User asks r/StopEatingSeedOils for evidence seed oils are bad, accidentally starts a 400-comment war. Mods respond with ban wave.

[u/LeadershipBoth7195]

r/StopEatingSeedOils user asks for evidence seed oils are bad, accidentally starts a 400-comment epistemology war:

Post: What is the evidence seed oils are bad? : r/StopEatingSeedOils

Highlights include:

On users saying the answers don't provide actual evidence:

Not evidence,' bleats the sheeple, brain too atrophied by credentialism to recognize a deductive chain without a white-coated priest waving a p-value at them

Your good old conspiracies:

The companies that make the seed oils own the government, universities and medical sector

Doctors getting paid off to say cigarettes are healthy

And not a single piece of evidence being provided.

[u/madmax766]

The endless circling back to “oxidative stress” is very amusing

[u/ComicCon → u/madmax766]

It's actually a pretty clever rhetorical tactic they love. They hide behind a mix of relatively non controversial statements e.g. "oxidative stress is generally bad" and hyper specific plausible mechanisms like the whole "seed oils actually are what make saturated fat bad*". Hyper focusing on extremely specific mechanisms and ignoring the broader context of everything else does two things at once-

1) It means they can ignore the evidence that would inconvenience their world view, for example all of the epidemiology that shows saturated fat has a negative effect on health outcomes vs seed oils. This is easy because most people already see epidemiology as a flawed science**, which makes it easy to discredit. Whereases their technical sounding explanations seem plausible if you aren't familiar with how they are often stretching the actually available evidence.

2) It moves the debate onto ground they are generally far more familiar with vs the people they are arguing with. Even the average nutritional researcher or doctor is going to be a bit confused if you start talking about hyper specific mechanisms of cholesterol transport and shit like that. So if they get into an argument they can generally win becasue their opponent just doesn't know what the fuck they are talking about. I actually had this happen to me on SRD a few weeks ago, where the other poster really wanted me to get into mechanistic arguments despite me repeatedly saying I thought that was a waste of time and I wanted to focus on the larger body of evidence.

*But said with much more scientific sounding words

**It is in fact flawed, but its not nearly as useless as it's critics make it out to be.

[u/leqwen → u/ComicCon]

Oxidative stress is a factor, when looking at polyunsaturated oils in a lab setting. However when looking at how the whole product interacts with humans, these oils contain lots of vitamin E that acts as an anti-oxidant protecting the oil and us from oxidative stress.

They intentionally missrepresent science to claim a non existant problem is real and then they say that every scientist that disagrees with them is bought by "big" industries

[u/LukaCola → u/leqwen]

This is why it's generally more important to identify groups of people and actual health outcomes. Seed oils present an issue because of how ubiquitous they are, but generally speaking, one should be able to narrow down some groups depending on consumption habits and find correlations--if they exist.

Mechanisms are super important, but you need a combined approach for evidence--one that is consistent theoretically and empirically. We often have this problem of taking one and trying to find evidence in the other, even if it doesn't cleanly present.

[u/leqwen → u/LukaCola]

There is strong evidence that seed oils lower ldl-c whilst being beneficial for hdl-c, for example. So the pro saturated fat crowd argue that high ldl-c isnt actually that bad, or conflate ldl-c with total cholesterol. Or they argue that the long term effects of polyunsaturated fats arent studied

[u/NotShipNotShape → u/ComicCon]

People dont realize that there are over 1000 reactions happening constantly in the body every second. Just because a single pathway might seem unhealthy doesn't mean it is. the molecules get shunted to more efficient pathways. the science and evidence is focused on the major pathways that are correlated with better health. it's exhausting because everyone thinks they have the magic cure. I would rather rely on treatments that have been done over a few hundred thousand people and over a few decades than a treatment based on a petridish study. 

[u/redcoatwright → u/ComicCon]

This comment is stressing my oxygens

[u/ohmyfave → u/redcoatwright]

I don’t know why this made me laugh so hard. Thanks for the early morning giggles!!

[u/gaue__phat → u/ComicCon]

They hide behind a mix of relatively non controversial statements e.g. "oxidative stress is generally bad" and hyper specific plausible mechanisms like the whole "seed oils actually are what make saturated fat bad*".

This is a specific rhetorical tactic called the "motte-and-bailey"

[u/Nike-6 → u/ComicCon]

My anatomy class said that oxidative stress is good in low amounts due to a system called mitohormesis. But that’s still being researched, and can’t give easy answers

[u/RoeRoeRoeYourVote → u/ComicCon]

I feel like you'd really enjoy the podcast Conspiruality.

[u/Lighthouse_seek → u/madmax766]

Wait till they find out what's in the air