Chris Masterjohn

So it takes us back in history.

But there was a period between World War II and 1970s where there was a lot of motivation in the research community to do these grand randomized controlled trials of nutrition.

We don't have that anymore.

And I think it's because...

Scientists love to, in their collective imagination, to say that what they're doing is they're just carrying forth a linear path of addressing knowledge gaps left from the previous literature and just making a linear progress in science.

But they're really not because the incentive structure is to publish a large number of papers in high-impact journals on a yearly basis as your university reviews get done.

And then there's other incentives, too, because you have to get grants with preliminary data.

So you have shorter studies that you then say, well, I'm going to do a longer study now, and it keeps the grant cycle going.

And then the people who write the grants want to see things getting published out of those papers.

So for you to be like, I'm going to do a 12-year randomized controlled trial of seed oils, it's going to be hard to get the people, you know, get all those box checked.

Like you might not be publishing a paper for a while.

So what the LA Veterans Administration hospital study showed was that

They randomized people to seed oils or traditional fats.

And in the first two years, you had a little bit of a heart disease benefit, but then it wore off over time.

And so the heart disease mortality basically by the end of the trial was just kind of flat.

But the cancer was the same for the first two years, but then at the two to five year mark, it started diverging and you see, oh, it looks like there's something there.

The five to seven year mark, it's traditional fats down here and this gap starts widening where seed oils are up here.

And then by the end of the study, total mortality was kind of flat the whole time, but it just started to diverge at the end of the study to favor seed oils causing more death.

And this study was the longest, and it was also the one where the only trial ever done with seed oils where the people, the mean age was 65.

So the people were older than in every other trial.