patrick.net

A team of researchers in Japan has succeeded in making catfish all female with a compound found in soybeans -- a development that promises to increase the production efficiency of this and other species whose females are more valuable than males in the food market.

The team, from Kindai University's Aquaculture Research Institute and based at the institute's Shingu Station in Shingu, Wakayama Prefecture, used isoflavone -- a compound found in soybeans similar in effect to female hormones -- to create the all-female groups of catfish. The feat is a Japan first, according to the university.

As female catfish grow faster than males, "by making them all female, production efficiency will rise," commented team leader and aquaculture science associate professor Toshinao Ineno. "This can be applied to other farm-raised fish whose females are more valuable." ...

While 68% of catfish in the ordinary water tank were female, 96% of the catfish kept in the water with genistein at a concentration of 100 micrograms per liter were female. A concentration of 400 micrograms per liter yielded a 100% female group, the same as in the female hormone-treated water group.

A team of researchers in Japan has succeeded in making catfish all female

That happens naturally with ocean fish around here. Part of nature that fish turn from male to female as they age.

Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mention democracy either.

I know, just having fun.

The New York Times wheeled out economist Emily Oster to inform America that, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might technically be right about chronic disease and our broken food system, he is definitely totally wrong in blaming seed oils. Oster claimed the science pinning obesity and other health problems on omega-6 oils like canola, safflower, and sunflower is “flawed” — just another case of correlation, not causation. (Even more guffaw-producing, she admitted that “better data” might later prove RFK Jr. was right.) The real villain, Emily insisted, isn’t the oil, it’s the deep-fried Oreo it slid in on.

Dr. Oster is obviously a greasy science denier. ...

Seed oils are exactly what they sound like — oils squeezed from the tiny seeds of plants like soybeans, corn, canola, cottonseed, and sunflowers. That all sounds very natural and healthy. ...

The snag is, seeds don’t easily surrender their oil. They greedily prefer to keep it for themselves. So extracting the oils requires an all-out industrial assault: high-pressure mechanical rollers, solvent baths in hexane, repeated heating, chemical refining to strip out unpleasant odors and revolting colors, and finally “deodorizing” to make the end product palatable. By the time the bottle hits the supermarket shelf, it’s been through more processing steps than a gas-station chicken nugget and looks more like industrial waste than anything found in nature.

That’s why critics call them “factory foods.” They’re not pressed like olive oil or churned like butter, they’re manufactured, the byproducts of an industrial chemistry set built to turn valueless agricultural waste into profitable, shelf-stable cooking fat.

Emerging science —the same kind of imperfect-but-actionable evidence Dr. Oster once cheerleaded— has been painting a consistently ugly picture of seed oils. High-omega-6 industrial oils like soybean, canola, safflower, and sunflower aren’t just inert cooking mediums; their polyunsaturated fats oxidize easily under heat and in the body, spawning reactive aldehydes that inflame tissues, damage cell membranes, and scramble mitochondrial function. They skew the body’s omega-6 to omega-3 ratio toward a chronic, low-grade inflammatory state, priming the immune system for misfires and front-loading the metabolism for insulin resistance.

Animal models and controlled feeding studies have linked high seed-oil diets to fatty liver, obesity, impaired satiety signaling, and cardiovascular dysfunction— especially when combined with refined carbs and sedentary living. In other words, they’re not the lone assassin of American health, but they’re definitely in the getaway car.

Carnivore Aurelius
@AlpacaAurelius

Wow…turns out seed oils are required for UV
light to cause skin cancer in animals.
Mice fed 20% saturated fat had basically
zero skin cancer....
But when fed 5 to 20% polyunsaturated fat,
they developed lots of tumors.
Stop blaming the sun for what seed oils did

EFFECT OF DIETARY LIPID ON UV LIGHT
CARCINOGENESIS IN THE HAIRLESS MOUSE
VIVIENNE E. REEVE*. MELISSA MATHESON. GAVIN E. GREENOAK.. PAUL J. CANFIELD.
CHRISTA BOEHM-WILCOX and CLIFFORd H. GALLAGHER
Department of Veterinary Pathology, University of Sydney, Sydney, N.S.W. Australia
(Received 2 February 1988: accepted 13 June 1988)

Abstract
Isocaloric feeding of diets varying in lipid content to albino hairless mice has shown that
their susceptibility to skin tumorigenesis induced by simulated solar UV light was not affected by the
level of polyunsaturated fat, 5% or 20%. However a qualitative effect of dietary lipid was demon-
strated. Mice fed 20% saturated fat were almost completely protected from UV tumorigenesis when
compared with mice fed 20% polyunsaturated fat. Multiple latent tumours were detected in the
saturated fat-fed mice by subsequent dietary replenishment, suggesting that a requirement for dietary
unsaturated fat exists for the promotion stage of UV- induced skin carcinogenesis.

I swore off seed oils about 5 years ago and replaced with saturated. I lost a lot of weight. I've heard it takes 7 years to get your omega-6 levels back to normal when you do so. I still eat some mono unsaturated but I don't heat it over 300F if I do and usually just olive oil for salad dressing. Once in a while I still eat crap when I'm at family's or out with friends because I'm not that guy who complains about food. I will mention it though so hopefully others can learn but I don't belabor the point because most really don't want to hear it. I dropped transfats maybe 30 years ago as much as possible.