Seed Oil Panic and Beef Tallow
Public Health in Retrograde is back with series 2.
Public Health in Retrograde starts its second series with something that's truly mind boggling. They want to replace vegetable oil with beef tallow. Needless to say, this is another right-wing moral panic based on nothing. Public health has gone through the effort to reducing the amount of saturated fat and trans fat in our diets, for them to regress back to beef tallow is a level of ignorance on par with raw milk.
Of course, America is still on average unhealthy. The explanation for this to any well informed person is clear: eating in excess plus a culture and built environment antithetical to healthy eating. There is no mystery. However, this complex answer is not palatable to the certain groups, resulting in attempts to find a simple explanation to serve as the scapegoat. "It must be the seed oils!" they cried.
With all nutrition topics, the discussion about fat is nuanced, which does not fit the current social media zeitgeist of making everything absolute. While the "fat is bad" era certainly exaggerated the harms of saturated fat (everyone in France would be dead if saturated fat was that harmful. Have you seen how much butter they eat?) and underestimated the harms of sugar (thanks to sugar industry lobbying), the key lesson to derive from this is the same boring lesson that scientists have been trying to communicate for decades: balance. You can avoid all forms of saturated fat and still be woefully unhealthy, just as you can eat mainly saturated fats like butter and animal fats but as a part of a healthy balanced diet. Every nutrition grifter is trying to come up with a new magic bullet, demonizing or exalting one nutrient as the key to good health, when the key to a healthy diet is primarily about the amount and proportion.
As a cooking enthusiast (a fancy way of saying home cook), I appreciate animal fats. In fact, as I type this, there are 4 jars of animal fats in my fridge: lard, chicken fat, duck fat, and goose fat. If these people's main argument was simply "beef tallow tastes better", I would find it reasonable. But like most conservative positions, this idea has fully gone into the conspiracy theory realm. Stemming from a fundamental lack of understanding of science and statistics, they are pushing the dangerous idea that seed oil is somehow more dangerous than stuffing their face with beef tallow.
The next episode of Public Health in Retrograde will be in a few weeks. Next week is the release of a special collaboration episode with the absolutely remarkable and talented Daniella from Public Health is Dead. I am so excited, it was a delight to work on the episode, and I hope everyone likes it too.
Stay tuned,
MJ
