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Friday Fun Thread for December 13, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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There are seed oils and seed oils. Some things like cold pressed sunflower oil have been in our diet for centuries - so are probably safe-ish enough.

Actually, sunflower is the worst, canola best.

The whole thing is kinda dumb, the issues are marginal I believe. But it's hard to quantify. Best to avoid all such and fry in animal fats I guess. Ofc, pigs are fed omega-6 feed, so lard has a fairly high omega 6 content too.

best to avoid all such and fry in animal fats I guess.

Depends on what you worry about, but if its linoleic acid, animal fats are not the silver bullet. Pork fat is around 15% linoleic acid, chicken fat is around 20%.

The entire seed oil discussion is a red herring. Avoiding them only works because you end up eating less processed foods and less fried foods.

There are different kinds of sunflower oil, high-oleic, high-linoleic, and I guess maybe some in between.

I'm a big fan of the theory that it's not necessarily the crops themselves, but the adoption of crop dessication for cereal grains in the 1990s that caused "gluten intolerance" (that Americans don't seem to experience when eating bread in Europe), then the same thing happened with seed oils when they started using crop dessication for soy and oil crops in the 2000s and 2010s. Cereals, brassicas, and legumes are the most lindy foods that exist outside of animal products. It'd be bizarre if they caused persistent inflammation to humans over their histories without selecting it out of either the humans eating it or the plants themselves.

I also think that this is possibly why alcohol's J-curve is disappearing, despite alcohol being so lindy as well. Phthalates in tubing used in bottling plants, pesticide residues, and other rarified byproducts all end up in the final product and have started to outweigh the protective effects.

"gluten intolerance" (that Americans don't seem to experience when eating bread in Europe)

Isn't it basically a fad, like women declaring they're bi etc? In Europe I know IRL like 2 gluten intolerant people out of say, 100. Real but rare disease. In US it's massively overrepresented