Chris Masterjohn

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.

And one of the important things about being old is that's what makes you able to get cancer.

There are some childhood cancers, but in general, people start getting cancer when they live long enough to not die of heart disease first.

So doing the trial in older people for longer is what allowed you to see that the seed oils seem to be able to cause cancer.

And what the author's conclusion was, was that because the total mortality was just starting to diverge at the eight-year mark, and because they had a plausible reason for it, that the cancer was exploding.

They said, we have ultimately left the question of whether these oils are toxic unresolved.

And the one thing that we need is instead of the previous goal of the trials being five years long, that the trials be done well in excess of eight years.

Okay, so scientists think that they're just like looking at the older insurance and they say, oh, what was the gap in the knowledge that we need to solve next?

Well, I'm telling you, they concluded in 1969 that the gap in the knowledge was we need a trial that's a lot longer than eight years.

And what did we get?

Seven to 12 week trials.

It's kind of like that...

that, who was it, Peter Thiel or someone had a tweet that was like, they promised us flying cars and all we got was 180 characters or something like that, whatever that quote is.