Oddbean

Look, I think there would be a lot we agree on when it comes to the failures of our food system and that we'd both agree the standard american diet is atrocious for health. If everyone at more whole food, it would go a long way in promoting public health outcomes. These podcasts lack substance however, even though they might pull at the heart string of what we feel is wrong with a broken system. I am well familiar with most of the arguments that are presented by those that follow the carnivore diet like Saifedean, Shawn Baker, Saladino, etc. I've read both of Saifedean's books. I agree with his economics a lot, but he makes poor arguments for a lot of the connections he loves to make towards the year 1971. In the podcast you linked with Natalie and Matthew, Matthew makes the same poor compelling arguments about nutrition that Saifedean and the rest of the anti-seed oil community make. For example, they appeal to ancestry even though our ancestors didn't eat for optimal nutrition at all, nor were they devoid of heart disease. Life expectancy was also far lower and they died more of infections before the ravages of post-prandial diseases have a chance to take hold. Anthropologically speaking, diets in human history varied greatly as well. So appealing to ancestry means very different things depending on where you look in the world. The connection between nutrition and 1971 also fails scrutiny. They try to link the bludgeoning fiat money system to poor nutrition guidelines and food subsidies that lead to the national health crisis we're in. But this premise fails to recognize the fact that the animal agriculture is the largest recipient of agriculture subsidies in the US. Animal agriculture and the feed crops that go toward it account for more than half our agriculture subsidies. If our fiat system is to blame for any skewing of economic markets within our food system, ignoring the biggest recipient of these subsidies by far is a gross negligence of this theory. That's not the mention the outsized and direct influence that the Meat Board and their ilk have played in our national dietary guidelines dating back to the 1970's. So the whole connection between fiat money and "fiat food" falls a bit flat to me. You can't point the finger and fiat monetary policies and unchecked budgetary subsidies all while ignoring the largest recipient and beneficiary. All through the podcasts, you hear the claim "I/we looked at the data", but rarely do they state what that data is or was that they looked at. Science isn't settled in podcasts. Show me some research from scholar.google.com that backs some claims made. You can make all the claims of corruption you want, but at the end of the day if you're going to make claims about " the data shows this", then show it. If your data isn't backed up with any correlation, doesn't have any explainable biological mechanisms of action, doesn't have strong statistical significance, and doesn't have a myriad of meta-analyses to back it up, then what exactly is this "data" being mentioned? If there isn't data being presented and available for review, then in the end it is preaching to authority ironically in anger about authority. To be honest, I'm not even pro-seed oil. I think oils in general are an overly caloric dense food that almost always leads to overconsumption; which I'm sure we'd both agree is unhealthy. I just find it extremely hypocritical/anti-critical that those in the carnivore community are so anti-seedoil when in reality every single argument they make against seed oils can be made against carnivorism. For example, not once do you ever see any carnivore explain why in controlled trials where "seed oils" are substituted in place of saturated fats, we see either neutral or positive metabolic health outcomes. Like I said, if you actually want to read about any of this, I can send you links to countless studies that back up these repeatable results. But you've already written them off as part of a much larger conspiracy. Better yet, do yourself a favor and provide yourself the data from yourself, like I mentioned before. It is easy enough to perform an N-of-1 trial on yourself to get an idea as to what your health outcomes are. If you haven't had your apo-B levels checked, then how can you be so sure that what you're prescribing to is actually helping? If they are, that's great. Keep on trucking!