This is definitely an interesting topic, and I too would like to see a continued discussion as well as more research in the area. I also think that Jeff Nobbs’ articles are not a great source, as he seems to twist the facts quite a bit in order to support his theory. This is particularly the case for part 2 of his series—looking into practically any of the linked studies, I found issues with how he summarized them. Some examples:
he claims one study shows that a study showed a 7x increase in cases of cardiovascular deaths and heart attacks, failing to mention that a) the test group was ~50% larger than the control group (so it was actually a ~5x rather than 7x increase), b) that the study itself claims these numbers are not statistically significant due to the low absolute number, and c) that you could get the opposite result from the study when looking at the number of all cause mortality, which happened to be ~4x as large for the control group as for the test group (which too is not statistically significant of course, but still)
he cites a study on rats, claiming that it shows that replacing some fat in their diet with “fats that you usually find in vegetable oil” (quite a suspicious wording) increased cancer metastasis risk 4fold—but looking into the study, a) these rats had a significantly increased caloric intake when compared to the test group, and b) 90% of the fat they consume came from lard, rather than vegetable oils, making this study entirely useless for the whole debate
for another study he points out the negative effects of safflower oil, but conveniently fails to mention that the same study found an almost as large negative effect for olive oil (which seems to be one of his favorites)
(note I wrote this up from memory, so possible I’ve mixed something up in the examples above—might be worth writing a post about it with properly linked sources)
I still think he’s probably right about many things, and it’s most certainly correct that oils high in Omega6 in particular aren’t healthy (which might indeed include Canola oil, which I was not aware of before reading his articles). Still he seems to be very much on an agenda to an extent that it prevents him from summarizing studies accurately, which is not great. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but also means I won’t trust anything he says without checking the sources.
This is definitely an interesting topic, and I too would like to see a continued discussion as well as more research in the area. I also think that Jeff Nobbs’ articles are not a great source, as he seems to twist the facts quite a bit in order to support his theory. This is particularly the case for part 2 of his series—looking into practically any of the linked studies, I found issues with how he summarized them. Some examples:
he claims one study shows that a study showed a 7x increase in cases of cardiovascular deaths and heart attacks, failing to mention that a) the test group was ~50% larger than the control group (so it was actually a ~5x rather than 7x increase), b) that the study itself claims these numbers are not statistically significant due to the low absolute number, and c) that you could get the opposite result from the study when looking at the number of all cause mortality, which happened to be ~4x as large for the control group as for the test group (which too is not statistically significant of course, but still)
he cites a study on rats, claiming that it shows that replacing some fat in their diet with “fats that you usually find in vegetable oil” (quite a suspicious wording) increased cancer metastasis risk 4fold—but looking into the study, a) these rats had a significantly increased caloric intake when compared to the test group, and b) 90% of the fat they consume came from lard, rather than vegetable oils, making this study entirely useless for the whole debate
for another study he points out the negative effects of safflower oil, but conveniently fails to mention that the same study found an almost as large negative effect for olive oil (which seems to be one of his favorites)
(note I wrote this up from memory, so possible I’ve mixed something up in the examples above—might be worth writing a post about it with properly linked sources)
I still think he’s probably right about many things, and it’s most certainly correct that oils high in Omega6 in particular aren’t healthy (which might indeed include Canola oil, which I was not aware of before reading his articles). Still he seems to be very much on an agenda to an extent that it prevents him from summarizing studies accurately, which is not great. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but also means I won’t trust anything he says without checking the sources.