WIL Weekly Review #38

Vegetable oils wrecking the brain, You need more sunlight & more

This is my free weekly newsletter covering 5 interesting points from the week. Subscribe (if you haven’t already) if you’d like to get it in your inbox each week!

1. Sunlight: Time for a rethink?

A paper published just over a week ago (April 24th, 2024) in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology is questioning the ‘don’t get too much sun or you’ll get skin cancer’ narrative.

“Although well-intentioned, the current dermatology approach to sunlight only considers skin health, in particular, risks of skin cancers and photoaging, and fails to take into account systemic health benefits and modern research on mechanisms through which sunlight affects overall health. I hope that this paper will help colleagues reconsider.”

2. What do vegetable oils do to babies’ brains?

・DHA is thought to be a key piece of the puzzle to human brain evolution.
・A 2014 paper outlines the work of some researchers at the University of California Davis giving Rhesus monkeys a diet high in DHA for their entire lifespan of 17-19 years. (Rhesus monkeys’ diet is plant-based and therefore very low in DHA) They found that compared to other monkeys, the brains of the monkeys on the unnaturally high DHA diet … in some ways “resembled the healthy human brain.”
・DHA is important for brain development, brain maturation and overall brain health in the womb, for infants, for toddlers, for children, for teenagers and for maintenance of brain health for adults and especially seniors. (It’s even associated with less incidence of Migraines, better outcomes in the case of traumatic brain injury (S1,S2,S3,S4) and confers protection against PTSD)
・Linoleic acid is the key fat in vegetable oils like sunflower, soy, cottonseed, safflower, corn, ricebrain, grapeseed and canola.
・Linoleic acid competes with DHA for incorporation into tissues. That is, excess vegetable oil consumption depletes DHA.
・Linoleic acid in mothers’ diet alters the fatty acid composition of the placenta and decreases DHA.
・Excess linoleic acid consumption by mothers has been linked to depleted DHA and poorer brain development in their children.(S2)
・Excess consumption of linoleic acid by mothers has been linked with autistic traits in children.
・The FDA requires at least 300mg of linoleic acid in infant formulas. (I haven’t been able to find a single formula for children under 9 months that does not contain vegetable oils and the lowest linoleic acid content I could find is 500mg. This one for 12 months and up does not have seed oils.)
・This requirement is likely due to the fact that infant formula is designed to mimic breast milk as best as possible. Though, this is very unlikely to be the “optimal” amount of linoleic acid a child should get because modern women consume an abnormally large amount of vegetable oil and this affects the composition of the breast milk.
・A natural human diet would indeed contain some linoleic acid, though we are consuming so much industrially produced vegetable oils that our bodies contain about 5x the linoleic acid they would if we didn’t have access to vegetable oils.
・A 2021 paper in Advances in Nutrition acknowledges the harms of excess linoleic acid and calls for more research to find out what amount of linoleic acid best supports children’s development.
・Practical thoughts: (These are just thoughts, not “advice” …) In the case that breastfeeding is impractical, it may be wise to prioritize formula brands lower in linoleic acid.

3. Finally: NHS declares that sex is a biological fact

Changes to the health service's written constitution proposed by ministers will for the first time ban trans women from women-only wards, and give women the right to request a female doctor for intimate care.

4. Your brain is tired of explaining

Ruben Laukkonen tweeted a paper titled The Thermodynamics of Mind, saying:

Humans always be chasin’ that flattened temporal hierarchy. Imagine if there was like an ancient tradition that figured out a step-by-step way to do this on demand. Or like… a scientific paper explaining it?

"Whole-brain modelling implementation of the Thermodynamics of Mind theory has provided insights into why our subjective experience of watching the naturalistic, multimodal dynamics of film is so highly motivating, soothing, and entirely different from our usual everyday resting experience of mind wandering."

Someone asked him to explain, he said:

“the brain likes to explain things all time. tries to explain itself to itself. never stop try to explain - tiring and annoying, watching movies make brain explain less. feel good. meditation make brain explain even less. feel very good. no more need to explain. happy.”

5. ‘Trauma doctor’ Gabor Mate - Freud 2.0?

While doing the research for my two articles Is Gabor Mate Helpful or Toxic? and Gabor Mate is wrong about ADHD, addiction, women and disease, I couldn’t help but notice his parallels to Freud.

Mate likes make use of Freud’s concept of “repression” or “suppression” to patch up any holes in his theories. For example, on The Diary of a CEO podcast, Mate says that even if someone seems unaffected and peaceful despite a serious adverse event, there’s a good chance that that peaceful person is “suppressing their healthy anger because they're actually sitting on their rage unconsciously which is going to show up in a form of some kind of health manifestation, I guarantee you later on.”

He seems to be taking a page directly from Freud’s book:

"Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways." -Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud had several interesting ideas about how the mind works. Many of them, he just kind of …came up without much or any evidence. For example, Freud had this idea called the “oedipal conflict” which assume that boys aged three to six sexually lust after their mothers and fear their fathers will castrate them as punishment.

Freud claimed that he could remember an incident when he was three years old, saw his 23-year-old mother nude, became sexually aroused by this, and then his father took his mother elsewhere out of Freud’s sight and Freud felt jealous and angry at his father. Freud admitted in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that “I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood.”

As you saw in the tweet above, Gabor Mate employs the Freudian concept of “defense mechanisms,” saying:

“If we look within deeply, honestly, and without succumbing to defensive avoidance, most men—myself for sure—will find lurking in ourselves anti-female anger & an urge to control women. It's part of the culture we've absorbed; it isn't always personal. But the reflection must be.”

That is, Gabor Mate has this weird anger towards women inside of him, therefore everyone must have it. If you disagree, then that’s because you’re succumbing to “defensive avoidance.”