Peter Attia· MD
I'm going to tell you what I've heard as the four main arguments for why seed oils should be viewed as potentially harmful. And we're going to kind of talk through these um in in not necessarily in this order, but I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of go through these. So, one comes down to um the mortality literature on some of the large RCTs. We're going to talk about two in particular. In other words, when we go back and look at the literature, particularly in the era when people began to appreciate that saturated fat raised, at the time it was total cholesterol, eventually when it got fractionated, it became another subset of that called LDL cholesterol. We saw the association between LDL cholesterol and ASCBD. The question became, hey, can we substitute something else for saturated fat? This is kind of think margarine versus butter. Um to lower cholesterol. So these a couple of these studies were done and these studies while lowering cholesterol did not lower mortality. So we're going to we're going to talk about that. We're then going to get into some really mechanistic stuff and talk about LDL through the lens of oxidation. And you you you alluded to this a little bit with your uh your your your change in thinking around LDL particle size, but this goes kind of a step further than just particle size. and we get into the the really granular biochemistry of what is happening to to an LDL particle that renders it pathologic versus maybe not so much. We're then going to talk a little bit about not just the seed oil per se, but the industrialization of how a seed oil is refined. And in other words, is there something about the process of making a seed oil commercially that introduces something that's harmful as a byproduct? And then finally, we're going to talk about this from maybe an evolutionary or first principles perspective, which is look, you know, if we were having this discussion 100 years ago, there were no seed oils and people were a lot healthier. So maybe, you know, the introduction of seed oils should be viewed as potentially problematic.