Are Seed Oils *Really* That Bad For You? Ben Asks Skeptical Questions (& Unveils DIRTY Secrets Of The Food Industry) With Dr. Anthony Gustin & Steven Rofrano

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

Everyone knows what's your body temperature? 98.6 degrees, right? That's the standard human body temperature. That's actually not true anymore. That was true in 1905 or 1907 when the Harvard whoever was measuring average human body temperature. People on the whole have gotten, I think, whatever that is, 15 to 20% colder.

I can't— everybody's doing cold plunges now, bro.

Yeah, yeah, that's it. So yeah, people have gotten colder, which is one way of measuring average basal metabolic rate. You know, I, I'm not necessarily claiming that seed oils are the, have the, are the only cause of this drop in body temperature, um, but clearly something is going on with humans where we're much less metabolic than we used to be.

Welcome to The Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

It's time to get greasy. I got Anthony Gustin on the show. Anthony, didn't I have you on the show before, like decades ago?

It may have been like, yeah, 2012 or something.

Yeah. Yeah, like forever. And for those of you not familiar with Anthony, he's kind of like an OG in the health industry, former sports rehab clinician turned entrepreneur, author, podcaster, inventor, amateur farmer. I don't know how many hats you wear, Anthony, but you're a prolific person. Also, Anthony's a functional medicine practitioner. He's a board-certified chiropractor. He has a master's in science, doctor of chiropractic, and he does a lot in the healthy food industry. Along with Anthony, hooray, surprise, we get a three-way show here. Stephen Ruffano, who's basically building like the Frito-Lay of health food, and we'll talk a little bit about seed oils and chips and why Stephen's made something that's like my new crack hanging around the pantry. But, I really want to take a dive today into seed oils in general. And, these chaps are a couple of the most informed dudes that I know on the topic. So, I get so many questions from you guys about, I don't know, whether or not you need to avoid the cold- Speller pressed canola oil, cold food section of Whole Foods, all the way down to, is this olive oil okay? So anyways, we're going to dive in. Anthony, Stephen, welcome to the show, fellas.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah. And there's obviously a ton of places that we could go with the whole seed oil chat. And because we have so much to cover, I'm going to skip asking you like, you know, what you had for breakfast and where you were born and how you were raised and all that jazz. And, I just want to jump straight into the science. You guys game to do that?

Yeah, sure.

Ben Greenfield: Alright, cool. We'll do it. So, I kind of sat down before the show and thought, what are a bunch of questions that I wish I had a better answer to when it comes to seed oils? And, some based on omega-6, omega-3 ratios, some based around heat stability and oxidation, But, probably the first thing that people hear about when it comes to seed oils or the polyunsaturated fatty acids, the PUFAs in seed oils, is that they're unstable and they get damaged when they're heated. Different people have different ways of explaining why that's a problem, but why would you guys say that that's an issue, the heating of PUFAs in general?

Yeah, I think that when you look at why linoleic acid, which is an omega-6 fatty acid predominantly found anywhere from like 20 to 70% in seed oils, which is besides nuts and seeds, mostly like low single digits in our food supply. There's two main things that make those bad. Like the, the molecule isn't bad itself. It's the fact that it can oxidize really easily and break down into—

you mean, you mean the molecule linoleic acid? Yeah.

So it can oxidize itself very easily, but also break down into a bunch of different toxic metabolites. And so it's not just heat. When I think about oxidation of these molecules, it's sort of a function of time times heat times oxygen times light. And so all those factors sort of combine to see like how fast and how much does this oxidize itself as well as lead into these toxic metabolites.

Okay. So, so time, heat, light, those are the 3 things that would actually somehow cause damage to linoleic acid and exposure to oxygen. Yeah.

Yeah. Which, which conveniently your body has all of those in, in large quantities.

You mean your, your body has time, obviously it's got oxygen, it's got heat. Yeah. What about light?

Maybe not a lot of light.

I mean, well, some, I mean, these, these days, these days people like the mitochondria signal each other using forms of red light. Who knows how much light the body produces, right? If you're into gas discharge visualization cameras or whatever, that, that could be a factor.

Well, especially in the skin, right? People talk about seed oils and skin cancer and seed oils and sunburn. Like you got light there. So some, somewhere. Yeah.

What's going on with that, with, with the linoleic acid sun exposure thing?

Yeah. So I mean, there's two ways to think about this oxidation toxic byproduct equation. One is the oil's oxidizing and doing this outside of the body and then inside of the body. So when you consume all this stuff, The linoleic acid, your body's mostly made of fat, will be taken up in the phospholipid membrane, the mitochondrial membrane, and cardiolipin all over the place, different lipoproteins in the skin. So your skin then turns into effectively linoleic acid. And so it takes 2 to 4 years to get that out of most of your cells up to like—

I've heard some people say 3 months. You said 2 to 4 years.

Yeah, 2 to 4 years.

The half-life, the half-life is 2 years. So it could take, you know, if you, if you do the math on a half-life, it'll take 7 years for 90% depletion.

Holy cow. Has that actually been looked at? Like, obviously it's one thing to say it, but is there a way to do like a tissue analysis that, oh, hey, a person ate this, whatever, carbon-labeled linoleic acid X number of years ago, and here's where it's at in the tissue? Like, where do those numbers come from?

Yeah. I mean, that's exactly how they calculated this. There's other examples as well of tissue turnover. This is just in, in fat cells. And so there's a study, I mean, I can take a list here of all the studies we talk about and then get you a list for the show notes.

Oh, that'd be awesome.

So let's take a note right now. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's where it was at 700 days for the half-life in general tissue.

Geez. Okay. So that's obviously an issue. And by the way, show notes gonna be at bengreenfieldlife.com/seedoilpodcast. BenGreenfieldLife.com/SeedOilPodcast. You said one thing there, everything you just said, you said made sense, Anthony, except one thing, cardiolipin, the mitochondrial membrane and cell membrane. A lot of people are probably familiar with, but what's the cardiolipin?

So electron transport chain. So you have the mitochondria in your cells, it has outer membrane, inner membrane. In between those membranes, you have a, you know, a bunch of gradients. You have Actions that go on, I don't, I don't know how crazy you wanna get into this, but you have the in, in inner membrane complex 1, coenzyme Q2, 3, 4, you have cytochrome C and you have ATP synthase. So electrons flow along that gradient and that allows hydrogens to be pumped into the inner, inner membrane, which creates ATP. So cardiolipin is a molecule that's found basically bound up in all of that. Cardiolipin is a 4 has 4 esterified fatty acids. Like we know of triglycerides as 3 fatty acids. Cardiolipin has 4. And it's demonstrated that when you eat linoleic acid, so I mean this, it might be interesting to just pull back and say our linoleic acid in our tissues have, has known to go up considerably over time. Stephen Guinée did a study where he looked at the rate from about 1958 through 2016 or '18, and it went from low single digits in our cells to above 20+%. So we know that the more we eat and our, our diet composition has gone from low single digits to now 35% of our calories are coming from linoleic acid. The more we eat, the more we bioaccumulate because it takes so long for it to get out of our cells. So as it gets accumulated into the tissues, different fatty acids will then start switching out. So the cardiolipin, which is made of the linoleic, which is made of fatty acids, then starts swapping that out for linoleic acid. The reason this is a problem is because again, we talked about in your body, heat, time, et cetera, starts oxidizing. This starts changing the shape of that inner mitochondrial membrane, which does a lot of things. One of them is that opens up the cytochrome C, which has a heme group in it, and that itself has oxidizing properties. Iron, like free iron in the body oxidizes then surrounding tissues.

Yeah.

Cardio, the cardiolipin ends up also becoming effective like a, a firecracker. So once it starts oxidizing, it starts producing this toxic metabolite called 4-HNE, which is pretty much only found from eating omega-6 fatty acids.

Yeah, I've heard of that. 4, 4, what, hydroxynonenol?

Yeah. 4-hydroxy-2-nonenol is the, the technical name of it. Okay.. And so it starts producing that, which then destroys more cardiolipin, which then produces more, and it's like this firecracker, firecracker cascade of oxidation in the cell, which disrupts the entire inner membrane of mitochondria.

Okay. And, and I'm sure that people are wondering right now, why the heck would nature even have linoleic acid? Like, why is this? If I have an acorn or, you know, a peanut or whatever, that this would even exist if it's so bad, or is it, is it just the amount?

Well, so remember that whole thing about how the body has oxygen and heat and all this stuff? Well, mammals have heat, but other organisms are not warm-blooded. So seeds where these things are found, seeds, uh, particularly seeds that are in, you know, temperate areas. So places that have winter, um, they need liquid oil. They need oils that remain liquid when it's cold. It serves quite a purpose in the places where they're found because these seeds need to have some kind of fat. And when it's cold, saturated fats are solid. Similar to fish. Why do fish have unsaturated fatty acids? Cold water fish in particular. Well, cold water fish, if their bodies were made of tallow, you know, saturated fat, they would freeze solid and they'd be, they'd be unable to swim.

So, right. When you'd go fishing, you'd just be plucking clumps of fat globules off the surface of the ocean.

Yeah, basically.

With, with little pieces of fish meat inside.

They would not be able to move. So there are useful functions in nature for these types of oils. One of the main features of them is that they are liquid. I've heard it compared to antifreeze almost. Because if you put olive oil in the freezer, it'll, you know, get cloudy. But if you put seed oils in the freezer, they'll remain liquid. So there are uses in nature for this, just not in human biology.

And when you look at what it does to the human physiology of effectively creating damage to the fat cell and the fat cell causes insulin resistance in the surrounding muscle tissue. And then also if you, I think you had Brad on, I don't know if you've had Peter Dovromilsky talk about their Ross theory of obesity, which is basically the reactive oxygen species theory of obesity, which is basically saying that eating linoleic acid in some of these fatty acids lead to lowered FADH2 to NADH ratio, which is a fancy way of saying, again, that input to the electron transport chain, which causes some transient insulin resistance, which when you're eating saturated fat is a good thing because your body stops taking in fat. So why would nature want this? So if you look at the amount and seasonality of foods that contain linoleic acid in high amounts, which is nuts and seeds, basically they drop in the fall and they're in high amounts only in the fall.

I see where you're going here.

So when animals need to pack on weight to hibernate, they want insulin resistance and they want fat accumulation, but it's only in that short period of time and they burn through all that. And then don't get it again to the next fall. Works essentially in like a preparing for winter and preparing for hibernation status all day, every day for your entire life, but never going into hibernation.

Well, like with a human, you know, theoretically, let's say I were going to say, okay, well, I'm going to eat seasonally. I love almonds, but I'm only going to have them during the cold months. Would that be a reasonable way to go? Or do you just like forego seeds and nuts altogether?

I think if you, Then also took the natural environment to the nth degree. Like, I'm also only gonna hunt and forage for my foods and food scarcity is much lower, therefore calories are much lower. Like, you're gonna want to put on that fat, but if you're gonna be shopping from supermarkets and have high food availability, it doesn't make sense. And this is also like, the colder the climate, the more linoleic acid. So like, if you look at latitude, the higher in latitude you go, the more foods have higher amounts of linoleic acid for, for the plant physiology itself, but also to pair with the mammals there that eat those, those products.

Say they were the cold water fish. The Vikings have access to cod or the Eskimo have access to salmon or something, all of which are super high polyunsaturated fat content foods. Those are unique to a certain place and time of year. And conversely, if you go to the tropics, right, what kind of oils come from the tropics? Coconut oil, palm oil, all these are very saturated oils because in the, in the warm weather of the tropics, They're liquid all year round. So the, the place and time where you're eating and their relation and how much that affects you, right? If you, if you live in a car or if you live in a house with heat and you get in your car with also that also has heat and you wear warm winter clothes, like, are you being as affected by the seasonality as your, you know, hunter-gatherer ancestors may have been? Probably not. But all the things, all of those factors should be taken into account when thinking about what I'm gonna eat and when I'm gonna eat it.

Okay. So, I could just imagine somebody like, I don't know, let's say Lay Norton on YouTube next week saying, "Hey, heard on the Ben Greenfield Show, don't eat nuts unless you're snowboarding or you're going to have a heart attack." Do you guys really just not eat seeds and nuts unless you're in a state of extreme hypocalorism or cold?

So, I think there's a big difference between eating seeds and nuts and eating seed oils, right? That's, that's kinda the issue.

So I, that, that's probably an important differentiation here.

So, so please, yeah, we're, we're just, I think illustrating why they're there in nature and what purpose they serve. But I mean, again, the dose makes the poison, right? Am I gonna eat an almond and freak out? Of course not. But when you, not that almond oil is very common seed oil, but the amount of almonds you would need to produce 1 tablespoon of almond oil are more almonds than you would eat in an entire season. Right. And then people consume that on a, or several times that on a daily basis.

Wait, say, say that again.

So the amount of whatever seeds that the oil comes from that you would need to produce 1 tablespoon of that oil is more quantity of those seeds than you would eat in any reasonable timeframe. Okay. Right.

So, okay. So, so you're, you're, you're arguing more for the concentration and volume and the extreme concentration that we find in oils. You're not saying don't have a handful of nuts.

Correct.

Absolutely. Okay. And naturally occurring linoleic acid in food also contains things that help reduce the oxidation. So nuts also known to have a high amount of vitamin E paired with that. There's also a study at CanSend that shows that egg yolks that have higher amounts of linoleic acid also have these things called hydrosylates that protect against the oxidation of linoleic acid.

Right. And, and, and, and choline that can help to protect, you know, neural cells, for example.

The brain is made up predominantly of DHA, which is a highly unsaturated and therefore unstable fatty acid., but the brain also tightly controls the oxidation that happens in your brain. All right. It's, I think that it's called oxygen tension. The oxygen tension, aka the partial pressure of oxygen in your brain, is lower than other parts of the body. Glutathione and other antioxidants are directed towards the brain in order to keep that fat stable. It's supposed to be there. That's fine. The problem is that the seed oils in these artificial extracts are concentrated and they're removed from the context that they've occurred, that they naturally occur in, which makes them very dangerous, right? If you, if you keep the vitamin E, if you keep all these antioxidants, you keep all the other nutrients, you eat them in low doses, is it going to kill you?

No.

But when you extract them and remove them from that context of, you know, that safety net, basically, then that's where the problems arise.

Okay. I'm, I'm tracking. Playing devil's advocate here, you know, I've seen, I don't know, I don't know how good this data is. You guys probably know better than me. Areas of places like Japan and some parts of Asia, or even components of the Mediterranean diet, and some people in Mediterranean regions have really good health outcomes, but somewhat high seed oil consumption, or at least seed oils are a part of the diet. How do you reconcile that data with claims that across the board seed oils would cause issues?

Yes. There's two things. Let's do Asia first and then the Mediterranean. Asia has 27 of the top 50 countries by diabetes rates per capita. North America has 2 countries in the top 50 and they are Mexico and Saint Kitts. So while the Asian countries may not, like China for example, may not have the obesity symptoms, they clearly have other symptoms that are not so great. Oh, and also importantly related to, you know, metabolic syndrome and all these other things, right? The, the diabetes rates of Asia are kind of off the charts. The other thing is that the seed oils consumed traditionally in most Asian countries, like what do you go to a Thai restaurant, what do you get? You get pad thai, it's fried in or tossed in peanut oil. Peanut oil happens to be one of the lowest, have one of the lowest concentrations of linoleic acid of any seed oil.

So, yeah, good, good. 'Cause I used to fry my turkeys in it for Thanksgiving.

Yeah, no, there you go. And so, I mean, not that I would, you know, go and eat a whole bunch of Five Guys french fries. However, the fact that they use peanut oil does make it much safer than someone using soybean oil, for example. So I think for Asian in particular, it's not, they may not be fat, but they are unhealthy in other ways. And also insofar as their traditional cuisine does contain seed oils, those seed oils have lower concentrations of linoleic acid. As far as the Mediterranean diet is concerned, I can't think of any traditionally consumed seed oil in Mediterranean countries, like the health outcomes in Mediterranean countries may still be high today, but they're getting worse by the year and their food quality is also getting worse by the year. Seed oils were, you know, industrially produced seed oils, what we're talking about here, were invented in America. And there was a very long and drawn out scientific argument between the American Heart Association and their corresponding doctors and researchers in the UK that, that cholesterol and saturated fat were, you know, even bad for you. The British doctors maintained that saturated fat was good for you up until I think the '70s after 20 years of fierce scientific, you know, battling. Of course, science funded by the seed oil companies themselves. So yeah, in summary, the Mediterranean countries may be healthier than us today, but their trend is getting worse. And they also have historically not consumed high degrees of polyunsaturated fats at all.

Yeah. So that's why the croissants taste so much better in Europe. Yeah.

They're legally mandated to be made with butter.

I had a croissant for breakfast like every morning. Yeah. They're just made with butter.

They're incredible.

Yeah.

And I, I assume they add in the Japan front, which is, there's another study I can share here. I think Eltheim 2014, where they took 3 groups of mice and they were fed 1% linoleic acid diet, 8%, and then 8% linoleic acid, and then 1% omega-3. The 1%, totally fine. 8% was obese, like morbidly obese. The, wow, the 8% plus 1% group did not get obesity, but they died of liver failure and heart disease. And so it seems like omega-3 in small amounts with omega-6 in particular has some protective benefits for getting fat, but you still have high incidence and rate of, of issues because it's the, the omega-6, the total omega-6 still breaks down into these toxic metabolites. And so it may help with obesity, but still have all these downstream effects on the mitochondria.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. Now, that's something people might find confusing because you also hear in the oil debate the claim that, oh, hey, we're eating whatever, a 20:1 or 30:1-ish omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid ratio. And in primal ancestral times, we're eating a 4:1 or a 3:1 or a 1:1. When people say that, is the omega-6 piece synonymous linoleic acid, or is there something else about the omega-6s that make them an issue when consumed in excess?

I think that it's impossible to square the, I mean, it's just, it's the wrong thing to look at because if you're consuming 10 milligrams of fat total and the ratio is 20 to 1, it's not going to be an issue. If you consume 3 liters of fat and it's 1 to 1 ratio, Not gonna be good. Again, all this omega-6 still has to break down. It gets stored in your body, it oxidizes over time, it turns into these toxic metabolites. And if you were to balance out even the recommended daily intake, which is why that study was at 8% from, from the USDA, is 5 to 10% of our calories from these omega-6 fatty acids. The food availability is actually 30%. And so we're getting way more than that. So to even eat a 1-to-1 diet, you'd have to eat anywhere from 12 to 30 salmon fillets, wild-caught salmon fillets a day to get that back up to a 1-to-1 ratio, which is obviously impossible.

So when people say things like PUFAs are heart-healthy, are they totally off base or are there shreds of truth to where that's coming from?

That claim is generally shared because what happens is when you consume these fatty acids, your LDL cholesterol goes down. But what's not shared is that your LDL cholesterol gets oxidized, eaten up by, like, gives a signal into macrophages, turns into foam cells, and gets deposited in your endothelium as plaque. So that's why your LDL goes down while eating seed oils. So yeah, LDL may go down. That doesn't mean that you actually have better outcomes from heart disease.

I'll ask, cause I know some people will real quick. Are you just saying that, or have they actually shown that when you consume PUFAs and LDL decreases, there's increased plaque accumulation?

Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a paper from James DiFantonio outlining this entire process of how, from 2018, I can share again in the show notes. You almost cannot get oxidized LDL without linoleic acid and oxyl— oxidized LDL is required for the macrophages to turn into foam cells. Like you, you cannot— the guy who found the LDL receptor did a study to say, oh great, we figured this out. Let's turn these into foam cells. Was impossible. A follow-up study had to be done and it had to be oxidized to be taken up into foam cells. And that could only happen with omega-6 fatty acids.

That's an important differentiation because it's still pre-published, but a paper came out.

I heard about it yesterday.

That there is no significant association between LDL and coronary plaque. But from a semantic standpoint, you did not say LDL, you said oxidized LDL.

Correct. So 75% of people who have heart attacks actually have a normal LDL level, but people who have— people who have oxidized LDL had 16x more risk for heart attack.

If I go to my doctor and get a blood test, can I get oxidized LDL, or is there any way to know if the LDL is oxidized or non-oxidized?

Yes. I mean, it's, it's pretty ubiquitous at a lab company at this point. Will most doctors run that? No. There's all, I mean, you can also figure out, like, I know that ApoB is a huge point of contention around, like, is this predictive for, or, or causative in any way? You can also, with Boston Heart Health, get an oxidized ApoB and look at that from an oxidized level. So there are ways to measure these things. It's also important to note that 9-HODH, which is another toxic metabolite from oxidized linoleic acid, is used as a marker of atherosclerosis. That and 13-HODH are found in atherosclerosis and plaques 30 to 100 times fold.

If I didn't have a lot of money to throw around, let's say, and I, and my doctor ran just a basic blood panel on me. And my LDL was elevated, if I also had elevated levels of inflammation, because most basic affordable blood tests are going to tell you CRP, for example, maybe homocysteine, do you think you could draw a reasonable conclusion that if you have high levels of inflammation that some of your LDL, if elevated or not elevated, I suppose, is getting oxidized?

Yeah. I mean, this work comes to be like a very complicated web of inflammation and how that gets distributed through the body and how it affects different pathways. Um, you know, is that connected to like, what would a person do about it? That's, that's what I care about generally, especially when I was practicing with patients. I was like, okay, we have this data now, what do we do? And the thing that's very easy to do, just to see afterwards, do you still have these oxidized levels of LDL? Do you have higher levels of inflammation? Do these things go down? Is reduce things like seed oils, high amounts of omega-6, eat more real food diet. And generally what happens is oxidized LDL goes down, LDL-P goes up, LDL-C goes up. So you're like, you're basically trading out oxidized LDL for quote unquote regular LDL.

Okay. All right. That, that makes sense. You know, we've, we've talked about the linoleic acid and the issue with heat and oxygen and light and temperature. But when it comes to seed oils, I've also heard it's not just the fats, there, there are also toxins in them somehow related to the way that they're created or processed. Is that true?

So hexane is used in the processing of seed oils. The question is how much of it can be actually removed. Hexane is fat soluble, So it's, this is, this goes into the whole sort of FDA, like what do they regulate for? The FDA cares about, you know, if you get inspected by the FDA, if they come to our factory, what are they going to look for? They're going to look for microbiological contamination pretty much 99 out of 100 times, you know, on their 100-thing long checklist. Most of the things they're looking for are things that have implications for microbiological activity. And so part of the issue is that stuff, you mean like, like E.

coli or something?

Yeah, whatever bacteria, stuff that's dirty things. We're not sterilizing this or that, the other thing. They don't check for certain contaminants or they don't care about, they actually don't, like they'll recommend you use plastic for almost everything if they, if you can, even though that will mean there are gonna be microplastics in my food, right? They'll say that's okay cuz they don't care about that kind of thing. They care about bacteria. Same thing with these solvents, other chemicals, the deodorizing, the bleaching, all the other stuff that people do with seed oils. If it doesn't cause a bacterial outbreak and it doesn't kill you dead instantly, in a way that's like very easily tied to the cause, like this cause and effect relationship. Their standards for it are, you know, they basically don't care that much about it. And so, I mean, there's an entire industry around the production of seed oils and making them taste okay. These rotten, rancid oxidized fats. There's an entire industry that's developed around this in food production. And what they can do, like what they do is FDA doesn't care. Right? Because we operate under this model of generally recognized as safe in the U.S. So in order for a food item or something in production to not be used, I, the person complaining about it, have to go and prove that the thing is unsafe. And until I do that, the manufacturer can keep using it versus somewhere, you know, in Europe, for example, um, it's the burden is on the manufacturer to prove that the thing is safe before they start using it. So it's a completely, the burden of proof is on a completely different party. And it's way more rigorous over there, which is why, I mean, this, I know this is getting a bit beyond your seed oils, but this is one of the reasons why they have so many substances that are banned from usage in food or agriculture. And arguably one of the reasons why they're so much healthier than our, than us is because their food industry is unable to use as many chemicals as ours is.

So if somebody like the Food Babe says, whatever, there's, there's aldehydes and toxic metabolites of processing in your seed oil. And I were to go test it or I were to look at, I don't know, epidemiological data showing accumulation of those compounds in actual tissue, is it overblown or is it an actual issue? Like, like, is this stuff actually accumulating beyond just say, like, you know, damaged linoleic acid?

So the aldehyde and toxamietaplate is sort of like the downstream issue of linoleic acid itself getting oxidized and breaking down. And then there's another issue, which is like unequivocally the more we consume, the more we have in our body and unequivocally tied to enormous amount of downstream pathologies. Like it is just very, very clear. I don't know why anybody argues this. There's entire journal episodes of like scientific journals, entire journals dedicated to HNE and how that affects the body, which we could get into. But so that's like very clear. It's no one should question after they look at the literature. The second one, I actually sort of like don't think that a lot of the processing in itself adds to a bunch of extra toxins because for example, like the bleaching agents are, are mostly clay, the clay from the earth that like filters through the solvents. I think there's a fair argument that they don't actually end up in the food itself. There are things like TBHQ, which is an artificial preservative, like I was saying before. Food has natural things like vitamin E, choline, et cetera, to protect from oxidation. A lot of food manufacturers will add in TBHQ, which has been shown harm in humans. Like that is one of the things. However, I think it's more about just the, the, the sheer amount that we're getting in the processing, changing the food to such that we cannot use our senses to be repulsed by it. So for example, We, we know this process happens in fish very easily. So the omega-3s and 6s in, in fish get oxidized very easily. And this is why when we take fish that's been in our fridge for a week, we haven't, we haven't cooked that, smells rotten, smells fishy.

Right. So, or, or the Costco fish oil has been sitting on the shelf for 3 months.

Exactly. And then like our nose and our eyes and our taste and all, we have all these senses to tell us without an RCT, without human RCT data. Don't eat this food. When you put the seed oil through all this crazy manufacturing, add all these chemicals, bleaching, deodorizing, refining, et cetera. What we're doing is we're stripping our body's ability to tell, is this an okay food to eat? Because before it goes through all these steps and it's just the raw from seed to fat, I don't know if you've seen like the how canola oil is made, et cetera. Like you wouldn't, you would see that and just know what without having to have data, this is not a food to eat because I'm internally repulsed by it. And so that's why I think the processing itself is bad.

So this just makes me think, like, if we were to change the processing and go with healthier options, you know, before we recorded the show, I asked you if you were still involved with that company, Zero Acres. I interviewed them. It was fascinating. They figured out how to use some process of fermentation to actually produce like a healthy oil, it didn't seem that scalable from an affordability mass population standpoint. If we aren't processing these ingredients at mass scale, you know, from the standpoint of actually having enough oil to go around for restaurants, cooking, et cetera, like, do you guys see that having economic implications?

Yeah. I mean, this is a huge issue in our food system overall is that we're depending on these large monocrop, large multinational corporations to drive food prices down. We've gone so far away from having diverse small farms that can handle resiliency and produce more food per acre. They, yeah, I think like we're truthfully in a quagmire, but the way out is not continuing what we're doing. We need to start going backwards and finding more resiliency in our food system on all fronts, on a scalable front, as well as on a non-scalable front. And we can't keep, we can't keep doing it.

At the same time that this is happening, right, we're monocropping and pesticiding our way to obesity and early death. Billions of pounds of beef fat are being turned into biodiesel or soap or whatever in this country because there's no real use for it. Even though obviously grass-fed pasteurized beef is superior to, you know, factory—

is that like, is that like tallow, Stephen? Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, exactly. So most of the, I mean, every cow has fat and because we don't use tallow in our food system, the fat goes somewhere. And so the processors like Cargill, right, which does $100 billion a year in revenue. It's the largest private company in either the world or America. They, they do a staggering proportion of all beef processing in this country. The fat that comes off those cows goes straight to biodiesel. It's not even slo— it's not even sent to a USDA, you know, food approved facility. It's just going straight to industry. I mean, as far as I can tell, there's much more petroleum around and much other ways, much better inputs for the diesel system than taking valuable foodstuffs and not eating them because we're obsessed with this, you know, low saturated fat, whatever crazy.

So you could scale diesel without tallow and free up more tallow for the food supply. That's what you're saying.

I mean, they're just doing it because they don't know where else to put it. Right. The places where you could put large quantities of any sort of fat, whether it's animal fat or anything else. You can turn it to biodiesel, you can make soap out of it, or you could eat it.

Those are, you know, I know your chips are made with tallow, but what about like, you know, vegans and vegetarians don't have beef tallow as an oil. It's still an issue. Yeah.

I mean, vegans and vegetarians, vegans in particular make up less than 3% of the American population. They're not that large of a group. If we want to send all our olive oil over to them, they can have it, you know, go for it. But for the rest of us, good trade, trade, trade, trade.

Trade our olive oil for extra beef tallow.

Yeah, exactly. They can have the palm oil, like, go ahead.

Right.

I was in El Salvador about a year ago and the, we were, we learned basically the country's just overflowing with coconut palm trees, but they don't have the infrastructure to turn that into, you know, oil and other coconut food products. It's just, but it's an entire country, hundreds of millions of acres. I don't know if millions, hundreds of thousands. Yeah.

That could produce tons of oil.

Yeah.

Tons of oil. And then palm, palm oil doesn't fit into the category of the high linoleic acid oil.

No, it's a tropical oil. It's highly saturated. Yeah. That being said, it's production, deforestation, there are other implications, but from a, from what we're talking about here, palm oil is not unhealthy.

The, the thing I don't understand here is that there are foods that if you want to eat fat, and I don't need to prescribe anybody a high fat, low fat, like I, I think humans are omnivores and they have a wide range of where they feel good with between high fat and low fat. I don't think there's like one magical human diet, but if you wanna consume any sort of fat, whether it be animal or plant-based fat, there are naturally occurring, easy to obtain ways to get that fat. All of avocado, like avocados, palm, like you can, you can press the fat out of these things sometimes with your hands. Other times it's like a simple mechanical press. Obviously animal fat is like straight outta the animal. You don't have to do anything to it.

So I, dude, even with that, if, if I didn't buy any oil, cuz, cuz extra virgin olive oil and avocado oil, macadamia nut oil, it is kind of expensive and it's kind of a pain in the ass to try and figure out how to like press your own nuts to make oil. If I had no oil, you guys, and again, we're an omnivorous family, there is so much like bacon grease left over from my son's making breakfast to drippings from the meals we make at dinner at night to the fat from the different beef cuts, chicken cuts, chicken skin, et cetera. I don't actually have to buy oil. I do it because it's convenient, but just for our small family, there's enough fat to go around for days just from our normal cooking processes. I just think a lot of people maybe don't have the educational, the know-how about how to just like save it, preserve it, put it in a Pyrex glass containers, toss it in the fridge. Some of it's fine on the countertop. Like it's not that hard to have enough fat to go around.

No, they just throw it out. Right. Which is exactly what happens at a massive scale in our agricultural system, right? They just throw out the beef fat. I mean, if you get a chuck roast, which is one of the cheapest cuts of beef you could possibly obtain, cook that in the oven once a week, you'll have more than enough tallow leaking off of it as you cook it for the entire rest of your cooking and the entire, for the rest of the week.

Right. And probably half your personal care products.

Yeah, exactly.

The, the hard part as well is that I think we had a bifurcation in the, when, when Ancel Keys had a 7-country study come out and we started demonizing saturated fat because what happened is we started, we, we now have 60, 70 years of a food system that uses these oil byproducts as food ingredients. And I mean, even McDonald's until the '90s used tallow, like there was a supply chain for it. But because we went so far away from that, now farms, when they produce cattle and slaughter them. Like Stephen said, like Cargill buys all this up. We don't, we don't have the farm animal fat to consumer pipeline and distribution system set up the same way we have the seed, like the seed to seed oil distribution set up like we do now. So our food system is very hard forked in one direction, and that's going to be an enormous problem, which is why Stephen and I both wanted impact on supply chains of the businesses we're doing so that we can get back to using more traditional fat.

Yeah, there's, there's no issue with raw materials. It's merely an issue of the, the infrastructure and the, the institutions that humans have built over the past 7 decades do not allow us to make good use of the raw materials that we have available to us. And like Anthony said, like part of what we have to do is go rebuild that so that instead of setting off the fat for biodiesel, We can put it in jars, stick it in restaurant fryers, and, you know, not have to worry about this anymore.

Wow. I want to go back to biochemistry biology for a second and the whole calories in, calories out equation. Because briefly, a thought crossed my mind was when Anthony was describing how linoleic acid can kind of, you know, gum up metabolic machinery, to use a highly scientific term, that that could potentially imply that someone who is consuming seed oils could be eating the same number of calories as someone who is consuming no or less seed oils and burn those calories less efficiently. Am I on the right path here?

There, there's, um, so when you talk about like fat gain in general, is that sort of where we're going here? It's like, I think just taking a step back and understanding that the flux of fat in and out is not as simple as calories in, calories out. But even if it were, there is a very clear mechanism. Even if we're taking out this like machine, like the metabolic machinery getting destroyed, causing insulin resistance, damaging the fat cell, which again, there's like very clear evidence on that. Even if we take all that out, we have yet another mechanism in which high amounts of linoleic acid lead humans to eating more food.

Okay. You mean like an appetite control mechanism or it's affecting leptin or ghrelin somehow?

Yeah, there's this study, Michael Eades talks about this. He has a great little talk on YouTube where he, part of it, he goes into the study where they fed a bunch of kids different combinations of carbs and fat. So there was a carb plus either a saturated or an unsaturated fat, you know, canola oil or butter basically. And he told the kids, hey, eat however much you want and then tell me when you're full. Stop eating when you're full. And they measured the amounts of calories that the kids ate depending on, you know, what the combination was. And they found about a 300-calorie difference in the amount that people ate, not the kids, kids again, not even adults. 300-calorie difference in the amount that kids ate when it was carb plus saturated fat versus carb plus unsaturated fat. And of course, the kids ate 300 calories more of the unsaturated fat, the canola oil plus potato combination. But when they had butter and potatoes, they ate 300 calories less. So imagine a 300-calorie differential and the amount you need to actually feel satisfied. You know, if it's an adult, maybe it's 400, who knows how many calories it is. 3 times a day, 7 days a week, every single day, every single week of your entire life, you're, you're eating more in order to feel full.

Yeah. And that's intuitive to me. Like saturated fat could be more satiating than unsaturated fat. I've certainly experienced that, but What I'm asking is, if I'm eating a high seed oil diet, and let's say we have some of that 2 to 4-year bioaccumulation you're talking about, maybe cardiolipin has changed or the mitochondria of cell membranes, does that affect how efficiently I can burn the calories I'm consuming such that if one person is eating 2,000 calories a day and a high seed oil diet, another person's eating 2,000 calories a day and a low to moderate seed oil diet, that the former person would have a more difficult time burning those calories?

Yeah, it's a, it's a good question. I would say yes. I mean, I think that Brad, Peter, Tucker Goodrich, et cetera, would be able to go into like exactly how with the mitochondria breaking that would tie out. But even when you look at how, like, I wish we had very clear human RCT data and we can talk about like the, the broad issues with having enough inputs and outputs from a data perspective for seed oils. One of the big things here is we don't have a population that hasn't eaten seed oils compared to a population that has in some of these markers.

And even if it's difficult to replicate in long-term research, you could do a 12-week study. I don't know how much Joey.

So for example, like if, if we all smoked for 30 years and then one group stopped smoking, the other group kept smoking, and then we compare lung cancer rates between the two of them, they would be the, the exact same. Conversely, if we took two groups that had never had any exposure to cigarettes and they smoked for a year, there would be no, also no difference in lung cancer rates. And that's kinda like what we're looking at here for seed oils. It's like, it's not an acutely toxic thing to have all this oxidation in your body at one time. Same thing, like smoking a pack of cigarettes for a year is probably not gonna be that damaging to most people because our body has ways to process and deal with these downstream issues. But then there's a threshold in which we have oxidative stress where we, we no longer can deal with all of this stuff with all of the HNE buildup, with all of the 13-HOD buildup and MDA and all these other toxic metabolites that increase over time. But even beyond that, I think I was talking about with the ad libitum feeding, which is like which is how people eat. Like, people don't eat in a metabolic war. People eat— like, very few people track all of their calories and do that that way. That's not how people generally lose fat. Again, my clinical experience is anytime I would ever try to have people like a very strict tracking their nutrition, no one would do that. It's like the compliance rate is so incredibly low. People are busy, don't have time. So people eat generally ad libitum. Like, when are they full? When are they not full? And there's direct mechanisms here. Of when you have increased linoleic acid, which converts to arachidonic acid, which converts to 2-AG and AEA, which activate then our CB1, our endocannabinoid system, the same exact way THC does, which upregulates appetite and basically gives you the munchies, the same exact pathway. Wow. And so that, this is why like a difference between saturated fat.

So, so, so like that, I think, what is it, Snoop, Snoop Dogg that has the new THC dusted Dorito-esque chip brand. That's like the worst of both worlds for appetite satiation. It's a great business move.

Probably high sorbino L for something like that.

Double whammy. Yeah.

The, the theory that I'm familiar with to answer the, to, from my perspective on the question, Ben, is from Dr. Cate Shanahan, her book Dark Calories. The theory I'm familiar with to answer this question is that when you put polyunsaturated fats, linoleic acid in your mitochondria, All of these oxidation byproducts are very toxic. They're damaging, they destroy cellular infrastructure. The mitochondria, the mitochondria get damaged, so they're not able to operate at full capacity. And so as mitochondria are unable to produce as much energy as they should be, and they know that, that this toxic fat is causing them to become further inefficient, they end up, the cells for lack of energy end up pulling glucose from the blood. And because they had to pull in glucose from blood, blood sugar drops, and then you feel this hunger pang. You need to eat, right? You know, hypoglycemia, all that stuff. And then you have this constant war with your mitochondria. They're, your cells are trying to get energy, trying to burn the fat that you're eating. They can't do it well because they either, you know, tear themselves apart, these little turbines blowing themselves apart, you can imagine. And so then you end up stealing more and more blood sugar from your blood, and then that feeds this whole chain of insulin resistance and whatever else.

Yeah, that's, um, yeah, that, that, that makes sense. It's, it's, you know, I, I don't think it's rocket science to understand how it would affect appetite regulation and insulin resistance, my mind was just going to whether or not long-term you see an appreciable decrease in metabolic rate, very similar to what you'd see with something like thyroid dysregulation, right? That would result in kind of a defiance of the whole Seiko equation.

Well, I think we do. And so, the interesting thing, I learned about this a few months ago, everyone knows what's your body temperature, 98.6 degrees, right? That's the standard human body temperature. That's actually not true anymore. That was true in 1905 or 1907 when the Harvard, whoever was measuring average human body temperature. Average body temperature today is 97.5 degrees in America, whatever, in the, in the West. People on the whole have gotten, I think, whatever that is, 15 to 20% colder.

I can't, everybody's doing cold plunges now, bro.

Yeah. Yeah. That's it. So yeah, people have gotten colder, which is one of the better ways or, or one way of measuring average basal metabolic rate. And so if everyone's gotten colder to such an extent, you know, I, I, I'm not necessarily claiming that seed oils are the, have the, are the only cause of this drop in body temperature, but clearly something is going on with humans where we're much less metabolic than we used to be.

Yeah, but if you were right, Stephen, it would be fascinating because maybe the body's downregulating its temperature. So the seed oils that they're getting more of cause less damage back to what we talked about at the beginning. Which I highly doubt, but yeah. Okay. So over Thanksgiving, I was down at my mom's coffee shop and she's notorious. I love my mom. She listens to some shows. She knows I love her when I say stuff like this, but she's notorious for saying, I got this, it's organic, you can eat it. Like, it could be like a cigarette. This cigarette is organic. It's fine. And so she's like, I have these great organic tortilla chips. And I'm like, "Mom, go look at the label." And she's like, "Why?" I'm like, "You have to look beyond organic. You know, what kind of sugars are added? What kind of fillers are added? Is the corn GMO or non-GMO? What kind of oils are added?" And sure enough, we look at the label, you know, it's corn oil. I think it was 3 corn oil, sunflower oil, and safflower oil. And chips are obviously a notorious source of oils that are high in these linoleic acids. We talked about, you know, these vegetable oils and processed seed oils. So, when it comes to chips, Stephen, this question is probably perfect for you. There's some new ways that chips are being made that I do want to dive into because I've got potato chips and tortilla chips now at my house that are like freaking crack. Everybody leaves my house and like steals a bag because they're so incredible. And I want to know, what goes into these actual bags? 'Cause I, I think you're kind of like the mastermind behind this seed oil-free chip project.

Yeah. So good question. I mean, obviously there's, there's more to it, or there's a lot of things to it, fillers and all these things you mentioned, but chips have 3 main ingredients. There's a carbohydrate, there's an oil they're fried in, and then there's whatever seasonings you got, salt, peppers, whatever. So like you mentioned, you know, you want organic non-GMO corn as for tortilla chip, for example. All that's great. Nixtamalize it, which is the ancient, you know, Mesoamerican practice of making corn more digestible.

Wait, what'd you say?

Nixtamalization. Nixtamalization is the ancient Mesoamerican practice of boiling corn with limestone, basically, which makes it more digestible. It's similar to how you might soak nuts or sourdough ferment wheat to make bread. Nixtamalizing accomplishes the same, you know, phytic acid and micro, you know, anti-nutrient reduction. That, you know, it's important when eating seeds and grains.

So that would be like, like nixtamalization to corn would be like sourdough is to bread. Exactly. Or like fermentation is to bread.

Yeah. Or soaking is to nuts.

Okay.

It's exactly the same. Okay. So yeah, all that's important. But the main thing that, you know, the reason why we're talking about this is the oils. So virtually all chips are fried in seed oils. Not only are they, it's, it's so crazy to me. How, like you mentioned, the bag of chips had, you know, sunflower and/or safflower and/or corn oil. Like, they don't even know what's in their own chips. All these oils are such—

Right, you're right. It does say and/or. We don't know what those oils are.

It's literally such indiscernible, indistinguishable trash that they might as well be one, it might as well be the other. No one cares, you know, because it's, they're all the same garbage. And these people, like these giant factories pump out chips by the God knows how many billions of bags a month. And no one even knows what's going into them, which is insane. Yeah, all those oils are high in linoleic acid. So instead for, I believe if, if I had to guess the chips that you're speaking about, Moss chips, we fry them in grass-fed beef tallow, which is important for two reasons. First of all, it's not linoleic acid, it's not unsaturated fat, it's saturated fat. And saturated fats don't have this oxidation problem like unsaturated fats do. So we don't have any of those downstream effects, you know, the 4-HNE, all of the oxidative byproducts, like the metabolic disorder, all this, the same The satiety, all these things we talked about don't apply to a saturated fat like beef tallow. The other thing is that beef tallow is a nutrient-dense food. Seed oils, in addition to being toxic, have no vitamin content of note. There's nothing to write home about. Plant oils in general.

I didn't even think about that.

Yeah. Plant oils in general.

So like beef tallow would have more like vitamin A, D, E, K, the same stuff you're eating, whatever, liver for.

Same, same thing that you're eating any beef products. Wow. Yeah.

The conjugated linoleic acid, which is Not, that's funny that I, there was conjugated linoleic acid in my pre-workout energy drink this morning cuz it's used as a, as a workout aid.

It's not the, the bad kind that's found mostly in dairy fats and stuff, but yeah. Yeah. So not only does it not have the toxic stuff, it's also, it also has vitamins. It's like you're eating your grass and beef fat from a steak or something. So that is the original frying fat, right? If you think about Belgian french fries, Belgian cemented french fries in the 1800s, what do they use? They used beef tallow because that was what was available.

And that's what RFK is trying to get McDonald's to use again. Exactly. That's why McDonald's became so popular.

And this is an important dimension cuz people will talk, you know, people like us will talk about others tell you it's not healthy all day. But what matters for the 95% of say normal people is that the food they eat tastes good and satisfies them. And so while there may be people who are interested, you know, in health above all else, which is great and fine, and, and that's, you know, I think a lot of us here, the average everyday person is gonna eat what tastes good and stuff fried in beef tallow tastes way better than a corresponding—

Yeah, it's kind of dangerous because your chips are not only like way thicker, so the mouthfeel is incredible and they don't get soggy, but they do taste really good. Like calories are calories. I'm still conscious when I grab a handful of chips. I'm like, these things, I will mow through a bag if I'm not careful.

Yeah. Yeah. And they taste good, which is, I think, great because if we're replacing this in the diet, you know, if we're replacing the crappy chips in the diet of, you know, 95% of Americans with something like this, Yeah, they'll eat them, it's, they'll snack on them, that's whatever, but they won't be, it won't be actively contributing to their metabolic dysfunction causing their low metabolic rate and the obesity and all this other stuff. And they'll enjoy it too, right? One of the hard sells about diets in general to people, whether it's keto or gluten-free or carnivore or vegan or whatever, is that the diet doesn't taste good. You know, you have to have extreme amounts of willpower and some amount of, you know, masochism almost in order to maintain yourself in some diet that's unpleasant. Some people can do it, most people won't do it. And so if we want the mass of people to be healthy, their health foods have to also actually taste good and satisfy them.

So if I get the Masa original flavor, let's say, I think it's like a red, red and white bag. Yeah. What are the actual ingredients on the label?

Organic corn, grass-fed beef tallow, and sea salt.

And what do you do as far as the sea salt goes? 'Cause some people talk about, you know, microplastics, metals, things like that in sea salt.

Yeah. Well, we use, there's, there's no one salt that will satisfy everyone, right? Yeah. We use Redmond Sea Salt, which is microplastic free cuz it comes from—

that's a good brand. Huh? Yeah, I've, I've seen some of the lab analysis from them. It's good. It's clean.

Yeah. I mean, we, we like it. I think it tastes very good. I think it tastes good as, as much as salt can taste different from other salt. I think it tastes good. But yeah, it's pure ancient sea salt. There's no microplastics or anything. And yeah, the, the organic corn, at least as of right now, is all grown in New England. Which I think is somewhat important because not only, you can have organic fields anywhere, but part of the issue that organic farmers face is if your neighbors are all pesticide farms, their pesticides will blow onto your land. And so it's a huge issue.

Do you have to like choose the state so that you're not near farms that are using herbicides and pesticides?

It's definitely something that we have to think about. Yeah.

Wow.

Wow.

It's crazy. Anthony, have you tried the potato chip? Because the mozzas are the tortilla, but then they have the Vandy's. Have you tried those? Absolutely, dude.

Yeah.

What do you think?

I try to keep that stuff outta my house. Not because it's, not because it's bad for me, but because I will open a bag and then it will be gone within 5 or 10 minutes.

Yeah. And it, correct me if I'm wrong, Stephen, but it's a similar philosophy. You use the beef tallow, but then you're using, you're, you don't have to nix.

No, you don't have to nixtamalize. You don't nixtamalize potatoes. Yeah. It's just we, we rinse them to get some of the excess starch off, which can if it gets, if it's in the fryer, it'll get brown and kind of burnt. And so there's some, you know, you don't necessarily want to eat too many like burnt things. So we do a little bit of rinsing to the potatoes in filtered water, of course. But the potatoes come from Idaho and we get our potatoes thus far from the, like the, the longest standing organic potato farmer in Idaho.

Oh, no way. Yeah. Wow. I was born in Idaho, moving back to Idaho in about 20 days. Oh, nice. So, you know, what I figured out the other night because I was making burgers. A friend showed me, this is way back in college. He's like, "Check this out." And, he took crackers, in this case, they were just Saltines, and he crumbled them up in his scrambled eggs. And, he made scrambled eggs with crackers and it tastes incredible. It makes it more fluffy and increases the density and the mouthfeel. And, it was later in college, I tried it with hamburgers. I actually crumbled up not the crackers but chips, potato chips. I think I was just using whatever, the Lay's or whatever in the hamburger. Incredible. So then, 2 weeks ago, I took about half a bag of the Vandy's original flavor potato chip because now you have— what's the second flavor they have now?

Smokehouse. It's a barbecue flavor.

Yeah, Smokehouse. My wife says you guys got to do sea salt and vinegar.

We're working on it.

But anyways, crumbled a bunch of that up, rubbed it into the burger, formed the patties, and made the burgers. Dude, you guys, so good. Because it's something about the texture and the flavor of the potato chips kind of seeps into the burger while you're making the hamburger. It's incredible.

With a side of chips as well, or what?

Oh, of course. Oh yeah. Yeah.

So like here, even when I was in high school, one of my favorite things to do was I make a sandwich. And the very last thing I do is I line the right underneath the top layer of bread with a couple of stacks of chips, crunch it down so every bite of sandwich is just crunchy chip goodness.

That's awesome.

Yeah. And, it is kind of cool because it's kind of like when that company— they're not perfect. They actually do have some sunflower oil in them. But, when that company Magic Spoon came out with healthier for you cereal, it was awesome because I could go back to my nostalgic cereal flavors again and be doing Frosted Flakes or Froot Loops but a healthier high-protein, low-sugar version of that. This is similar for me. I was like, whoa, I'm back to before I understood what actually goes into processed foods and I'm able to have chips again. And now I've got guacamole and salsa in the refrigerator again. And now I'm, you know, I'm crunching the chips. Well, for me now I make wraps instead of sandwiches, but I crunch the chips into my wrap. So they're amazing. The spices thing, is that something you need to be concerned about though? I thought you might know this, Stephen, because, you know, like I like Traeger, but they'll send me these rubs. Kind of like done-for-you rubs. Obviously people will get spices like Morton's and forget the other one's super popular from the grocery store. With the spices, is that an issue? Like, or spices, just spices.

I mean, it's definitely an issue. I do want to clarify though, that the amount of spices in any product is always so small relative to say the 25% of all calories or whatever, whatever it is. I forget what Anthony said. The, the large percentage of all calories that we eat that are seed oils, right? Like that's a big deal. If the dose makes the poison, that's the biggest dose of anything that we get. So I mean, yeah, I, I am of the personal philosophy that I wanna optimize and tweak every single thing and make it perfect. However, to be completely fair, spices are a very small portion of whatever it is that you're eating. But just to give you an example, for like lime, you know, after we had the original flavor, I thought, okay, let's do a lime chip. Everyone has a lime chip. You know, Late July's lime chips, Yeti's lime chip, Tostitos lime chip. Okay, people want lime tortilla chips. So I went about looking for organic lime powder because I don't want, you know, other weird ingredients in it. And I couldn't find a single vendor of pure organic lime powder. And I was like, this is weird. How do other companies do this? Like, surely there's lime powder. It's limes are everywhere. It shouldn't, shouldn't be that hard. I looked at some other brands. I'm not gonna name names, but people can figure out for themselves. One, one brand was citric acid and lime essential oil was their lime flavor on the ingredient label. Another brand was lime juice powder and maltodextrin for their flavor. And there's variants of all this, but I couldn't find a single brand.

One was a picture of a lime on the label. Plug your nose and imagine it tastes like lime, literally, right?

I mean, so for the lime and citric acid, it's like the lime oil is the fragrance flavor, and then you get the citric acid for the sourness. And so I'm like, I don't, I, I can't tolerate this. Like, we're not gonna do that. I had already ordered all the green bags for the lime flavor though. So like, we're already committed. We have to make this recipe work. So we ended up buying cases and cases of organic limes from our local health food distributor, slicing them with a deli slicer by hand, and then dehydrating them, grinding up the dehydrated lime discs into a powder, and then sprinkling that on the chips. Like that's, that's what we had to do. I literally could not buy a lime powder. And so we're facing the same issue. You mentioned salt and vinegar chips, same issue with vinegar, right? It turns out that it's very difficult to turn liquids into, or certain liquids into powder because if you evaporate them, there's not any, you know, there's nothing solid to really like sprinkle on a, on a chip.

So to turn vinegar into— it's like pixie dust.

Huh?

It's like pixie dust.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Like if you dehydrate, uh, if you boil a pot of vinegar, it might leave a film of something vinegary on the surface of the pot, but you can't, there's no powder. You can't put that into a chip. So it's incredibly difficult to try and figure out for a lot of these liquids, uh, vinegar is another example. And then also dairy products, right? Like the cheeses, how to turn those into a spice that does not have any other like weird fake fillers and ingredients. It's not trivial by any stretch of the imagination. Again, does it matter that much? Is a little bit of maltodextrin gonna kill you? Probably not, but I want to be perfect about it. And so we're, we're, we're taking our time to figure out how to do this the right way.

Dude, well, I mean, the flavor's incredible, you know, and I didn't know you guys were doing a potato chip when a potato chip showed up at my house. I was over the moon because I like potato chips even better than tortilla chips. So in case people didn't get the name, the— I'll link to it in bengreenfieldlife.com/seedoil, but the tortilla is Masa and the potato one is Vandy.

Yeah, masachips.com, M-A-S-A, and then vandy, V-A-N-D-Y, crisps.com.

Okay. And there's 2 flavors of Andy's?

Yeah, right now.

Yep.

And what are the 4 flavors of the 5 flavors of the masa?

Masa's original, blue corn, lime, carbonara, which is a spicy, you know, savory, kind of like a Dorito flavor. And then there's churro, which is quickly becoming a very, a very big fan favorite.

Churro crumbled up on top of coconut vanilla ice cream. Have you guys tried that yet?

Yeah. Yeah. We, Churro and ice cream.

We did, you can literally dip a churro in the ice cream like salsa and have like a dessert chip dip.

It's, it's far too good. Yeah. There was a grocery store in New York that makes healthy soft serve ice cream. The only place I've ever seen that has soft serve ice cream without your crap in it, which is soft enough to not break the chip. Right.

Yeah.

And they, they served it with, you know, like if you go to Italy and you get a gelato, you have that waffle cracker thing in the cup of the ice cream. Yeah. They put a churro chip in the ice cream. Oh my gosh. It was very good, dude.

Guys, it's only like 11:45 and I want to go eat lunch now. Well, obviously, a lot here, especially when it comes to the science. And Anthony, you mentioned you'd be kind enough to send me some studies. I will totally put those in the show notes. If people go to bengreenfieldlife.com/seedoilpodcast, seed oil podcast, I'll put links to the Mandy, the Moss and the Vandy stuff. This is some groceries. Is it in Whole Foods yet?

Not yet. We'll be in a few in the Northeast in Whole Foods early next year, but not yet.

You know people at Whole Foods, talk to people because they need to be there. Yeah. My opinion. Yeah, please. So, yeah, check out the show notes and Anthony, just like email me the studies and I'll put them in there as well. Okay. You guys, this has been incredible. You answered so many questions in a very concise and efficient manner. So, I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having us on.

Yeah. Thanks.

Appreciate it. All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield, one with Steven from Ancient Crunch and Anthony from All Over the Health World. Signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com. Ben-greenfieldlife.com/seedoilpodcast. Have an incredible week.

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