As always, the lede is buried near the end of the article:
Before the seeds can be sold as food or feed, they'll need approval from the Food and Drug Administration
I'm honestly tired of nonsense headlines like this -- officially the FDA has not approved Cottonseed for human consumption, the only thing that has happened is that the US Dept of Agriculture has deregulated the growing of it.[0]
Now, aside from the fact that most people here on HN would be shouting about the nasty effects that deregulation can have, we have an irresponsible headline from NPR of all places about how it is "safe". This is patently false -- nobody has declared this safe except for the typist who wrote this article.
I think you have the concepts upside down here. Safe food is safe even without FDA approval, it is even safe if the FDA explicitly rejects it (e.g. for political reasons or by mistake). Safety is not something granted by a bureaucracy but by the laws of nature.
This article merely explains that a new strain of cotton has been developed that does not have the qualities that typically make cottonseed poisonous.
FDA approval is still needed, but that doesn’t make the article a lie.
You can't just assume some piece of food is safe. You need a credible and dependable 3rd party - be it a bureaucracy like the FDA or something else - to let you know if it is. And there's no shortage of food that was assumed to be safe to eat in the past but turned out to be toxic.
Bidaou (aka Tricholoma auratum), for instance, grows in south-western France, and was rated as delicious in some mushroom books as recently as 20 years ago. Selling it has only been banned since 2005. The last recorded death it caused was in 2009. [1] [2]
Fools webcap [3] and Deadly webcap [4] were likewise thought to be edible until last century.
Perhaps legally, but as for actual effictive safety, the default is not to declare everything safe barring counterevidince without due dilligence. Known unknowns and all that.
Unsafe is the default. Until a third party confirms its safety, then it’s not safe because safety needs evidence.
If you like to think in probabilities, the likelihood that this is unsafe is far greater, if you judge based on other modern, engineered foods.
Heck, judging by the damage of vegetable oils which are still considered to be “heart healthy”, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were approved only to discover it was a poison, a decade or two from now, which is about the time it takes to see the effects at large. Plus another two decades for health professionals to finally acknowledge it.
The burden of proof is on the inventor, not on the FDA or other organizations.
Given the complete clusterfuck that is nutrition, the though that this new cottonseed could be fed to the livestock we eat is terrifying.
Humans require n-3 and n-6 fats in our diet. These tended to be consumed in equal ratios until the advent of vegetable oils which increased the n-6 intake dramatically. As the other post mentions, research has found that this intake pattern leads to high levels of inflammation, which contribute to cardiovascular disease and other ailments.
I'm sorry but could you point me to actual research articles. most neta analyses I've found indicate a cardioprotective effect of n-6 polyusaturated oils relative to alternatives. eg
Because all available evidence shows that seed oils, which have only been consumed for 100 years and were previously used for paints, lubricants, water-proofing, etc., are highly correlated with a number of inflammatory disease processes, including type 2 diabetes. Which makes sense, as polyunsaturated fats undergo lipid peroxidation in our bodies, which releases free radicals.
Sorry, I didn't notice your reply before. It is different in that you're getting fewer of the antioxidants naturally found in nuts and seeds to slow down the rancidification process. You are also getting it in all kinds of things from bread to seasonings to supposed "dairy" products, so your exposure is much higher. And finally, nuts in shell are protected from oxidation by a skin and the shell, so they are less rancid when you eat them. Seed oils tend to be quite rancid already when you purchase them. I am not sure that eating nuts is a good idea in the first place though. Things that plants don't want to be eaten and put toxins in to prevent from being eaten aren't high on my list of "probably good eating".
The fertilizer plant where I used to work also sold feed. Used to import semi-loads of cottonseed for use as dairy feed, the cows just loved the stuff.
I think the fact that cottonseed can now be fed to other types of livestock is far more important than it being used by humans. But unless there is something that you can specifically see or a very simple test the chance of getting the wrong kind is high.
Here in Michigan flame retardant got accidentally mixed in animal feed causing the PBB crisis. As a result most citizens of the state have measurable levels in their blood. There was even a TV movie with Art Carney and Ron Howard. I was friends with the farmer who wrote the book upon which the movie was based.
The article stated that the genetically-engineered-to-be-safe-to-eat versions are missing some sort of dark glands apparently associated with being toxic. Kinda wish the article had more side-by-side photos to demonstrate this, because that sounds like a good way to identify poisonous v. non-poisonous.
The PBB crisis realy was astounding. My dad and the rest of our extended family lived in Michigan at the time. He developed type one diabetes in his mid thirties. We have no known familial history of the disease. I have always wondered if they were related.
It is interesting to contrast the U.S system of genetically modified food (e.g. the "new" genetically modified cottonseed) with how traditional systems dealt with food (such as cottonseed).
Cottonseed is considered as a nutritious source of food in Madurai, India (and perhaps in other parts of the world). They don't genetically modify cotton, but they process cottonseed to create cottonseed "milk", a healthy, nutritious drink
ddg couldn't find many online references to cottonseed milk (Paruthi Paal in Tamil). However, here are a couple of links
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlD9gxef5mo
Starting from around minute 18:00 onwards, this video shows a vendor talking about how he makes cottonseed milk. Unfortunately, the video doesn't have English subtitles, but it might be interesting anyway :)
Seeds can't defend themselves so they all include some poisons, some well known and others more subtle. Just to point out one example, Lectins are in almost all seeds and are associated with gut tearing and autoimmune diseases. Even with FDA approval eating cottonseed may not be a good idea or truly safe.
While you may be right that secondary metabolites can be a problem (the mentioned gossypol being a perfect example), lectins (as any other protein) are not risk when you heat your food. I would rather worry that removing the insect toxins from a plant is intended to increase the sale of insecticides.
Consider if lectins were not a risk when heating food, then castor beans would be completely safe to eat after cooking: the toxic component of castor is ricin, a lectin.
The most cooking can do is reduce or mitigate the harmful effects to some extent. Fermentation is another technique but neither reduces the risk to zero.
"(as any other protein)" is not true either, consider for example peanut allergies, and related allergies such as tree nuts and soy. Cupins, prolamins, profilins are known protein families which can cause allergic reactions. Hence the warning you may see on food labels:
Allergy information: This product was processed in a facility that processes peanuts, tree nuts, soy, wheat, and dairy products.
Heat is not a guaranteed way to destroy lectins. It depends on how long you cook it, how hot, and the moisture level. Most of the time, it just reduces the levels.
20-30 years ago my family used to give each other "cotton bolls" from Mary of Puddin Hill as gifts. They were said to be cotton seed in white chocolate, and I have no reason to doubt it was genuinely cotton seed. They weren't very good, the seed added nothing delicious. More of a clever food pun.
Yeah, and they developed the nontoxic version a long time before genetic editing became a thing. IIRC they irradiated seeds until they got one with just the right mutations. Then they decided “rapeseed” wasn't the best name for a food product, and renamed it “canola”.
Yes. However in law there is really specific definition for GMO and that falls out of it.
Therefore for marketing and legal reasons one may want to still use really inefficient form of genetic modification just to avoid those additional loopholes users of the more efficient method must jump trough.
The most attractive thing about cotton as a food crop is that the FDA has approved use of pesticides on it that are not allowed on crops meant for people. They need these because cotton pests are among the worst.
That cottonseed oil is permitted in food is among the most egregious loopholes in US food regulation. When you see cottonseed oil in the ingredients you know that the manufacturer has cut cost and quality of every other ingredient to the absolute limit.
Cows' tolerance for cottonseed toxin is exaggerated -- recommendations are that cottonseed meal be no more than 10% of their diet. The attraction for ranchers has been that cottonseed meal is practically free, because it is toxic waste.
Growing cotton is terrible for the soil, and cotton needs huge amounts of water. Anything that increases acres under cotton cultivation is an evil.
If you write an article about how Javascript, UBI and A/B tests will save the world then it's true by default and it's on the skeptics to disprove it.
If you want to feed an engineered plant seed, which is already being consumed by some livestock and humans to more livestock than you did previously then you need to win a Nobel Prize and get Knighted by the Queen of England before the HN crowd will even consider that there's a remote chance your new engineered seed is safe.
I'm not sure what this says about HN or human nature in general but it's at least an amusing contradiction.
I think it says that people are more concerned about being poisoned than they are about a website being slightly more or less crappy than it would otherwise be.
I’m dubious. I don’t think we’ve fully grasped the long term health consequences of introducing new seed oils into the human diet yet, opting to go further and actually eat cottonseed too seems like a bad call.
> I don’t think we’ve fully grasped the long term health consequences of introducing new seed oils into the human diet
We are beginning to understand the effects of seed oils (marketing term: vegetable oils) and it is not looking good. Excerpt from _Don't Eat The Oil! The Health Consequences of Consuming "Vegetable" Oils_ by Thomas L. Copmann:
---
This book is a compilation of two and a half years of research based entirely on peer-reviewed publications. While I wasn't planning on publishing a book, the further I looked into the interrelationship of a number of major diseases, there slowly appeared to be a common denominator - the levels of polyunsaturated oils in our fatty tissues from consuming vegetable oils. Finally, the weight of evidence compelled me to write this book.
Polyunsaturated oils are a fairly new addition to the modern diet. Prior to their introduction at the turn of the century, cooking fats were mostly beef tallow and butter. Corn oil was introduced in 1911, followed by cottonseed, soybean, and rapeseed (Canola) oil labeled as "vegetable" oils. The fact is however, these oils have nothing in common with vegetables, but are the product of solvent extraction of oils from seeds.
The problem with these oils is their molecular structure. They are rich in polyunsaturated fats which means they have multiple double bonds between carbon atoms. Oxygen reacts with the double bonds in a process called _lipid peroxidation_. The end result is the formation of highly reactive free radicals which interact with cellular membranes, nuclear DNA, and deplete cells of their antioxidant defenses.
As you read the following chapters, the important thing to remember is exposing polyunsaturated fats to oxygen leads to free radical formation, while saturated fat cannot undergo this reaction because of their lack of double bonds. During the process of oil extraction, the oil is subject to high temperatures which accelerate the peroxidation reaction.
Polyunsaturated fats break down as their double bonds are exposed to oxygen. And heating accelerated this process. Therefore, lipid peroxidation is the degradation process involving the double bond(s) found in polyunsaturated fatty acids, causing a deterioration of food quality (odor, flavor, color, texture, toxicity). This is collectively known as turning "rancid". According to one analysis, a total of 130 volatile compounds were isolated from a piece of fried chicken alone!
... In summary, polyunsaturated fats are highly unstable and are readily oxidized to form toxic compounds that are implicated in most of our modern diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity, immunological disorders, neurological disease processes, dysbiosis, lipofuscin, and premature aging). We will explore each of these in detail looking at mechanistic as well as epidemiological evidence.
---
Long story short, it took nearly a century to assess the consequences of the oil of cottonseed, declaring "New Cottonseed Is Safe for People to Eat" is irresponsibly premature. Only time will tell.
I keep coming back to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book _Antifragile_, where he explains how he doesn't eat any fruit that doesn't have an ancient Greek/Hebrew name, and doesn't drink any liquid that hasn't existed for a thousand years. Will this new "safe" cottonseed survive the test of time, or be looked upon hundreds of years from now as another catastrophic dietary mistake?
Favoring stuff with Greek/Latin names is just a bunch of Euro-centrism, which isn't really a good look. The Romans also ignored the risks of lead, which is just ironic in this context.
In general I think it's best, when possible, to stick with foods that have been around for a long long time. I think a lot of the new stuff we've introduced this century has some pretty nasty medium to long term consequences, even if it won't give you acute poisoning right off the bat. If a food/dish has been around for a few centuries or millenia then chances are we've already worked those kinks out.
>Favoring stuff with Greek/Latin names is just a bunch of Euro-centrism
I think Taleb's heuristic here is for him to eat only fruits his ancestors have been eating for at least 1000 years. IIUC, his advice to a person of Chinese ancestry would be to eat only fruits with a Chinese name.
(Also, you changed the "Greek/Hebrew" in the earlier comment to "Greek/Latin".)
>Favoring stuff with Greek/Latin names is just a bunch of Euro-centrism
They said "Greek/Hebrew" not "Greek/Latin".
>which isn't really a good look
How is that exactly? Why would it be bad for a Greek person to embrace Greek culture, history and tradition?
>The Romans also ignored the risks of lead, which is just ironic in this context.
It is not ironic, it is the point. He's not saying "do anything Romans did!" (even if we pretend he said Romans when that's something you made up). He's saying "do things that have been around since Roman times and nobody has found any health problems with in the 2000 years since then." We had lots of time to find out lead is bad, we found that out, told everyone, and now we eat less of it. We've only been eating seed oils for 100 years. They are probably bad too but we haven't had the time to figure it out and tell everyone yet. So you take a risk by eating them.
This is one of the issues I've noticed that has the biggest disparity between evidence and common belief. We have mainstream reputable people and organizations actively promoting polyunsaturated fats as a "healthy alternative" to saturated fats, while all the available evidence says saturated fats are healthy and polyunsaturated fats are not. It is pretty scary to consider how many people have likely already died prematurely from this mess, nevermind how many more will before common knowledge catches up to evidence.
The article mentions that processing seeds to make cotton seed oil removes the poisonous element. Also that cows' digestive system can handle the element - that's why the seeds were relegated to cattle feed and cotton seed oil previously.
So I don't understand.. is cotton seed naturally edible, just needs processing? Lots of things need processing but we don't call them inedible. Some edible mushrooms have to be boiled to cook out a toxin. Fish needs to be deboned, some fish can kill you if not prepared properly...
The seeds contain oil, protein, and a poison. Before the genetic modification, you took the oil, and threw away the valuable protein together with the poison. (Or gave them to cows.) After the modification, you just eat the whole seed.
Given the negative environmental impacts of growing cotton, why would we want to grow it just to eat the seeds when there are so many viable alternatives?
As always, the lede is buried near the end of the article:
Before the seeds can be sold as food or feed, they'll need approval from the Food and Drug Administration
I'm honestly tired of nonsense headlines like this -- officially the FDA has not approved Cottonseed for human consumption, the only thing that has happened is that the US Dept of Agriculture has deregulated the growing of it.[0]
Now, aside from the fact that most people here on HN would be shouting about the nasty effects that deregulation can have, we have an irresponsible headline from NPR of all places about how it is "safe". This is patently false -- nobody has declared this safe except for the typist who wrote this article.
[0]: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/biotechnology/brs-...
I think you have the concepts upside down here. Safe food is safe even without FDA approval, it is even safe if the FDA explicitly rejects it (e.g. for political reasons or by mistake). Safety is not something granted by a bureaucracy but by the laws of nature.
This article merely explains that a new strain of cotton has been developed that does not have the qualities that typically make cottonseed poisonous.
FDA approval is still needed, but that doesn’t make the article a lie.
You can't just assume some piece of food is safe. You need a credible and dependable 3rd party - be it a bureaucracy like the FDA or something else - to let you know if it is. And there's no shortage of food that was assumed to be safe to eat in the past but turned out to be toxic.
Bidaou (aka Tricholoma auratum), for instance, grows in south-western France, and was rated as delicious in some mushroom books as recently as 20 years ago. Selling it has only been banned since 2005. The last recorded death it caused was in 2009. [1] [2]
Fools webcap [3] and Deadly webcap [4] were likewise thought to be edible until last century.
[1]: https://www.mycodb.fr/fiche.php?genre=Tricholoma&espece=aura... [French]
[2]: https://www.mycofrance.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Lettre-... [French]
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortinarius_orellanus
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortinarius_rubellus
Perhaps legally, but as for actual effictive safety, the default is not to declare everything safe barring counterevidince without due dilligence. Known unknowns and all that.
Unsafe is the default. Until a third party confirms its safety, then it’s not safe because safety needs evidence.
If you like to think in probabilities, the likelihood that this is unsafe is far greater, if you judge based on other modern, engineered foods.
Heck, judging by the damage of vegetable oils which are still considered to be “heart healthy”, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were approved only to discover it was a poison, a decade or two from now, which is about the time it takes to see the effects at large. Plus another two decades for health professionals to finally acknowledge it.
The burden of proof is on the inventor, not on the FDA or other organizations.
Given the complete clusterfuck that is nutrition, the though that this new cottonseed could be fed to the livestock we eat is terrifying.
could you discuss further why you believe vegetable oils to be ubhealthy? foods?
Humans require n-3 and n-6 fats in our diet. These tended to be consumed in equal ratios until the advent of vegetable oils which increased the n-6 intake dramatically. As the other post mentions, research has found that this intake pattern leads to high levels of inflammation, which contribute to cardiovascular disease and other ailments.
I'm sorry but could you point me to actual research articles. most neta analyses I've found indicate a cardioprotective effect of n-6 polyusaturated oils relative to alternatives. eg
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Because all available evidence shows that seed oils, which have only been consumed for 100 years and were previously used for paints, lubricants, water-proofing, etc., are highly correlated with a number of inflammatory disease processes, including type 2 diabetes. Which makes sense, as polyunsaturated fats undergo lipid peroxidation in our bodies, which releases free radicals.
how are these different than consuming seeds and nuts directly? eg walnuts, sunflower, peanuts etc
Sorry, I didn't notice your reply before. It is different in that you're getting fewer of the antioxidants naturally found in nuts and seeds to slow down the rancidification process. You are also getting it in all kinds of things from bread to seasonings to supposed "dairy" products, so your exposure is much higher. And finally, nuts in shell are protected from oxidation by a skin and the shell, so they are less rancid when you eat them. Seed oils tend to be quite rancid already when you purchase them. I am not sure that eating nuts is a good idea in the first place though. Things that plants don't want to be eaten and put toxins in to prevent from being eaten aren't high on my list of "probably good eating".
The fertilizer plant where I used to work also sold feed. Used to import semi-loads of cottonseed for use as dairy feed, the cows just loved the stuff.
I think the fact that cottonseed can now be fed to other types of livestock is far more important than it being used by humans. But unless there is something that you can specifically see or a very simple test the chance of getting the wrong kind is high.
Here in Michigan flame retardant got accidentally mixed in animal feed causing the PBB crisis. As a result most citizens of the state have measurable levels in their blood. There was even a TV movie with Art Carney and Ron Howard. I was friends with the farmer who wrote the book upon which the movie was based.
http://www.michiganradio.org/post/michigans-toxic-1973-pbb-f...
The article stated that the genetically-engineered-to-be-safe-to-eat versions are missing some sort of dark glands apparently associated with being toxic. Kinda wish the article had more side-by-side photos to demonstrate this, because that sounds like a good way to identify poisonous v. non-poisonous.
The PBB crisis realy was astounding. My dad and the rest of our extended family lived in Michigan at the time. He developed type one diabetes in his mid thirties. We have no known familial history of the disease. I have always wondered if they were related.
It is interesting to contrast the U.S system of genetically modified food (e.g. the "new" genetically modified cottonseed) with how traditional systems dealt with food (such as cottonseed).
Cottonseed is considered as a nutritious source of food in Madurai, India (and perhaps in other parts of the world). They don't genetically modify cotton, but they process cottonseed to create cottonseed "milk", a healthy, nutritious drink
ddg couldn't find many online references to cottonseed milk (Paruthi Paal in Tamil). However, here are a couple of links
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlD9gxef5mo Starting from around minute 18:00 onwards, this video shows a vendor talking about how he makes cottonseed milk. Unfortunately, the video doesn't have English subtitles, but it might be interesting anyway :)
2. http://www.themomandthecity.com/paruthi-paal/
Seeds can't defend themselves so they all include some poisons, some well known and others more subtle. Just to point out one example, Lectins are in almost all seeds and are associated with gut tearing and autoimmune diseases. Even with FDA approval eating cottonseed may not be a good idea or truly safe.
While you may be right that secondary metabolites can be a problem (the mentioned gossypol being a perfect example), lectins (as any other protein) are not risk when you heat your food. I would rather worry that removing the insect toxins from a plant is intended to increase the sale of insecticides.
Consider if lectins were not a risk when heating food, then castor beans would be completely safe to eat after cooking: the toxic component of castor is ricin, a lectin.
The most cooking can do is reduce or mitigate the harmful effects to some extent. Fermentation is another technique but neither reduces the risk to zero.
"(as any other protein)" is not true either, consider for example peanut allergies, and related allergies such as tree nuts and soy. Cupins, prolamins, profilins are known protein families which can cause allergic reactions. Hence the warning you may see on food labels:
Allergy information: This product was processed in a facility that processes peanuts, tree nuts, soy, wheat, and dairy products.
even if they are cooked.
Heat is not a guaranteed way to destroy lectins. It depends on how long you cook it, how hot, and the moisture level. Most of the time, it just reduces the levels.
Huh. We used to eat cottonseed and I don't seem to have died. The father of a friend of mine even made a candy with it, something like peanut brittle.
20-30 years ago my family used to give each other "cotton bolls" from Mary of Puddin Hill as gifts. They were said to be cotton seed in white chocolate, and I have no reason to doubt it was genuinely cotton seed. They weren't very good, the seed added nothing delicious. More of a clever food pun.
haven't died yet =\= safe to eat
Rapeseed also used to be toxic (high levels of erucic acid, which is damaging to cardiac muscle of animals)
Yeah, and they developed the nontoxic version a long time before genetic editing became a thing. IIRC they irradiated seeds until they got one with just the right mutations. Then they decided “rapeseed” wasn't the best name for a food product, and renamed it “canola”.
Isn’t that still genetic editing, just an inefficient form?
Yes. However in law there is really specific definition for GMO and that falls out of it.
Therefore for marketing and legal reasons one may want to still use really inefficient form of genetic modification just to avoid those additional loopholes users of the more efficient method must jump trough.
The most attractive thing about cotton as a food crop is that the FDA has approved use of pesticides on it that are not allowed on crops meant for people. They need these because cotton pests are among the worst.
That cottonseed oil is permitted in food is among the most egregious loopholes in US food regulation. When you see cottonseed oil in the ingredients you know that the manufacturer has cut cost and quality of every other ingredient to the absolute limit.
Cows' tolerance for cottonseed toxin is exaggerated -- recommendations are that cottonseed meal be no more than 10% of their diet. The attraction for ranchers has been that cottonseed meal is practically free, because it is toxic waste.
Growing cotton is terrible for the soil, and cotton needs huge amounts of water. Anything that increases acres under cotton cultivation is an evil.
>> They also roasted a few and ate them. Rathore says they taste like chickpeas.
The vegetarian equivalent of tastes like chicken
officer Milo Minderbinder likes this :-)
Better than chocolate-covered cotton, anyways.
If you write an article about how Javascript, UBI and A/B tests will save the world then it's true by default and it's on the skeptics to disprove it.
If you want to feed an engineered plant seed, which is already being consumed by some livestock and humans to more livestock than you did previously then you need to win a Nobel Prize and get Knighted by the Queen of England before the HN crowd will even consider that there's a remote chance your new engineered seed is safe.
I'm not sure what this says about HN or human nature in general but it's at least an amusing contradiction.
I think it says that people are more concerned about being poisoned than they are about a website being slightly more or less crappy than it would otherwise be.
I’m dubious. I don’t think we’ve fully grasped the long term health consequences of introducing new seed oils into the human diet yet, opting to go further and actually eat cottonseed too seems like a bad call.
> I don’t think we’ve fully grasped the long term health consequences of introducing new seed oils into the human diet
We are beginning to understand the effects of seed oils (marketing term: vegetable oils) and it is not looking good. Excerpt from _Don't Eat The Oil! The Health Consequences of Consuming "Vegetable" Oils_ by Thomas L. Copmann:
---
This book is a compilation of two and a half years of research based entirely on peer-reviewed publications. While I wasn't planning on publishing a book, the further I looked into the interrelationship of a number of major diseases, there slowly appeared to be a common denominator - the levels of polyunsaturated oils in our fatty tissues from consuming vegetable oils. Finally, the weight of evidence compelled me to write this book.
Polyunsaturated oils are a fairly new addition to the modern diet. Prior to their introduction at the turn of the century, cooking fats were mostly beef tallow and butter. Corn oil was introduced in 1911, followed by cottonseed, soybean, and rapeseed (Canola) oil labeled as "vegetable" oils. The fact is however, these oils have nothing in common with vegetables, but are the product of solvent extraction of oils from seeds.
The problem with these oils is their molecular structure. They are rich in polyunsaturated fats which means they have multiple double bonds between carbon atoms. Oxygen reacts with the double bonds in a process called _lipid peroxidation_. The end result is the formation of highly reactive free radicals which interact with cellular membranes, nuclear DNA, and deplete cells of their antioxidant defenses.
As you read the following chapters, the important thing to remember is exposing polyunsaturated fats to oxygen leads to free radical formation, while saturated fat cannot undergo this reaction because of their lack of double bonds. During the process of oil extraction, the oil is subject to high temperatures which accelerate the peroxidation reaction.
Polyunsaturated fats break down as their double bonds are exposed to oxygen. And heating accelerated this process. Therefore, lipid peroxidation is the degradation process involving the double bond(s) found in polyunsaturated fatty acids, causing a deterioration of food quality (odor, flavor, color, texture, toxicity). This is collectively known as turning "rancid". According to one analysis, a total of 130 volatile compounds were isolated from a piece of fried chicken alone!
... In summary, polyunsaturated fats are highly unstable and are readily oxidized to form toxic compounds that are implicated in most of our modern diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity, immunological disorders, neurological disease processes, dysbiosis, lipofuscin, and premature aging). We will explore each of these in detail looking at mechanistic as well as epidemiological evidence.
---
Long story short, it took nearly a century to assess the consequences of the oil of cottonseed, declaring "New Cottonseed Is Safe for People to Eat" is irresponsibly premature. Only time will tell.
I keep coming back to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book _Antifragile_, where he explains how he doesn't eat any fruit that doesn't have an ancient Greek/Hebrew name, and doesn't drink any liquid that hasn't existed for a thousand years. Will this new "safe" cottonseed survive the test of time, or be looked upon hundreds of years from now as another catastrophic dietary mistake?
So he doesn’t eat corn, tomatoes, peppers, quinoa, etc... from the new world?
Even brussels sprouts doesn’t pass that test.
Favoring stuff with Greek/Latin names is just a bunch of Euro-centrism, which isn't really a good look. The Romans also ignored the risks of lead, which is just ironic in this context.
In general I think it's best, when possible, to stick with foods that have been around for a long long time. I think a lot of the new stuff we've introduced this century has some pretty nasty medium to long term consequences, even if it won't give you acute poisoning right off the bat. If a food/dish has been around for a few centuries or millenia then chances are we've already worked those kinks out.
>Favoring stuff with Greek/Latin names is just a bunch of Euro-centrism
I think Taleb's heuristic here is for him to eat only fruits his ancestors have been eating for at least 1000 years. IIUC, his advice to a person of Chinese ancestry would be to eat only fruits with a Chinese name.
(Also, you changed the "Greek/Hebrew" in the earlier comment to "Greek/Latin".)
>Favoring stuff with Greek/Latin names is just a bunch of Euro-centrism
They said "Greek/Hebrew" not "Greek/Latin".
>which isn't really a good look
How is that exactly? Why would it be bad for a Greek person to embrace Greek culture, history and tradition?
>The Romans also ignored the risks of lead, which is just ironic in this context.
It is not ironic, it is the point. He's not saying "do anything Romans did!" (even if we pretend he said Romans when that's something you made up). He's saying "do things that have been around since Roman times and nobody has found any health problems with in the 2000 years since then." We had lots of time to find out lead is bad, we found that out, told everyone, and now we eat less of it. We've only been eating seed oils for 100 years. They are probably bad too but we haven't had the time to figure it out and tell everyone yet. So you take a risk by eating them.
This is one of the issues I've noticed that has the biggest disparity between evidence and common belief. We have mainstream reputable people and organizations actively promoting polyunsaturated fats as a "healthy alternative" to saturated fats, while all the available evidence says saturated fats are healthy and polyunsaturated fats are not. It is pretty scary to consider how many people have likely already died prematurely from this mess, nevermind how many more will before common knowledge catches up to evidence.
Cotton seed oil is used in central Asia for making pilaf and other dishes. Are they being unsafe or is that oil something else?
The article mentions that processing seeds to make cotton seed oil removes the poisonous element. Also that cows' digestive system can handle the element - that's why the seeds were relegated to cattle feed and cotton seed oil previously.
So I don't understand.. is cotton seed naturally edible, just needs processing? Lots of things need processing but we don't call them inedible. Some edible mushrooms have to be boiled to cook out a toxin. Fish needs to be deboned, some fish can kill you if not prepared properly...
The seeds contain oil, protein, and a poison. Before the genetic modification, you took the oil, and threw away the valuable protein together with the poison. (Or gave them to cows.) After the modification, you just eat the whole seed.
Given the negative environmental impacts of growing cotton, why would we want to grow it just to eat the seeds when there are so many viable alternatives?
Brand new GMO. I'll pass.