Mainstream Medicine Says Seed Oils Are Completely Safe, But This Doctor Says They're Destroying Our Health with Dr. Cate Shanahan

This episode delves into the controversy surrounding seed oils, questioning mainstream claims of their safety and highlighting their potential health dangers.

1. Prevalence of Seed Oils: Common vegetable oils, often referred to as 'the hateful eight,' are found extensively in processed foods and restaurant dishes, contributing significantly to our dietary intake.
2. Health Risks: These oils can cause oxidative stress and inflammation, leading to various metabolic and chronic diseases.
3. Misleading Marketing: Products often contain these oils while being marketed as containing healthier alternatives, like olive oil.
4. Professional Stance: Despite emerging evidence of their harm, many health organizations continue to endorse seed oils due to outdated dietary guidelines.
5. Consumer Impact: The episode emphasizes the importance of consumer awareness and the need for individuals to make informed choices about their dietary fats.

1: Introduction to Seed Oils

Dr. Shanahan introduces 'the hateful eight' — common but harmful seed oils in our diet. She discusses their widespread use and detrimental health impacts. Dr. Cate Shanahan: "These industrially refined oils promote toxicity in our bodies."

2: Misconceptions and Marketing

This section debunks common myths about seed oils, highlighting misleading marketing practices that mask their prevalence in our foods. Dr. Cate Shanahan: "Even foods marketed as healthy often contain these harmful oils."

3: Scientific and Health Community's Stance

Dr. Shanahan criticizes the health community's slow response to acknowledging the dangers of seed oils despite substantial evidence. Dr. Cate Shanahan: "The reluctance to update guidelines despite new evidence is concerning."

1. Read Labels Carefully: Always check food labels for the presence of seed oils, even in products that are marketed as healthy.
2. Opt for Whole Foods: Focus on a diet rich in whole foods, which naturally contain healthier fats and fewer processed ingredients.
3. Question Restaurant Ingredients: When dining out, inquire about the oils used in cooking and request alternatives like olive oil or butter.
4. Educate Yourself on Fats: Understand the differences between various types of fats and oils to make informed dietary choices.
5. Advocate for Transparency: Support regulations that require clearer labeling of food products regarding their fat and oil content.

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, Momentous, and Lumebox.

The debate around vegetable oils is heating up in the wellness community. While some tout them as a heart-healthy swap for saturated fats, others argue they pose more significant risks to our health than previously believed. Our guest today contends that vegetable oils are wreaking havoc on our well-being and are a primary culprit behind numerous chronic diseases.

Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Cate Shanahan to discuss seed oils and how they have overtaken our diet. Dr. Shanahan shares the top eight oils destroying our health and their hidden sources. She also shares the process used to make these oils and the research on the impact of oxidative stress. Dhru and Dr. Shanahan also discuss why there is so much confusion about these oils and how to reduce overall exposure to these oils.

Dr. Cate Shanahan is a Cornell-trained physician-scientist whose works have inspired movements involving bone broth, live-culture ferments, and seed oil-free business empires. Together with NBA legend Gary Vitti, she created the LA Lakers PRO Nutrition program, which wide elite championship teams worldwide have emulated. Dedicated to her field, she runs a telehealth practice and a health education website. In her upcoming book Dark Calories, Dr. Shanahan provides shocking evidence that vegetable oils are a public health disaster, wreaking havoc on our bodies by depleting antioxidants and causing the cellular damage that underlies virtually all chronic diseases.

People

Dr. Cate Shanahan

Content Warnings:

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Speaker A
You believe something pretty mind blowing, and that is that vegetable oils are destroying our health. So let's go through the list and then what the top sources are. So the list, I call them. There's eight of them. So I call them the hateful eight.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
So hopefully people can at least remember that there's eight things to remember, and there are three c's and three s's. So we'll start with those because they are the most common. They're the ones that are in grocery store foods. And those are corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower. And then the other two right now are mostly in kind of fine dining, fancier restaurants.

And that's rice bran and grapeseed oil. And I picked those because of their fatty acid profile and that lack of cultivation, the fact that they need to be harshly processed. And then you get all these lipid oxidation products in the. In the oil. But as you said, it's not just the oils that we buy.

So one of the most disturbing things is that people discover that they're like italian restaurant. They're making pizza with soy oil or a blend of soy that's 99% soy and 1% olive. So they can still say that they're using olive oil in their marinara sauces and all their sauces. And, like, every restaurant now is taking every possible shortcut. So they are no longer using butter.

A lot of them are using butter oils that are made out of these things. So when you go to a restaurant and you get anything that is. That will, if it's been deep fried, that's probably the worst of the worst. Although pan fried is right up there with the worst of the worst. So your onion rings, your shrimp scampi, obviously your french fries, your tempura at your japanese restaurants.

But then also stuff that's breaded and pan fried. So the eggplant parmesan, one of my favorite dishes, and then all of the sauces and the aiolis, the marinades that the meats and vegetables are soaking in before they get cooked to add additional flavor. Because they marinate, they put spices in the marinades. And they don't want to use an expensive oil because marinade gets dumped out. But some of that oil gets absorbed.

The dressings, the dips, the desserts, cakes, cookies, pies, frostings. Now, like, instead of using real whipped cream, it'll be like more like a cool whip kind of scenario, which is vegetable oil based often. And so that's how that we just get up to this 30% of our diet, where it's coming from, these hateful eight industrially refined oils that promote toxicity in our bodies. And that's why we're seeing these insane epidemics and horrible things happening to especially children whose bodies were reconstructed under the misdirection of all this oxidative stress in the womb. And it's just terrible that this is happening.

And the American Heart association is standing by, taking your donations. Well, you know, you mentioned butter oil. Just to share my screen here for a quick second and kind of share an example, this is a butter oil that's being sold on Amazon to give people kind of a sense of it. Like, literally you can buy it. And if we look at the ingredients, you know, people think, oh, butter oil for popcorn, it would have butter or something inside of it.

Speaker A
The first ingredient here is soybean oil. Then the next ingredient is natural butter flavor, and then there's some color inside of it. So this is what you're sort of highlighting from my understanding is that these vegetable oils are in everything, in particular, the hateful eight. That if you are eating a diet that is not based on largely a whole foods diet, and if you're even eating whole foods at restaurants when you're going out there, unless they specifically go out of their way to avoid some of these oils, you are getting exposure to these on a regular and a high basis. Do you have any estimates, Doctor Shanahan, about what percentage in the United States in particular, because it might be different globally?

What percentage for most people is coming from cooking oil, their exposure to these hateful eight, and what percentage is coming from just ultra processed foods? Chances are if you're over 40, your enzyme levels have already begun to decline. Enzymes are the workhorses of our digestion. They break your food down into usable macro and micronutrients. And research shows that by the time that someone hits 65, their saliva and pancreatic secretions, both of which are involved in enzyme activity, can have declined as much as, get this, 50%.

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To get 20% off my favorite creatine today. So it's. The majority is probably coming from the processed foods and the restaurant foods and things that I'm not even sure are considered ultra processed, honestly, because, you know, ultra processed, that's something I want to talk about later. The Nova classification system, that there's no logic to it, and there's a lot of bias there. And there's things that are considered ultra processed that make no sense, like butter.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
So the. Yeah, so it's mostly coming from the ready to eat stuff, the takeout and condiments. And, you know, not very little is coming from the cooking oil because unfortunately, very few people actually do that much cooking. And really, the oil that you cook something in is not where you get a lot of the fats. It's from the other additives and the sauces.

You know, mayonnaise is America's most popular condiments. The number one people think it's ketchup, but mayonnaise, we eat more mayonnaise than any other condiment. And that's made out of the hay fellate oils. And your tuna fish is going to be canned in one of the haylate oils. Your sun dried tomatoes are going to be showing up instead of in olive oil.

A lot of times they're in soy oil or one of the hateful eight. So they just put it in so many things that. I'm glad you brought it up, though, because, you know, when I first started talking to people about this, I would say, you know, yeah, you don't want to use these oils. And they'd be like, oh, yeah, don't worry, I only cook with olive oil or something like that. But that's maybe like 5% of your exposure, you know, depending how much home cooking you do and how much sauces you make, and all that kind of stuff is minimal.

So really, we have to be on the defensive, always reading ingredients, and we have to know how to navigate the restaurant situation. I'd love for you to explain a quote from your book that's going to be a little shocking to people. And that quote is, a serving of french fries cooked in vegetable oil is potentially as harmful as smoking 20 cigarettes. That's pretty wild to hear talk about that claim. Yeah.

So it's from a toxicologist who's one of the best, you know, at his job, world renowned Martin grootebelt. And he's kind of been signing the alarm on these things for many years. What he does is he does some pretty high tech research using an NMR spectroscope to test for some of the worst toxins that you can consume. And they are alpha beta unsaturated aldehydes. That's his specialty.

And he's found that when you cook McDonald's, he basically went to a couple of regular fast food restaurants, took some samples, found this level of alpha beta unsaturated aldehydes and equated it to how much you get from smoking cigarettes. And it's comparable like on a one cigarette to one french fry rate. Right. So that's pretty horrifying and pretty bad that that is actually something that has not been discussed, but it's not been disputed. And it's, and he's published this like years ago, right?

No one's called him out, no one says he's wrong. So you're probably wondering where, how does that happen? Yeah, I'd love to know, like, what is the mechanism of how that happens? We know that certain fried foods and highly sort of charcoal foods are generally recommended for people to minimize in their diet. Past podcast experts have talked about acrylamide being an issue for people, especially with deep frying.

Speaker A
But, yeah, how does that happen? Yeah, so it happens because the vegetable oils that are used now in the deep fryers are full of very highly unstable, highly fragile polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are, you know, they were supposed to be the heart healthy fatty acids because the more stable saturated fatty acids were supposedly so solid that they just solidified in our arteries and boom, we got heart attacks. That was the, that was the whole like, science behind the massive sweeping change that the American Heart association made in this recommendation to change. Hold everything, take the tallow that people have been eating and consuming forever out of our meals and out of the deep fryers, and replace them with this liquid vegetable oil that is prone to deteriorating. Because when pufas and oxygen react, the pufas disappear and become a whole series of, like the chemists call them lipid oxidation products, or lop's for short.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
And that's what Martin Grutfeld has studied for 20 years. And of course, it's not just him, it's many other scientists, but he's just sort of the most, like, been in it the longest and the most outspoken because it's really horrifying. And this change was made from oxidation, stable, saturated fats to oxidation prone pufas, polyunsaturated vegetable oils at the behest of the American Heart association. And, you know, that is why I call the book dark calories, because that is bad. That is so bad.

It's evil. And not enough people are talking about it. Doctors don't even learn any of this stuff about oxidation and polyunsaturates. Dietitians don't really learn much of it either. And the only reason I ever, like, clued into it at all is because before I went to medical school, I was actually studying biochemistry at Cornell University.

And so I immediately, once I knew what was in a vegetable oil, and I saw that the polyunsaturated fatty acids that is very high in the vegetable oils, like the concentration of polyunsaturates, is so much higher than it is in the traditional fats, I knew that that's going to be a problem because they react with oxygen and it's just a, it's a basic fact of chemistry. And I can't believe that it's considered controversial because this is how, like, when people make vegetable oil, they have to do all kinds of things to minimize the toxicity, but they cannot make a vegetable oil that doesn't have toxins in it as it leaves the factory. It's just simply not even possible. Well, you mentioned something that I would say is the understatement of the year. You said this topic is controversial.

Speaker A
I probably put it in the top three most controversial things that's going on in the world of nutrition. And we're going to get into some of the ideas that people who actually not only don't see vegetable oils as not harmful, but actually, in some cases, see them being, being actually good and, you know, getting your perspective and thoughts on their ideas. But let's lay the case first for your argument that you make inside of the book. Not only do you list vegetable oils as the most damaging thing to human health, you also say something pretty outstanding in the book that I want to highlight. You say even the folks who are warning that seed oils are toxic are underestimating the extent of the problem.

So even people that have been sounding the alarm on Twitter and other places, you feel that they don't even sometimes fully understand how bad they are. Can you expand on that? Yeah. So, like, folks are talking about it as like, oh, they're bad because they've been used as machine oil or, oh, they're bad because they can be used as pesticides. So that's an interesting argument.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
And it gets people's attention. But frankly, tallow and butter were used as machine oil. And any oil, you can spray olive oil and use it as a pesticide. So that's not a mechanism of toxicity. That's just kind of a cute little clickbait.

Folks are also talking about the linoleic acid to omega three fatty acid ratio. And that also does not get anywhere close to the truth, which is the oils oxidize. And because they oxidize into toxins that then turn around and oxidize more of the polyunsaturated fatty acids, it's like when you manufacture these things, you are letting a genie out of a bottle. You're really opening a pandora's box. And as they leave the factory, these oils contain toxins.

This is not controversial. What kind of toxins, if you wouldn't mind just explaining? When you say toxins. Yeah. So there's a lot of them, right?

But because we're talking about molecular reactions that are almost like an explosion reaction. So what we're doing is we're taking the polyunsaturated fatty acids, which have 18 carbons, and we're reacting with oxygen in kind of a molecular explosion. And so you get two carbon molecules, you get four carbon molecules, you get nine carbon molecules. You get all of these molecules that are not what nature made. They are not the original linoleic or linolenic or gamma linolenic acids that nature put in the seeds.

They have been obliterated and turns into stuff that is basically burnt garbage that we should not eat. And the thing is, during the processing, I mean, this. This happens during the processing, right? And the crude oil. So I should define crude oil.

How are these things even made? I think it's kind of important to understand how they're made and why they are so different from oils like olive oil and, you know, coconut oil, peanut oil, and the oils that I don't call the hateful eight. So I'm not out to get peanut oil. I'm not out to get sesame oil. I'm not out to get all seed oils.

I'm not against vegetable oil. It's only these factory refined oils that are very high in polyunsaturates and were never curated by mankind to be oily, to be used for oil. You might assume that soy, soybeans were cultivated for a long time to be used as oil in Japan, but that's not true. It was never used until the industrial era. Even in Japan, unlike a peanut or an olive, you can't just mechanically, gently squeeze it and start to see oil being released.

People have cultivated the healthy oils for so many thousands of years that you don't need the high heat, the pressure, the solvents to get the oil from the seed. You just squeeze it. And so all of the vitamins are in there. You don't need extensive processing. And there's not a lot of byproducts that happen, because byproducts happen.

Byproducts are the problem. Oxygen plus pufa equals toxic byproducts. And like I said, the chemists call those lipid oxidation products. And there are so many of them. But perhaps one of the most famous is, are the alpha beta unsaturated aldehydes.

So those are very reactive. And the single one that's the most well studied is four hydroxynol. That is a toxin that you can, you can kill cells with at very low concentrations. So even if there's just a tiny bit of it, it's a problem. And then during the.

So what we've done is we've taken seeds that were never meant to be used as oil seeds. Soy, corn, canola, cotton seeds. Sunflower is an iffy one, but it's not the good. It's still on my bad list and a couple others. And we run them through factories under high heat and pressure.

They're polyunsaturated fatty acids start to oxidize and become toxins instead of healthy, normal fatty acids. And it's just a mess, like all the heat and everything. You've got waxes in there and gums and weird things. And the oil itself doesn't look like olive oil, which is green. You know, it looks like the olives and it smells like olives.

But soy oil is not green like soybeans. They're green. Why isn't soy oil green? There's nothing like the soybean. It's very, very different now.

It's all been oxidized and there's a bunch of garbage and goop at the bottom of the barrels that have to be centrifuged, really, to be cleaned out. And then it goes through extensive refining, degumming, de waxing, deodorizing, bleaching, washing. If there was a solvent used, they have to remove the solvent. Extensive. Entire factories for every single one of those steps that I just listed.

Very complicated. And at the end, they've removed almost all of the antioxidants and vitamins. There's very little nutrition in there. It's really just, at best, empty calories with the triglycerides and a little bit maybe of some vitamins and that have survived all of that processing. But there's a good amount of toxin in there.

And the very last cleanup step called deodorizing or bleaching. Anyway, it doesn't matter which one, whichever the last cleanup step is, I always get those mixed up. It's like left and right. It generates trans fats at measurable levels. So the bottles will leave the factory with between one and 5% trans fat in there.

And this, actually, I'm citing a study that was done on expeller pressed organic canola oil, which is supposedly that super healthy seed oil, but it has toxins in it when it leaves the factory. And it can still be called organic. Can you believe that? Because they did not add hazardous materials. But there's like this giant loophole.

If hazardous chemicals are created during the processing, doesn't matter, you can still call it organic. As a consumer, just an off bar. If I saw that, like my parents, or I'm not cooking with seed oils, but if I wanted to go buy a few seed oils from our local whole foods or Kroger's or whatever it might be, can I send it into a lab? And do you imagine that in the lab analysis for a lab that would look at trans fats, that you would see one to 5%, somewhere in that range when it comes to, let's say, something like an organic canola oil? Yes.

If you sent it to a lab like what Doctor Grootfeld has, yes, you should be able to find that. And of course, I've interviewed him for the book, and he's told me that he's found, you know, significant levels off the shelf. So I think that's pretty surprising if you bill, and there's a couple other things you mentioned that we're going to pull on, but just stopping right there. We know that trans fats are one of the most, if not the most deadliest fat that's out there. The government came in and I need.

To stop you, because you're correct, they are not healthy. But trans fats that are created by hydrogenation are less unhealthy than the trans fats that are created by this random act of oxidation. Because trans fat doesn't refer to just one type of chemical, it refers to an entire category of chemicals. And during the process of hydrogenation, the trans fats that people created on purpose for the purpose of being better than the liquid vegetable oils, that's like Crisco. And those things, right?

That kind of trans fat is not as toxic as these alpha beta unsaturated aldehydes and the four hydroxynol, it, our liver can metabolize it. There's a limit to how much it can handle, but it is nowhere near the degree of toxicity. And one of the people that I interviewed for the book basically said it was. It was public health disaster to replace the trans fats from the hydrogenated oils in fryers with the liquid vegetable oils, because the kinds of trans fats are not all the same. There's very, very toxic trans fats, and some trans fats are actually potentially helpful.

For example, conjugated linoleic acid. That's a trans fat that some people are studying to help with breast cancer. So it's a category of chemical, right? It's an entire chemical. So if we just say trans fat, we want to make sure we know that because they're not all created equal.

Speaker A
Got it. And of the ones that. Well, why don't you explain? Why don't you explain on your end, if I'm understanding correctly, there was some limitations that were played, placed on trans fats, and I think it was around, like, 2015 by the government that end products could not have a certain level of trans fats in them. Is that accurate?

In my understanding, yes. And so most of the food companies knew that that rule was coming, and they started making replacements as early as 2004. And most of the McDonald's fryers and the fast food fryers already had the liquid vegetable oil many years before the total ban, which took place in 2017 and 2018. Really? So are you saying that the vegetable oils that a lot of these fast food chains and places are using to deep fry food or to make things or process food companies, those are sort of grandfathered in, even though if they have, like, one to 5% trans fats in them, like, how are they getting and skirting past the, you know, the limitations that the government placed on it?

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Got it. Because. Because it's not a hydrogenated oil. So the trans fats that are manufactured out of vegetable oils by the process of hydrogenation are just a very small category. There's only about two or three types of trans fats in there.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
So every molecule has a different name. Literally. We're talking about 18 carbons, and we're talking about one double bond in that 18 carbons. And that double bond can be anywhere in the middle. It can be at the very end.

It can be in the middle. It can be between any of the 18 carbons, is one double bond. That's what the types of trans fats are when you hydrogenate oils. But there's other types of trans fats that are totally different from that. And every single type of configuration has different health effects.

So the government doesn't get into all that. They just say, well, we don't want those hydrogenated oils. But the hydrogenated oils only have one category of trans fats with, you know, the bond in a few different locations. And it's not the four hydroxynol. It's not the same as the alpha beta unsaturated aldehydes, which have that double bond closer to the end of the molecule, where it's much more reactive, and there's an oxygen double bond at the end, there just has completely different chemical properties.

So when we're talking about chemistry, these little details matter. And the whole conversation now is just lumping trans fats as if they're all the same, and they are radically different. Some toxins are called ketones, right? The kind of ketones that we want when we're burning our body fat. So that does.

I'm just mentioning that not to confuse anyone, but just to give you a sense that these chemical terms are used generally in a way by laypeople, in a way that is very inaccurate and very confusing and diverting the conversation away from what, you know, the truth of the toxicity, because people have been focused, and I'm glad you brought it up, Drew, on trans fats. And people do say those are the worst things in the food supply, but they're not chemists. The chemists are telling us that something else entirely different. These alpha beta unsaturates and other peroxidized lipids are the worst things in the food supply. And there's not just one.

Speaker A
There's many to pick it up from where we were asking the question. So there's a lot of nuances then, a lot of layers that are there. There's the chemistry that's there. And one of the reasons that you are not excited about vegetable oils at all and are writing this book and are sounding alarms is because the trans fats that are a part of vegetable oil, in particular, these hateful eight that you mentioned, those trans fats, is one of the reasons why these vegetable oils are bad. But there's many other reasons.

Is that correct? Yes, but let's call them what they really are, lipid oxidation products, or lop's for short. That's what chemists call them. And I use that term, and I introduce that term in the book so that people can get the correct, like get their mind wrapped around at least the correct words. They're lipid oxidation products.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
So trans fat is one category, but there's others in there that are ketones and aldehydes and that are not trans fats, too. So let's continue a little bit further to lay the groundwork here. And then I want to talk about some of the counterpoints that are there, because I know you have a really strong understanding of all sides of the landscape, but that'll help our audience understand where you're coming from, because as we've talked about before on the show, there are a lot of people that are more in the sort of traditional medicine landscape, but also even some people that are leaning sort of more. I don't even want to give it a category but there are people that have different opinions than you do. You're very aware of that.

Speaker A
Right. And I want to help our audience understand why do they believe that, you know, you mentioned something in the beginning, which is this shouldn't be controversial. We'll get into why there is the controversy in the first place. But before we do, we're going to pull on this thread a little bit more about oxidative stress. You know, you say oxidative stress is the root cause of metabolic and inflammatory diseases.

And in particular, these vegetable oils, these hateful eight, you say that they are oxidative stress in a bottle. So when you're consuming these vegetable oils that have these toxins shipped right out of the manufacturing process that you alluded to earlier, what's actually happening in the body that creates this oxidative response? And why is that so toxic for us? Yeah. So when we've been eating the standard american diet with the toxins, and without the tendent vitamins and antioxidants, our bodies are depleted of something that is so essential for life.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
It's called antioxidants. Our body. We've all heard of antioxidants, right? Like in blueberries and goji berries and stuff like that. But our bodies don't use those kinds of antioxidants, okay?

Like, they don't get into our cells to any significant degree. We are controlling oxygen in our bodies is so essential to life that we have many enzyme systems that help to prevent oxygen from attacking the polyunsaturated fatty acids that exist in our cell membranes. So the polyunsaturated fatty acids in the oils are susceptible to oxidation and deteriorating to toxin. And the really scary part is that we have those same polyunsaturated fatty acids in every single one of our cell membranes, around every single cell in your body, your brain cells, your muscle cells, all the epithelial cells you see on your skin, they have this membrane that contains a lot of polyunsaturated fatty acids. And nature is smart.

Nature is not stupid. Nature has put plenty of chemicals and compounds and enzymes and cofactors in place to protect those fragile polyunsaturated fatty acids in our cells from being attacked by the oxygen that we must breathe. So we have an huge army of these things, and it's, what is it protecting us from? It's protecting us from this state of cellular imbalance. When oxygen starts to react with these polyunsaturates in our membranes, you get high energy free radicals flying around inside your cells that are harmful, just as if you were exposed to radiation.

So it is a devastating for the cell. It can kill the cell, and it certainly can spark off an inflammatory reaction. So why does this happen from vegetable oil? Well, because we are eating so many kind of naked, unprotected polyunsaturates, and the toxins that I mentioned earlier, they promote more oxidation. So we're depleting our body of its ability to control oxygen.

We're depleting these vital antioxidant enzymes, things that like acatalase and glutathione peroxidase. And these are some of the fastest enzymes in the human body because they are that important to keep us alive. And this may be a tiny tangent, but I think it's just so fascinating. Back in 1950, a doctor named Denim Harmon created this whole field of anti aging biology. Maybe you've had some people on to discuss it.

Well, denim Harmon was the father of it. And what he discovered that changed the world was, why do we die? Why do cells die? Like death begins at the cellular level? And he was scratching his head over this question, and he realized it was free radicals, and free radicals form because of oxygen oxidation, oxygen going out of control.

And he founded the entire field of free radical biology. And longevity medicine is also a piggyback that with this quest of finding a way, finding some combination of antioxidants that would slow aging, slow the free radical production in our cells. Now, he had no idea about vegetable oils. He had no idea that vegetable oils basically accelerate the aging and degenerative process. Had he, we would not be where we are now.

We would not be eating these oils had he known of it, because he was so influential and so smart and so knowledgeable, that he would have just put two and two together in a second, and he would have said, we ought to stop eating these vegetable oils right now because we'll never be able to eat enough vitamin C or vitamin E or, you know, any other form of antioxidant supplementation to be able to slow oxygen when our diets are composed of these vegetable oils that promote oxidation and cause oxidative stress and free radicals to form in our bodies. So the vegetable oils literally are oxidative stress in a bottle, which is to say they are accelerated aging and death in a bottle. What, in addition to accelerated aging, which in itself, obviously, nobody wants that, what are the metabolic and chronic diseases that these vegetable oils exasperate or accelerate? All of them, like everything you've heard of from a to z, Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes, because this is why I brought up. Dan Aparman.

It's why we die. And, you know, if what we're doing is we're causing cell damage and cell dysfunction in various tissues throughout our lifespan, you're going to get disease from that. There is no disease that doesn't have oxidative stress as one of the core root causes of that disease. It's not only vegetable oils that cause oxidative stress. You can get oxidative stress through smoking, through emotional stress, through overdoing it with alcohol, through never exercising.

There's lots of things that cause oxidative stress. But oxidative stress is the root cause of everything. It's the root cause of asthma and acne and, like, every skin problem. And, like, this is something that changed the way I practice medicine, because when I was a brand new family practice doctor, fresh out of medical school, out of residency training, I family practice. We see all the diseases, right?

We don't just treat the heart. We don't just deal with the brain. We deal with all the organs and all the diseases. And I was seeing, like, people were having these collections and clusters of diseases that were treated as though they were different. Like, people with hypertension often had gout and psoriasis and high cholesterol, abnormal cholesterol levels, low good cholesterol, and high triglycerides.

And people who had had asthma in childhood, they weren't growing out of it anymore, but they often would have, like, polycystic ovarian disease if they were women, or they would have fertility problems, or pregnancy complications, and then they would go on to have more problems as they got older, like fatty liver. They would get diabetes. I was starting to see that these things just somehow seemed all connected. And it wasn't until I understood oxidative stress that I was like, eureka. That's what connects everything.

And what any given person is going to get is unpredictable. But I call it, in the book, I call it, chapter two is called the all you can eat buffet of chronic disease. Because when vegetable oil is in your body, in your diet, when it's in your body, then you're gonna get something. It's like you go up to an all you can eat buffet. You don't know what they're serving until you get there, but you're gonna end up with something on your plate when you leave.

Well, on a diet of vegetable oils, you're gonna end up with some sort of disease. And maybe it's gonna be influenced by your genetics or your activity habits or whether you smoke and drink, but you're gonna get something. And so, I mean, the obvious good side of that is, if you just avoid vegetable oils, you are so powerfully enabling your body to control oxidative stress, and you will reverse all of these diseases or significantly improve them to the extent they can be improved. Let's use an opportunity here before we continue a little bit further. And there's a lot more to get to.

Speaker A
Can you help us, steel man? The other side. What do people who disagree with you believe about vegetable oils and help us understand why, even though you disagree with them, why they believe that? Well, let's start with what I was taught. I was taught they were heart healthy, right?

Dr. Cate Shanahan
And so why do they say they're heart healthy? Well, because they're not saturated. And saturated fats are solid in the fridge, and therefore they will solidify in your arteries. That argument is absolutely specious. There is no physiological validity to it.

And that was one of the big kind of hoops I had to jump through myself. We're told in medical school that saturated fat clogs your arteries. Originally, the theory was it directly clogs your arteries. Then they quickly pivoted that one and said, oh, it raises your cholesterol, and cholesterol clogs your arteries. And vegetable oils are healthy because they lower your cholesterol.

Isn't that amazing? So vegetable oils do lower cholesterol. How do they do it? They oxidize your cholesterol carrying particles. And what actually really causes heart attacks is oxidized lipoproteins, not like regular LDL.

It's only oxidized LDL, which shows off often as small, dense lDl. Just one of the buzzwords now. So is that. Am I doing that steel man thing? Right?

I'm always a little confused by those arguments. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's layer one. So that's layer one.

Speaker A
I think that there's another question, which is a secondary layer from being a little bit aware of this landscape. Is that often the claim from one side, and I don't know how you feel about this claim, is that vegetable oils are inflammatory. Do you believe that vegetable oils are inflammatory? Yes, but not for the reasons that most people are talking about right now, which is great. So I'd love to hear your reasons.

And then there's the. There's the. I'm just gonna loop together, lump together, rather, the other side. When I say the other side there, they feel that there actually has been not a demonstration that vegetable oils are inflammatory and that there's various degrees of this, but that there's been various meta analysis showing that vegetable oils are not inflammatory and actually in some cases they can be lowering inflammation that's there. So let's talk about first why you feel that vegetable oils are inflammatory.

Is it primarily through this oxidation process here? Yes, and that's not a theory. So when the inflammatory response is triggered, it is due to the oxidation of certain types of polyunsaturated fatty acids in the membranes, namely arachidonic acid. That's the most famous one, which happens to be an omega six. But that is not why vegetable oils are toxic.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
Vegetable oils containing omega six, linoleic acid, it's not what makes them toxic, because the omega six in vegetable oils is not automatically converted into this arachidonic acid, which is a precursor to inflammatory compounds. So it's a signaling molecule, basically having. So the cells put arachidonic acid in all of our membranes to detect damage. And how do they detect damage? By becoming oxidized.

So it is built into our biology that oxidized arachidonic acid will trigger an inflammatory response. And what we're supposed to do is be able to control that inflammatory response. And omega three does play a role in that. But also, more importantly these days, what plays a role that people don't have is the antioxidants, those enzymes that I was talking about that require vitamins and require minerals, and they just require a lot of other nutrients and people just don't have them because they've been depleted, they've been battling too much oxidation for too long and they can't do it anymore. Is there any way, before I get into the omega six and seed oils and some of the things that the other side believes, which maybe you might agree with on certain points, because you're arguing a different sort of mechanistic component, right?

Speaker A
You're arguing a different mechanistic appointment, mechanistic way that these seed oils create the inflammation. Is there a way today, with all the advances that we've had in precision medicine, is there, what's the best way today to see the damage that seed oils are having on our body? What are the biomarkers? What are the tests that we could get? What, is there a way to quantify this oxidative damage?

Is there a way to do that? Yeah. So, well, actually, the way that I recommend doesn't involve any blood tests or anything painful at all. In chapter four of dark calories, I talk about assessing your cellular energy as it's dropping, how you can assess that, because that's what happens when your body has been damaged by too much vegetable oil. Certainly there are biomarkers, and one of them is oxidized glutathione, which is a test that's very difficult to get.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
But all of the biomarkers that people talk about are biomarkers of oxidative stress. It's just they're indirect. But the most immediate and the most important one to know about is your own body's ability to generate cellular energy. And when you lose that ability, you cannot go very long between meals without getting hungry. But it's not a normal hunger.

It's hypoglycemia, hunger, which makes you feel hangry or it gives you brain fog or makes you feel jittery or causes a headache, makes your brain dysfunction for reasons that have to do with what your body, how your body deals with the fact that it's overwhelmed with oxidative stress. And one of the ways that it does that is it starts just using more sugar, but we only have a little bit in our bloodstream between meals, so we start getting hypoglycemic. And that's what hangry is. So you look very young, like you're probably 24 or something, and I mean, not in a good way. Like, when I was growing up, much earlier than 24 years ago, nobody was hangry.

Kids didn't need snacks to function at school, and we didn't get snacks when we came home from school because we were going to ruin our appetite. And so it's this hunger, overactive hunger and extreme snacking that is driving the obesity epidemic, right? That's if we're hungry more often, we're going to eat more often, and how are we not going to gain weight? Most people are gaining weight unless they're really able to balance their calories and exercise a lot. And that's what we are seeing.

So the whole, in chapter three, I talk about the energy model of insulin resistance, which is a whole different way, but I think much more scientific way of describing why we're getting fat and even what insulin resistance is because. And right now, it's all the focus is on glucose and carbohydrates, which are less toxic. They're not good. I mean, you know, high blood sugar has toxic effects, but it's not as bad as what the vegetable oils do to our body. And it doesn't cause.

It can cause oxidative stress. So overeating sugar, way too much soda, way too much refined flowers that can promote some oxidative stress. But the root cause of, like I said, everything, including insulin resistance is oxidative stress, and vegetable oils promote it the most powerfully. And I've just worked out how they actually do that in a step by step manner. And it starts with, they're in our diet, then they build up in our body fat.

Have you heard any of these obesity experts talking about how our body fat is now composed of different fatty acids of extremely high the content of polyunsaturated fatty acids? And the follow on question, which I know the answer to this one. Can our mitochondria generate energy from polyunsaturated fatty acids safely? And the answer is no. A very small concentration of polyunsaturated fatty acids, yes, it can tolerate, but oxygen, it's all about oxygen.

Mitochondria are full of oxygen. And so you can see how trying to burn polyunsaturates for energy is going to be a disaster for the mitochondria. And it shuts them down. It can start, you know, killing the cells. So they need an alternative, and they use sugar.

Speaker A
So we're going to jump around a little bit, but just let's build on that example. Okay. One of the most popular drugs today are all these glp one and agonist. Right. Ozempic, Magerno, et cetera.

I think in the, I was listening to a podcast on Barry Weiss's Honestly podcast, and they were saying that I think in the last year, more than like 10 million prescriptions have been written. And when you look at individuals that are on these, and we've done a couple episodes on them, help me understand that that largely the vast majority who have been placed on something like ozempic, they, for the most part, these individuals have not changed their diet. They've just eating less food. So even though they're eating less food, but I would imagine they're just eating less seed oils, they are dropping medically enhanced, they're still dropping serious amounts of weight. With the new classification of these drugs, originally it was like 15% to 18%.

I think the new classification, they're dropping about 23, 24 plus percent of their total body mass, which can include a lot of things. It includes some muscle mass, lean muscle mass, includes some body fat, et cetera. So in your theory, I'm just trying to understand it that if they're still eating a lot of these seed oils that are oxidative, right. They're consuming less calories. So I'm sure you believe in some aspect of calories in, calories out, does matter.

They're still able to drop weight being on these drugs. So does that you know, does that fit into your model that you were just explaining that it's the seed oils that are largely driving this? Yes, because, I mean, what help me understand why you think it might not and that might help, you know, listeners kind of understand where this disconnect is. Well, I think that what I'm trying to understand is that independent of calories, are we arguing, is the argument that seed oils can drive weight gain independent of calories, that seed oils can drive. Appetite, so they change our appetite.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
Right. So they make us hungry more often. So calories matter. Yes. But seed oils make us hungry more often.

So we want to eat more often and we're surrounded by food, so it's easy to do. So that's how we get overweight. So I'm not saying calories don't count. No. I mean, I believe in physics and stuff.

Speaker A
Got it. So in that instance where these individuals are losing weight, and I don't know if you have any patients that have been on this or work with people. This is something that I've been curious about independent of this conversation, but kind of fits into it, is that are those individuals losing weight but they still have poor, they still have poor metabolic health markers? Yes. Well, I don't, I don't.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
It depends what marker you're looking at. But they are losing weight, but are they getting healthier? I would argue that they may not be. It does depend on details that folks aren't talking about. It does matter what they're doing.

What are they eating if they're just eating the same diet? And let's take this scenario, if they're just eating the exact same diet that is very high in vegetable oil and that put too much polyunsaturates in their body fat, depletes their antioxidants, they're forcing their bodies now to burn fat that their cells just didn't want to burn. That's why they gained weight. Right. That's why the energy model helps us understand so many things.

And I predict that people who do lose weight on exempic, and you can, you know, mark my words, I will stake my reputation on this, that if people are not changing their diets, just eating the same standard american diet, we're going to find that people who have lost weight on ozempic are developing new unusual problems that are going to surprise doctors. And what are they, they're all going to be based on oxidative stress or frailty or some sort of problem, because oxidative stress promotes inflammation and degeneration and cancer. And everything bad. So I would, I would suggest, think I would, you know, this is because five years from now we're going to see that people who have used a lot of ozempic but did not change their diet for the better are going to be worse off. Because obesity, gaining weight and snacking is kind of a way of protecting yourself from having to burn body fat that you don't want to burn your body, your cells don't want to burn, you want to burn it, but your cells don't want to burn it and they'd much rather burn the sugar.

So people are craving sugar and eating sugary foods and doctors are wagging fingers at them, but they are need, their cells need it. And this is just so important to understand that I think you can't tell people to just stop eating all carbs without taking into account are they doing all right, burning their body fat? And you can answer that question by assessing for the eleven hypoglycemia symptoms that I teach people to assess for indoor calories. So if you have those symptoms when you go too long between meals and again, just they are like the brain fog and feeling hangry or irritable or anxiety or some people get headaches, some people get weak, shaky, some people get heart palpitations or sweatshirts. Any of those symptoms when you go too long between meals and it's relieved by eating, that means your brain was experiencing a energy emergency from not getting enough sugar and it's going to make you want sugar or carbs or, you know, starchy foods that, you know, give you energy quickly.

And so now we have this situation where parents of overweight children are told you can't give your child juice and their child's in the middle of a meltdown and they know juice works. What are they supposed to do when they're not? What are they supposed to do? How are they supposed to solve the problem? I'm saying that child has a physiologic need for more sugar at that moment.

And we have to educate parents that it's not just taking away their sugar. We have to do what I do, what I teach people to do in my practice and in all of the books that I wrote, which is build meals that sustain your energy for at least four, five, 6 hours, so you don't need to snack and you won't have a meltdown until such time as your body fat is no longer inflammatory, oxidative, stress promoting toxic fat. And that's going to take some time. So that's the approach that I take, because it works. People feel better.

They get more energy, they can lose weight. But I tell them, let's understand the root of the problem, the metabolic problem. Metabolic disease is not a matter of being overweight. I think people are starting to wake up to this idea now, but they haven't really pinpointed what it is. I'm saying metabolic disease boils down to oxidative stress, to the inability to generate energy in your cells without causing harm to those cells.

That's metabolic disease. And insulin resistance is the most common manifestation of that. And this gets back to your question about biomarkers. Any biomarker that's indicative of insulin resistance means this is happening in your body. It means you have too much.

You know, you probably can't burn your body fat without some degree of cellular damage, or you can't, like, go too long on only burning your body fat without some degree of cellular damage. And I recommend against extended fasting when you feel those symptoms, because you will be damaging your cells if you force your body to burn that polyunsaturated fatty acid. And so that means. So what are the biomarkers of insulin resistance? Well, the waste circumference is a popular one.

Elevated triglycerides, especially in conjunction with low hdl, the so called good cholesterol, elevated blood sugar, and probably the best is elevated insulin. Right, elevated insulin level, because when your body's insulin resistant, it makes more insulin.

So those are some of the biomarkers that I use also in my practice to help people assess, kind of like, their baseline, and then also just see things improve. It's important to have those numbers improving. I think for a lot of people, we like to see that it's like, more money in your bank account. We like to look at those numbers, too. Sometimes.

This is kind of like that. Yeah. Can I ask a follow up question on that? So, can you imagine a individual that has high fasting insulin? Like, right now, my fasting insulin is, like.

Speaker A
It's around, like, maybe three, 3.2 somewhere right around there, my fasting insulin. That's good. Can you imagine somebody with a high fasting insulin? So now, you know, everybody maybe has a different definition of high. There's optimal.

There's that. But let's say you're above, you know, 8910, 1112. You know, you're getting higher. That has a high fasting insulin. When you see that on somebody, do you immediately think this person has a large exposure to these vegetable oils, these hateful oils in their diet?

Or could somebody still be in that category not have a lot of vegetable oil or be eating at home largely, but they're eating a diet that has a lot of, uh, you know, glucose or glycemic, you know, variability. And they're on the sort of up and down roller coaster that's there. Like, could you see somebody that has a high fasting insulin that is getting there, not through the exposure of high amounts of vegetable oil in their body? Oh, I mean, could I. Yeah.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
Could I, like, envision that? Well, yes, you can definitely get insulin resistance in a variety of ways. It all comes down to oxidative stress. So if you're an alcoholic and you smoke and you never exercise, and you live basically on candy bars and soda and chips, well, let's say you don't even eat any vegetable oil, you can definitely still develop type two insulin resistance, type two diabetes and all the bad things. Absolutely.

It comes down to oxidative stress. So it's not all about vegetable oil. But these days, when 30% of the average person's calories are coming from them, that's the number one thing that I think most people need to pay attention to, because we know what sweet foods are and we know what starchy foods are, but people don't know intuitively. They don't know. They don't hear about vegetable oils.

They don't really know what they're in. They don't even know which ones matter. So unless they're reading ingredients, they're not going to know they're eating them. But even if they are, if they haven't memorized the hateful eight, they're not really going to be sure which ones are the problematic ones. Right.

So, in my experience, just working with people, I always take a very detailed diet survey, and I get a sense of what did they do in the last 24 hours. What about when you go out? How often do you go out to eat? And that helps me assess how often they're getting vegetable oils. And then I reflect that back to them and I say, yes, it's definitely something that is important for you to pay attention to right now.

It should be your number one priority because it just so happens, I mean, so far, all of the people that I've worked with so far, they're not, like, doing candy bars and sodas, stuff like that, without also doing a ton of vegetable oil. Right. And so, given equal amounts of both, I want them to focus first on the vegetables oil. You know, going back to what the other side believes about this, one of the things that I did as I sent you some articles ahead of time just to kind of snapshot some of the points that are there that people have. And actually, I would love to bring one or two up just to drill into this to make sure we understand, because I find that the more that we understand the full landscape, the more that my audience walks away and they really feel crystal clear about what, you know, your argument is because there's a lot of nuances that are inside of it.

Speaker A
Right. I've already learned a few things from you today. So one of the ones that I sent to you, we've had a guest on this podcast previously. His name is Simon Hill. And I would say he is an individual that identifies himself as plant based.

Right. And if I would summarize his argument from it previously on vegetable oils. That's been on the podcast. And I had a lot of questions for him. He would say, I'm not asking people to, I'm not promoting vegetable oils, and I don't want people to go out of their way and get a bunch of vegetable oils in their diet.

His concern, which you've already addressed, the first part of it, is that my concern is always, what are they going to replace them with? And he's talking about them replacing those vegetable oils with saturated fats and him having more of the traditional view that saturated fats are going to increase your risk of cardiovascular disease. The number one killer. Right? So we talked a little bit about that and your views on that one Instagram post.

For those that are looking on YouTube, I've shared it over here. I'll link to Simon's post that he walks through, which actually, I wanted you to get a chance to comment on because I thought there might be some things that you agree with, because mechanistically you're not. You're even saying that some of the people that talk about vegetable oil as being problematic have an incorrect understanding of why they're problematic in the first place. Right? Absolutely.

In this post here, he says, you know, I'm going to dive deep into it. Do omega six rich seed oils cause inflammation? And then in this first section here, he goes into the theory, right, about how people are understanding what omega six and omega three are and knowing some of your content. I already know that you have some nuances in terms of what you believe omega six and omega three are in their relationship to driving health and disease. But I'm going to read his out.

So in this Instagram post here, he goes into the theory that omega six s raise arachidonic acid levels in the body, which is a precursor to a number of pro inflammatory mediators, including a couple of these, which I'm not going to pronounce here. Protaglastins and leukotyrenins. I don't know. Prostaglandins and leukotrienes. There you go.

There you go. And then on the one side, he has omega six turns into linoleic acid, and that la turns into arachidonic acid. And that's a pro inflammatory in the way that people are proposing this theory that's there. And on the other side, he has omega three, the alpha linolenic acid, and the mechanistically aspect of that breaking down into EPA and DHA and how that's minimally inflammatory or it's inflammation resolving. So let's just start off over here.

He's presenting the theory in the way that the traditional landscape of individuals are saying that omega six s are inflammatory to the body. Right. Then he goes into why he feels that that theory is not accurate. But let's just even start with the theory. Your theory, from what I understand, is even different than how maybe people see this theory of omega six and omega three driving either disease or driving health.

Is that accurate? Correct. It has nothing to do with this. Yeah. Okay.

Has nothing to do with this. And I'm familiar with this theory. This comes from a book called the omega diet that was published in the 1990s, actually by Joe Robinson and somebody at the NIH named Artemis Simopoulos. And it was popularized by Rob Wolf and a few other people in the Paleo and primal movement many, many years ago. And it's an interesting idea.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
I looked into it and the body regulates these things. And this is, this is why I dismissed it. And then it turns out several years later, it has been disproven. Got it. So it's been disproven.

Speaker A
And Simon Hill goes to continue to break it down, including highlighting what he says are a meta analysis of 36 human clinical interventions. So interestingly enough, and why I wanted you to comment on this is that still, I still hear a lot of individuals talking about this is the primary reason why people need to be avoiding seed oils. And if I would understand you correctly, you would say that there is truth in what Simon is saying because your understanding of why cereals are so problematic is not this mechanism. Correct. I agree.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
This is not the main reason that they're bad for you. But I would say that in some people and some circumstances, I think this mechanism, if we have very little what this mechanism is, boils down to the idea that omega three fatty acids and omega six are now in a very bad imbalance, which is true, and we need some of those omega three s to help shut down the inflammatory response once it's gotten started. And I think there's some truth to that. But it's only going to be something that comes up, like in the intensive care unit, when you're septic and your body's overrun with bacteria, you can start getting blood clotting within your arteries. It's called dic, and it's almost always fatal.

It can perhaps worsen some of those things. It might contribute to a small percentage of the blood clots that people get, maybe like 2% or something like that. So in some people who've got unique ability or disability, actually, with this pathway, that's necessary to elongate the shorter chain omega six s into the longer chains that are the biologically active. When that pathway is disrupted, then, yes, if you have a genetic predisposition to that, you might have more problems. But it's really not the big issue, and it's not what's driving.

That's why I say that even the folks are warning that seed oils are toxic are really underestimating the extent of the problem. Yeah. So to piggyback on that a little bit further, if oxidation, in the way that I'm understanding from you, is the main component that's there, that's accurate. Right? Step one.

Yep, oxidative stress. Yep, oxidative stress is the main component. Have there been, you know, clinical trials that have looked at that as the driver of. So where does the science, in terms of the landscape that exists today? Right.

Speaker A
Like, randomized controlled trials, et cetera. Like, what is the level of science that that shows that oxidative stress has been proven out? You mentioned an experiment that happened earlier in the podcast, I believe, or you were talking about them measuring oxidation in these vegetable oils that were being released from the factories. But have there been these human level interventions, or are we still waiting on that? Okay, so there have been many, many studies that have been done in humans, but not in the form of, you know, what is considered the randomized clinical trial, the best, which is the randomized controlled clinical trial, where they also tested for oxidation.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
Right. So they did do a series of randomized, really great clinical trials in humans, comparing vegetable seed oils to margarines, actually, with trans fats, and then also more saturated fats. There's a study called the Minnesota Coronary study, the Sydney Hart study. There was a series of studies called the Elgin experiments. These are all done.

And they showed that when you give people more of like, corn oil or soy oil than margarines, which are made of hydrogenated oils, that it was a little bit worse to have the liquid oil than, like, the hydrogenated oils. So, like, that's bad, right? Like, if it's worse than hydrogenated oils, we should be paying attention to that. But what happened is those studies were never published. Have you had people on to talk about, like Christopher Ramsden at the NIH?

Who did? He's like the Indiana Jones of nutrition researchers. He dug up some buried data that was produced in like the 1960s and seventies. Has anybody talked about that on your show? Not that I'm aware of.

Speaker A
Are you talking about some of the experiments that were done in the prisons? In a controlled environment? In a controlled environment, yeah. Like in mental hospitals. And mental hospitals, yeah.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
Yes. Right. So Malcolm Gladwell is. These are the papers that Malcolm Gladwell covered in his series? Yes, Malcolm Gladwell did he.

Great job, too. But of course, what they were missing was that these were suppressed. And then when it came out, Harvard minimized it. They said, it's an interesting historical footnote that has no relevance to today's nutrition advice. And what these findings showed is that you lower, remember, they're heart healthy because they lower cholesterol.

So what Chris Ramsden showed was that the more that they lowered cholesterol, the more likely people were to die. Yeah. And that's a historical footnote that has no relevance to today. And this comes from Harvard. And Harvard is responsible from a guy named Walter Willett, who has his name on several thousand articles that have been published promoting the idea that saturated fat is unhealthy and that we need to eat more unsaturated fatty acids, including the polyunsaturated vegetable oils.

So this guy is responsible for so many publications that people out there, you know, trying to shut down the truth, are citing not knowing that this guy, Walter Willett, has clearly no interest in public health. If he says it doesn't matter, that our theory has been wrong all these years, I mean, how does that sit with you?

Am I making enough sense to even follow me? Because this is really a big problem. And for our health leaders who are doing all the nutrition research, to have clearly no interest in the truth, I think is something we should be focusing more on instead of like, little details of the studies that they publish. Yeah. Well, maybe you could help me understand a little bit further.

Speaker A
Largely in this sort of world of precision medicine. And it has a lot of different branches. Right? Has a lot of different branches. I've seen the continuation of that argument of like, okay, hey, we thought it was cholesterol.

It's not cholesterol. We thought it's ldl. And then it's the folks that say, okay, oxidative. LDL is one thing, but also a high elevated APOB is also indicative of total shots on goal of something that could be these particles that end up being contributing to atherosclerosis. Right.

And what are your theory, what's your thoughts about that? That's making something that's very simple, a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Do we want to talk about the details on that? I mean, the problem is oxidized particles. APOB is not an oxidized, has nothing to do with oxidation.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
Apob is just the sort of like the wrapping. So let's talk about what is a lipoprotein? What is it made out of? It's a fatty center with a protein outside. Lipo means fat and protein means protein.

So it's like an amphibious vehicle that floats through our bloodstream containing the fat and guided by proteins on the surface that cells recognize. And this is a fat distribution system that's designed to distribute nutrients and fat to cells that need energy. Right. So it's very important that the proteins on the surface are intact and not oxidized and able to be recognized by the little cells that are saying, hey, I have an Apob receptor out here, I'm trying to capture some of that fat as it floats by. If that's oxidized, it's not going to capture it.

And where's it going to end up? Well, it might end up in the liver, causing fatty liver, who knows? It's oxidized, it's bad. It might end up causing. A white blood cell has to clean it up.

White blood cells are the immune system cells that clean up, oxidize toxic messes, and that creates a foam cell. But ApOB is just one of those surface proteins, and there's other ones called apoA and aPoE, and they can all be oxidized too. And I don't understand this fascination with ApOB, except for the fact that APOB is also found on LDL particles. And everybody has been, including myself for a long time, brainwashed to believe that LDL cholesterol is the bad cholesterol and ApOB is the lipoprotein around that. And people with familial high cholesterol are often have abnormalities of their apob.

And so they just like. It's like a trigger word, but it's not the simple explanation. I like to make things as simple as possible and no simpler. And really, it's oxidation. Oxidation damages the proteins, it damages the particle, and it just disrupts this intricate distribution system that biology has invented to make sure that our arteries stay clean and our cells stay well nourished.

Speaker A
So when, um. When you hear people say that, hey, there's no evidence that vegetable oils are causing this sort of inflammatory cascade that's out there, am I understanding that your response is, hey, there is some evidence? And also, too, we could actually design better studies. That would be a slam dunk, that would show people. Is that accurate in the way that you're viewing it?

Dr. Cate Shanahan
Yes, but I mean, sure, we can design studies. I don't think we need to, because we've actually been involved in the largest human experiment ever in history. Over the past 70 years, as we have gotten fatter and sicker and more diabetic. The only macronutrient in our food supply that correlates with all this are the vegetable oils. In fact, our consumption of them has doubled.

The liquid vegetable oils we've doubled in 2010. Before the trans fat ban, we were, on average, consuming about 30 pounds per year. And in 2020, the average is around 60 pounds per year. In that same time, our consumption of carbohydrates and sugar has dropped, and our consumption of fructose has plummeted by something like 60%. So what other you have to have correlation for there to be a causation without any other correlation?

What other. What is a better explanation than these vegetable oils? We're not eating more saturated fat. I guess some people would say that we, you know, is total calories. Just the fact that total calories have gone up, is that the argument that the other side makes, that that's the reason why?

Yes, that's an important argument. And that's also an interesting paper came out not too long ago that showed that our calorie consumption between, I think, was the years 2020 and like, 20. I'm sorry, the year 2020 or something like that timeframe, our calorie consumption had gone up by something like 50, right? Like 2300 flat to 23 50. And this came from Dariush Mozaffarian at Tufts, and he said, wow, how strange it is that our obesity rates have, I think, almost doubled in that time period.

Well, our calorie intake has gone up by something like, what is that as a percentage? Like. Like one or 2%? And he had no real explanation for it. But I do.

We're eating more food because we're hungry more often. And the other thing is we're less active because when your cells don't make energy, you don't want to get up and clean the house, you don't want to go to the gym, even though you have an expensive membership. You don't feel so good when compared to when your cells have energy. When your cells have energy. When you wake up with energy, you know you're going to have a good day, don't you?

Right? Like, if you got a good night's sleep and you wake up, you're like, I can take on the world. And you think about what you're going to do, right. You don't think about just sitting around and vegging and eating, but when you don't have energy, you, you think about sitting around and vegging and eating. So you burn fewer calories and maybe you don't eat more, but you certainly don't eat the healthy stuff because how are you going to get that if you don't feel like cooking?

You're just going to eat what is easy, which is processed food and junk food. Right? You're going to do takeout. Right? So are you with me?

Can I get a hallelujah?

Speaker A
Give us a sense of when you're working with your patients and what you're presenting in the book. If you believe that vegetable oils are the biggest problem that's driving chronic disease today, how much into what degree do you tell people to watch out for them? And as you've mentioned, they're in everything. Even a lot of restaurants that serve organic food or other things or might serve grass fed steak might be using some vegetable oils. There's more awareness that's out there.

And some restaurant chains have even made an acknowledgement of wanting to shift away from them. You know, to what degree are you saying to people that they have to watch out for them? Right. Is there a percentage of total calories right now, you said that we're getting 40% of our total calories from vegetable oil, right? 30%, yeah, 2020% to 30%.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
But somewhere around 30%, I think. Think it's tough to tell because they stopped collecting data about ten years ago, and that was when we started getting more liquid vegetable oils in the food supply. So it's a, it's a little, you know, it could be more. So what, what is it? What are you having in this world where people are trying to prioritize many components, right?

Speaker A
Family work, but even inside of wellness, working out et cetera. Everything that we add in, I think you generally would agree with this. Everything we add in, people often, when they're reprieve, prioritizing something, have to maybe not be able to have the attention, energy to put on everything else. So what is your target recommendation that you're advocating? Well, okay, so I 100% agree with you.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
It's so important to hierarchicalize what to pay attention to, and that's why I say it is these seed oils. And of course, the worst of the worst is going out and getting deep fried food or anything that's been fried at a restaurant, especially if it's a starchy food, because these starchy foods are going to absorb greater quantities of the oils and the toxins. Right. So that's the worst of the worst. But just avoiding that isn't really enough.

We also have to eat healthy foods. And so that's what I really focus on more, is giving people permission to eat foods that they thought were bad for them, really, because that's the way to make it easier. Right. I don't just say, you know, you can't do, you can't do. Take this away.

Take this away. How about just having, like, a simple breakfast of, like, a apple with peanut butter spread on it and a glass of milk? How, you know, I mean, if you like peanut butter and you like apples, wow, that's a delicious combination. And if you can do dairy, that's a so super healthy, fast breakfast. I also help people just come up with simple, like, almost like, well, when I was a kid, I used to babysit, and I would raid people's pantries for, like, like, whatever they had, right?

I would just create all these combinations, and it would be, like, stuff that a kid would want. Like, so I would create chocolate. I would mix it with peanut butter and nuts and stuff like that. So just think of, like, what you would want to combine, but not candy. Right?

So yogurt actually tastes pretty good when you put some fruits and nuts on it, and you put a little extra, maybe some whipped cream on there to make it kind of a special treat for the morning.

There's, like, a thousand combinations you can do just with that as a template with different fruits and different nuts. And so I help people. It comes down to building healthy, fast, convenient meals so they don't need to rely on, you know, food bars or the drive through or donuts, you know, and muffins and some of the really bad sources of the seed oils. So I really don't give people, like, a percentage, because how's anyone going to figure that out anyway? But if I had to guess, I would say, you know, if you're having no seed oils six out of seven days of the week, that's good.

And if you want to go out to a restaurant one day with week, just don't get the fried food, you know, if you can help it. You're really doing your body a huge service because it's not just about what you are eating now that's bad. It's also about what you're not eating because you've been told it's unhealthy, right? We've been told not to do red meat. And I spend a lot of time debunking those very specific claims that the who makes in there, there.

But one of the easiest things to do in the world is just come home and stir fry some ground beef, throw on some like taco seasoning, get some salsa, put some shredded cheese on there, and that's like a little festival of yummy, healthy mexican food, right? So it's so important to know what you can eat. And I, in the back of the book, dark calories, I give people a whole ton of fast, easy ideas and just do as many of those as you possibly can and as little of the processed food as you possibly can. So in the context of a lot of other recommendations that people have come in on this podcast to share, I'd love to get your sort of perspective and viewpoint. So one of the top sort of recommendations that continues to come up as a theme in the last like year, two years, is people talking about making sure to get appropriate amounts of protein to make sure that our lean muscle mass loss doesn't accelerate after the age of 40.

Speaker A
And the sort of implication being on that, that a lot of people are under eating on protein in particular, as a macronutrient, how do you feel about that generalized recommendation? Yeah, I feel like a lot of people are not getting enough protein and some people are getting too much, and neither one is good. And when you say too much, what do you mean by that and how are you quantifying that? Yeah, so if you're doing protein powders, you're probably getting over 100 grams a day. A lot of people don't realize how quickly those things add up.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
And protein powders are highly processed. They also are oxidized and they're giving you an overload of nitrogen. So also in the book, I help people quantify how much they need, and I give people a range. So, for example, how tall are you? So I'm 510.

Okay. So you would probably need a bare minimum, something like 80 grams of protein, which some people might consider way too low. But the dietitians, you know, the dietitians are trained to say that we only need something like 60% of that. So it's more than what the dietitians might tell you. And a maximum would be maybe, like, 120.

Once you're beyond that, you're just going to convert it into fat. This idea that you can somehow force your body to build muscle by overeating protein is unproven. Got it. I would just say from my n of one experience, that until I was around a gram of protein for my healthy, lean weight, which is about 160 pounds, is that I'm a little bit on the slimmer side.

Speaker A
Until I was at that rate, I was not able to lower my body fat percentage. When I first measured in through caliber testing, I was about 25%. I would be considered in the skinny fat category. And then when I increased my protein intake and sort of rebalanced out my macronutrients, I added in about nine pounds of lean muscle mass over the course of a year, and I reduced my body fat percentage to its lowest. I was about 12.5.

I didn't want to stay there, but I kind of ended up balancing out at about 15%. Body fat composition, which we know from the research, is sort of. At least that's available for us. That's like, a good body fat that's there body fat composition. So where does the.

When you're saying, like, above, like, 120 would be too much, like, what is that kind of coming from in your sort of world? Yeah, it's really an estimation, but it's based on my patients having abnormalities that go away when they stop using the protein powder. So, like, like, for the most part, to get that much, most people are doing protein powders, and you can get, like, a elevated lp a out of that. You can get dropped hdl out of too much protein powder. And you said something important there, that you rebalance your macros.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
And, you know, I would argue that you want to drill down into that and consider, you know, were you cutting out vegetable oil? Were you also, you know, including more nutrition in there? When you rebalance those macros, what are the details of what you did? Because it's the details that matter. We talk about macros like, that's enough.

No, protein powder is not steak. Right? So when we're rebalancing your macros, were you, did you eat, you know, there's lots of details to know about, to drill down into it. So also, that same way, just to kind of build off of what you're saying, is that I. I doubt you probably had patients that only removed protein powder and that you're seeing that they're getting better or not better, you're making a totality of changes.

Speaker A
I think that we all agree that eating less vegetable oils. Yes. People who had already made the other changes that I recommend and were relying on protein powders when I said, let's swap those out for whole foods, for whole food based proteins, and see if these numbers don't improve. The numbers do nudge towards the right direction. So protein power has a very different effect on our metabolism than whole food protein.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
Yes. And the other thing to REM. Well, now I interrupted you, so I was just going to say, the more protein we eat, the more we oxidize. Right. If we eat more than we need, we will oxidize it.

So that's why I put an upper limit, because if we oxidize too much protein, that is a load to the kidneys, it can cause kidney problems. And I've actually, unfortunately, seen some of that happening when people go a little overboard. You know, I can't say it's only due to the excess protein, but there's a chemical reason to be concerned, and I trust chemistry more than I trust the studies that are funded by people selling whey protein powders. So, you know, like, the industry is mostly running its own research. Right.

The whey protein supplementation industry. A lot of conflicts there. So I just, I trust chemistry. And the chemistry says that naked amino acids, which is protein powders, are basically naked amino acids. They've got a lot of nitrogen and nitrogen.

Well, trinitrotoluene, tnt, it's explosive. It reacts with oxygen even faster than polyunsaturated fatty acids. And there's reason to be concerned there, just knowing the chemistry. And besides, why should we be eating protein powder like, that's not normal food? Humans never did that before.

That's highly processed. We're all trying to avoid hot, processed foods. Why are we trying to eat a processed protein when and be healthy? So I just. On its face, to me, it doesn't make sense to do protein.

Speaker A
Yeah. And just to clarify here, I think the vast majority of people, even myself, like protein powder, which I do consume whey protein. I don't sell any whey proteins. Just, you know, just so that's, that's a, you know, I have no conflict there. Yeah.

It's in my 160 grams of protein a day, it would be a no more than a total of probably 30 to 40 maximum of those total grams of protein that are there. So let me switch this over a little bit more to kind of an associated area, because the topic of protein comes up as individuals talking about what actually helps us with longevity, specifically in the sense of making sure that what do we know from the data that's available to us, even if it's not perfect, what do we know that is more correlated with longevity? So I'd love to get your perspective on that and see how your conversation of seed oils fits into it. So when people talk about vo two max, as a proxy of sort of our overall level of fitness being the number one predictor of longevity, do you think that that has. How would you weigh that out when you talk about, you know, longevity with your patients, like things like grip strength and vo two max?

I'd love to get your perspective on that. Yeah. So I would say that those are kind of modern ways of solving the problem of longevity. And nature has been doing that long before we did, and some basic common sense things are what I lean on. I am not a huge fan of those kinds of studies because we've got no real.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
I mean, longevity means decades, and we've only had the technology to even, you know, were we measuring people's vo two max back in the fifties when people, or back in the twenties, you know, like, when. Right. Like, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. We didn't have that technology. So, like, the things that, for me, that promote longevity, that are, we know, promote longevity, is just obviously healthy diet, you know, good community support, plenty of sleep, and a meaningful life.

Right. Because I've, as a family practice doctor, I've seen so many men, especially, go into a serious decline after they retire because they don't have a job, and they feel like they lose their sense of purpose. And when you go into decline, are you active? No. Are you physically active?

No. So you get weaker. Right. So you become more frail, you lose your grip strength. So these are the things that I think are important to pay attention to.

And, I mean, just for me, that's what I pay attention to. All those other things that are kind of cool, too. Yeah. I mean, I love all the gadgets, but I don't put a lot of stock into that. And I'm not going to say, like, let's focus on boosting our vo two max.

I would say focus on building a meaningful life because we know that, well, it creates immediate joy. Right. What is the purpose of having a long life if you just are out there doing one hack after the other after the other? Right. Like, this is not life anymore after a while.

Speaker A
And just to clarify why I'm asking that, is that when I hear somebody say what you've said in your case, that vegetable oils, amongst everything else, are the biggest contributor to chronic disease, I'm sort of putting that against, you know, what my understanding is of what are both. And I do agree, in a long, fulfilled life, having healthy relationships, community, we know that those things play into it. I'm trying to also make sure I understand in context how you feel about these other things that I've heard individuals share on the podcast. And it's not vo two max for vo two max strength. It's not grip strength for the streak of having a strong grip, but that these are all proxies of physical fitness and that those independent of diet who have strong levels of physical fitness and who have strong grip strength as a proxy of lean muscle mass live longer than those individuals that don't.

So I'm trying to understand where you fit those into your worldview. I would say, how do we know that it's independent of diet? Did they control for their diets somehow? From what limited understanding I have of individuals that have been sharing over here is that those studies that have been done on those two areas and reading Peter Attia's book, not that they're going deep into vegetable oils or that, but that they had a large variety of people that are. Oh, okay, sure.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
So, yeah, I would see that they haven't answered the question. My guess is they probably have not compared to, you know, to healthy diet, especially if they haven't come to the basic grasp of the healthy diet does not include vegetable oils. Like, that's my opinion. Right. So that's my answer to you.

Fitness, of course, is important. You know, I wanted to be a sports medicine doctor. I was an athlete in college. I loved exercising. It gave me meaning in life.

It got me out of nature. I loved it. But I would say that having worked with the Los Angeles Lakers and a number of trainers there, especially Tim DiFrancesco, who was the head trainer, he said, you can't out train a bad diet. And I think the people who are working in the athletic world, I've just spoken to so many of them that agree with that, that they say, yeah, we've got our top athletes here, but they're destroying their body. And so, you know, you don't build the right kind of tissues to sustain exercise if you're not eating well.

So I would say that diet is vastly, vastly more important than being a fitness like master. Right. Just to be clear, that is your collection of your clinical experience, everything you've read. It's not that you have the data on your end. I'm just making sure I contextualize for the audience.

Oh, yes. No, I mean, there's like, you know, let's say when we say the data, like, hardly any data out there is really good, you know, worth talking about. A lot of this has to go from much more fundamental stuff. I mean, doctors learn, most of what we learn in medical school about how the body works is the fundamental kind of stuff that. That I'm talking about.

You know, we know that, you know, how the heart beats. We know that a weak heart is not as good as a strong heart. Did we do randomized controlled trials to figure that out? Obviously not. Right.

So some of the stuff that I'm talking about is. Yes, based on my experience and opinion, but I would argue that some of that is kind of unassailable, like common sense, sort of basic stuff we all should agree on.

Speaker A
Yeah. Well, just in the context, since we're on this, as we're winding down here with a little bit of time left and want to give an opportunity for you to talk about the book a little bit more. But just curious, since we're on the topic of longevity, what are you imagining? So, a couple questions with this. Are there countries or pockets that you think are doing it?

Well, when it comes to this topic of vegetable oils and are demonstrating, or are we not there yet? Because there's so much, they're so common that the world has sort of been brainwashed. Yeah, the world has been brainwashed. I mean, we exported, when we exported the western diet, the first thing that we export is vegetable oil and flour and sugar. And you and I haven't talked much about this, Drew, but they.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
I think it's important to, I think, maybe expand the conversation a tiny bit into just what is ultra processed food. What should we be talking about when we're talking about the kinds of foods we don't want to eat? And that is the four pillars of processed food. So vegetable oil is one. Refined flour, refined sugar and protein powders.

Any food that you. When you look at the ingredients, when you buy it, if it has those as a major component, then that is a food you should avoid. Now, the Nova food classification system that defines what is an official ultra processed food does not make it that simple. They make. They have all these lists and all kinds of numbers and stuff like that.

They say, actually, that, like, juice is healthier than a steak. You know, Cheerios are. They score foods on a zero to 100, and Cheerios get a 95. That's like, almost is. Almost.

Nothing is better than a Cheerio. And, like, eggs with cheese get less than 20. You know, this is. This is the insane world that our health thought leaders are trying to create for us. And I think that conversation is so important that it is why I wanted to write dark calories.

Like, I want to try and make it simple for people so we can get our eye away from these vague terms. How many people are talking about ultra processed food? Okay, what is it? Can you even define it? Well, when you look at the Nova food classification system, there's no definition.

It's a bunch of lists that came from the mind of a bunch of people in Brazil who created this thing. And that's what like is supposed to be. That's what our health thought leaders at Tufts and Harvard and, you know, all the Ivy League institutions, that's what they're having us talk about and think about. That's absurd. Let's get back to the basics, man.

Let's talk about normal food. Let's talk about the soil. Let's talk about healthy animals, not torturing them. Let's talk about what really matters. We all know this in our bones, that a healthy, happy animal eating its species appropriate diet is going to be a better tasting food, a better thing to eat than whatever hot pocket or whatever, like Cheerios or something that gets some kind of high rating from tufts.

It's absurd that we are letting these minor points run the conversation. Let's talk about the basics. We're eating 30% of our calories from oils that did not exist before the industrial era. A lot of people into fitness are eating a processed type of protein that also didn't exist before the industrial era, and they're thinking they're doing their body some good. When I think there's a lot of chemical, mechanistic reasons to be seriously concerned, we're not paying attention to our cooking skills.

Do you like to cook? If here's what I learned when I was in Hawaii, Hawaii has the longest lifespan, or did when I was there by a two year margin of any other state, why it didn't make it into the blue zones book is probably because of the reality of what they eat, which is they hunt pig. They get a lot of, you know, animal products, plenty of fish, too. Of course. But they make their own food and they love doing it.

They love tradition, their traditional food. The part of the island I lived on, they were mostly Filipino. They had all kinds of crazy foods using goat leg and. And cowhead and, you know, pig liver and just everything. They love those foods because they grew up eating them.

The people they loved taught them how to make it. That is what we need to be doing. That is the conversation we need to be having. I'm so glad people are doing this biohacking stuff, but what are we really hacking into here? What are we doing?

We're hacking into nature. We're just trying to get back to what our bodies want. But let's talk about it using the natural terms. Let's not talk about it using, like, all these crazy, you know, the way that people talk about food now, I. I'm really a little bit repulsed by it because it is so anti nature.

Food is not macros, you know, food is not even antioxidants, even though I've been talking about how important antioxidants are. It's food. It's information that came from, hopefully, a healthy part of the planet with beautiful soil. That's what we should be talking about. Let's get back to that, because if we don't, we are going to get sick and die, and that's what's happening.

Let's change the conversation, Drew, and you can do it. You. I'm asking a favor now. Please have some people on who are into, like, ancestral health, and maybe you've already done this. Have you had people talking about Weston a.

Price? Yeah. Yeah. Many dentists in particular. Bring them back.

Bring them back again, because it is more relevant than ever. Now, as we are going down this path of people vaguely talking about ultra processed food, I just see it getting more lost in confusion. And, you know, children are doing worse than ever. And there's a reason for it. It's not all social.

A lot of it is nutrition based. And I talk about that in some of my other books. Deep nutrition, I go into. I actually predicted that we would be seeing chilled medication dependent youth. I predicted this when I first wrote the book in 2009.

And what are we seeing? Medication dependent youth. When add medications are in low supply, parents freak out, children can't go to school. It's insane. This is the big picture.

I think it's important to focus on the big picture. And all the little details are so cool and they're so fun, and we have all these technologic gadgets that help us measure everything. And yes, it's fun and cool. And I do it. I do it with my patients.

I enjoy it. I love watching numbers get better. But let's keep our eye on the ball, and that is food. Get real food. Try to find a meal that you can make in 30 seconds that you like.

And I've got that. That's what I have for breakfast. Well, it's maybe a little more than 30 seconds. It takes me probably about a minute and 30 seconds to pour milk and cream and cold brewed coffee in a cup. And that's what I have had all day.

That's all I've had all day. Day, yeah. I mean, would you say then largely, like, if, you know, the vast majority of our diet, 90%. Right. And let's quantify that.

Speaker A
You know, the only reason I'm bringing in calories is I'm saying it not by there can be things that we could be eating that look small but are a high amount of caloric intake for our body. Right. So I'm just using one measure, because some people will look at volume, they'll look at the size of a plate. So by calories, if the vast majority of our diet, let's say 90% or even 80% or above, is coming from whole foods that we're making at home, we're in good shape. Do you believe it's kind of hard to mess that up?

Dr. Cate Shanahan
Yeah. Great. I mean, if you're like a normal person. Right? Like, you're not going to be all eating sunflower seeds.

Right. I mean, there's one way you could kind of mess it up is if a lot of people do go a little heavy on fruit because it's so delicious and sugary and, you know, somewhat addicting, that's the only way you could mess that up. But, yeah. So don't, don't overdo it with fruit. Got it.

Speaker A
But as long as 80%, you want to be an optimal achiever. 90% of our diet is largely coming from foods that are whole foods we're getting a chance to make. You're going to be in a good position from your perspective. Yeah. And you got to do, you do got to meet those macros.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
Right. And you do got to get your RDA of your vitamins and your minerals. Right. You do want to get plenty of protein because as we've said, you know, people, some people out there are not getting enough protein, especially women over the age of 50, I found, because they're concerned about their weight and their calories, and they're also, if they're following a keto diet. They're doing a lot of fat, but they may not be getting enough protein with the fat.

So you do want to hit those macros. They are important because we don't have a functioning cuisine culture. You know, 100 years ago, dial back 150 years ago when most Americans lived on farms, what we grew from an ecosystem was a variety of plants and animals that made human beings build bodies that were extremely healthy. It was naturally balanced by the culture. We didn't have to be, you know, tabulating our macros, but now we, we do.

So there's some basics and I go through what are the basics you just really need to, to do? Pay attention to in dark calories and all my other books. Amazing. Kate, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you coming on the show to explain your perspective on this and where you're coming from and also your clinical experience with the patients that you work with.

Speaker A
I know you're super active on x, and of course, that's where we'll send a lot of people to follow you to continue the conversation. Most importantly, of course, the book is available. People can go get it. It's called dark how vegetable oils destroy our health and how we can get it back. And that link is in the show notes.

And if you're watching this on YouTube, it's in the caption below. So please, everybody check that out anywhere else you want to send our audience to continue to follow you on this journey. Absolutely. So thank you for asking. It's my website, which is drcate.com dash e.com.

Dr. Cate Shanahan
i have tons of resources there. I've got useful shopping lists, I've got a whole bunch of downloads you can get that will help you calculate your macros, a bunch of recipes and a lot of articles about just some of the basic concepts that we have been talking about. Like why did we all get fooled about cholesterol being the cause of heart disease and very important stuff. And please sign up for my newsletter if you do visit. Amazing.

Speaker A
How frequently does your newsletter come out? Is it a weekly thing? I wish I do. Long, detailed. So it's about like once a month?

Dr. Cate Shanahan
Yeah. Okay. But worth the wait because you're going deep. Yeah. Yes.

I like that. Thank you. Awesome. Doctor Kate Shanahan, thank you again for being on the podcast. Congratulations on the book and thank you for coming on to explain your argument about why you feel the vegetable oils conversation is both so controversial but also so overlooked.

Speaker A
I really appreciate it. Well, I appreciate you and your excellent, detailed questions. You really have a firm grasp on all this. And very, you know, you've had excellent guests on, and I'm a big fan. I don't know if I have a firm grasp, but I can at least ask some questions.

But thank you for that. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already subscribed, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app.

And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called try this.

Every Friday. Yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy to digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free, and get my weekly step by step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called try this, or just go to druprowit.com. that's Dash r Dash o dash I t.com and click on the tab that says try this.