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by samatman
1403 days ago
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During my whole primary education, trans fats were considered a healthy alternative to saturated fat, this was universally promoted by the same authorities, and tens of millions of people suffered poor health, obesity, and premature death. Unlike tobacco, none of the researchers responsible for this calamity have been censured, sued, or otherwise suffered negative consequences. They are, for the most part, still in power, and research is conducted under their auspices. Does this mean they're wrong about linoleic acid being healthy as well? No, not inherently, but it does mean that it's worth looking elsewhere and drawing your own conclusions. |
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However, all nutrients, including all essential nutrients, have a range of daily intakes within which they are healthy, and when eaten in much greater quantities than the upper limit of that range they become unhealthy, or even dangerous.
For example a too low selenium daily intake can cause illnesses, but eating selenium only a few times more than the maximum recommended intake can cause a severe poisoning.
That is true also for linoleic acid, in moderate quantities it is very healthy, in too large quantities it is unhealthy.
Until the last few centuries, it was extremely unlikely for anyone to be able to eat too much linoleic acid. It was possible to do that if one would have eaten huge quantities of, for example, pine nuts, poppy seed paste or walnuts, but all those were quite expensive so most people would not have been able to buy enough of them, much less eat enough of them, to suffer from that.
That changed especially since the 19th century, when the industrial production of edible oils began to provide large quantities of cheap vegetable oils, like sunflower oil and many others, which have a very high content of linoleic acid.
These cheaper oils have replaced the traditional olive oil and also the animal fats in most applications, which resulted in a greatly increased consumption of linoleic acid.
So for most people, now it is more likely that they might eat too much linoleic acid, than it is that they might eat too little linoleic acid.