Jessica Knurick

And then you have polyunsaturated fats.

And that chemically just means there's multiple places where you're missing a bond for a hydrogen bond.

Polyunsaturated would be seed oils.

Yeah, so in nutrition science, we have pretty strong data to show, again, global nutrition science data to show that diets that are relatively high in polyunsaturated fatty acids to saturated fats, so you're eating more monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids and less saturated fats are heart healthy, are more healthful dietary patterns.

We see this in longitudinal epidemiological studies.

Yeah, so when you're looking at populations, like large populations over time, and you're looking at their dietary eating patterns, and then you're looking at health outcomes, that's what we tend to see.

We see this in studies that replace saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats or monounsaturated fats.

We see that improvement in health outcomes.

There tends to be this thing in nutrition where, and the way that misinformation spreads really quickly, is they take a mechanism of action and then they say that that's going to happen in a human model, which we know that that's not really the case.

Most mechanisms, most hypotheses based off of mechanisms don't actually end up doing what we think they're going to do.

So seed oils are rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids, linoleic acid, alpha-linolenic acid.

Linoleic acid converts to something called arachidonic acid.

And arachidonic acid can be inflammatory.

They can have pro-inflammatory markers.

And so this is where this comes from.

But the problem is that when you look at the conversion,

of linoleic acid to arachidonic acid, it doesn't convert effectively at all in the human body.

It's less than 1%, usually closer to 0.1% conversion.

And so if you're just looking at that conversion and saying, well, this can convert to this and this can cause inflammation, that's where that comes from.

And it sounds sciency and it sounds like they know what they're talking about, except for when you actually look at it in a human, it doesn't pan out.