I’ll add more and fix this up tomorrow at my pc. Sorry bout the sloppiness and the formatting, you’ll see why I was so excited.
I really can’t stress just how much this adds up. It’s really quite uncanny. I encourage anyone to just read that instead of me, but I gave this a shot for when you’re done with that.
Just found this, it reminded me of your post, as I’d been thinking about it a ton.
Looks to me like it’s vegetable oils. Practically fits everything perfectly. The new addition to our diet. They were only invented about a hundred years ago. They’re in nearly everything packaged in the supermarket—hence why it looks environmental, why the rats got fat, why the processed food looks bad, even why the Cubans got skinnier, since these oils are highly implicated in global trade.
If you look at what soybean oil does in mice studies it’s kind of ridiculous. Not a medical professional, so who knows. Especially how it solves most of the points addressed in that paper.
Changed over the last hundred years
Yep
With a major shift around 1980
For the 1980 thing, I think the author focuses on that date a little too much anyways, it’s a monotonic increase in both oils and obesity all the way up.
-It could be a threshold that got passed around that time—it looks like that’s about when the average man went from just under to just about overweight BMI
-Perhaps a large cohort was hitting a certain age around that time
-Global trade really starts kicking off
And whatever it is, there is more of it every year
Yep. See source.
It doesn’t affect people living nonindustrialized lives, regardless of diet
Global trade, new invention from USA, ticks this box for me.
But it does affect lab animals, wild animals, and animals living in zoos
Lab animals fed store bought food, yep. Wild animals, no source from what I can tell, surely raccoons are eating plenty of cheetos nowadays.
It has something to do with palatable human snackfoods, unrelated to nutritional value
Yep. Unrelated to carb or fat content.
It differs in its intensity by altitude for some reason
Also think they’re a bit too focused on this one, maybe there’s a mechanism, maybe Colorado is an outlier. There’s a lot of talk of lipids, and oxidization in papers about veggie oils, perhaps that’s something—less oxygen, less oxidization, less CVD? I don’t have the expertise. Maybe it’s something else for that.
And it appears to have nothing to do with our diets
Not so sure about that one
Some quotes and my rebuttals:
But again, it’s not just the contents. For some reason, eating more fat or sugar by itself isn’t as fattening as the cafeteria diet
Well, not the macronutrient contents. I think we have plenty of studies that show low fat vs low carb etc is kinda a wash. But surely there’s plenty of vegetable oil in all those processed foods.
For an abrupt shift, 1980 is when the USA started guidance going against saturated fats….and we replaced lard and butter with veggie (soybean) oil.
When humans switch from an ancient to a Western lifestyle,” he says, “they experience increased waistlines, reduced insulin sensitivity, higher blood pressure and a host of related disorders and diseases.“
Same location, new lifestyle? If they didn’t also move, I don’t see why you should say it’s in the water, vs a complete diet makeover. Note that these oils do all these things to rats. The oils also seem to act on their brains, messing with the hypothalamus which from what I could tell seems somewhat implicated in set point type stuff.
Diet won’t work—only potatoes did. Whole foods does. Those get rid of veggie oils for sure. Switching from fats to carbs won’t get rid of the veggy oils that are in near all processed foods though.
“palatable supermarket food”; not only Froot Loops, but foods like Doritos, pork rinds, and wedding cake.
Oils are in doritos (ingredient 2), in froot loops even, presumably in ‘fried pork skins’. As for wedding cake, couldn’t find a good label on the internet, if it’s store bought it’s probably there though.
I actually doubt it’s chemical contaminants—you’d think China with the factories and air pollution, or the Congo with mines and terrible water would be worse than us. The USA really cleaned up its air in the past 60 years or so, no dice on that in my book.
Finally, I don’t have a horse in this race, i posted some thoughts a few weeks ago here too with an entirely different explanation. I don’t usually get emotional about science, and try to kill my bias. But something smells here. This works way too well, it’s new, it’s simple, why is this not one of the first things anyone thinks of? The people who wrote the paper in the OP didn’t address this at all, when veggie oils are in nearly everything and absolutely exploded from nothing about a hundred years ago. I’ve done a fair bit more digging, there are allegations of corruption—especially of Proctor and Gamble (crisco) buying out the American Heart Association essentially. I’m skeptical, but it does seem like they were throwing some money around in support of Crisco.
Per the source:
Throughout our decades-long battle with chronic disease, Americans have closely followed everything the CDC, AHA, and USDA have told us to do. We’re smoking less, drinking less, exercising more, eating less saturated fat and sodium, and eating more fruits and vegetables. Still, chronic disease and obesity rates continue to rise. All the while, vegetable oil has steadily and stealthily made its way into our pantries, restaurants, and packaged foods, now contributing 699 calories per day to our diets, or about 20% of everything we eat.
Tldr, vegetable oils were invented about 100 years ago, highly promoted around when they started to turn on saturated fats, and line up with close to every mystery the authors assert. It’s also a way simpler explanation.
EDIT: My complete thoughts are here: https://goodtosell.substack.com/p/a-response-to-a-contamination-theory
https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease
I’ll add more and fix this up tomorrow at my pc. Sorry bout the sloppiness and the formatting, you’ll see why I was so excited. I really can’t stress just how much this adds up. It’s really quite uncanny. I encourage anyone to just read that instead of me, but I gave this a shot for when you’re done with that.
Just found this, it reminded me of your post, as I’d been thinking about it a ton.
Looks to me like it’s vegetable oils. Practically fits everything perfectly. The new addition to our diet. They were only invented about a hundred years ago. They’re in nearly everything packaged in the supermarket—hence why it looks environmental, why the rats got fat, why the processed food looks bad, even why the Cubans got skinnier, since these oils are highly implicated in global trade.
If you look at what soybean oil does in mice studies it’s kind of ridiculous. Not a medical professional, so who knows. Especially how it solves most of the points addressed in that paper.
Changed over the last hundred years
Yep
With a major shift around 1980
For the 1980 thing, I think the author focuses on that date a little too much anyways, it’s a monotonic increase in both oils and obesity all the way up.
-It could be a threshold that got passed around that time—it looks like that’s about when the average man went from just under to just about overweight BMI
-Perhaps a large cohort was hitting a certain age around that time
-Global trade really starts kicking off
And whatever it is, there is more of it every year
Yep. See source.
It doesn’t affect people living nonindustrialized lives, regardless of diet
Global trade, new invention from USA, ticks this box for me.
But it does affect lab animals, wild animals, and animals living in zoos
Lab animals fed store bought food, yep. Wild animals, no source from what I can tell, surely raccoons are eating plenty of cheetos nowadays.
It has something to do with palatable human snackfoods, unrelated to nutritional value
Yep. Unrelated to carb or fat content.
It differs in its intensity by altitude for some reason
Also think they’re a bit too focused on this one, maybe there’s a mechanism, maybe Colorado is an outlier. There’s a lot of talk of lipids, and oxidization in papers about veggie oils, perhaps that’s something—less oxygen, less oxidization, less CVD? I don’t have the expertise. Maybe it’s something else for that.
And it appears to have nothing to do with our diets Not so sure about that one
Some quotes and my rebuttals:
Well, not the macronutrient contents. I think we have plenty of studies that show low fat vs low carb etc is kinda a wash. But surely there’s plenty of vegetable oil in all those processed foods.
For an abrupt shift, 1980 is when the USA started guidance going against saturated fats….and we replaced lard and butter with veggie (soybean) oil.
Same location, new lifestyle? If they didn’t also move, I don’t see why you should say it’s in the water, vs a complete diet makeover. Note that these oils do all these things to rats. The oils also seem to act on their brains, messing with the hypothalamus which from what I could tell seems somewhat implicated in set point type stuff.
Diet won’t work—only potatoes did. Whole foods does. Those get rid of veggie oils for sure. Switching from fats to carbs won’t get rid of the veggy oils that are in near all processed foods though.
Oils are in doritos (ingredient 2), in froot loops even, presumably in ‘fried pork skins’. As for wedding cake, couldn’t find a good label on the internet, if it’s store bought it’s probably there though.
I actually doubt it’s chemical contaminants—you’d think China with the factories and air pollution, or the Congo with mines and terrible water would be worse than us. The USA really cleaned up its air in the past 60 years or so, no dice on that in my book.
Finally, I don’t have a horse in this race, i posted some thoughts a few weeks ago here too with an entirely different explanation. I don’t usually get emotional about science, and try to kill my bias. But something smells here. This works way too well, it’s new, it’s simple, why is this not one of the first things anyone thinks of? The people who wrote the paper in the OP didn’t address this at all, when veggie oils are in nearly everything and absolutely exploded from nothing about a hundred years ago. I’ve done a fair bit more digging, there are allegations of corruption—especially of Proctor and Gamble (crisco) buying out the American Heart Association essentially. I’m skeptical, but it does seem like they were throwing some money around in support of Crisco.
Per the source:
Tldr, vegetable oils were invented about 100 years ago, highly promoted around when they started to turn on saturated fats, and line up with close to every mystery the authors assert. It’s also a way simpler explanation.