| HN Mirror

So before I start, I just want to say that I have no intention of trying to properly argue some kind of complete and rigorous position and have this turn into yet another discussion where people throw sources around and nothing gets accomplished. Sometimes that's fun, but that takes a lot of time and effort, neither of which I have the luxury or desire of burning right now. Basically this is ultimately a drive by comment written on a break (now breaks, fuck). I can't commit to anything else, and I am just assuming you genuinely are interested in something you've not been exposed to.

I offer my strong encouragement to reevaluate and look on with suspicion about the standard "health advice" that has ultimately been provided and supported by an industry that has been dependent on products with high omega-6s in order to achieve low costs and strong preservative effects. And when I say industry I don't mean some "the man" boogeyman cackling in the shadows, I mean I work in agriculture and the very boring humans up and down the supply chain have a lot of incentives for certain thoughts and behaviors, and are strongly disincentivized to ever stop and say "hey is this a problem?".

Ask yourself this, if it is true that eating more omega-6 fats than humans have historically been exposed to is healthy, then why has turning away from the high saturated fats found in "traditional" european and american foods (piles of butter and carbs) only resulted in a population level increase in cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes? While you can't make a rigorous conclusion from just that correlation, Chesterton’s Fence definitely seems relevant here. To be clear, I consider there to be multiple causes for all three of those issues and no one single fix, but I do consider the omega-6 called linoleic acid to be a particularly strong one. Unfortunately there seems to be different "metabolic gears" people can be in, so just taking a metabolically compromised person and only feeding them butter and carbs may not help and could even hurt their situation.

The food oil industry is well aware of the problems that omega-6s have, but obviously aren't keen on announcing something they are at fault for. What you will see is a quiet move to new varieties of plants bred/modified to produce higher monounsaturated fats in place of polyunsaturated fats. As a side note, this may actually not be the best move. Linoleic acid can induce a lower metabolism (in fact animals that enter torpor seem to require it) however once that happens it appears that the monounsaturated fats found in body fat stores seem to maintain the cycle. So it's unlikely to help those with compromised metobolisms. Another side note, I've heard that consuming very large amounts of linoleic acid can sometimes do the opposite and raise metabolism though I've not explored that much. Frankly it's a bad idea to try and achieve it that way, but it's another example of a surprising reverse of what you'd normally expect. If you ever wonder why there's so many seemingly contradictory relationships, it's because your metabolic pathways are an impossible clusterfuck of nested feedback loops, like if a hydra fucked an ouroboros. Look at this map and despair of ever trying to make a 100% always correct statement even with well done science: http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1

But shortly put, the only thing (probably) correct in that article is that linolenic acid intake does not seem to correlate with arachidonic acid levels (I'm presuming this is in rats). I can say this because I'm reasonably convinced that linoleic (not to be confused with linolenic) also doesn't seem to correlate with arachidonic acid (in rats). So I find it definitely reasonable to take on it's face. The conclusion that omega-6s are somehow then good, is absolute bullshit though. Arachidonic acid is not the only omega-6 with issues. The most well researched one with a laundry list of negative effects is linoleic acid.

>American Heart Association (AHA)

AHA is a highly biased organization that puts out bad science. They are the Autism Speaks of the health world. If their stamp is on it, be extremely wary.

>"Omega-6 fats are not only safe but they are also beneficial for the heart and circulation," says advisory coauthor Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Jesus titty fucking christ, she couldn't be more irresponsibly and dangerously wrong. Now, there a load of resources one can explore that counter this idea of "heart healthy" omega-6s, but instead of a gish gallop that not even I'm interested in, here's my personal favorites, because it so perfectly illustrates how easily one can walk away with the exact wrong conclusion if the trial isn't thorough enough.

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/ajpheart.004...

See Figure 2. Basically Both Normal and diabetic rats were fed a "normal" diet vs one with very high omega-6. Apoptosis is controlled cell death, in this case measured by caspase-3 activity. The Diabetic rats had their heart cell caspase-3 activity reduced by about half.

So this means, omega6 resulted in less heard cells dying, right? Heart healthy and great for diabetics!

But they also measured something else. Necrosis is uncontrolled cell death (resulting in inflammation and other negative side effects), in this case measured by serum LDH. In Figure 3, they show that serum LDH more than triples.

Basically feeding diabetic rats omega-6 enriched food traded heart cells dying in a controlled manner, with dying in an uncontrolled manner.

P.S. Epidemiology in health research (which the pro-omega-6 crowd is heavily reliant on) is a giant pile of dogshit that can be made to say whatever the author wants, and severely suffers from the replicability crisis that plagues other areas of science where it's hard to actually control and measure everything involved. Beware both the conclusions, as well as the time spent digging through shit to find out that yes, it really was shit.