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That happens naturally with ocean fish around here. Part of nature that fish turn from male to female as they age.
Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mention democracy either.
I know, just having fun.
The New York Times wheeled out economist Emily Oster to inform America that, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might technically be right about chronic disease and our broken food system, he is definitely totally wrong in blaming seed oils. Oster claimed the science pinning obesity and other health problems on omega-6 oils like canola, safflower, and sunflower is “flawed” — just another case of correlation, not causation. (Even more guffaw-producing, she admitted that “better data” might later prove RFK Jr. was right.) The real villain, Emily insisted, isn’t the oil, it’s the deep-fried Oreo it slid in on.
Dr. Oster is obviously a greasy science denier. ...
Seed oils are exactly what they sound like — oils squeezed from the tiny seeds of plants like soybeans, corn, canola, cottonseed, and sunflowers. That all sounds very natural and healthy. ...
The snag is, seeds don’t easily surrender their oil. They greedily prefer to keep it for themselves. So extracting the oils requires an all-out industrial assault: high-pressure mechanical rollers, solvent baths in hexane, repeated heating, chemical refining to strip out unpleasant odors and revolting colors, and finally “deodorizing” to make the end product palatable. By the time the bottle hits the supermarket shelf, it’s been through more processing steps than a gas-station chicken nugget and looks more like industrial waste than anything found in nature.
That’s why critics call them “factory foods.” They’re not pressed like olive oil or churned like butter, they’re manufactured, the byproducts of an industrial chemistry set built to turn valueless agricultural waste into profitable, shelf-stable cooking fat.
Emerging science —the same kind of imperfect-but-actionable evidence Dr. Oster once cheerleaded— has been painting a consistently ugly picture of seed oils. High-omega-6 industrial oils like soybean, canola, safflower, and sunflower aren’t just inert cooking mediums; their polyunsaturated fats oxidize easily under heat and in the body, spawning reactive aldehydes that inflame tissues, damage cell membranes, and scramble mitochondrial function. They skew the body’s omega-6 to omega-3 ratio toward a chronic, low-grade inflammatory state, priming the immune system for misfires and front-loading the metabolism for insulin resistance.
Animal models and controlled feeding studies have linked high seed-oil diets to fatty liver, obesity, impaired satiety signaling, and cardiovascular dysfunction— especially when combined with refined carbs and sedentary living. In other words, they’re not the lone assassin of American health, but they’re definitely in the getaway car.
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Which of them are worth avoiding entirely?
Here are the fats and oils I think are bad:
- margarine (which is just canola and other crap oils hardened to make them stick in your arteries better)
- canola oil
- cottonseed oil (especially bad)
- palm kernel oil
I'm undecided about these:
- soybean oil
- sunflower seed oil
- avocado oil
- coconut oil
- peanut oil
I'm sure these are pretty good for you:
- olive oil
- butter
- lard (yes, I think lard is OK to eat)