Nina Teicholz - 'Vegetable Oils: The Unknown Story'


(Ross) #1

Freaking horrifying.

I’ll keep saving and using my bacon fat from uncured pigs & using local butter.


Why are Vegetable Oils Bad
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(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #2

I know, right? And to think it was Crisco that put the American Heart Association on the map. :frowning:


(Mel Soule) #3

Proctor & Gamble continues to celebrate that move as the smartest thing they ever did. Soap maker hits it big. Crystalized Cottonseed Oil (aka Crisco), nectar of the processed food gods…LOL


(Brian) #4

I always wondered what Crisco really was. Now I know. Haven’t used the stuff in years, way before going keto. Something just never seemed quite right about that stuff.


(Keto in Katy) #5

Beware of any institution whose name begins with “American” and ends with “Association” — it’s a good bet it is a corrupt lackey for industry.


#6

Very interesting and disturbing.
I’m wondering if there is someone out there (Hint: e.g. named Richard or Carl for example) that would be able to explain to us non sciencey people how “epidemicoglocial study methods” differ from “hard” study methodology - typical approaches and why it isn’t as accurate/when it can be used/if it should be used at all…
I notice this is spoken a lot about food/public health science/policy being based on this - and as the ‘weaker’ method as they can’t run specific trials which I understand - but would appreciate some more detail without getting lost in a bunch of mathematical formulas etc.


(Rob) #7

@Ajax Epidemiology is just the term for the study of diseases. It is neither weak nor strong per se.

The weak science is the Observational study where a researcher observes things, often stated in secondary data gathering like public health stats or hospital records rather than personally observing them and then tries to correlate them e.g.These people said they ate these things on average and they got these diseases so I am going to conclude that this diet is more likely to ‘be related to’ this disease. There is lots of statistical shenanigans to attempt to ‘prove’ correlation or even causation or people just latch on to results and assume causation based on their own beliefs without the researcher even implying it - like cholesterol deposits are found in all heart attack victims, so it must be a cause or people who eat meat get cancer so meat must cause cancer (strokes pet sheep) :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:.

The strong science is the clinical trial where the researcher actually controls the inputs and measurement of results directly e.g. we will feed these people X and see if Y happens… and then try to explain it. There is obviously a lot of room for error in this latter form too especially in the design of the study, the initial hypothesis (you can create a study and manipulate the analysis to ‘prove’ pretty much anything) but it is much more likely to be able to show causation that the observational study.
The strongest form of clinical study is the double blind or randomized version where some people get the real stuff (actual drug, specific food etc.) and some don’t but the researchers don’t know which until after the study so they can’t bias the results during the test. The ‘double blind’ is that neither the subjects nor the researchers know who’s getting what. This is how drugs are tested. A good study will have a statistically significant number and spread of subjects e.g. tens or hundreds of subjects depending on what you are testing and women, men, ethnicities etc. so you know how those things impact the results. If it is something uncommon you might only need 10-20 subjects but if general to the overall population you might need hundreds.
Many clinical trials in the past were only carried out on white men so it was not known how a drug or phenomenon might affect women or non-white populations differently e.g. women have heart attacks and symptoms differently to men so the ‘clutching your left arm’ thing is often irrelevant for women while jaw pain might be a better indicator.
They can still bias the analysis etc. so it isn’t protection from that but at least the data should be sound and have a ‘control’ group to compare the results against.

After the study, you get the peer review where (hopefully) eminent scientists in the field review and analyze the study and either declare it flawed or good. As we all know this is often driven by the conventional wisdom in a particular field so often it is about confirming existing bias rather than a totally fair review but it is another protection against totally BS studies making it into the established science. It doesn’t stop snake oil sales-persons running tiny trials with no statistical significance, not getting them peer reviewed but then writing a book to make money off it. :thinking::rage:


#8

Nice explanation.

Another good option is to do a cross over with a wash out period. Give one group the pill. treatment whatever for 6 weeks, then everyone goes back to normal for 4 weeks as a washout and then the control group and the treatment group switch.

Supposedly even with double blind, there are still manipulations that happen. There is natural unintentional bias in how you explain the results. Along those lines you really need to look at the whole study not only the abstract because the experiment does not always support the conclusion. You need to look at methodology as well. For example, what they call low carb may be 30% carbs. It is lower than Sad but not low enough to show a change. Or how much weight they attribute to confounding factors such as smoking may vary and really be arbitrary. For example, many anti meat studies did not account sufficiently for the situation that meat eaters were often smokers. They can assign it a weight of say 10% but there may be no scientific basis for assigning it that. Finally the peer review is not what you think it is

Was listening to a podcast recently and the researcher said that they have to provide their own reviewers. This is true across the board so it is not that the paper is sent by the magazine to a bunch of universities and comments are solicited instead the scientist provides a list of 5 people to review his work and those count as peer reviewed. This obviously stacks the deck.

The worst studies are large recolllection studies. How often did you eat broccoli in the last year? I cannot tell you how many times I ate it in the last week, let alone the last year, I barely remember what I ate for lunch yesterday. Also, people who are vegetarians or in health care want to make a good impression so they over list broccoli and under list hagen daz. Meanwhile people who are smokers and do not care may over estimate how many times they had steak and pork. It is simply not accurate and does not account for other risk factors like exercise, medications or environmental quality


(Chris) #9

Even with clinical trial, there’s plenty of room to fudge the numbers, with whatever variables one could use black magic fuckery to skew the results. I’ve read countless that ended up just being crap science.

Peer review can be a bad thing in some cases, too, unfortunately. In the case of all of the vegan Seventh Day Adventist studies, all of the peers were fellow vegan Adventists…

The unfortunate/fortunate part is one needs to read each one end to end to make sure there’s none of that BS going on. It’s a friggin conundrum.


(CharleyD) #10

Basically if your study depends on people’s recollection of the food they ate, whether the last week to years ago, and you use that to paint with a broad brush guidelines for all the rest of us (two rashers of bacon extra per week WILL KILL YOU) then you are a bad scientist.


#11

Thanks everyone who pitched in. That helps a lot.


(Empress of the Unexpected) #12

Think this should be bumped up. I am trying to use only butter or just adding butter after oven baking. Dr. Berry’s top three are: Sugars, starches, and cooking oils. I guess coconut oil is okay to cook with, but I’m not crazy about the taste. My husband fries everything in whatever and I, for one, am frankly tired of the cleanup - everywhere. Thanks for posting this.


#13

After seeing the video I still have questions. Nina objects to the use of the word “vegetable oils” for the badies, prefering “seed oils” - implying oils made from seeds. Well, guess what, coconuts and palm “fruit” are seeds. So are they OK or not? Is there a difference between cold and hot pressed coconut/palm oil in terms of the fats involved?
I notice in many of the vegetarian keto websites, canola oil is used in many recipes. Is this a tradeoff to stick with non-animal products, or do the producers think that this oil is OK?

As a take away from the video and the discussion above, the first question I ask myself (and anyone close by) when I hear of the “latest research” is: Who paid for the research? That appears to be the most important factor affecting the results. And it applies to all feels of study. It’s a sad thing when we can no longer trust our scientists. (I remember my stats classes at university in the 1960s on “How to lie with statistics.” We’ve come a long way.:confused: )


(Brian) #14

Yeah, that is so hokey. I barely remember what I ate for supper last night. A week ago? Nope. Maybe if it was a special occasion that I might actually remember, there’s an off chance I could come up with something, but there wasn’t. A year ago? Yeah, right. I imagine I ate. What? Who knows? How much? Who knows? It just gets pretty stupid beyond maybe a day or two and even that is suspect. Kinda turns into the “science of imagination”.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #15

“Seed oils” is what the industry that makes them calls them internally, “vegetable oil” is the marketing term. Avocado, olive, and coconut oil are pressed from the flesh of the fruit, not from the seed.

As far as following the money is concerned, Crisco oil and shortening put the American Heart Association on the map, and the AHA has always reciprocated by giving its blessing to margarine and vegetable oils and warning against saturated fat. It’s also why people from the AHA tend to denigrate coconut oil, because it competes directly with the seed oils for sales.


(Edith) #16

This is true as long as the oils have not been refined to remove their smell and flavor. I’ve been using a refined avocado oil that I get at Costco, but after reading about the refining process, (thanks to this thread) I’m not sure I should be using that avocado oil. I shall be reading up on nut oils next.

Ah, sometimes ignorance really is bliss.


(CharleyD) #17

Yeppers! The Harvard Food Frequency Questionnaire has been given too much authority.


#18

The flesh of the avocado and olive are indeed OUTSIDE the seed. Cocounut oil (water and “meat” as well) comes from inside the nut. Coconut oil is produced from the meat (the endosperm) in the seed. The embryo is embedded in the endosperm just beneath the germination hole (where in an undevelped coconut you may have stuck a straw to drink coconut water). There is an explanation with diagrams and photos of the development of the coconut seed at https://www2.palomar.edu/users/warmstrong/ecoph10.htm.


#19

I wonder if the urefined avocado oil is suitable for heating, though. Thinking about coconut oil. Only the refined one should be used for heating.


(Edith) #20

Really? I did not know that.