Why Seed Oils Are the Worst Foods in Your Diet & How To Avoid Them - Dr. Cate Shanahan : 1168

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today's Interview is the fourth appearance of a friend of the show, Dr. Kate Shanahan, who first came on, believe it or not, 10 years ago in 2014, and she's been on in 2017 and 2020. So she's actually year overdue for this appearance. She's a well known Cornell trained physician, scientist, and she's just inspired movements including bone broth, live culture ferments, and she and I have been in violent agreement on the evils of seed oils for this entire time. And she's been one of the leading voices on that. The last time in 2017, we, we chatted, she had transformed the Lakers so that they ate more fat and then strangely, they perform better. But I guess no one actually tested the combination of fat and exercise. So more research is needed before you do anything. The reason I said that before the show started, ABC Nightline just did a major piece on, on me, came to my house and filmed for like 14 hours and talked about biohacking. But as they do in every journalistic piece, there always has to be a couple skeptics. So they found someone who said, it's not fair if people live forever. And another guy said, well, those supplements have never been tested in combination. Meanwhile, he's recommending things that also haven't been tested in combination with things like seed oils. Like maybe exercise with canola oil is bad for you and exercise without canola oil is good for you. Who's run those tests? Well, maybe Kate has. Why don't we ask her? Kate, welcome to the show.

Hi, Dave. Thank you so much for having me back on. Yeah. One of the things that you said in the intro that like struck my funny bone in a bad way was what if some people are healthier than others? Or it's not fair that some people might become healthier than others. We're already way past that with some people being healthier than others because some people live in food deserts and food deserts are flooded with vegetable oils.

Oh my gosh.

And we have all these statistics about the, the map. We can see the obesity map of the United States becoming more red in the States where more people live more in those food deserts and consume more of the, the vegetable oil. That totally destroys our metabolism.

I wonder what bioethicists think about that when they're saying it's not, it's not fair that some people might use biohacking. We'd have haves and haves not have nots. And your point? We already have haves and have nots. And it's controlled by the quality of diet, which is controlled in large part by poverty. Right.

In a lot of ways. Now, the one thing about vegetable oil that's unique is that, because that it, well, call the book Dark Calories because doctors don't learn about these things. Doctors do not learn very much at all about what vegetable oils are and they learn almost nothing about the fact that they can make us sick. And that has to do with how doctors are miseducated and why we used to think, or we, a lot of people still think that they're heart healthy. And so the problem is that, that because the world's top doctors at places like Stanford and Harvard are promoting these things as healthy, when people, you know, may come down with a cancer or heaven forbid, or if they have a serious problem, even the wealthiest of the wealthy are going to be treated with a, in a system that encourages more of these vegetable oils and less of the actually healthy fats that their bodies need. So it affects everyone, but it is disproportionate in the people who have less access to the better foods.

It's kind of weird though, amongst the ultra wealthy and you and I have both spent time with pro athletes and a list celebrities and, and hedge fund managers. I, I spent a lot of time actually working with people in those kinds of professions who can do whatever they want. They could eat an entire cricket diet from fresh crickets imported from, you know, Guatemala if they wanted to. Like, anything is on the menu. And you have some of them who look a lot kind of like Bill Gates, like they have a doughy midsection, man boobs and this gray power, and they're like, well, I decided to be vegan and I'm on a bunch of statins the way Peter Atia said. And I'm trying to exercise, but every time I do it, I get injured, which is weird because that's kind of what not having enough cholesterol to make cell membranes can do. So they, and then, and then there's another group that looks really healthy and they're like, yeah, you know, I, I see a bunch of different doctors. I do biohacking and yes, I eat butter and they're the ones loading up on steak and they look like they're doing triathlons, but they're probably not because they're busy. Right. So you can just see the difference in energy levels and, and I, I don't really Care if someone says, but I have 15 studies that say what I'm doing works. I'm like, dude, your metrics say that you're screwing up because you're weak and you're aging quickly. And I don't know how we, we break the myth. Like, like, how do people get stuck in that? You know, I heard canola oil was healthy. My doctor said it was healthy. So I'm doing it and everything sucks, but I'm going to keep doing it. That was me when I was in my early 20s. How did you break out of it, just personally?

Well, I really wanted to know what, what was the root cause of my patients health problems. I was hoping that that's what I would have been taught in medical school. But when I graduated, I was a, I'm a family practice doctor and so I was practicing primary care. And that's, you know, that's a lot of, well, child visits and acute care. But increasingly, I'd say about a third of my practice was refilling prescriptions for people who were on medications chronically. And at some point I noticed that people were coming in for like their, especially their blood pressure medications. And their nurse would, my nurse would say, oh, your blood pressure is high. And so they would know my blood pressure's high. And then I would come in the room and the first thing they would do would be apologize for having high blood pressure. And you know, I'd be like, oh, well, no, you know, I mean, that's all right. It's not your fault, you know, it's your body. And they would say, well, I didn't take my medications. And so I'd ask why not? And they would invariably say, I didn't feel any better while I was taking my drugs. And to that, that's where I started. My mind started going like, you know, I can't invalidate that. But at the same time, I had the script right. Cause we're, you know, I had gone to all the continuing medical education conferences that kind of prime us to deal with that. We had actually a term hypertension, the silent killer. You know, you don't have symptoms, so you don't, you don't expect the drugs to make you feel better because it's, it's, it's silent in the first place. You don't notice it when your blood pressure goes down. And so they'll tolerate it even if those blood pressure drugs are making you tired. And so I started feeling like, what am I even doing here? What is, I'm not making a difference I went to medical school to make a difference, and I was starting to feel like I was lying to people, and I had no idea what to do about it. I knew I was missing something. I didn't know where to start looking. But all that changed when I myself got really sick. And my. My husband kind of pointed out that my diet was terrible. I had a terrible sweet tooth, and I was putting a quarter cup of sugar in my coffee every morning, and he thought that might not be great. And I really resisted that. He'd been telling me that for years. But, you know, as. As a medical professional, I was like, well, I never heard that sugar was particularly bad for you. And, you know, I. I should. I would have heard. So I'm not overweight, and so now I don't have a problem. But when I got really sick, I literally couldn't walk. So I had nothing really to do other than read this book that he plopped on my lap. And in that book, I learned about vegetable oils. I knew what vegetable oil was, but I learned that they had different compounds in them than just fat. I never really thought about what fat was made out of, even though before medical school, I was a biochemist, and I. I knew about, like, different fatty acids. I could draw the molecules out. So I was intrigued because this kind of put the two halves of my life together. I. I spent a lot of years studying biochemistry, but it didn't really get applied to anything that I learned in medical school or how to make people healthy. And so that was how I started brain bringing those two halves of my life together. When I started looking into what was vegetable oil even made out of, and very soon after I saw the chemical formula, I was like, this could be a problem because of the fact that it's got these two double bonds here, and I know that those reacted with oxygen. And I also knew that something called oxidative stress was, like, being discovered as the root cause of a whole bunch of these medical problems that doctors didn't have other explanations for. And we called them idiopathic, and hypertension was one of them. So that was how it started coming together for me. And that was like, the beginning of, like, these things are something I need to know more about. And ultimately, after a couple of years, it took a long time for me to overturn my miseducation around fats. And ultimately, when I did, I was actually able to finally change people's lives in a positive way, like, in this way that. It was the whole reason I went to medical school. People come back. And they would say, oh my gosh, I love it. I love that I'm able to use like butter or that I'm able to use. A lot of people hunted there so they like rendered their own pig fat. They were very, this was Hawaii. I lived in Hawaii. They were very knowledgeable about cooking and very connected to their culinary roots. And so by me telling them that the things that they, that were part of their heritage were healthy, they loved that. And so it was just a win, win all around. And we started, I started getting people off medications. It helped me too. So that, that was like the beginning of it.

That's how you got going on it. And you see the sustained changes.

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I've been not eating seed oils for 15 years. I mean, like very carefully avoiding them. Like, I don't eat a chip for a lot of reasons, but I just don't do it. And I haven't had commercial salad dressing in forever. I guess the last time I had it, I didn't realize that when I ate a. You ever heard of a docent?

I've heard of a docent.

So a dosant is a croissant that apparently has been fried like a donut. And I was at Harrods in London. I can handle European gluten if I take enzymes. So I'm like, I'm gonna do that. And I just didn't know it was cooked in bad oils. So I did eat three of those, knowing full well that they had carbs and would spike my blood sugar and not really caring. But I was like, wait, hold on, these are too good. And then I realized it wasn't butter in those because it had that stuff. But other than that, I've had no seed oils in 15 years. Like, it just doesn't happen.

Amazing.

The difference though, after two years of no seed oils and putting lots of butter in my coffee. You know, everyone knows about bulletproof coffee now, by the way, it's Danger Coffee, my new coffee brand. And well, after two years you stop craving butter. Like you're going to die without it. And that's because the half life of fat in your cell membranes is about two years. And after four years you got 75% healthy fat in your membranes. And all of a sudden you're like, butter's cool. But it's not like the thing that saves me every day. And then you end up in this sort of just feeling really good. And strangely for me, I can tolerate carbs better than at any time in my life. I eat 200 grams of carbs a day. Blood sugar doesn't go up. It's amazing. I'm not eating, you know, candy. I'm eating mostly white rice because having some starch works. And, and plus, if you're six and a half percent body fat, like, going full keto all the time is probably not a good idea. So I don't need to do it. But holy crap. To go from £300 to that from avoiding seed oils. That's cool. Now you and I have stack rank lists of bad oils, and you talk about the hateful eight oils. What are the hateful eight oils?

So the hateful eight are the ones that we want to avoid, and they are. I'll just list them off first. Corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower, rice bran, and grapeseed. Now you brought it up. So do you have different oils on your bad oil list? Because I'm curious how they got there.

I want to know first, what is the worst oil of the hay filet?

Oh, well, you know, they're all very similar chemically, so. But the, the, the best one is a little bit easier to answer. Actually, the best, best of the worst is possibly sunflower because of the fact that it had been cultivated and used a little bit for oil in certain areas. And that makes a big difference to the crude oil and how extensively damaged it gets during the refining process. So, so sunflower oil is probably one of the better ones, but the rest of them, their chemical makeup is very similar, and the crude oil is roughly easily toxic. So. So part of how I answered the question is what does the crude oil look like? And then where does it go from there? Because it only goes down from, from the crude oil. And I've spoken to a couple people inside the industry, and they, they say that in terms of the quality between, you know, the, between all of them, all the hateful eight, really what matters in their minds is the harvest is harvesting factors and how well they were kept before they were extracted, which is information that we just don't have. Nobody keeps. No one will tell us that. But otherwise. So that's why the testing, that's why it's so important that they have oil scientists constantly in the factory. Because every batch can be different, and every batch will have different challenges and different solutions to clean up the crude oil. And the crude oil is very nasty because in order to get oil from these seeds, which were never bred to be oil seeds, with the slight exception of sunflower, they have to be pummeled with 400 to 600 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures and insane pressures and then sometimes even solvents like hexane. And it's just a total mess. What the liquid is, that is the crude oil, and it is inedible and it is toxic. And it's a weird loophole that enables these oils to be considered organic unless they use hexane because they're toxic in their crude state.

I mean, a lot of organic stuff is toxic. I mean, if I go into my backyard and start eating organic plants back there, most of them are going to seriously disable me, if not kill me outright, you know, so organic cotton or organic cotton mouth juice from cottonmouth snakes is also deadly. So I kind of feel like plant based, animal based, organic. It doesn't mean anything except organic means that it doesn't have certain chemicals in it.

Added.

Yeah, yeah, added. But they can still be there.

That's the key difference. So you're bringing up a really good point, because certainly natural and organic, like natural is organic technically, but the label is all about, did you add any hazardous materials during the processing? That's it. And so if you didn't add any hazardous materials, you're off the hook, even when the. The processing itself creates extraordinarily hazardous materials that are probably equally as bad as hexane, if not worse in some cases.

I wonder if there's some kind of lawsuit against the Organic Standards association, because if you're not allowed to. To add toxic substances and they're adding canola oil, which itself is a toxic substance, aren't they violating the organic standards?

Well, that comes down to, like, what's in it? What. How did you define hazardous material? Right, and so that's such a good point because, like, once you know what it's made of and what it does to your body, you start thinking of it, of course, as a hazardous material. But it comes down to, you know, what is listed as a hazardous material in the. By the organizations that define these things. And because vegetable oils were created long before there were any food standards and sold to the public long before there was any sort of testing whatsoever. Back in the early 1900s, it was just basically grandfathered in as under the term grass, which means generally regarded as safe. So that should be. That, you know, is a great point. I would love somebody to start a lawsuit, but, you know, if I was going to sue somebody, I don't know that it would be the edible oil industry. I would prefer to go after the folks who are the folks who we look up to for health advice. Like, nobody looks to the processed food industry for advice on what to Eat. They look to the processed food industry for fast, cheap solutions. But people do look to their doctors, and they. The doctors. And when it comes to nutrition, doctors and dietitians look to the American Heart association and in dark calories. I have an entire section devoted to the American Heart Association's origin story.

Tell us.

Yeah, yeah. Because it's entangled with the vegetable oil industry. And this is something that cardiologists don't know and doctors don't know, dietitians don't know, and all these influencers out there who are. Now, there's a lot of people debunking the whole idea that vegetable oil is bad. They just have no idea that the only reason we're eating them is because of some pretty dark dealings that happened between the American Heart association and Proctor and Gamble in 1948.

That was before the big tobacco companies bought all the processed food Companies in what, the 90s? They did that. So you people don't know this, but most of them are owned by big tobacco. And big tobacco is really good at getting doctors to tell you something bad for you is good for you. So what a surprise that they would do that. And it's not that the doctors are knowingly doing this in most cases. I mean, at high levels, I think possibly, but. And most of them, it's just that's what they learned in school. And of course you're going to believe it because it was taught to you by, you know, the teachers and it's doctors like you who look around and. And to your point, the dietitians. I love it when a dietitian troll comes on, you know, high and mighty on social media and tries to say something. I'm like, hold on a second. Your profession created hospital meals and school lunches. You don't have a leg to stand on. Like, get a certification. That matters because your registered dietitian actually means you don't know how to e. And you look like it. And that said, I'm seeing an emergence of functional dietitians who went through the training, threw up on it or probably in class from eating what they were told to eat and then became functional dietitians. And they're actually fighting against the profession. Like, one of them works for me. And it's. It's really cool to see even, like, the most toxic of those types of professions, there are people moving it towards this idea that it doesn't matter what the studies say. If you do it and it makes you miserable and gives you cancer and diabetes and heart disease, don't do it anymore. Right. Maybe the studies are paid for by someone evil. And that's usually what happens.

I mean, this is so true. Like, no one is asking who is educating the health professionals. And one of the things that really bothered me as a young doctor was just lack of interest in questioning the standards that, that we, you know, believed in. I remember one time I was at a conference on breast cancer and I asked the surgeon who was a breast surgery specialist, what is the natural. What do we know about the natural course of breast cancer if we don't do a mastectomy? What happens if we don't do any treatment? How long does it take before these things metastasize? And he said, you know, that's a really good question to his credit, but he didn't have a clue. And how can you say that you need to do any terrifically disfiguring procedure or any procedure at all without questioning the natural history of a disease? And that gets back to the failure of the medical system to really progress at all, much at all in the past 2,000 years. And what I'm talking about is the root cause question. So you may be familiar, Dave, with a guy named Denim Harmon.

Yeah.

And if that name, you know, probably rings a bell, because he is really the father of free radical biology. Right.

Yeah.

Old.

Old research. Right.

Yes. And. And he actually, he published a paper in the 1950s that sparked off the entire field of free radical biology, which had. Which has recently, in recent years, sort of given also rise to the anti aging movement and is somewhat, you know, obliquely related to. Well, you probably know about it because it's the, the whole biohacking movement, which I believe you have some relationship to that.

Yeah, I kind of started that thing back in the day.

So. So this guy, Denim Harmon, he. He was. He asked a really important question, which is, hey, why do we die? A really important question. He couldn't answer it, but he was fascinated with it. And so he went to medical. He was, he was a chemist. He thought the answer had something to do with chemistry, but he didn't know enough about the body. So he went to medical school to learn about the body, and he graduated and he assigned himself. He found himself this kush job where he sat around and basically had to press a button a few times a day so he could think. And that's what he did. He was like a theoretical physician. You know how there's theoretical physicists who think about the origin of the universe? Well, he was like a theoretical physician who thought about the origin of death. And then, and after a few months he realized, I think it begins at the cell, in the cell.

Shocking, probably in the mitochondria. Who would have thought, right?

Well, he didn't, you know, he didn't focus on the mitochondria.

Everything he knew about them back then, they had, I don't know, you know.

I don't know that doctors really learn much about them. Yeah, but, but then the next thing he did, and I'm paraphrasing here, he said he realized if you want to know the root cause of sickness and death, you follow the free radical. Because at the chemical level, that is where our cells, these highly intelligent, highly organized little bags of chemicals that have like cities, city level of complexity inside them. They are all run by chemicals, chemicals just following like thermodynamics. And you throw free radicals in there and you throw everything off. It's, it's impossible. So that's what throws off the system. And free radicals come from oxidative stress. And the number one source of oxidative stress in any cell with a mitochondria is the mitochondria, because mitochondria produce energy. And it's like an engine. It's literally very similar to engines. It's amazing construction. And it acts, actually has a little teeny tiny turbine like thing in there that makes the ATP for us recharges our ATP batteries. But like engines in our cars, it has a byproduct and in our car the byproduct is heat. Right. So it's not 100 efficient. Mitochondria aren't 100 efficient either. Their byproduct are free radicals which generate oxidative stress. And keeping that oxidative stress under control is so essential to life and health that our bodies have like the fastest enzymes in the body are designed to control free radicals. So we call them antioxidants. And there's some of those, like superoxide dismutase, catalase, they're the fastest in the, the mammalian world. The fastest enzymes, possibly even the fastest enzymes known to science, because controlling free radicals is that important and that central to health. But one thing that he didn't know, asides from not knowing too much about mitochondria, is that we were, we were eating foods that, that kill our mitochondria and in so doing make them generate free radicals. Well, they make them generate free radicals first I had that out of order. And. And then when they do that, they start to cause mitochondrial dysfunction and ultimately can kill them. And so that lack of paying attention to vegetable oil, which again, why I call it dark calories.

I like that name.

Happen to have one? I just got them the other day. Because he didn't know about vegetable oils at the time. They were less prevalent in the food supply, but people were still eating a couple pounds a year. But because of not understanding that vegetable oils cause mitochondrias to start shooting out free radicals and promote oxidative stress, the science of free radical biology never really made any huge inroads into its whole goal, which was extending life. Right? The whole science has thrown all kinds of antioxidants at the problem of oxidative stress over the years. And it's not really added up to extending life because the first, what's more important than throwing antioxidants into a broken system is to unbreak the system. And the only way to do that is get rid of the worst foods in our food supply, which are these vegetable oils.

Okay.

Are you with me?

I'm with you.

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You mentioned the, the hateful eight and I've been trying to figure it out. I think I have the nasty nine.

You added another one.

I, I added another one.

I bet it was peanut.

It was peanuts. And I was also looking at how would I pick the worst ones. Well, when you're, when you're concentrating these oils, there's how much glyphosate are you going to get? And Stephanie Sinef has been on the show a couple times talking about the dangers of glyphosate along with Dr. Mercola and many others. And you know, glyphosate is clearly bad for us. But what a lot of people miss out on is mycotoxins, these toxins from mold. And people say, Dave, you're obsessed with those. I'm like, that's weird because governments around the world are obsessed with them because they keep putting regulations in place because it makes people sick and it gives them cancer. So these are things that form in the field while things are growing or during storage before they, they make it into oil. And there are studies, lots of them, showing that they make it into the final product. And peanut oil. Aflatoxin, the most cancer causing compound we know of, is present in peanut oil. And peanut oil unfortunately also has very long chain fatty acids which are a different problem than the Omega 6s that you and I are focused on. But the VLCFAs are so long that they don't fit in cell membranes. When they get in there, they kind of turn sideways and clog up the cell membrane and they're overrepresented in Alzheimer brains. So why you would ever fry something in peanut oil, I don't know, it's just a bad idea. And the other two that are particularly bad, especially with toxins from man made glyphosate as well as from mold, would be corn and soy. And believe it or not, there are mycotoxin maps published every quarter about which species of mold is most prevalent in which region and how contaminated the crops are that year. So this is something that agricultural people will trace. But you're not going to know when you get your canola. What's in there, but you can guarantee glyphosate, you can guarantee that there's going to be some amount of mold, but you don't know what it is and it can change. So what I would say there is don't eat any of those things or peanut oil, and you've got a pretty safe list. But if those are the, you know, the nasty nine or the hateful eight, what are the, the super six or. I have no idea. I'm just making up words that kind of sound good. But what are the six best oils you think people should eat?

Well, yeah. So sure. So first, though, I, I want to say I did take a lot of that into consideration when I decided to exclude peanut oil. And a lot of it comes down to the fact that. So first of all comes down to the simple axiom in toxicology, which is the dose makes the poison and what happens with these other toxins that are environmental contaminants. And I'm throwing the mycotoxins in there as a. It's part of the, the category of environmental contaminants. Yeah, those are. A lot of them are removed. And yes, of course, they can't remove all of them. You can't really, you know, purify something fully, but they're present in like, parts per million or parts per billion. The problem with the, the hafalate is that when you, when they leave the factory, there are toxins that are present in them in parts per hundred, which is. What is that? 10,000? A thousand times higher. 10,000 times higher. And the dose makes the poison. And then that's just the beginning of the story. So what happens next is, you know, it's exposed to light, you get a few more. You open the bottle, more oxygen in there, you get more toxins forming, and then when you cook with it, you get a whole heck of a lot more toxins forming. And this is true, you know, the cooking forms toxins in the same principle as like a burn on your skin. It's time and temperature. So the longer you cook in the higher temperature, the more toxins will form and the. If you reheat it again, more toxins form. Right. So to me, the most important factors to be paying attention to are the reactions between are the oxidation reactions. It's these reactions that promote oxidative stress, which is the root cause of death and dying and every disease that you can name. And in overlooking that single most important root cause, medical science has opened the door for just like a lot of confusion for folks. And I just want to make things as simple as possible and hierarchicalize those. So, yes, it's absolutely important to avoid glyphosate and avoid the mycotoxins. 100% agree degree. But I like to hire hierarchicalize for those people who just need to know, especially for those people who just need to know where to start or, you know, what is the first most important thing. Because having worked with thousands of patients, I know how overwhelming it can be when they hear all of these things that are true, but they don't get told what to do first and, you know, have it be made clear for them so that they don't get overwhelmed and just give up. And that's what I have seen happening if it's not made clear. So I want to share that with you so that you understand, like, my rationale for. For. For like, defining the eight and then. And then having you know it. It's really not to say that these other factors don't matter.

I share your pain in that. I went through and stack ranked oils and proteins and carbs according to a whole bunch of different factors and put that on the bulletproof diet roadmap. People still download it every day. It's daveasprey.com roadmap. But the amount of times when you're like, that's an edge case. Like, you can make a case. For me, peanut oil would fall on the bad ones because it's 36% omega 6. So it's gonna break down with, you know, a third as many of the heavy toxins that you would get from canola or something. But if you look at things like pork fat, it's only 10% omega 6. So I'm like, I go for low omega 6 oils, but if I had to eat, if. If we had the nasty nine that included peanut oil and I looked at all that crap, I think peanut oil would be slightly better than the other ones, but I don't know that I would intentionally add it to my food. So I'm with you there. Like, these corner cases, there's no way to. To definitively say, you know, good or bad. It just like, it. It's sort of. For me, eventually it became a green, yellow, red, and I would have put peanut in the low yellow, high red. And, you know, it wouldn't have been green.

I think we also need to clarify if we're talking about refined or unrefined peanut oil, because it's a totally different scenario.

Fair point. Yeah.

Yeah. So because, you know, there's. There's lower grades of olive Oil that I wouldn't want to eat either.

Good point.

And so when I'm saying the hateful eight and pin oils not made the list, I'm only talking about the unrefined peanut oil that is that top quality peanut oil that has all those antioxidants and has the ability to withstand, you know, the kind of cooking that I recommend using it for. Like I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend throwing it in the deep fryer. I used to recommend that. And I've changed my mind in my latest book.

Okay, cool. Like, so olive oil and peanut oil I think are terrible frying oils. But you know, if you wanted to pour some on a salad, if it's on refined peanut oil and you're not allergic to lectins, okay. It's probably not that harmful. I'm totally with you there.

Yeah, so. And then the other thing is that you know, even like the canola oil, a lot of folks get sucked into the whole omega 3. Let's talk about that ratio. So omega 3 actually has more double bonds than omega 6. The name has only to do with the position of the first double bond at the end of the chain. So it doesn't tell you anything about like the number of double bonds or stability. So the, it turns out that having three double bonds in an 18 carbon fatty acid instead of two makes it at least twice as likely to produce toxins. And in some conditions, and we're talking about everything matters here, Ph matters, the salt content matters, the iron content matters. So in some conditions it's 10 times as likely to turn into toxin. So the amount of the, the Omega 3 in linole and which is called linolenic acid in canola oil is actually worth at least double that in terms of toxicity as the Omega 6. And so I think some of this conversation has gotten strayed from the root cause. Not our conversation, Dave, but the conversation around seed oils. So it's strayed from the root cause. The root cause of the problem is the reactions with oxidation. And when I say strayed, I mean it's gone into other territories that have to do with metabolism. And that's where the Omega 6 question comes up. And I don't like, I've not focused on Omega 6 as being problematic, but I want to raise the like, the argument for it, which I'm sure you brought up, is that, you know, it's metabolized into an eicosanoid which has pro inflammatory effects as opposed to the Omega 3, which is metabolized into an eicosanoid that has anti inflammatory effects. But the, the key to why it's not much of an issue is the fact that our cells have to metabolize it and our cells will only do so under certain conditions. It's highly regulated. Cells are control freaks. So it's not like it happened like we eat this stuff and then all of a sudden we produce all these eicosanoids. It's nothing like that. And so the conversation out there on the web that linoleic acid is, is pro inflammatory that has taken that turn. I want to set the record straight on that because it is making it so easy for the American Heart association to come out and debunk that. Right. Because it's actually debunkable. I wouldn't rest my case on that one.

That Omega 6s are bad or that.

Linoleic acid is inflammatory because of its eicosanoid effects, which is kind of this what people who, when they talk about Omega 6 as if it's more of a problem than Omega 3, I think that must be what they're talking about because omega 3 actually oxidizes more easily. Right. So they. To talk about seed oils as being unhealthy. We have to reframe the conversation and refocus on oxidation. And that's why I wrote Dark Calories. One of the reasons, because that's what I do in the first four chapters is the first, very first chapter actually I focus it right on. We gotta be focusing on the oxidation and the reaction with oxygen because that is where the toxins come from. And that's where all of the toxicity and the downstream metabolic effects come from. That not from the simple fact of it contains linoleic acid. So now you seem like maybe you disagree with that, but so tell me.

No, I, I agree. I, I was just gonna say one of the things I hear over and over from, from angry vegans. Guys, I was a devout vegan, a devout raw vegan. And I was angry too. And like it. It's okay if you're listening to this. Thank you for just being curious. And you know, I'm, I'm not judging you, especially if you're calm and by the way, I want to know how you did it. But they'd say but, but plants have omega 3s and then you say yes, but your body converts them at a ratio of 45 to 1 into the kind of omega 3s that your body needs, the EPA and DHA. And it only does that if it has the right minerals and co factors and enzymes and your Metabolism is working. And it's not working because you eat too many omega 3s and probably some sixes because in excess of six creates oxidation as well, even if it makes good eicosanoids. And guys, if you don't know what eicosanoids are, the late great Barry Sears wrote a whole series of books in the 90s and early 2000s about different fats and iconoids and signaling. And that was, I think I would give him credit for introducing that concept to the, the broader community. So what do you think about that vegan omega 3 conversion ratio?

That whole argument, if I understand it. I just want to make sure that I've gotten what you said correctly and what, you know, what they said. If we're on the same page about what they're saying, basically they're saying that too much of Omega 6 blocks the conversion because it's the same enzyme that elongates omega 6s and omega 3s. And we don't get enough long chain omega 3s. Is that what they're just saying?

I don't need to eat animal based omega 3s because my body will make them from plant based omega 3 threes. But they don't talk about the 45 grams of plant based omega 3s. To yield 1 gram of quality omega 3s, your body needs the EPA and DHA. So.

Right.

The other 44 grams wreak metabolic havoc, but they don't mention that. So you could, as you go to one of the vegan restaurants and there are many where everything's fried in canola oil and they're like, yeah, it was vegan. It must be good for me. I've done all these things and it's just not. And that Omega 3 myth I think needs debunking because there's oxidized and not oxidized omega 3s, and then there's plant based omega 3s, more than one of them. And then there's animal based omega 3s. And some of the animals make the same as the plant based Omega 3s. So it's kind of confusing. So what are the good omega 3s to eat? What are the ones that are actually more dangerous than Omega 6?

So we need some Omega 3 in our bodies. We don't need all that much when our bodies are healthy. We need both Omega 3 and Omega 6. I should say, make that clear.

We do indeed.

Yeah. Because these are what we call essential fatty acids. And our body uses them for all sorts of things. But when our metabolism is healthy, we really don't need all that Much, historically, most, we think most people got some less than 5% of, in terms of calories from, from either omega 3 or omega 6. But you know, we don't know very much about that. And it doesn't, you know, so that's just a hypothetical. It could be a lot more than that. But here's the thing, and we're talking about something that I want to make an analogy to kind of help, help clarify this.

Okay?

So what we're talking about right now in terms of like the, the elongation and that being a problem, we're talking about like trimming the sails on a, on a boat. Imagine you have a sailboat and you want to make it go as fast as possible. This is what they do in the Americas cup, right? And they, they have all these folks that are out there and they're talking about the depth of the hull and exactly like what type of ropes they make the, the upholstery, like ties out of and all these little things. But no one's talking about the fact that, oh gosh, you know, this boat has a gaping two foot hole in the hull and it's taking on water at, you know, gallons per second here. That's where we are with vegetable oil. Because we have to pay attention to the fact that everyone we've been studying is living on more vegetable oil than is healthy, I should say, for the past probably 50, 60, 70 years. All of the science that we have, all of these studies that we have where we believe that these elongation ratios are 1 to 45, maybe it's true, maybe it's not true because we were studying an unhealthy population, right? Or we don't know if we were studying an unhealthy population because medical science never took the time to define what health is and to focus on oxidative stress and how to measure it in the human body and how to identify people who are, who have that healthy metabolism and therefore are able to. They should be the subjects of these basic science studies, right? So we can't really answer some very important questions because we've not really studied it. Full stop.

We haven't studied it. But that doesn't stop our dietitians and the aha from making dumb recommendations, right?

They think that they've studied it, right? The worst, the worst thing is to have like to think that you've learned something and then you are closed, right? Like your mind closes once you think that you've learned the answer to a question. What causes heart attacks, cholesterol what makes cholesterol saturated fat? Once you think you've learned the answer to that question, you've, your mind is like naturally lazy, right? Like, our brains are really great and amazing, but they're also naturally lazy. They try to save energy. They're like, I answered that question already, I can't go there again. And people just literally sat down that.

Whole chain of just, oh, our brain saved energy by making a decision and then sticking to it because it was easier than thinking. We do it all the time. It's just, it's a feature of our brain to save energy. Just like couches look better than gyms. But man, it really does break our science so often.

It does. And you know, this gets back to the American Heart association and their relationship with the vegetable oil industry because not only do they have the, like, the, this intellectual blind side where they can't question something they think they've already learned, they have money on the line now. So. And there's another thing about like the hardest something about like Mark Twain said this, the hardest thing to do is teach a man something that his salary depends on him not knowing.

You know, it does happen, especially in advanced science. You know, if you spent your entire 25 year career on string theory and then some young buck comes along and disproves it, you're going to cancel him. And you're not even going to know why you're canceling him unless you're a highly enlightened theoretical physicist. And there are some of those just go, oh, wow, maybe I was wrong, but man, it takes a hell of a human being to just say, I pursued something for a long time and I put my self worth in it. And maybe I was wrong. And now if you're a dietitian listening to this, put down the McDonald's and go to a meditation class and you too can learn nutrition. There, I said it.

But you know, I have met people that do that and I, I, I really admire them. And actually I was just on a podcast with one the other day. His name is Dr. Avadi and I call him out in my book for being one of these rare people who is a cardiologist who is making, you know, money, lots of money to be made and just profiting off of the illness industry, right? And especially cardiology, because that's sort of the root of all of this, is the wrong explanation for heart disease. And, and you know, he's taken up the banner of being interested in the truth and there are people out there. That's the point. I'M making. There are doctors, there are dietitians that want to know the truth, and they're actually looking for it, you know, but it's just that there's so much noise and so much pressure and so much misinformation coming from the American Heart Association. I keep coming back to them because they are the organization that educates doctors. They do this by. They fund a lot of research. They get. They raise over $1 billion a year. 200 million comes from industry. From the processed food industry, from pharma. And 800 comes from. 800 million comes from people like you and me donating, you know, workplace drives. And I want to put an end to that waste of money because it's making. The American Heart association does one thing really well. They make money for the health care industry and the processed food industry by making us sick. And when we are sick, we go after processed foods because we're too tired to learn how to cook.

It's totally true. When you're too tired to cook, you're kind of in trouble. Right.

We don't even, like, respect, you know, the basic. Because of the processed food industry taking over medical education, doctors, you know, when we separate people from cholesterol and animal fat, we separate people from their traditions. And this is what I saw in Hawaii, where just me saying, yeah, vegetable oil is bad. It's these other things. You can. You can have your. Your. Like, your liver. Like, they loved the organ meats. They. They love bone marrow. They loved using the fatty parts of the animal because that's what people traditionally eat. Ate.

Yeah.

And once the American Heart association came along in the 50s and said, no, no, no saturated fat, no cholesterol. They severed our connection to all of these culinary traditions and all of the. Just like, the joy that families used to have of coming together to celebrate multiple generations of food. And from that, it's not the only thing, but from that, we have the disintegration of the family dinner, and from that, we have the disintegration of the family itself.

I think you're onto something there. And it's one of the reasons I wanted to grow my family's food and live on an island and start a regenerative farm and did all that. And I've had. As long as I was not traveling, I had every dinner with my family, and it was, you know, probably thousands and thousands of them, but I think it does. It does matter. And there's a lot of people now where, you know, you have an hour commute each way, and you know, there's so many activities now, so it doesn't always happen. So I'll just say when it can happen, guys, it's probably worth doing. And if it's not a perfect meal, who cares? At least you got to have it together.

Yes. It's so. It's so nourishing. Like, there's the nourishment of just being with family and having a good time together. And, like, there's a lot of talk now about something called toxic masculinity. And what, you know, I'm sure you've.

Probably heard, does that come from omega 6 oils or.

I'm gonna make the case that it plays a role that these oils have. You know, because of the American Heart association disintegrating the family has led in some ways to toxic masculinity. Because people who study family structure and just what it takes to be a healthy man in society continuously come back to having a male father figure or, like, you know, a male adult in their lives.

I'm sorry, Kate, saying that, doesn't that make you toxic feminine? You can't say that. I mean, I'm feeling triggered right now. Okay, Totally.

I'm sorry. Well. Well, right. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. I don't know. I don't care. But I believe in it.

Acknowledging masculine and feminine acknowledgment exist and that family units who contain those energies are good. And that disrupted lipid metabolism, up hormones for men and women, and makes it harder for us to interact in a healthy way. That. That seems like science to me, but maybe I'm just go. Maybe I'm toxic. I don't know.

I hope we don't get canceled now. No, but. But seriously, like, you know, this destruction of people. People lived to eat, right? We lived back 200 years ago. Everything people did almost was oriented around food, Right. The other thing was oriented also was around spirituality and religion and organized religion.

And a little bit of home defense, too. So you're like, I'm a hunter, I'm a. I'm a farmer, or I'm a soldier, or I'm a priest. Those are your professions?

Yes. For men, yes. We were raising warriors, right? And so back in the day, people were so much more real about what a healthy diet is because it mattered so much in so many ways, Right? It was what brought you together, not just your family, but your whole culture, right? So we had. We had celebrations, like any excuse to have a celebration. People getting married, people getting circumcised. Maybe that's not the Best excuse. But, you know, villages coming together, other things happening, like the seasons. Right. Any excuse to get together. People got together around food. It was all around food. And there was so much thought that went into the preparation of the food that, you know, was knowledge. That was knowledge that was built generation after generation. Because let's not take away the, the wisdom that went into this and just the importance of trusting. Now I'm going to say something that possibly might get me canceled anyway. Trusting. What. What does a healthy human look like? Right. I talked about that in Deep Nutrition.

I just look at the COVID of Sports Illustrated. Whatever they tell me must be true.

Well, your brain knows. Our brains know. It's built in to our biology to, to recognize health because we actually recognize a geometric pattern. I don't know if I ever talked about this with, with you on my other.

No, but it's. It's real. Talk more about this. I know the pattern. You're going to say it's beautiful. Keep going.

Yeah, it's the. Related to the Fibonacci sequence. It's a ratio called phi phi. And it's very important in math and physics and understanding how the universe works. And it's a. It's an irrational number that starts with 1.618 and goes on for infinity. And it is the ratio that is so fundamental to growth in all of biology that we see it everywhere and every living thing. We actually see it actually in the structure of galaxies. It's so fundamental to like, possibly the structure of the universe. But our brains naturally recognize it and identify it as beauty. It's so important that we have a physical emotional response to seeing beautiful things, whether in a tree, in a flower in the shape of a galaxy, or, you know, in, in a beautiful piece of architecture like the Greeks were, they.

Based the person on waist to hip ratio. No, that wouldn't be in there, would it?

Absolutely. Waist to hip ratio. Right.

I'm triggered right now.

Yes.

So you're saying some people are more beautiful than others. I just wanted to make sure.

I'm saying that we recognize. Yes, I'm saying that. And it's not like it shouldn't be.

Controversial because some people are healthier than others, too. It's a fact.

People get paid more when they're more beautiful based on movie stars that are more attractive make more money. And that is a fact. I don't, you know, like, I don't know how you could argue with that. If you look at Julia Roberts, one of the most beautiful women, most beautiful faces, based on this geometric ratio. And so there was a man that I interviewed for my book Deep Nutrition, and his name was Stefan Marquat. He created a geometric pattern based on the Fibonacci ratio sequence and the phi ratio that defines a beautiful human face. And you can overlay this little map over men and women and different races, you know, black, white, Asian, slight variations on the mask, but all of those variations are just tweaks on the, the, the number phi and that, that in fact our hand is full of this number phi. And like the, the ratio of this bone to this bone is 1.618. And you do it again and again. And these are all Fibonacci numbers. We have five bones, a Fibonacci number eight. Five bones in our. These are our metacarpal bones. We have eight tarsal bones in our wrist, and we have two. That's a Fibonacci number bones in our forearm. So these are patterns we see over and over again in nature. And it's comes from nutrition and vegetable oils. Because of oxidative stress, they disrupt the ability of nutrition to manifest in ideal optimal growth. So that people like me, who's. Who grew up was. My dad was a doctor. So we had margarine, we had. My mom cooked with vegetable oil. We avoided butter. Well, I need to wear glasses. I had to have my wisdom teeth removed. My jaws a little bit narrow. I have all kinds of problems in my. With the geometry of my hips. So I developed hip problems early in life. These are important structural features that keep us healthy, that we lose when we lose good nutrition.

Yeah, the thing about jaw structure, one of the first hundred interviews was with a guy named Dwight Jennings on the show. This is going back 12 years or something, but I worked with them. And maternal intake of nutrients changes jaw structure. So I had to lower my jaw and bring it forward, not through surgery, but just through basically spreading the upper palate. And James Nestor and I talked about this, the guy who wrote the book Breath, an amazing book. Both of us had to do this to make space in our sinuses and to allow less stress in the jaw. And you know, if, if our parents had access to good food, we wouldn't have to. To do all that stuff.

Right, Exactly. A generation after generation, you know, little mistakes can become bigger mistakes.

Well, testosterone levels are half what they used to be. And we know that excessive inflammation will do that. And for me, it's kind of personal. So when I was 26 and I was really not not doing well, chronic fatigue, arthritis, constant sinus infections, all that stuff, toxic mold. I went to the doctor and he called me and said, congratulations, you have lower testosterone than your mom. I was 300 pounds, or actually I'd probably, at that time I was probably about 275. I lost some of it.

But.

When you're low or high testosterone, it changes your view of the world, whether you're a man or a woman. It really does. And just to say that doesn't matter, I don't think is scientifically valid. And the endocrine disrupting things and things like atrazine, where I've had some conversations with Bobby Kennedy about that, you know, atrazine appears to be a really potent endocrine disruptor in, in animals. And so I don't want to eat foods that have high levels of pesticide residues. And it turns out that's seed oils for sure and a lot of other things. Can I go like super nerdy with you? You're one of the few people I think might be able to answer this controversial question.

Let's try it.

Well, olive oil, you and I both put it on the pretty good for you list. But I found a bunch of studies out there that say that oleic acid, the predominant olive, olive oil fatty acid, increases the expression of rate limiting enzymes that break down linoleic acid. And these are called D5D and D6D. And so what that means is if you eat a lot of olive oil, your body is going to further oxidize the omega 6 oils like linoleic acid. If you eat a moderate or no olive oil diet. And olive oil does have benefits, I'm not advocating that. But if you would eat less oleic acid, your body would have more enzymes available to handle the Omega 6s you do eat. So that means excessive olive oil probably isn't good, at least if you also eat omega 6 oils from other sources.

Well, I'm not sure. I'd have to know what exactly that enzyme does so that like when we, we, we really can't eliminate linoleic acid or these, these omega 6s, when we have them in excess, we, the only way to get rid of them is either to metabolize them into a longer chain omega 3 or omega 6, or to burn them for energy in our mitochondria. So, you know, not being familiar with that exact enzyme and what it does, I'd be kind of curious what they're talking about because, you know, toxicologists who I've spoken to have, have said that yes, these, these oils, they do build up in our body and behave as toxins because we do not have the ability to eliminate them other than metabolizing them for energy.

They turn a linoleic acid into arachidonic acid.

So, okay, so those enzymes turn linoleic, so they elongate, right?

Yes.

Okay. So that's one of the ways that the body's trying to, to get rid of them, I guess.

And so if you can't get rid of it, you're going to have more oxidation and more inflammation.

Yes, I wouldn't think that that depends very much on, on our diets. And, and I, I say that because the body can turn oic acid into saturated fatty acids if it wants to, so we can desaturate it. So I don't think we need to worry honestly about that. Like, nature is not stupid. It doesn't make us like, have to tabulate all these things and, you know, become extraordinary like, you know, calculating and weighing everything like that, knowing everything about molecules in order to be healthy. Right.

I've gone through periods where I've, you know, eaten almost exclusively olive oil and I've gone through periods where I eat almost exclusively saturated fat from animals. And I feel way better on the saturated fat from animals, but I feel best If I do 2 tablespoons of olive oil, but I don't, you know, have excessive amounts of it. And it could have to do with membrane fluidity because if you have hyper fluid membranes from excessive olive oil, that means you're more, they're more susceptible to oxidative damage from linoleic acid or other inflammation. So I'm kind of like, how do I build healthy cell membranes? How do I enjoy lots of different foods and how do I not over index on butter or over index on olive oil? And I don't know the right answer, but I feel like all one, none of the other is probably not the right answer.

We always want to listen to your body, right. And so, but I would see, I would suggest that what you want to pay attention to maybe is also like, what were you cooking and how were you cooking in the olive oil? Because it does come down to oxidative stress in the end. And, and so if you were exposing yourselves to more oxidative stress because you were having more slightly easily oxidizable, you know, oils and you were reheating your food and exactly what you were doing, all of that, you know, factors in, but, but you can, you can take your worry like engine offline when it comes to do you need to regulate oleic acid near your oleic acid intake Per se. Right. When you cook with oleic acid and it oxidizes, it's not oleic acid anymore. That's what I mean by per se. Right. So, so you do want to pay attention to your body. If you're doing something with your food that's making you feel bad, then then think about how it could be promoting oxidative stress. And that's what dark calories will help you to do. And then go back to dial it down a little bit with the oxidative stress. And always the number one thing is get rid of those vegetable oils because they are in a lot of foods that people don't realize. You know, one of the things that I think, you know, maybe you say this a lot, but needs to be said during this conversation if not is it's not just what you cook with at home. Right. Everybody's trying to feed you vegetable oils. It is the cheapest oil out there. So all the restaurants are now using them and all the fruit food service industry now uses them. All the, like the workplace cafeterias, they get their stuff shipped in from like they outsource all their sauces and all their marinades and all their, their dips and their, you know, of course, mayonnaise. All of these can are just full of vegetable oil. That's how we got to the point where now the average person has something like 30% of their daily calories from these oils. So it's not just a matter of, you know, ditching the canola oil bottle next to your stove and using butter or olive oil or one of the, I call them the delightful dozen in my book. Instead it's a matter of really just being on guard out there in the world all the time. Because truly everyone is trying to shove these things down your gullet.

They are. And I also just would like to warn people, I've seen an explosion of brands that maybe one time were healthy and then suddenly they use kind of more deceptive things. They just whittle away. So made with olive oil and turn it over, it's 1% olive oil, 99% canola. There's another brand I've worked with where the label now says butter, blend of organic and grass fed butters. And the way I read that is it's a blend of organic, non grass fed butter and grass fed butter. And they don't tell you which one. Right. But if organic is first, that means they cut costs on the organic. And I'm, I'm not going to name any particular brand, but you should read your Labels. Right. And if it's, you know, a butterfly, you know, butter powder sort of thing that you put in a beverage or something, it should be 100% grass fed butter. At least that's the way I like to make stuff. But labels can be deceiving and sometimes the big words on the front are the tiny words on the back.

Absolutely. I mean, you, if you aren't a label reader, you can't be, you can't know what you're eating. Right. And if you don't know what you're eating, and eating is the most important thing that determines your, you know, what your body's built out of and your metabolic health, then you know you're missing a big opportunity. Yeah, it's, it's not that hard to turn the bottle around. It is hard to read those teeny tiny ingredients. So some folks over the age of 40, they need to bring like a magnifying glass or special glasses to be able to even know what they're buying. But it's, it's definitely worth it if you want to. If you can turn that bottle around, then you can turn your metabolism around.

Ooh, that's a great quote. I, I love it. And it is so possible to do that. Something else that stands out in your work is something that doesn't get nearly enough press. And it's, I think in present in three of my books too. It's the idea that there's a difference between hunger and being hypoglybitschy or hangry or just, just this craving state. I wrote a lot about that in my fasting book on Fast this Way, my second fasting book after the Bulletproof Diet. And what I found is that I never understood what hunger was because I always had a broken energy system. So food was like, if I don't eat soon, like someone's going to die and I'm going to have to eat them. Like, like you're so hungry and you can't think and you're just reactive and snappy. So what's the difference in your work between that, like, I'm going to die hunger and, you know, I probably should eat in the next day or two kind of hunger?

Yeah. So you're talking about my energy model of insulin resistance and insulin resistance. When we are insulin resistance, we very often have abnormal hunger. I call it pathological hunger. Pathological means related to disease, the disease, insulin resistance. So if you get hangry or brain fog or irritable and there's nine other eight, nine other symptoms that I list as the most common. Hypoglycemia, blood sugar falling symptoms. That means you. You probably have insulin resistance. Of course, I have to say there's other things that can cause those symptoms, and headache is one of them. Of course, you can have migraines. You can have other things. So you need to talk with your doctor about what they are.

What do you need to talk? You're just saying that because you're a doctor. You could also just go online, do some research and find out what it is and change your diet and not spend the money at the doctor's office. Unless you're really sick.

Yes, if you're confident in your research.

Or you could use an AI model that I'll be talking about soon at the biohacking conference.

Oh, that sounds exciting. But. But yes. So when you're so like, we have an epidemic of worse than our obesity epidemic. We have an epidemic of insulin resistance. And in chapter three of Dark Calories, I talk about the research I found that showed that 99% of us in America, more than that, actually, are already insulin resistant, which is the first step on the metabolic disease progression to type 2 diabetes. But along the way, insulin resistance also increases your risk of everything else. It increases your risk of all kinds of inflammatory disorders. Cancer, psoriasis, increases your risk of. Of. I'm sorry I threw cancer in there. It's not an inflammatory disorder, but it does increase your risk of cancer. But I meant to say, like, asthma and, you know, inflammatory arthritis, inflammatory bowel diseases.

You don't think of cancer as an inflammatory disorder.

Well, I think of it more as a. Not so much being triggered by the inflammatory cascade and all those eicosanoids and stuff.

Yeah, it's not likeosinoids. It. It. It is, though, from mitochondrial dysfunction, which is. Creates inflammation, but. Okay, but different pathways. I. I get it why you're thinking that way. Okay.

It's oxidative stress. Yes, exactly. Yes. And so. Yeah, so. So the. The sign, though, of metabolic damage is the. Those hunger symptoms that. What's happening when you have hangry is that your brain is not getting enough sugar. And your brain isn't getting enough sugar because all your other cells in your body are gobbling it up abnormally fast because your body fat is reformulated with vegetable oil, and it destroys your cell's ability to produce energy. So you need sugar. Your cells need sugar. They have a physical addiction to sugar. And this is my energy model of insulin resistance that says vegetable oils are the root cause of type 2 diabetes. Not sugar, not carbohydrates. So I throw the whole insulin model of type 2 diabetes out the window. And I think this is very, very important because it helps people understand that vegetable oils make you crave sugar, but it's not the other way around. Sugar doesn't make you crave vegetable oil. And that's so key to getting your cravings under control and getting your whole life, your dietary life under control.

So eating the Omega 6s will make you crave sugar, and, you know, drinking a Coke won't make you crave sugar. That's what you're saying.

Well, it's not the Omega 6s. I don't want to focus on the Omega 6s because that allows the bad guys, that allows the bad guys to knock down this whole argument. The American Heart Association. So we have to say like the hateful eight. You can say the hateful eight.

Fair point. So we'll say that the hateful eight oils, that, that those are going to cause food cravings, including sugar cravings. And it's true that if you have just, you know, just a can of soda, which is not something I recommend, that you'll have far less cravings from that than you do from eating bad fats. But if you're like most people, your blood sugar will go up, then go down. And when you have really low blood sugar, you'll probably have a hypoglycemia induced craving, which is not the same as a bad fat, hateful eight induced craving. Those are stronger cravings, right?

Well, hypoglycemia actually is hypoglycemia, but so the, the, the is, they feel the same. You can't tell the difference. But the very. They're, they are bad in terms of they both drive you back to more sugar. And you don't want either one of them right now. Definitely eating sugary foods will put you kind of on a high blood sugar, low blood sugar roller coaster ride. And so I'm definitely advocating for, for eating those.

Yep.

I'm just trying to make it clear that one drives you to the other. And it's vegetable oils that drive you to sugar, not the other way around.

Gotcha. I, I like a lot sugar won't make you crave vegetable oil. Okay. Something else I like about your work is that most of the longevity doctors I've worked with, and at this point it's, it's hundreds of functional medicine doctors, they, they look at statin drugs with suspicion. And it's not that they won't ever prescribe them in certain circumstances, but There, there's a well known downside. And lately there's this one guy who says he's a longevity doctor, but in his book he says you can't extend human life. So what you should do is over train, take statins, get vaccinated, and that the best you can hope to do is to be healthy until you die at the same age you were going to die from before. And I'm like, come on, man, like, this isn't longevity medicine. This is, I'm a traumatized fat surgeon who's only been in the field for like three years kind of thinking. But it, it kind of hurts my heart to see this kind of message going out there. And your book is so solid about the risks of statins and many of the other cholesterol lowering drugs. So walk me through some of the downsides of statins that maybe we can teach this particular guy about once he learns that we can extend human life.

Absolutely. I love this topic. So, because statins are my least favorite drug and that's saying a lot. There's a lot of bad drugs out there. So statins are bad because they lower cholesterol. So cholesterol, right. I mean, cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease. Cholesterol is an antioxidant. Cholesterol does not promote oxidative stress. Why do we care? Because oxidative stress is the root cause of all disease. Oxidative stress is what causes the plaque to build up in our arteries. Ultimately, it causes the failure of the lipoprotein delivery system. And those little lipoproteins full of fat will start to crash and burn on your arteries, or they build inflammatory fat around your arteries. Both of those cause heart attacks. So to say that you need to take a cholesterol pill to lower your risk of heart disease makes no sense. And you know, I know that's what doctors learned, that we are indoctrinated in this whole thing. But that's why I keep calling out the American Heart association, because it all came from the American Heart association in the first place. The cholesterol theory of heart disease came from Ancel Keys, who was the, the benefactor of $1.75 million of research money from Procter and Gamble, who sell vegetable, sold vegetable oils at that time. And, you know, it wasn't for nothing that he was the benefactor. The American Heart association could have given that money to somebody else, but he reached up and grabbed it because he knew that he was against cholesterol and that these oils didn't have cholesterol and at the very least that they had something going for them in that sense. And so there was this synergy of interest between the oil industry and the. And Ancel Keys, who was basically running the nutrition flaw at the time of the American Heart association. And he's the one that came up with this whole idea that cholesterol caused heart disease. And he was not a good person and we shouldn't believe him. And the American Heart association is not a good organization. And it was their theory. So why are we trusting our health to these bad people who are liars and profit when we are sick? Why would we just based on that without even going deeper into the science, which I would love to do if you'd like to do that. But why would we trust a bunch of liars?

Maybe because we were so hangry we didn't have energy to think anything.

Think.

That's the only reason I could think of. And it's, it's funny, the, the side effects of statins are there. It's not that I wouldn't use them, but the first statin drug was Nystatin, which is commonly used as an antifungal anti yeast agent. And all of them are potent antifungal drugs. And funny enough, if you have a fungal infection on board, your risk of cancer goes up dramatically. But fungus will also raise cholesterol because it's your body fighting off the, the toxins from the fungus, which look a lot like cholesterol too. So there's this weird effect where maybe some of the statins are having an anti inflammatory effect because they're actually having an anti infective effect. But to be on them for life because, you know, one marker is higher than it should be. And to think if I just do that and exercise, I'm going to be healthy until I die at 86, I don't think there's good evidence for that. But if you're a, you know, cardiac surgeon or something, it seems like you're just gonna be willing to die on that. Whatever, that pile of rocks or something. I forget the analogy. It's probably a pile of canola oil bottles that you drink. What are some other drugs that lower cholesterol that don't work on extending life or making it healthier?

Yeah. So. Well, like the first cholesterol lowering drug ever invented was a drug that blocked the last step of cholesterol formation and it caused cataracts and severe skin diseases. And so it was taken off the market pretty quickly because of that. So the thing about the statins that makes them so successful from a drug marketing standpoint is that they block, unlike this other drug that was the first one that blocked one of the last steps in the formation of cholesterol, statins block a very, very early step. It's a basic building block of not just cholesterol, but things that hold our muscles together, things that make our immune system function. That's how statins suppress our immune system called isoprenoids. And so statins were block that. And because they block that early metabolic step, people can have one of a million, probably not a million, but one of many, many, many side effects. And so you, you have so many side effects that from a marketing standpoint, it's great because people will attribute it to just aging or, you know, overdoing it or something else because there's not like a single list of, you know, clear things that definitely happen from the drug.

Yeah. Mitochondrial dysfunctional will manifest throughout your entire body because it's such a low level thing where, yes, it's tied to Alzheimer's and cancers, but it's also tied to, I don't heal as fast, you know, my skin isn't as good and my digestion isn't good. And so it's, it's those things that usually trick doctors because the training is still, well, if there's more than five symptoms, the patient's probably crazy. And so that means anything that's a mitochondrial poison equals a crazy patient. Not a broad spectrum foundational assault on biology.

That is so true that if people come in with like a laundry list of things, it's, it's partly because we are overwhelmed, you know, with time. We're supposed to be seeing four patients an hour. That gives us seven minutes each.

Right.

And if they have more than one simple thing, it's like we start to think, oh my God, how am I going to get to all that stack on my inbox that I'm going to get to? And, but yes, and so I think, you know, out of desperation, we kind of justify that, like, oh gosh, they really can't be bothered by any one of them. Too bad. But yeah, no, it's, it's really terrible that this lack of a simple root cause philosophy in medicine has made us, made doctors unable to recognize health when it's sitting in front of us. You know, like, and you mentioned mitochondria. I talk about mitochondrial health because of energy. A healthy person is a person who's full of energy. You know, when you wake up in the morning and you've had a good night's sleep and you have a ton of energy, you feel amazing.

Yes.

And when your metabolism is damaged, you have fewer and fewer of those kinds of days. But because doctors don't learn about how to assess for health and energy and important stuff that people really care about, we instead learn about risk factors. You know, like high blood pressure, high blood sugar. And the, the worst of them all is high cholesterol. Because high cholesterol is not a risk factor. It's actually, it's an indicator of a nourished body.

Oh my gosh. Did you just say that high cholesterol is an indication of a nourished body?

Cholesterol is a nutrient. And doctors are so brainwashed that about it's being unhealthy for us and it being the root cause, we actually think of it as a toxin. You know, it took me a while to like, get over that fear of, of a person's number being high, like flagged as high. It's red on the lab. It must be true, right? Yeah, it took me a long time to get over that. But cholesterol is a nutrient.

I see it the same way. I mean, if you like having sex hormones which are necessary for life, or myelin in the brain, it seems like you kind of need some cholesterol, whether you eat it or make it doesn't seem to be relevant though, unless maybe you're eating oxidized cholesterol at night. There was a time, maybe 10 years ago or so, I was about to call Nina Takeholtz about maybe suing the American Heart association for some stupid stuff. They're doing like a class action lawsuit kind of thing. Don't worry. Aha. If you're listening, I'm, I'm not going to do that. And I gave a talk at, in Malibu at a, a very wealthy person's home. And some of the Hollywood elite were in the room. This one lady is a cardiothoracic surgeon. I, I had her name still. And, and I said, well, I don't know if you like what I have to say here, but I walk through some of the stuff we're talking about here and the effect of high carbohydrates and omega sixes and how cholesterol wasn't a problem to eat. And one of the major producers in Hollywood's like, well, I have an egg white omelet every morning. I'm like, give me the yolks. And, and you know that we can hang out. So she stands up and goes, I'm a Former president of a chapter of the American Heart Association. And I'm like, man, this is going to be fun. You know, I. I know my science, but she has a lot of credibility. And she stands up, she looks around everyone. She goes, what he just said is right. She said, two years ago, we announced that cholesterol is a nutrient of non concern. But no one will listen to us. They're still stuck on this idea that eating cholesterol is bad for them, but we don't even think that's true anymore. And it was almost like a. I. I honestly almost teared up. Cause I was like, man, I thought I was gonna have to, like, take these guys down. And that's a lot of work and. And all. So at least they cleared that up. They still think saturated fat's bad for you. That's a different thing. But the whole cholesterol thing is such nonsense. You can eat it or not eat it. But it does seem that eating oxidized cholesterol, like powdered egg whites, probably isn't good for you. Talk to me about oxidized versus non oxidized cholesterol.

Yeah. So oxidized just means that your body can't use it. And so instead of being able to, you know, put it into lipoproteins and circulate it around in a healthy way, your body needs to eliminate it and into the bile. So that is one of the reasons why we don't really have to worry about eating too much cholesterol. Because if our body senses that we have too much of a thing, we can simply not have it in our body. And our liver will eliminate it. Right. Also, our. Our bodies are smart. If we already have enough cholesterol, well, we won't make anymore. We'll stop making it. But we need a lot. We need like 2,000 milligrams a day. And like a tablespoon of butter has something like less than 100 milligrams. So we'd have to have like 20 tablespoons of butter. You know, it's. It'd be hard to eat too much cholesterol.

Yeah, it'd be very hard.

It'd be hard. But oxidized anything is not good. Oxidation destroys nutrients and very often turns it into toxins. And you. You know that some of the earliest experiments linking cholesterol to heart disease were done in rabbits. Who. This is 100 years ago. Guy named Virco injected rabbits with cholesterol.

And that rabbit study.

Yeah, the rabbits developed atherosclerotic lesions. They didn't have heart attacks, but they at least developed atherosclerotic lesions, which was bad. But it turns out that he was using oxidized cholesterol because, you know, this was back in the day, they did not have very good, like, ability to purify cholesterol and it was oxidized. So you, when you use regular cholesterol and you don't inject it, but you eat it, it's very difficult to give experimental animals atherosclerosis and, you know, nearly impossible to give them heart attacks. Most of these studies in animals that talk about causing heart disease don't give them heart attacks. It just gives them fatty streaks or something like that, which is very, very early stage of the damage. Because the body is smart, it can clean up these fatty streaks if you're healthy. Right. But so oxidized cholesterol was the reason that cholesterol was even on the list of possible things that could cause heart disease because of oxidation. And this just gets back to the importance of understanding oxidation a little bit. If you want to be healthy as a consumer because doctors don't learn about it, and if you want to be one of those doctors that actually does have, you know, the ability to help your patients and give me a lot more reward in my career, then you have to understand oxidation. It's crucial because oxidation is what makes us sick and kills us. And if we're recommending a diet that promotes oxidation in our cells, we're going to be making our patients worse. And we are basically becoming agents of disease if we're recommending vegetable oils to our patients.

There you go. You've been so consistent in your message now for more than 10 years. You've helped a lot of people understand this. You know, you have a great medical credentials and you're willing to say the hard things. It's. It's not a popular opinion still for a lot of the world that your cholesterol drugs are probably just malnourishing you and making your mitochondria not work as well. Cholesterol be damned. Right. What about apob? There's a lot of conversation about that. Would you look at drugs to lower that?

No. So APOB is an apolipoprotein. And it's an apolipoprotein that the body makes to help distribute cholesterol fat, fat soluble vitamins and other nutrients throughout the body. It's part of the lipoprotein delivery system for fats, circulates throughout our bloodstream. It's not a bad guy. And it's associated with ldl, Right? So that is how it's gotten, like, called out as a problem. But it literally is not a problem. Having high LDL is not a problem. There is no such thing as bad cholesterol in a healthy oxidative stress under control body. And it's. And of course, it's not just apob that can play a role in heart disease. When your diet is unhealthy and your lipoproteins are oxidized. It's also all the other ones. You can oxidize apoa, you can oxidize apoe, and that is all bad.

We don't even measure oxidized APO A or B. So let me read you a direct quote from when Peter Attia was on my show, back before he had a podcast and decided to charge a quarter million dollars to tell people they can't live longer. He says. And so I know, unfortunately, it's really popular in the blogosphere to talk about how heart disease has nothing to do with LDL and has nothing to do with cholesterol and all these things. But the reality of it is that's just patently false. This is clearly a disease that is driven by lipoproteins, inflammation and endothelial dysfunction. So he says it's patently false, everything you just said. Now, granted, he only has a couple years in the longevity field. He's a fat surgeon with trauma. We have to account for that. Like, he just, he just got sick, decided to get well, and decided to do it by exercise. Exercise, exercise and statins and vaccines and wrote a book about it. But how do you account for medical doctors with lots of books saying that it's patently false that cholesterol causes heart disease? Like, one of you guys has to be right. I think I know who's right. It's pretty obvious. But how do you respond to people who just say it's false?

Well, I'm just saying they don't understand oxidative stress. I mean, that's like the simplest way to put it. It's oxidative. Stress is what sickens and kills us. And it's not cholesterol. Cholesterol is a molecule that has been with life on Earth for a couple of billion years. And it's been in our bodies ever since we've been humans, and it's been at pretty high levels. There's so many studies that show that high levels of cholesterol correlate with better longevity, better, less dementia, less cancer, and on and on it goes. It's selective thinking. I would say that, you know, people are. They have to have something, I guess, that they say is controversial. I don't know why saying that. But. But it's not based on a knowledge or understanding of how the body works and what makes us sick, I can tell you that. And, and also there are. There are doctors, you know, just, you know, so that's like the, the mechanistic argument he has. There is none. There is no mechanistic argument that by which cholesterol can cause oxidative stress and therefore cause atherosclerosis and therefore cause heart attacks. Right. We have to go step by step here. We can't just say cholesterol bad. Yeah, we have to understand every step in the process when we're talking about a disease mechanism. But there are, aside from the mechanism, the lack of mechanistic evidence against cholesterol. There's so many doctors who are practicing with living patients and have thousands of living patients of worth of experience that without really thinking about any of the mechanisms, they came to the conclusion themselves that people were looking better and feeling better and not dropping dead of heart disease when their cholesterol was high. Also, some of these doctors are of a certain age, like myself. And when we first graduated, when I was first in training in medical school, a high cholesterol was 300. Total cholesterol, 300. And they've had to lower this time and time again. And now we're talking about not just total cholesterol anymore. We're focused on LDL. Well, when I first graduated, that number was 190. And now it's down, getting down below 70. And they're talking about maybe lowering it towards 20 because they don't think that would kill people. So that too, like having that extra perspective of why do they keep moving those goal posts? Why are they changing the rules of the game? Why do they have to do that?

Well, they have to do it because they have to be right. Because it's too much work to rethink some basic beliefs there. Yeah, I've gone through the, oh, my gosh, my cholesterol is high. And right now it varies. It's usually around 220. Cholesterol tests change based on what you ate. You can lower your cholesterol by 50 points in three days if you want to get life insurance or something. Like, we know how to do that. Activated charcoal helps. Like, there's. There's just lots of ways to, to just tweak cholesterol. So it's just a nutrient that flows around in your blood.

It is hard sometimes to raise it, you know.

Oh, it's quite hard to raise it. What I see from millions of people who've gone on the bulletproof diet over the years is almost universally HDL goes up, triglycerides go through the floor. Those are both good things. Ldl, I couldn't tell you. Some people it goes up, some people it goes down. And for most, more than half of people, it'll go up for two years and then go down. And at, during that time they resolve fatty liver and that's why their cholesterol is high as they're transporting all the crap oils out of their fat. And I'm, I'm sitting here, I just had a liver scan. We're doing a bunch of those at the biohacking conference with one of the, one of the vendors there and they said, oh wow, you know, you have exceptionally low stiffening of the liver for someone your age. You know, top 1% of that and exceptionally low, like almost unheard of fat in the liver. And you my fmris and spec, it's like less than.08% liver fat. Last time I had it quantified, which is low for an 18 year old. So apparently eating all this fat lowers liver fat. And during the process of lowering liver fat, which is high, if you have diabetes or pre diabetes, you might have more triglycerides or you might have more cholesterol. So it's a multi year problem. But this isn't something that you know, you're gonna hear when somebody says take some drugs to reduce cholesterol. They didn't talk about homocysteine, they didn't talk about C reactive protein, they didn't talk about all the other markers of inflammation that are clearly more correlated with heart attacks. So I, I just, it's frustrating, uh, when you hear people taking steps that reduce their energy, which is what statins can do for a lot of people out of a false fear or just from getting bad advice from popular books.

It's tragic really because I've seen this happen so many times that people feel, you know, going back in people's histories, they were, they were basically okay and they, but they went to their doctor for a physical and they had the high cholesterol work put on a statin. Then they start feeling depressed because your brain needs cholesterol, possibly partly because of that. But no, they blame it on, well, I'm going through a divorce, right H. Maybe you're going through a divorce because low cholesterol also Makes people irritable. This was something that Dr. Beatrice Golem discovered many, many years ago. Makes. Lowering cholesterol makes. Can make you some people irritable. So it can change your personality. So, but I would, I would see these people that as going back in their history, more problems accumulated and more drugs. I call it the statin slippery slope. You start out healthy, you go in for a physical, your cholesterol's up, you get on a statin, your health goes downhill from there. Then the next drug might be, you know, you're depressed and you're going through a divorce. Now you're divorced, now you want to go date. But, oh, gosh, now you have low testosterone and erectile dysfunction, so you get on a drug for that. Those are pretty safe.

I'm glad you said that. I would just say one of my longevity drugs is low dose or microdose Cialis, because enormous studies about blood flow in the brain.

Right, right. So, but then another thing, like I've seen this pattern, like, so people get. And then they get another problem. Say maybe it's heartburn. Right. Because your, your cholesterol, your cholesterol can. If you're low in cholesterol, then rapidly dividing cells can't divide so rapidly. And your gastrointestinal system is full of the most rapidly dividing cells in the body. So statins cause lots of intestinal distress. And then you get on another drug like omeprazole or a proton pump inhibitor that lowers your, lowers your acid. Your stomach acid.

Yeah. And you can't absorb minerals at that point. And then you're screwed.

Right. Throws off your whole gut flora. You can, it is associated with a higher rate of osteoporosis and bone fractures. And on and on it goes. That is the statin slippery slope. And so one of the other reasons I wanted to write this book was to help people gain the confidence that they don't need that statin. That high cholesterol is never been the problem that hurt anyone and it will never hurt you. It's actually a good thing to have. And especially if your HDL is high and your triglycerides are low, you can go ahead and celebrate that high total cholesterol and that high ldl because it means your body is replete with this very important nutrient.

I like that perspective. I will say it's a nuanced argument. And when someone tells you straight up, looks at you, you have high cholesterol, you're going to die, it's the same thing as saying if you don't Smoke like the way your doctor says you're going to die. Or if you don't buy a new pickup truck, no one will love you and then you'll die. Or if you don't buy my makeup, you won't look pretty and then you'll die. It's not reality, it's marketing and it's very dark marketing that's expertly designed and it's delivered by doctors who are not even aware they're doing it because it's really good marketing. You can't spot good marketing when it's done right. It just looks like it's obvious. So I feel like we're experiencing that with seed oils. I feel like we're experiencing that with statin drugs. And it's sad to see that some people get kind of sucked into that and then expand the thing and probably, you know, are suppressing their own testosterone and suppressing their own cholesterol to the detriment of their cognitive function. Right. So I don't, I don't like seeing this happen in our society, especially to our elders. When you're in your 60s, 70s, 80s, you've probably made enough mistakes to really learn some good stuff. And that's when you're supposed to be giving back and teaching people. But not if your brain's too tired because you're on blood pressure lowering medications. So your brain has no blood and you're on anti cholesterol medications here. Testosterone's in the tank. It's no wonder you just wanna watch Jeopardy. All day. Like I would wanna watch Jeopardy. All day under those circumstances.

You know, it. One of the worst things I hear from that makes me the most upset is when someone has read my books but their spouse hasn't and they're on a cholesterol medication. And then they tell me that they, they notice that their memory is slipping and also they're not avoiding the seed oils. Right. So like there are so many things that assault our brain. There is cigarette smoking is an assault on the brain, oxidative stress. Alcohol is an assault on the brain. It's a solvent. It also damages mitochondria and the vegetable oils and the, the statins and those combine and they create so much suffering in the form of cognitive decline, mood disorders, serious, serious mental health problems. You know, I truly believe that mental health, most mental health disorders are metabolic disorders and that they can be like reversed entirely or at least a whole bunch with improve diet, starting with getting off the vegetable oils. I know a lot of folks are using the keto diet now For a lot of these amazing health turnarounds in mental health. And also the keto diet is giving like taking diabetics off of drugs. But if you don't, if you do a keto diet and don't cut out the seed oils, you don't get the benefits. And so like, this is another thing that takes us back to cholesterol in the American Heart association because there are a number of studies on the keto diet for diabetes that, that were designed not by, that were designed by dietitians who are concerned about cholesterol that essentially kept people on a lot of vegetable oil. And those show that the keto diet fails to be any better than like the standard of care for diabetes, which is a high carb diet. Right. So the keto diet only works for anything if you're also, if you're not, I'm sorry, the keto diet only works when you cut out the seed oils.

Thank you for saying that. I did the keto diet, called the Atkins diet way back in like 1990 when I was trying to lose weight at the end of high school cause I was getting fat. But the original Atkins diet was like if it's not a carb, you can eat it. And so it was full of bad oils. And I, I saw so many people, including me, I, I could lose 50 of my, a hundred pounds to lose on that kind of diet. And then you plateau and then you start telling yourself it's cuz I'm just not keto enough. If only I could do 9 grams of carbs instead of 12. And even speaking at some of the early low carb conferences about that, the bulletproof diet was like, hey, ketosis with the right fats works. Ketosis with the wrong fats doesn't work. And it's true also of proteins. You know, soy protein for ketosis is pretty shitty. So once you teach people that and that they don't have to be in ketosis all the time, just some of the time, like suddenly a lot of stuff opens up for them and there will be shifts as their metabolism improves. But I, I do have one more kind of question about cholesterol here. I, I see people talking about, you know, lp, little A, they're talking about apoa and B, LDL particle numbers and ldl lp. How important is this? It feels like we're just saying, well, it must be cholesterol, therefore we're just going to like look so far inside cholesterol until we're seeing, you know, mandalas or something. But is there any validity to this or is this just like worried to doctors trying to stick to the cholesterol hypothesis?

Well, it's making a very simple thing so much more complicated than it needs to be. It does come down to oxidation. Now one of those markers I think is a reflection of oxidative stress and that's lp.

Yes.

And I say that because I have seen that improve, strangely enough, when people get off protein powders, because like you mentioned, you know, protein powders are not the natural form of how our body gets protein, but they, they can promote glycation and, and that's, and that's a form of a chemical reaction that is related to oxidative stress. But they can. I've seen people with high LP who have a lot of protein powder in their diet. I've told them to swap that out for real food based protein. And their LP has improved. I've seen that time and again.

Is that because of the amino acids like leucine can raise lp?

I think it's because, yes, the amino acids are sticky. And something about that LP molecule attracts certain amino acids to it. Like, we don't really know what it's, we don't really know all the ins and outs of this, this particular lipoprotein that we're calling lp. We don't know what the function is of it when it doesn't have, when it's not in its, you know, amino acid adduct form, this abnormal form that we identify. So we just don't know. But I do know that I have.

Seen that reversed steak, not collagen powder.

Yeah, exactly right. Real protein, real food protein.

Got it. I'm not opposed to doing both. Still, I think there's some pretty good evidence for collagen, but I wouldn't live on it. I would max it out at 20 grams a day.

You know, I'm glad you brought up collagen powder. Collagen is a little bit different than, than like say, you know, hydrolyzed, you know, beef protein or hydrolyzed soy protein or the hydrolyzed proteins. Because collagen is actually made up of a different group of amino acids and it's not fully hydrolyzed either. It's partly hydrolyzed. And there's peptides in there that have positive effects in our bodies.

Exactly.

So I don't put that in the same category as like the muscle building kinds of protein powders.

Yeah, I do. You know, I, I made collagen a billion dollar industry category when I was at Bulletproof. And by the way, guys you haven't heard? They let me go a year ago. And, like, I don't have anything to do. It's been bought by an investment bank. So what? Whatever's gone over there is not something I have any visibility into or control over. But collagen, when you take it in very high doses, it actually metabolizes in a meaningful way to oxalate. Right? So if you're avoiding kale and spinach and you're doing a hundred grams of collagen a day, you're probably overdoing it. And 20 grams a day is not gonna turn into a meaningful amount. And it'll provide the signal to your body via peptides to trigger healing of your joints, your skin and your tendons. I wrote about that in my last book. And collagen, when you take it alongside animal proteins, changes the ratio of amino acids. And I would. I would guess, without any studies on this, that changing the ratio of leucine to glycine, which is high in collagen, would probably affect lp. But again, that's just a guess based on how things seem to work. But we also know matching methionine and leucine to glycine has other benefits. These are. This is kind of nerdy deep protein stuff. Because if you're sitting here going, well, I'm not use. Not supposed to use protein powders. Like, what do I do? Because I can't get enough protein. And if you're on a zyc or something to use the protein powder. And don't worry about lp. It's more important you get the protein than not get the protein. But if you can eat meat instead of powdered meat or dairy, that's probably a good idea. So I'm. I'm with you there.

Yeah. Makes a world of difference to do what our bodies are expecting for so many different reasons. You know, we. I remember in the 70s, living through the sort of the better living through chemistry era and the astronaut promoting Tang. Right. Dehydrated food.

Oh, my gosh. I remember that.

Yeah. But it, you know, the more that something is processed and the more that it's. The more something is processed, the more it oxidizes, and that makes it less nutritious. So. So really the key is just finding real foods that you can make as quickly and conveniently as something like a protein powder. And I have a few. Quite a few recommendations in the back of my book, Dark Calories to help you actually get real, healthy, whole foods to be about as convenient as these, you know, instant processed foods. That everybody's trying to feed us.

I like it. We're going to make it. So people only want to buy good food and when they see these seed oils, the Hateful Eight in the label, you just don't buy it. And then that immediately causes seizures in the the board members of processed food companies and after 2/4 of that they change their formulation. Campbell's Soup a few years ago had a 20% drop in sales and they reformulated to have less chemicals. Like who would have thought. So thank you food babe for continuing that fight when it needs to happen.

Great.

So Kate, I absolutely appreciate your work. You've been consistently right with probably with a couple little things that aren't right, just like me. But you're directionally so far ahead of the curve that it's always a pleasure to talk with you and hear what you're up to. And I love the way you package things to make it really easy to understand, like the Hateful Eight and delightful dozen and just ways to think about it so it doesn't have to be that difficult. So I appreciate your work and I'm looking forward to talking with you again in a while.

Well, thank you so much, Dave. I really appreciate these conversations you always make. My my little bit of smoke come out of my ears with all of your deep thoughts and deep knowledge.

Well, thanks. And I only trolled Peter ATI a little bit, but that's because he's been on a biohacking hateful rant lately. So I just like to poke him because it's funny. And and so thank you for the calm and rational discussion about statin drugs.

My pleasure.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

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