Our friend and colleague Experimental Fat Loss over at Experimental Fat Loss just put out a post titled Seed Oils explain the 8 Mysteries of Obesity.
In this post, he takes a look at the 8 mysteries about obesity that we presented in Part I of A Chemical Hunger, and points out that most of them fit the seed oil hypothesis (viz. the obesity epidemic is caused by seed oils, and linoleic acid is probably the mechanism) pretty well.
We agree with ExFatLoss that the mysteries of obesity fit seed oils pretty well. This is part of why when we investigated seed oils in Interlude E (as ExFatLoss mentions) we took them seriously as a hypothesis.
There is room for multiple theories at once. Disagreement and uncertainty at this stage is normal/healthy and it just shows that this is an area where we still don’t understand everything. We can entertain seed oils as a possible explanation, whereas things like “diet and exercise” are non-explanations. And it’s quite possible that many things contribute at once. If any single cause could potentially explain half of the obesity increase since 1970, or even just 25%, that’s still a big deal.
We also really like this passage, which we think bears reproducing:
By the way, I find the way scientists talk about the “cafeteria diet” to be mystical to the point of being comical. Really, you couldn’t recreate lab chow that made the rats as obese as the human cafeteria diet? Weird, the cafeteria managed to do it.
They somehow imbue “human junk food” with a mystical, obesogenic property that cannot be explained by the sum of its parts, almost like the immortal soul. Please. You could start by differentiating fatty acids.
But despite the good fit with the first 8 mysteries, we’re still not convinced that the seed oil hypothesis is a fit for the evidence overall. In this post we try to explain why.
7 Out of 8 Ain’t Bad, But This is Out of 10
If we wrote A Chemical Hunger today, Part I would include 10 mysteries, not 8. And one problem with the seed oil hypothesis is that while it provides a pretty good fit to 7 of the 8 original mysteries, it doesn’t match the two new ones.
ExFatLoss pays special attention to the map of obesity in the US (below) which shows a relationship between obesity and elevation. He suggests that could be explained if lower levels of oxygen found at higher altitudes compensate for the damage seed oils do to your metabolism (presuming seed oils do damage to your metabolism, of course), but he admits that this is “not exactly a slam dunk”.
We take some issue with this interpretation. The mountain ranges definitely stand out as less obese, but the distribution of obesity is not actually a great match with altitude. Low-lying areas of Florida, Massachusetts, and California, for example, also have very low rates of obesity.
This is why we prefer an interpretation based on the length of the watershed, which we think is a proxy for the levels of some contaminant in the water. Longer watersheds have more of a chance to pick up the contaminant, and to pick up more of it, assuming there is any contamination in their higher reaches.
In this model, these regions of Florida, Massachusetts, and California are not obese because while they are low-elevation, they are also at the end of very short watersheds, which probably don’t contain much contamination. In some cases (like Boston and San Francisco), the water is piped from pristine wilderness reservoirs deep in the mountains.
But that map is one thing. A theory of obesity should also be able to explain this map:
Mystery 9 is that there is a lot of international variation — some countries are much more obese than others. The most obese nations on Earth are all tiny Pacific Islands. The Middle East is by far the most obese region in the world. The next runners-up are the USA, Canada, and Australia. And these are just the highlights — ideally a theory would be able to explain the whole pattern that appears on the map.
Seed oils would seem to have a hard time accounting for this pattern, though of course we’re open to explanations. But if Kuwait loves seed oils in a way that Pakistan doesn’t, well, we haven’t heard about it.
In comparison, this mystery is one reason to prefer the lithium hypothesis. You see, fossil fuels are often accompanied by horrible brines, brackish and sometimes radioactive water that is brought to the surface as the oil and gas are extracted. Many of these brines, especially in arid regions, are extremely high in lithium. Despite industry promises, huge volumes of brine are regularly spilled or otherwise improperly disposed of (or sometimes just intentionally used to irrigate crops), and this is a huge source of lithium contamination. We cover this all in more detail in Interlude G, if you want to read more.
So under the lithium hypothesis, the US, Middle East, Canada, and Australia are all unusually obese because they are all major oil producers, producing from oilfields in arid climates, which have brines high in lithium, leading to major contamination. Major oil producers like Russia and Norway are not very obese because their oilfields are not in arid climates, so their brines probably are not high in lithium, leading to much less contamination (and/or their oilfields are remote enough, or offshore enough, that the contamination doesn’t reach their populations). If this is the case, the map of obesity should roughly line up with the map of oil production, which it does:
The remainder of the international pattern can be explained by other fossil-fuel mining (coal, for example, is also often high in lithium), other forms of intensive mining that might also stir up lithium, countries importing most of their food from one of these high-lithium countries (remember that the US is a major food exporter), and possibly some other sources like desalination.
Mystery 10 is the variation of obesity rates between professions. Some professions are much more obese than others. Truck drivers, mechanics, firefighters, and transportation workers, for example, tend to be especially obese. Meanwhile teachers, lawyers, engineers, and “health diagnosing occupations”, as four more examples, are much less obese than average.
The two main sources for these patterns are this survey of more than 37,000 workers from the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries and this 2004-2011 NIH survey of US workers, if you want to take a closer look at the details. People often write this off as being about race or class, but the NIH analysis finds the same general patterns within each race, and many professions at similar class levels have very different rates of obesity.
Again, it seems difficult for the seed oil hypothesis to explain this pattern. Stereotypes about truck drivers aside, do we really think that mechanics consume that much more canola oil than lawyers?
And again, we see this as another reason to prefer the lithium hypothesis. There are some exceptions, but overall the ranking of professions by obesity rates looks like a pretty good proxy for “amount of exposure to vehicles and heavy machinery”, and lithium grease is the most common lubricating grease used in vehicles and heavy machinery.
We should be clear that this doesn’t leave the seed oil hypothesis totally dead in the water. A theory doesn’t have to fit all 10 mysteries to be correct. For example, the obesity epidemic could have multiple causes — maybe seed oils caused much of the baseline increase and something else is responsible for the variation internationally and between professions. It’s still possible that this is massively multicausal.
And as we’ve previously written about, reality is very weird and full of bizarre exceptions. Maybe truck drivers and other people who work around vehicles are more obese because ExFatLoss is right and oxygen levels make a difference, and people who are breathing exhaust all day get less oxygen. There’s always a way to add epicycles to save a theory, and sometimes those epicycles are actually correct.
But that said, the fact that seed oils don’t fit these two mysteries is still a strike against the hypothesis.
It Doesn’t Fit Case Studies
Our second gripe is that the seed oil hypothesis doesn’t fit a number of individual and population-level case studies.
N=1: Krinn & M
The seed oil hypothesis doesn’t fit the self-experiment case study of Krinn, who has lost weight taking large doses of potassium. Krinn hasn’t changed her seed oil intake.
The seed oil hypothesis doesn’t fit the successful half-tato dieters, the best example of which comes from our reader M. He ate more potatoes, but he was still consuming seed oils like normal, and he talks about this pretty explicitly in his report:
I tossed my diced potatoes in olive oil before air frying, and more generally used olive oil, duck fat and avocado oil to cook other potato preparations. I probably used 1-2 “glugs” of oil per 1-1.5lb potatoes across these preparations (“lightly greased”, call it). And of course in my non-potato meals, I consumed whatever oil – and other ingredients – restaurants would be using to cook their food. Given my diet was substantially made up of non-potato meals that I actively tried to keep “as before”, I think it is a safe bet that there wasn’t any particular type of food (diary, oil, red meat, etc.) I stopped consuming, or even materially reduced my consumption in, as a result of potatoes by default (beyond the generic ~1/3 reduction from swapping out a third of my meals to be mostly potato).
Pima
The seed oil hypothesis really doesn’t fit the case of the Pima (who we wrote about here and here). This group had a remarkably high rate of obesity in the 1960s, and we have no reason to believe they were exposed to any more seed oils than other Americans. However, we do know that their water contained 50-100x more lithium than the median dose in American municipal water sources at the time. At least one of their food plants was found to concentrate lithium in its berries, so they probably got an even higher dose from their food.
Frankly this case study is hard to account for by anything but the lithium hypothesis, which is part of why we so strongly prefer that hypothesis. Sievers & Cannon, writing in 1973, even say, “It is tempting to postulate that the lithium intake of Pimas may relate … to relative physical inactivity and high rates of obesity and diabetes mellitus.”
Fattest and Leanest Places in America
The seed oil hypothesis also doesn’t account for the pattern of fattest and leanest places in America. We can’t see any reason why Charleston, WV would be eating more seed oils than Bridgeport, CT. But we can see a reason why Charleston, WV would be exposed to unusual levels of lithium — because it’s a famous site for the prospecting of salt brines, including brines that as far as we can tell are unusually high in lithium.
We are still kind of freaked out by how well the pattern of fattest and leanest places fits the lithium hypothesis. The #1 most obese community in America is downstream from three coal power plants that are well-documented to be leaking lithium into the groundwater. The #2 most obese community sits on an aquifer that is unusually high in lithium. The #5 most obese community is in an area with many oilfield brine spills. The #6 most obese community (Charleston, WV) is, as we mentioned, a famous brine extraction site. The #7 most obese community is the site of a lithium plant that recently exploded. So is the #10 most obese community — it’s home to another lithium plant that, yes, also exploded.
Read our full report in Interlude I for all the gory details, but when you look at the most and least obese communities in America, you find a pattern that looks like fossil fuel activity and industrial lithium accidents. You don’t see a pattern that looks like canola oil taste testing.
It Would be Easy to Test
No one believes that carrot juice can cure cancer. If it did, anyone could give some cancer patients a bit of carrot juice, effortlessly cure them, use those case studies to raise money for a clinical trial, then pass go and collect their $200 billion and Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine. We can dismiss out of hand anyone who says that carrot juice does have such wonderful qualities — if it did, they would be out there demonstrating those qualities, not arguing with us.
Our point is, the easier it would be to collect evidence that a theory is correct, the less seriously we should take the theory in the absence of that evidence. As far as we can tell, if the seed oil hypothesis were correct, it would be easy to get evidence for it. So until seed oil theorists can present that evidence, we’re not inclined to take the seed oil hypothesis very seriously.
We’re not saying this as a dig — we’re saying this to encourage seed oil believers to go out there and collect that sweet, strong evidence, if they think they can get it.
The easiest test that comes to mind would be a variation of the potato diet. We know that people lose weight on the potato diet, and the seed oil theorists presumably think that this is because the potato diet is also a seed-oil-elimination diet. People on the potato diet do take some cheat days, but they’re surely consuming a lot less seed oil than usual, maybe close to zero.
It would be easy to run a variation of the potato diet where half the participants are randomly assigned to eat their potatoes with butter, and the other half are randomly assigned to eat their potatoes with sunflower oil. (Or substitute these for whatever fats the seed oil theorists think are best and worst.) If the seed oil theory is correct, then the participants eating potatoes + butter should lose weight much faster than the participants eating potatoes + sunflower oil. If the seed oil theory is wrong, there should be basically no difference.
Ideally you would go on to test more than just two fats — butter and sunflower oil differ in more ways than just how much linoleic acid they contain! But starting with two would be fine, and it would give us an idea of whether or not there’s anything worth looking into here.
If the potato diet offends you for some reason, you could do the same thing with any other elimination diet, or any other weight-loss protocol that we know to be effective. For example, ExFatLoss could add various fats to his ex150 protocol, the same amount of a new fat every week, and see if some fats stall his weight loss and other fats don’t.
Again, WE don’t think that this would shake out in favor of the seed oil hypothesis, which is why we don’t want to run the study ourselves. But if you feel differently, you should try to prove us wrong.
We want to emphasize that even if one of these studies did find a difference between seed oils and other fats, that wouldn’t be evidence for a specific mechanism — it wouldn’t necessarily point to linoleic acid. For example, it could be pesticides; some of these crops like grapeseed and soybeans and sunflowers might be sprayed with the same pesticide, and that might be the cause of the difference. Hell, it could still be lithium. There’s some evidence that sunflowers concentrate lithium (though “the lowest concentrations [occur] in the seeds”), so it’s possible that there’s more lithium in sunflower oil than in butter. If we need to, we can test for these things.
So this kind of study should be able to point to seed oils pretty easily — and if you’re a seed oil believer, you should try to make one of these studies happen. But if it does point to seed oils, that still doesn’t provide strong evidence for why seed oils might cause obesity. That would remain to be seen, though we would certainly be closer to an answer.
To recap: lots of things make the seed oil hypothesis an attractive explanation, and we’re still open to the idea. But right now it doesn’t seem very consistent with the evidence, and changing our mind would require addressing some of these apparent contradictions.
SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD 
I lived
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Mechanics are not in a similar socioeconomic class to lawyers. One requires an advanced degree and the other does not even require a high school diploma. Even if the the average mechanic and the average lawyer made similar salaries they would be in different social classes, which have different attitudes toward food, particularly the ultraprocessed and fast foods that contain the most seed oil.
Also, re: the example of M, olive and avocado oils are not seed oils. They are made from fruits and contain primarily monounsaturated fatty acids.
It’s possible that lithium could be to blame for specific outlier cases like the Pima but I find seed oils and ultraprocessed foods a much more convincing explanation for the overall obesity trend.
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I read your article back in 2021. The main issues I had with it are its looking for a root cause where more than likely, there isn’t going to be a smoking gun. All the data seems to suggest this.
Have you considered that obesity as a group may just be an intermediate indicator of liver problems. As I understand it, metabolic activity is primarily controlled by the liver, with impacts from gut, among several other things like thyroid hormones and the endocrine system.
Since lab animals are having the same thing, and they live in most of the same environment, its not a giant leap to think something in the environment is causing this. Unfortunately, the only thing I’m aware of that is extremely difficult to detect are PFAS and nanoparticles, which may potentially be shed from any product that uses them. Most foods contain them, but labelling isn’t needed because they are FDA GRAS, its my understanding they don’t recognize size as being a contributor to harm (i.e. like asbestos and silicosis which don’t become issues until particle size gets tiny).
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First you make the point that there’s probably no root cause or ‘smoking gun’, which I wholeheartedly agree with, to then continue to propose that it can be related to a single organ issue… As foo example why couldn’t it be an intermediate indicator of mental issues, or pancreatic, or stomach, gut biome, or any combination of those? Why would it work in one direction that the liver impacts the other systems, but in reality it’s often a much more complex system with all kinds of feedback loops and influential relations?
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Id say the liver or gut are very likely single organ points of failure, which should trace back to whichever toxin is responsible.
The fructose + seed oil pair hitting the liver seems likely to me.
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> “The most obese nations on Earth are all tiny Pacific Islands. The Middle East is by far the most obese region in the world. The next runners-up are the USA, Canada, and Australia. And these are just the highlights — ideally a theory would be able to explain the whole pattern that appears on the map. Seed oils would seem to have a hard time accounting for this pattern, though of course we’re open to explanations. But if Kuwait loves seed oils in a way that Pakistan doesn’t, well, we haven’t heard about it.”
We address this in the “Genetics, Vegetable Oils, and Obesity” section of our white paper: https://www.zeroacre.com/white-papers/how-vegetable-oil-makes-us-fat#h3-genetics-vegetable-oils-and-obesity. Here’s an excerpt:
—
The data suggest that there’s something about being a remote nation, surrounded by hundreds or thousands of miles of ocean or desert, that predisposes people to obesity. The “thrifty gene” hypothesis, whereby periods of famine select for more fat storage, is often invoked to explain why these nations’ obesity rates increased [*].
However, the originator of the hypothesis James Neel eventually admitted it wasn’t well supported, and others proposed an alternative theory called the “drifty gene [*,*].”
The “drifty gene” hypothesis described a genetic drift (i.e., random fluctuations in different versions of a gene from one generation to the next) rather than a positive selection force, leading to the accumulation of “fattening traits.” And these traits only became apparent once pushed above the threshold by environmental obesogens.
The Nauruans and Tongans in the Pacific Islands and Kuwaitis and Jordanians in the Middle East seem particularly susceptible to obesity once fast food is introduced to their environment. Whether their genetics explain this remains an open question. A VICE documentary described Kuwait, which has the highest obesity rate in the Middle East, as having an “obsession with American fast food,” which is just as processed and full of vegetable oil in the Middle East as it is in the West [*].
If there is one thing that everyone agrees on when it comes to foods that cause weight gain, it’s that so-called ultra-processed foods are especially fattening. However, researchers have not come to a consensus on what it is about processing food that makes it so obesogenic.
Interestingly, one thing that many ultra-processed foods have in common is that they’re cooked in vegetable oil, from french fries and potato chips to donuts and chicken nuggets. Researchers have shown that potatoes cooked in vegetable oil (fries and chips) are more fattening than baked and mashed potatoes, often smothered with butter and cream [*].
To prove the fattening effects of ultra-processed diets, a 2019 randomized controlled trial by NIH researcher Kevin Hall showed that an ultra-processed diet for 2 weeks caused participants to gain a pound of weight. Meanwhile, participants eating an unprocessed diet lost a pound, even when most nutrients were matched gram for gram and calorie for calorie [*].
The study’s authors point out that while they tried to match all nutrients between the two diets, there were some nutrients they couldn’t match between the two groups, including the amount of omega-6 (linoleic acid) in the diet.
The ultra-processed diet in the study had an ~11:1 omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, while the unprocessed diet had only a 5:1 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. Since omega-3 has shown to be protective against some of the obesogenic effects of omega-6 linoleic acid, the ratio is important, and the amount of linoleic acid in the ultra-processed diet may be the cause of its fattening effects, which may also give us a hint as to what’s going on in Kuwait, the most obese country in the world outside of the Pacific Islands [*,*].**
Kuwait consumes more corn oil than any other country in the world, by nearly 400%. Kuwaitis consume 201 calories of corn oil every day, while the next most corn-oil-consuming nation, the U.S., consumes “only” 58 daily calories of corn oil [*]. Of all vegetable oils, corn oil has one of the highest amounts of omega-6 linoleic acid and lowest amounts of protective omega-3 fats, with an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of 60:1 [*].
Corn oil is the most-consumed oil in Kuwait and also one of the first ingredients in McDonald’s french fries [*]. If Kuwaitis are following in the footsteps of American diets — based largely on ultra-processed foods, vegetable oils, and refined flours and sugars — corn oil consumption and diet-induced obesity are two areas where they’ve now surpassed the U.S.
Just like Kuwait, Pacific Island nations eat an abundance of processed foods. In Nauru, the most obese country in the world, “a reliance on imported food and [vegetable] oils” was cited as far back as 2007 as the main cause for the high level of overweight Nauruans [*]. Numerous other articles have linked Nauru’s obesity epidemic and its importation of Western fast food and processed foods [*,*,*].
Similarly, the Native American Pima tribe is experiencing an obesity crisis on a Western diet. If the Native American Pima tribe were a nation, it would be the most obese in the world, ahead of Nauru.
The Pima tribe has a 67% obesity rate and for decades now has been eating a more Western diet high in vegetable oil. As early as 1996, Pima Americans ate similar ratios of fats as other increasingly obese Americans, likely due to new dietary staples like fried potatoes and fried bread [*,*]. The historical diet of the Pima tribe had been replaced with a diet high in vegetable oil and flour, and obesity quickly followed [*]. However, Pima Mexicans with identical genetics who still live off of their traditional diet consisting of minimal vegetable oil struggle far less with obesity [*].
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We agree that some of the international variation is genetic, though we don’t find the thrifty or drifty gene hypothesis very convincing. Ideally to isolate genetics you would look at different groups in the same environment — African-Americans are the heaviest major ethnic group in the US, and Africa is not known for being “a remote nation, surrounded by hundreds or thousands of miles of ocean or desert”. It would be interesting to compare Kuwaiti-Americans if anyone has that data.
In the case of the Pima, we think you are mistaken. In 1973, Sievers & Cannon wrote, “At present the most widely used foods in the Pima diet are dried beans, chili peppers and wheat flour tortillas. Some tepary beans, onions, melons, cabbage, pumpkins, carrots and com are grown for food (9). Mesquite beans, cactus fruit and wolfberries are still gathered from the native vegetation that remains.”
Frank Hesse, writing in 1959, says that lard is “the only source of fat in the diet”, though he clarifies that a bit as “Lard, bought at the trading posts, is used almost exclusively, while butter and vegetable shortening are rarely used” later in the paper, and later “about 87 per cent of the fat is of animal origin and is almost completely of the saturated variety”. In the abstract he notes, “The finding of a relatively low fat diet in relation to the low incidence of degenerative heart disease may be consistent with the reported findings in other population groups, except that the type of fat consumed is all of the saturated type.” There’s nothing to indicate a diet high in vegetable oil.
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According to Wikipedia[1], lard is 6 to 10% linoleic acid, as much as olive oil with 8.4% according to USDA, and considering it’s practically the only source of fat in their diet, the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is poor. The lipid profile of lard varies, and the worse the ratio is, the less nourishing and the more health-damaging its consumption is.[3] Maybe it comes from there ?
I cannot find a source for Sievers & Cannon, but it seems they eat mostly what Hesse 1959 describe, and provide no information on the method of cooking they use.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lard
[2] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/748608/nutrients
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17898502/
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If I’ve gotten a dime for every time a see a LA and/or Omega-6 adversary promote rodent studies like [3] as basic evidence for human effects I could fund a lot more research on this topic.
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Very interesting, and I look forward to more discoveries. However,
1) People in Moldova and western Ukraine (at least) eat a TON of seed oils, as in every single day. Sunflower oil is dirt cheap and used for everything, including frying. Very very very few obese people.
2) The Middle East eats more sugar per capita than anywhere else – guarantee you that’s why they’re fat. They’ve basically replaced alcohol consumption (either outlawed or culturally restricted) with sugar binges.
3) Pacific Islands are an outlier for a number of reasons, including that obesity was celebrated in local culture (before European contact). Other factors for their CURRENT obesity include the fact they import something like 95% of their food, meaning it’s almost always processed/cooked beforehand (good luck getting a raw tomato in Fiji), and that their traditional (local foods) diet basically doesn’t exist anymore. What Pacific Islanders these days eat is basically a 100% “SAD” diet that was foisted on them by US soldiers in WW2.
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I still find it strange and unfortunate that you shrugged off Grant Genereux’s investigations into a diet free of Vitamin A. (blog https://ggenereux.blog/)
In short, Genereux, after developing eczema, resolved his condition by eliminating Vitamin A from his diet. He later shortly re-introduced Vitamin A and experienced a return of eczema. He has written extensively on his experience and readings and has a forum on his site where others share their findings. His thesis is that Vitamin A is a toxin, not a nutrient. Obesity is a result of a poisoning, as large fat reserves (Vitamin A is fat soluble) dilute the presence of the toxin.
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Your potato diet idea ignores the fact that linoleic acid accumulates in the body for years and jumping on a new diet doesn’t instantly improve things. All that PUFA/linoleic acid must be depleted and in some cases this can make things worse before they get better. Simply changing the oil out ignores the chronic effects of consuming them for a decade before the study (at like 15% or more of calories for Americans). The study would need a long term run-in or baseline diet before it even started. And that’s why looking at hunter-gatherer populations is so useful.
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Ok then, from a seed oil perspective, why does the potato diet cause weight loss if not the elimination of seed oil intake?
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It’s likely due to multiple factors, not just the elimination of seed oils. For instance, it’s a restrictive diet which can lower overall calorie intake. The high fiber content and low energy density of potatoes may also contribute to feelings of fullness and further limit calorie intake. Attributing all the weight loss from the potato diet to that alone oversimplifies human nutrition and metabolism. Weight loss is usually the result of a combination of factors and not due to a single dietary change. I am not denying CICO. I am open-minded, but my research leads me to believe that thyroid dysfunction from PUFA, iron, estrogen, and endotoxin is the primary driver of modern chronic diseases like obesity:
Some of the blogs I subscribe to and share similar viewpoints with:
http://haidut.me/?tag=obesity
https://www.functionalps.com/blog/2013/01/05/body-temperature-metabolism-and-obesity/
https://raypeat.com/
https://www.functionalps.com/blog/2012/06/23/pufa-estrogen-and-early-onset-of-puberty/
https://freetheanimal.com/2015/10/fortification-obesity-refinements.html#
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You can say you’re open minded, but then you mention sources that basically feed you stories. They’re not scientific sources, they provide dumbed down “evidence” that supports their narrative, it’s like following conservative political blogs, or reading socialist newsletters. That’s not to say they can’t be correct on certain points, but at the very least there’s a significant risk you’re only observing one part of the spectrum. And thus needlessly (and perhaps mindlessly) narrow your research perspective in such a way that you forget to look for alternate views and observations.
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At some point you have to narrow the scope once you have exhausted a long list of other things that could be driving obesity (and related chronic diseases). Just as you seem to have done, I’ve read some of your other articles. I always comb through the citations and references so that I can form my own opinion on things and dismiss weak evidence. I’m open to crossing seed oils off the list of potential drivers, or putting other things back on the list. Sugar intake has been off my list for a while.
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There’s no onshore oil in Australia. Certainly a lot of coal mines and coal power plants though.
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