Chris Masterjohn

And you don't just want to look at what do seed oils do to you when you're 25, because you might not be seeing the capacity for the increased vulnerability of tissue damage.

Another thing is the trials have to be long enough, both because it takes time to see the process of tissue damage play out, and also because we know from long trials of seed oils that

that short trials are useless.

A lot of the people who are talking the loudest in defense of seed oils are looking at trials that last seven weeks long or 12 weeks long, and they're ignoring trials that were done in the 50s, 60s, and 70s that were five to eight years long.

I'm just like,

by all means, analyze the shorter trials, but do it in the light of what we know from the longer trials.

And the most important of the longer trials was the LA Veterans Administration Hospital Study,

And this was the primary paper on it was published in 1969.

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