Think You Know Good Fats from Bad? 8 Oils to Avoid – Dr. Cate Shanahan with Dave Asprey – #713

Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave asprey. I've invited Dr. Kate Shanahan back on the show today. She was on hundreds of episodes ago talking about how she had transformed the Lakers diet so they could include more fat and they performed much better. But now she has a new book that just hit the New York Times list that talks about the kind of fat that's in our bodies that is at the root of inflammation. And Dr. Kate is really legit. She spent 18 years working as a physician and a nutrition specialist. And she and I are gonna go really deep with you on what different fats do. We don't agree on everything, but we agree on almost everything. So if there's a knockdown drag out battle, I'll probably lose. Kate, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me back on, Dave. It's been too long.

You know, I actually just realized this. You were on really early as well around bulletproofing the NBA. And then we talked about vegetable oil. So you and I are both long standing for more than a decade saying vegetable oil is dumb.

We're vegetable oil blood brothers. Yes.

Yeah, there you go. Except we don't, like, put that on our palms and shake, because that would be worse than just blood. So before we get into the fat burn fix, which is your new book, which, thank God, is not another dirty keto book. If it's fat, eat it. If it's not a carb, eat it. And then these people get all inflamed like the original Atkins people. So you and I are 100% agreement. Gee, does it matter? But why are you such a fat fan? How did you get here?

Well, it was a very long, interesting journey. And I was not born a fat loving doctor. I was born the usual, like, you know, the usual doctor. But I was an athlete, and I started to really dive deep into fats because. Partly because I had to question everything that I learned in medical school about nutrition. Because, you know, I think your listeners know very well that doctors don't learn a whole lot about diet and nutrition. But what we do learn is wrong. You know, we learn that fat makes you fat and salt, you know, raises hypertension, causes hypertension, cholesterol, clogs your arteries. Most of the things you're gonna hear in a doctor's office are myths. And for that, partly for that reason, a lot of doctors don't even bother giving people diet advice because we can't get into it. We're not excited about failure, and we've seen this kind of advice fail ourselves. So it's sad, but I was always into biochemistry, and before I went to medical school, I actually went to Cornell to study biochemistry. So when I had my little revelation, I had to have my, like, rebirth as a. As a doctor, which was because I, you know, I was really sick and I couldn't get better. So I had to learn about nutrition to get better. And I. I learned it was really at all hinged on fat. Everything about the, the awakening that I had hinged on the idea that I was so sure, because I learned it in medical school, that saturated fat was bad, and, you know, animal fat was bad and animal products were generally bad. But I had to do this deep dive into the biochemistry of it all to realize that that was radically wrong. And I had to just become really expert in the chemistry of how our body processes fats and how our body stores fats. When I was working with the Lakers, you know, I was promoting, I was helping them understand some of what, you know, my reawakening had involved, which is that, you know, it's. It's not that fat is bad for us. It's that these processed fats and the vegetable oils are bad, and everything you make with them is bad. But natural fat is good. And fat is actually the best fuel for athletes, even if they're not cardio athletes, even if they're team sport athletes. The body, when we eat carbs or when we eat protein, when we have to store energy as fat, the most prevalent fatty acid we store it with is basically your high octane doubled. It's two of them stuck together. But then we desaturate it right in the middle to form a kink. It's a double bond there. It's easily broken. So if you're fat adapted, your body, as soon as that big fatty acid gets into a cell, it goes right into another specialized chamber in the cell, breaks it in half, and now it can go straight into the mitochondria and be burned really quickly. So the whole reason that dietitians say that fat is not good for athletes, it's not the ideal fuel and sugar's better, is because they don't know this one fact. If they just understood that this speeds up the whole process, makes it such a better fuel faster than sugar. In fact, in terms of being able to get energy from it from the point of entry into the cell, then all of sports nutrition would have to be turned upside down.

Well, I actually was trying to get a study approved with an IRB the institutional review board to prove whether or not liquid was good for athletes. And so what I was going to do is I was going to give half the athletes drinking water or, sorry, drinking a bottle full of gasoline and the other half full of water and see which ones perform better. And then we could see whether liquids were good for them or not. Apparently someone knew that was a stupid idea. Yet that same institutional review board would be happy to say, let's study to see whether fat's good for you. But are you telling me, Dr. Gate, that different fats do different things in the human body?

Yes, they do.

How dare you say such a thing? Like, I am offended. What implication does this have for all of those? What the health game changers only eat vegetables and their accompanying vegetable fats, people.

Oh my gosh, it is so crazy that we are insisting that humans, animals, humans eat fats that came from seeds instead of fats that came from other animals.

Our cells kind of choke on those fats, don't they?

Especially in the amounts that we consume them now. Right. I mean, here's where everybody gets confused. And I don't mean like everybody, but I mean the people that stand behind canola oil and seed oils and say.

Well, as long as they can stand before they, they get kind of bent and wobbly. Sorry, that's what happens when you eat that way.

They do age quickly. Yes, it's an age accelerant. Absolutely. All kidding aside, that's true. But the craziness is that we do need a little bit of these polyunsaturated fatty acids in our bodies. We do. Just like we need a little bit of vitamin A and we need a little bit of. Our bodies need to contain a little bit of sugar in the blood. But that doesn't mean we need to eat a ton of sugar. Well, it doesn't need. We doesn't mean we need to eat a ton of processed seed oils to be able to get the right amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids, the omega 3s and the omega 6s. But when we get as many as we're getting, it's kind of like we're changing the recipe to manufacture humans, specifically our body fat. Right? So our, our body fat is actually the biggest organ in our body. Right. And if you're overweight, it can weigh as much as, you know, it can weigh 100 pounds, it can weigh 200 pounds. It's by far and away the biggest organ in our body. And nobody's talking about what's in it, what kind of what is it doing? What's in there? What's in that fat? What kind of fat is in there? And it turns out that you can do easy, you can find out easily. You just do a biopsy and send it off to a specialized lab. I mean, we can't get our doctor, can't order this test, but researchers have done this and they found that modern body fat is up to 30% polyunsaturated fatty acid. So, okay, what does that mean? Well, it's putting it in context. 100 years ago, before seed oils, the body fat percentage of pufa, polyunsaturated. I'm going to say PUFA from now on. So tongue tied used to be somewhere between 2 and 3%, maybe as much as 5%, because it would vary depending on what a person was eating, but Nowhere near the 30% that you can find today. It's a range even today. Like, you know, on the low end it could be like, you know, 15%. Unless a person is specifically avoiding these things, but the average person somewhere around 20 to 25%. And now what does that mean? Well, that's the million dollar question. So what? Well, what it means is we've been living in this, we've been living in this giant experiment for one thing, right? Because we've started eating fats that we know are great for seeds instead of fats that are great for animals. Okay? So that's a huge experiment. So anybody who says I'm promoting a fad diet. No, this is like the opposite of a fad diet. It's the antidote to this experimental fad diet that we've been on.

One of the things that I really dug into from an anti aging perspective for Superhuman was, look, we've got to control inflammation in the body. And one of the big things you do is the type of fat you eat. And this goes back to your very first book. This goes back to the first bulletproof diet book from 2014. But there's some new science that had come out around mice and it's like the fate of fats when you eat them. And I did not know this. In fact, the research hadn't even been published when you and I wrote our first books. And this was in mice, but it's likely true in humans. But they looked at the deposition of the type of fat and where it went. And, and what do you know? If you eat seed oils, the percentage of seed oil in your body fat goes up radically. But your brain will always pin the amount of saturated fat that's in There and your heart will do different things. So there's sort of ideal ratios for different cells. But if you want to really change the ratio of fat in your body, just eat some seed oil and your white fat becomes full of seed oil way, way faster than anything else. So these people who are coming up with 30% of their fat being from seeds, cause they, well, they went on a healthy plant based diet. Sorry guys, those words actually are like military intelligence. They don't actually exist, but, you know, oxymorons for all of us. The difficulty there is a lot of people don't understand what happens with PUFAs in your body fat, that subcutaneous fat, what do they do? What happens with PUFAs in your body fat, that subcutaneous fat, what do they do?

They are pro inflammatory. So they make your body fat inflamed, essentially. And what does that mean? What does it mean to be inflamed? Well, for one thing, it causes, eventually once the percentage gets high enough in your body fat, it causes your fat cells to be unable to properly divide. So. Well, that actually sounds like a good thing, right? And I'm sure that that has been used to spin that polyunsaturated fats are good because they prevent fat cells from dividing. You get in the way of what your body wants to do. It's always bad. And so if your fat cells can't divide, if you're still in the process of gaining weight, then where does the fat go? Well, in your arteries. And that's what happens actually. Literally that's what happens. Fat become, your fat cells essentially become incontinent. Right? So what's happening is, yeah, you've got transporters that will bring in fat, but then at the same time the fat cells are like, ugh, I can't take any more, I can't divide, I don't have any room. So they export them right afterwards. And so this is why you find that when people have Fairly advanced type 2 diabetes, their fatty acid levels in their blood are high continent, right? So what's happening is, yeah, you've got transporters that will bring in fat, but then at the same time the fat cells are like, oh, I can't take any more, I can't divide, I don't have any room. So they export them right afterwards. And so this is why you find that when people have Fairly advanced type 2 diabetes, their fatty acid levels in their blood are high, even though their insulin levels are high. And so this is kind of like a geeky topic, but it's important if you're into low carb, because in the low carb world, all the emphasis is on carbs. Obviously it's. The whole world is named after that. And they talk about insulin like it's the cause of everything. Insulin is the cause of insulin resistance. Insulin is the cause of the problems with your fat cells.

What happens if your insulin is really low, Dr. Kate?

Yeah, if you don't have enough insulin and you need it, you have type.

1 diabetes and your odds of dying from all cause mortality go up from low insulin more than high insulin, right?

Yes, absolutely. So, you know, we can't ever blame something that occurs naturally in our body for long because every time we've done that, whether it was cholesterol or saturated fat, it turns out we've been wrong. But polyunsaturated fats, they don't occur naturally in our body. We have to eat them.

Well, you said they do in very small amounts. You're saying the body doesn't manufacture them. And that is totally true, right? Yeah, that's why they're called conditionally essential. But if you eat a piece of cow, you'll get enough of them. Basically, you don't need much at all other than what, maybe some EPA or something?

Well, yeah, you do need the PUFAs. And the cow piece that you eat has to be fatty, Right. Or have some cheese or dairy. Fat is also going to be a great source of this stuff. So it's not hard to come by. You don't have to supplement if your body is healthy and your diet is balanced. But getting back to the incontinent fat cells, what happens when a person got too much PUFA in their fat cells explains a lot more than all these insulin theories. And it explains why a person reaches. There's another Dr. Nadir Ali, who's a really great cardiologist who realized he also went through kind of like the looking glass like I did, and realized everything we learned about nutrition is backwards. So he's coined this term which I love, your personal fat threshold. Right. And he says like after you get to a certain amount of percentage of body fat, you become insulin resistance and your fat cells can't hang on to fat and it spills out.

Body fat threshold, not how much.

Correct. That's a very important distinction in your body fat. That's important because if you are different races seem to have different thresholds. Right. If you're Asian, you seem to have a lower threshold before you'll become diabetic. But what everyone, no matter your race the problem is the seed oil consumption. You reach that personal fat threshold faster and your fat cells become incapable of hanging onto fat and preventing it from spilling into your arteries faster. The more seed oils are in your diet. Because these PUFAs are pro inflammatory, they prevent your fat cells from dividing. And you know, that's just one of the many problems that they cause in the fatwin fix. I do talk about how they just are couldn't be better engineered to cause metabolic problems. And they get this pass because from Harvard, which is where most of the doctors, the official doctor thought comes from, because they are essential. Like you said, the body can't manufacture them. So we need to eat some. The conditionally essential are the long chain fatty acids, right? So if we eat the short chain fatty acids, we can turn them into long chain fatty acids, which our brain needs, right? So we definitely, definitely need to have these things in our diet, but we don't need more than we need. And that's where all of this experiment began. Because back in the 50s we discovered, oh, we need some of these things. Well, if we need some and they're in our brain, more is better, right? And so if we eat more of these things that build our brain, how can that be bad? And that's about, I mean that is about the depth of the whole thought process. And P.S. there was a huge, huge conflict of interest in going any deeper into that thought process because Procter and Gamble was funding the American Heart association starting in the early 1950s. Procter & Gamble, manufacturer of cotylene made from cottonseed oil, one of the first seed oils to be produced and the industrial process perfected. And so you take like this semi science, like quasi science, well, if some is good, more is better. And you take conflict of interest from industry producing these things and 50 years later you have a nation that is unhealthy because we're eating what we think is healthy fat. Isn't that crazy?

It definitely changed my life when I figured this out.

I did lose 50 pounds from industry producing these things. And 50 years later, you have a nation that is unhealthy because we're eating what we think is healthy fat. Isn't that crazy?

It definitely changed my life when I figured this out. I did lose 50 pounds of the hundred pounds I had to lose. Jeez, this is back when I was in my early 20s and you'd see you go to a low carb conference a long time ago and there's all these incredibly fat people and they're 3, 400 pounds and you're going, this is like the worst conference ever. This clearly doesn't work. But then you talk to them like, oh yeah, I used to weigh 500 pounds of the hundred pounds I had to lose. Jeez, this is back when I was in my early 20s. And you'd see you go to a low carb conference a long time ago and there's all these incredibly fat people and they're 3, 400 pounds and you're going, this is like the worst conference ever. This clearly doesn't work. But then you talk to them like, oh yeah, I used to weigh 500 pounds and now I'm only 300 pounds. I love it. But this other 100, 150 pounds, it won't go away. Now I'm only 300 pounds. I LOVE it. But this other 100,150 pounds, it won't go away no matter what I do. Clearly I'm still eating too many carbs because I ate four carbs yesterday.