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Comment by geowwy | Hacker News Reader

I think everyone agrees sugar is bad, but I'm pretty sure it's only part of the picture.

The amount of sugar (and other sweeteners) we eat has actually gone down in the last 20 years, but we haven't seen a drop in obesity or other metabolic diseases at all.

My gut feeling is vegetable oils are another part of the problem. Unlike sugar, we keep eating more and more of them. And unlike sugar, we only started eating them around 100 years ago.

There are a few nutrition people talking about vegetable oils but it doesn't have the same mass consciousness as sugar. Maybe because there are still old school nutritionists telling us we should avoid saturated fats.

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In Serbia, at least the northern part, a lot of people (used to) cook on pig's (or mangulitsa's) fat instead of vegetable oil. We rarely used any oil aside from pumpkin seed oil and olive oil for salads. Unsure what's the popular opinion on that, but it's a worthy replacement.

I only use lard and butter for cooking and have done for years. I hope people keep using vegetable oil, though, because it makes lard really cheap.

Isn’t the issue with vegetable oils the omega-6 fatty acids? IIRC, our diets are supposed to be somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio since omega-6 is inflammatory and omega-3 is anti-inflammatory. If you over-consume either, you’ll be unhealthy. So vegetable oils aren’t completely bad, but when over-consumed without the corresponding omega-3 consumption, you get inflammation and a lot of the modern maladies.

And it’s not all vegetable oils that contain omega-6, so using olive oil, coconut oil and a few others should be fine and healthier than cooking with animal fats.

I guess I mean seed oils rather than vegetable oils. I'm happy eating olive oil.

Yeah, I think it’s really per-oil that you have to worry...not sure a broad classification is going to help much. Better to just memorize the whitelist of oils that you want to limit yourself to.

Safflower, Sunflower, Corn, Soybean, Cottonseed and Peanut are all particularly bad. Canola (rapeseed) is about 2:1, so it’s not too bad if you need to use cheap stuff. Then there’s a bunch that have hardly any at all, so those should be fine...coconut and olive are my favorites to cook with since they withstand high temperatures better, but I’m also starting to love avocado oil in a lot of dishes, particularly ones where the oil doesn’t get cooked. And, of course, flaxseed oil has the opposite imbalance, so it should be a staple in everyone’s pantry to help us correct for oils used in restaurants and other food we don’t cook ourselves.

And it probably should be said that palm oil is killing us for a completely separate reason, so even though it’s relatively healthy to ingest, it’s a good one to stay away from.

Do you mind sharing more info on the palm oil thing?

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

When you take flights over Southeast Asia, it’s quite a sad sight. It’s just endless palm plantations in what used to be pristine rainforest habitats. You can understand the perspectives of these third world countries because palm oil can bring in a lot of money to places that tend to be very poor, but from an environmental standpoint, palm plantations are a disaster. They’re destroying some of our most valuable carbon sinks to produce the stuff.

I believe OP is referring to the mass deforestation caused by harvesting palm leaves.

By seed oil do you mean grapeseed oil?

Canola oil, soybean oil, corn oil, etc.

Not sure where you got the stat on sugar consumption...it’s not really just sugar it’s carb consumption in general and I would be very surprised if that was trending downward at all.

Vegetable oils are not good but would not say that by itself is the issue. It’s the carbs you’re eating that is being cooked in vegetable oils.

There is a summary here: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/11/carbohydrate-s...

Data is sourced from USDA, you download it from their website

There are other sources if you feel like Googling

This is just some random guy’s blog. Sorry but I hardly believe any entity, govt or not, could accurately map out the % of calories that come from carbs for all Americans year over year going back a few decades.

You could look at the actual data, instead of taking the “I don’t like this so I’m going to go with my own assumptions” approach.

Stephan Guyenet is not "just some random guy". His book is one of the best in the field.

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