ) #1

A guy whose blog I’ve been tending to reading more lately is William Briggs - who also calls himself, “Statistician to the Stars!” Yeah, he’s a Ph.D. mathematician, with his bio here. He’s also part of the initiative to address all the bad science being reported.

This post is about a study published March 6, 2025 by the JAMA Network and it’s so bad it’s almost comically bad. Except that you know it’s going to adopted by the people trying to push crap like this on us.

It’s not just Food Frequency Questionnaires; it’s worse:

“The intake of plant-based oils (corn, safflower, soybean, canola, and olive) was ESTIMATED based on the reported oil brand and type of fat used for various cooking methods, including frying, sautéing, baking, and salad dressing, and all of the food composition data for calculating oil intakes were updated EVERY 4 YEARS. “

We’re talking butter amounts in the vicinity of 1/4 teaspoon being allegedly dangerous.

And people get paid for this…

(Bob M) #2

It’s Frank Hu and Walter Willett. As soon as I see them, I quit reading.

I’ll check out Mr. Briggs later.

(Chuck) #3

Seed oil and vegetable oil is very bad and unnatural. Real butter is great, as is pure lord and bacon grease. Anything processed is bad, but anything that is natural real food is good.

(Edith) #4

Time to revisit this image. :laughing:

image
image.jpg828×766 110 KB

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #5

Hey! that’s the one for me. It’s been engineered to be healthy :smiley: The other one is disgusting and came out of a cow :nauseated_face:

(Chuck) #6

I will take what nature creates any day over man-made garbage

(Joey) #7

The only problem with this particular solution is that it leaves private interests to fund research. And then we know whose “interests” influence yet more bad science. :thinking:

(Central Florida Bob ) #8

Considering how badly they influence things now, I’m not sure there’s room to get much worse. There would have to be less getting funded and published because the governments have that infinite checkbook called deficit spending.

(Joey) #9

Fair point!

Might be worth noting that the one government most able to issue a (seemingly) limitless supply of bonds is the same one willing to distort science under the influence of lobbyists.

Since “butter > seed oil” it’s unclear why the dairy farmers aren’t able to hold more sway when it comes to food research. :man_shrugging:

(Bob M) #10

I think having the government involved in handing out money is a good thing. Are there bad ideas? Sure.

But take my daughter’s illness, pediatric acute-onset neuro-psychiatric syndrome (PANS). It’s something that not many kids get (though I think it’s waaaay more prevalent than believed). There’s no real interest in solving it from the perspective of pharma, as there are too few kids. The government could fund studies helping determine what causes this, why it happens, and how to address it. Only the government is able to do this.

And if you look at these areas, there’s the Baszucki group, which was funded because the parent’s son had tremendous improvement in his bipolar from a ketogenic diet, and a group with a podcast about PANS, started because the parents lost their 24 year old to PANS (she got it at 19) and it took years for them to figure out what she had. By then, it was too late.

These are the things the government should be funding, because pharma is not. In these instance, these groups are funding it, but we could use much more research.

The NIH funds a ton of studies for diseases that only affect small numbers of people.

And GLP-1 inhibitors supposedly came out of study (multiple studies) involving animals that were mainly funded by the NIH and the government.

If you want to read the extensive number of studies that lead to the current GLP-1 drugs:

You don’t get to discoveries like that without funding from the government.

(Joey) #11

Agreed.

“Basic research” that may lead to future practical application is a source of intellectual property that becomes a community asset.

And community assets are often best resourced by a collective (e.g., a government).

(Central Florida Bob ) #12

I’ve heard stories similar to that pretty much all my life; that is, some disease isn’t getting researched because pharma thinks “there’s no money in it.” Pretty sure I remember a story from about 1976, but I’m hazy on what the condition was. My daughter in law works in big pharma, on the sciencey side rather than management, and I’m not one who believes everything they do is stupid or evil. It seems like the choice is faster or slower science - not bad or none - but, yeah, they don’t have infinite resources and someone’s going to pick what they get used for.

And guess what: both pharma and feds make mistakes, too.

(Joey) #13

If we reflect back on the great scientific discoveries made throughout the ages, it was typically rich aristocrats who spent their leisure time obsessed with exploring some particular aspect of the world around them of personal interest. They had the resources and decided what was to be their focus.

That’s essentially how resource allocation decisions got made.

Today, at least in the private sector, we have publicly-owned companies doing “science stuff” - and the owners’ expectations and preferences rule the day.

Nothing wrong with either model. Each has its pros/cons.

We then also get our governments involved when we perceive a broad public benefit to be had that wouldn’t otherwise be met in the marketplace. Nothing wrong with that idea, in principle.

But as with all three approaches (aristocrats, public companies, collective government funding) each has its benefits and shortcomings in practice.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #14

It is also very difficult to predict the value of basic research. Apparently trivial studies can result in great practical benefits down the road, or they can have trivial results; there’s no way to know in advance. Also, there is great value in confirming or refuting “what everybody knows” but great resistance to paying for that kind of research.

The advantage of the “aristocratic” model was that there was once a great deal of science that could be done with simple materials. Don’t forget Mendel and his bean plants! Also. cloud chambers and photographic paper were cheap ways to study atomic particles, but now that all that initial work has been done, we are forced to rely on expensive particle accelerators that only governments can afford. (Or perhaps Elon Musk, if he were interested in the topic.)

(KM) #15

I just read an interesting piece about Balamuthia. It was about the difficulty of sharing data about rare diseases. How in the case of a disease that’s both too rare to be profitable and too quickly fatal to have drugs be ethically tested on sufferers, it can be nearly impossible to coordinate the few N=1 stories that, while less than perfect, might save a life. The discussion centered on the combined ineffectiveness of Both government funded research and sharing of info And pharma funded research. Sorry, probably behind a paywall.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2025/michael-lewis-fda-who-is-government/

(Central Florida Bob ) #16

It’s not behind a paywall, but it’s a long, convoluted and interesting story. I started by asking “what’s a Balamuthia?” and then got pulled into the story.

An interesting perspective.

(Jane) #17

I had my husband pick up a quart of heavy cream from the grocery so I could make it into butter instead of buying more Kerrygold.

I am a bit lazy and use a hand mixer to separate the butterfat out though. I have to do it in my sink because it splatters a bit but I don’t mind. Will be making some after I break my fast on Friday - no way can I make butter without tasting it to make sure I have added the right amount of salt. And of course I have to taste it several times to be sure!!! :laughing:

(Jane) #18

I am out of ghee also but I make it out of the cheapest butter I can find and will make that also this weekend.