So my cherished little M&S salad pots are killing me too, now!

[StrangeAntics]

Just stumbled upon the whole seed oil fiasco, went down a few rabbit holes, came back up feeling somewhat dizzy!

Geez, is there anything left that faddy diets and pseudo scientific book hawkers haven't told us will destroy our hearts, gut biomes and brain tissue? It's like no one appeals to credited sources any more, and even the most intelligent people are listening to some really odd shit on youtube and substituting it for fact.

According to most health authorities, seed oils are ok. Don't go overboard, like with other fats, but chill out about it.
Wiki also states that the anti seed oil sentiment is an alt right political obsession, started by someone called Rogan and taken up by various members of the Trump campaign.

So now we have politics spilling over into food science, it's truly bonkers.
We live in a world ripe for criticism since we have a fairly messed up food industry, and we are aware that a lot of what sells isn't great. But this seems to have opened up endless opportunities for someone to capitalise on our fears and paranoia, creating a barely navigable web of tangled misinformation and potentially harmful trends.

I often buy little grain/salad pots from M&S, so since they contain a bit of seed oil, they're going to destroy me. Well heck, what to do about that?
Every month someone will come up with a new, fresh (and lucrative) food to demonise and blame for the obesity epidemic, and it seems the crowds lap it up and don't care much about credible sources.
No one hardly ever mentions what a correlation is - or else they use it to stiffen their own bias.

There's always someone who will claim an absolute, such as "I quit meat/dairy/whatever and my entire life improved and it cured my cancer!"

There are likely many factors that have led to an obesity crisis, from vehicle dependence, poverty, sedentary work, cheap fast foods, excess portions, to depression, loss and loneliness.
To try to single out a new food group every few months as the cure all for this is surely bonkers.

There’s not a peer reviewed study that shows any issues. It’s just the latest media hype

Yes - heavily processed seed oils in UPFs = not good for us, but to be honest I can’t be arsed working out if that’s the seed oils’ fault or the UPF’s fault. I just try and avoid that kind of food.

Locally grown cold-pressed rape seed oil is absolutely fine, not processed with hexane or any of that shite, and actually massively helps our family’s hay fever as we live in an area surrounded by rape fields.

It's not just death by salad, it's M&S death by salad.

I am not a representative of M&S. But am slightly peeved that I can't get the Waitrose yoghurt dressed coleslaw in the North. Just searched Ocado and nothing. Disappointed.

As for inflammation, if I've ever experienced it, it was very local to a part of my body (tonsil, stomach) that it was clearly something I needed to see my GP about. People talk about it as if it is some vague, spectral force, only ever connected to one's diet. I have a friend with rheumatoid arthritis, but that is all that I am aware of concerning more systemic inflammation, and her's is controlled very well with medication. She eats a good diet and doesn't exclude any foods.

I've never had to eliminate something from my larder because I never really ate much crap to begin with. I like the odd treat now and then with out remorse but have always enjoyed a fairly balanced diet, so it would seem silly to avoid seed oils based on something I have read on the internet.

I think a lot of this stuff is aimed at people who are ill, otherwise vulnerable, struggling with weight, or susceptible to shock headlines (my sister is one of them, the shock headlines get her every damn time). Surely your GP or a session with a dietician would clear up any concerns about healthy foods? I certainly would not trust a talking head on youtube over my GP.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g yep all is well- I did laugh at your comment ref M&S marketing - I do sometimes wonder -

Locally grown oils? This won't happen en masse. As soon as something becomes poplar it becomes industrialised. The only way to limit that and return to the land of unicorns and sweet bunnies when our great great grannies were alive would be by stopping having children.

It's the *progress trap, we have come this far and can't get off the rat wheel now or the system would fall apart. All we can do is our best, and hope for slow but steady changes for all of our wellbeing.

*I don't think the industrial revolution was my idea of 'progress', to be frank. But it did bring some rewards, amongst many catastrophes (urban poverty, lack of work-life-balance etc).

Sure though, if someone quit UPF and ate a whole food balanced diet, they would of course witness an uptick in energy, health and activity. There'll be outliers, of course (a person with Crohn's disease won't have fun with grains and a lot of vegetables)

3 for £7 at the moment. I succumbed.

I agree. I try and avoid UFPs if I can. Not fanatically, but I certainly try and limit them to a smallish percentage of my diet.

I love fat, sugar and salt, dairy, nuts, you name it

Lard makes the best cakes, cake depending of course

I dont any (barely any) processed foods, not because theres something wrong with them but because of dietary need. Its easier for me to make my own to check the nutrients etc

I try to stay away from wheaty type products, I find they were giving me pain in my hands and wrists

I think if someone does suffer from inflammation and amends their intake, by default they're going to be eating things that are more ntruitious overall, and therefore they'll link it to cutting out seed oils or whatever else but in reality it might just be that they're eating better generally

So where are you all getting inflammation, and is it diagnosed as being food related by a doctor?

I don’t buy the whole, olive oil is bad to cook with either .. i mean, is the whole of Italy dead? No.

Well this is interesting....concerning rapeseed oil.

Here is a link to a website that claims to be a charity, and you can search any food or additive and it gives it a rating for healthy or unhealthy (one might call this dichotomy unhealthy in itself). Makes claims that rapeseed oil becomes a trans fat when heated and is rather, er, deadly.

https://isitclean.org/ingredient/rapeseed-oil-refined/

Yet the British Heart Foundation has this to say, quite a different approach! Makes the claim that rapeseed oil is an absolutely safe and recommended choice regarding heart health.

https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/nutrition/ask-the-expert/rapeseed-oil

Both link to studies, so who is correct and what are the motivations behind them.
Do we pick the one that flatters our own bias?

Curiouser and curiouser indeed. What a bloody minefield it all is!

Well…. Olive oil exists…. Grown locally in lots of countries and eaten there, as well as exported.

I can't afford to eat out again ever so that's solved the problem for me 😂

I already use EVOO at home.
I also like M&S salads.
I think the balance is unlikely to kill me unless I am stupendously unlucky.

Once a month or so I even buy a slice of their UPF carrot cake for a late night treat.
90% of my diet is solid non UPF.
I can't honestly bring myself to worry about it just for that 10% carrot cake and salad.
I also like a good bottle of port and Belvoir cordials. I am literally screwed

An American not for profit (trying to raise crowdfunded money to create an app) isn’t exactly the same as a charity, and one of the reports linked there is actually positive about cold pressed rapeseed.

I’m not American, but I believe the issue over there is heavily industrialised/extracted canola oil (think Crisp and Dry maybe as a UK brand equivalent?).

Thanks, yes, I did read further after posting.

I also wondered if our collective issues with food in the the UK and the US might have something to do with having moved away very rapidly and quite aggressively from a traditional (locally sourced) diet since industrialisation.

Some countries such as Spain, Italy Japan, etc, seem to have kept a firmer hold of their traditional foods, even after the introduction of global corporations. I have heard that is changing now and UPF's are becoming more widespread, but am not sure to what extent.

People often mention WW2 and rationing having made the UK diet bland, but there isn't much info about what we ate prior to the industrial revolution outside of history docs for the layman. We do know that adulterated foods with dangerous additives were causing havoc in the Victorian era (so that fabled great great granny wasn't having a ball after all)..

We have certainly become suspicious of anything contemporary/industrially created, and have developed a fixation with a somewhat rose tinted image of our gastronomical past. Unfortunately, whilst reconnecting with traditions might be a healthy motivation, it seems to have opened up a political/cultural war on the internet, which creates so much noise, misinformation and chaos that it is difficult to see how any of it could aid in digestion!

It's like we are broken in that way.

No kidding! I live in the US and recently a friend from back home made some allusion to food quality in the States. I was nonplussed, but after asking her for clarification and doing some digging it turns out that there’s some weird social media conspiracy (from Russia or China, I’m guessing) that the food in the US isn’t fit for consumption. She also didn’t want to believe me when I showed her that they are ranked #3 in food quality, ahead of us.

I just ignore all of the food conspiracies. They’re batshit.

it’s all really interesting, isn’t it? I think the thing we don’t talk about enough is just how hungry this wee island was. Industrial food production is, in many ways, a miracle. We’re still in ‘the hungry time’ here in Scotland, the point of the year when there’s really the square root of fuck all available to be eaten (if we were growing our own food). People died of hunger, people died of malnutrition, people got scurvy and all kinds of stuff, and that’s before you look at food adulteration as you say. I do think you’re right in that the speed of how we got from an agrarian nation to an industrial one to a war one to where we are now is scarily.

I remember getting taught in school that the NHS wasn’t some amazing socialist experiment, it was waved through because the soldiers in both wars were ridiculously unhealthy and they feared a third war couldn’t be won with a weak and sickly army.

Yes, we have developed some odd myths around the NHS! Same with slum clearance at that time, also.

I have thought that the body likes to burn fuel, so societies and tribes that seem to have an ongoing connection to their environment, with high levels of pedestrianisation, seem to be healthier, no matter what carbs/sugar/stuff or white rice they eat.
Almost as if the body doesn't like inactivity, or having it's fuel sat around doing nothing.

I worked from home for over 20 years and when i began to get back into the world it was such an incredible uplift for both my mind and body. Just going to work in a car, then into the office, then back in the car isn't ideal. It is as if we are moving around in a sort of embryonic, covered sphere, with no direct contact with nature or other people.
It is probably much easier to fixate on carbs than how we can fix wider society.

It isn't going to improve anytime soon either, as more focus on roads and vehicles persists. Some towns are becoming mostly just roads now and are very depressing to walk through on foot, with a decaying built environment and vanishingly few pedestrianised areas.
We haven't transitioned to the digital age very well and many places in the UK are like ghost towns of their industrial past. All roads and uninhabited concrete.

20-30 years ago, foods were full of e numbers and trans fats and generally no better than they are now. People are lots of white plastic bread and there was a deliberate effort to convince us that sugary cereals were great start to the day. "wholegrains" were shoehorned into everything possible as a cure for the white plastic bread affliction.

Sadly many many people don’t have the capacity to eat mindfully.
People have lost sight of what real food is. They think potato waffles, chicken nuggets and peas is a home cooked dinner. They think coke, crisps and cookies are fine occasionally but by occasionally they mean daily.

Taking anything seriously, if said by the Maga loons, is a risk in itself. They don't believe in science unless they can twist something to their own agenda. Hence children dying unvaccinated from measles. In a supposedly civilised country with an educated population. Stay healthy and ignore them and their poisonous propaganda.

In my 65 years I've lived through so many things which we "shouldn't" be eating, only for the advice to change again. I just eat whatever I want, make sure that most of it is ordinary healthy food, and ignore everything I read.

What is the point of depriving ourselves of things which we enjoy eating? Sounds pretty joyless to me.

It's odd that most of these loons trust science when it comes to using the Internet, cars, planes and guns.

I think food regulation standards in the USA are rather laxer in some respects than in Europe eg growth hormones, regulation of additives.

That nugget is based on nothing more scientific than”stuff I’ve read” though so make of it what you will.