Identifying Healthy Fats - with Dr. Catherine Shanahan | The Empowering Neurologist EP. 105

Well, hello everyone. Welcome again to The Empowering Neurologist. I'm your host, Dr. David Perlmutter. You know, it's still pretty pervasive that we think we need to avoid eating fat, you know, from the years of being told that dietary fat will give you a heart attack and who knows what else. There's still the presence in the grocery store of the low-fat food, no-fat food being good for us. And the truth of the matter is our bodies need, desperately need dietary fat. Obviously, quality is important. What tends to relate to our pervasive chronic diseases, which are by and large inflammatory, is the consumption that is so widespread of refined carbohydrates, certainly simple sugars, and other ultra-processed foods. Today we're going to look at a very interesting book by speaking to the author. Oh, those are my notes. It's called The Fat Burn Fix. Dr. Catherine Shanahan comes back on the program. We talked to her in the past about her other book called Deep Nutrition. She is a trained family medicine practitioner and also has a deep background in biochemistry and genetics. She studied at Cornell, has authored, as I mentioned, Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food. And the genes she's talking about there are your DNA-type genes, not your Levi's. And also this new book, The Fat Burn Fix, that just came out a couple of months ago. She has worked with the LA Lakers to design nutrition programs and really, I think, played a very She's played a fundamental role in starting our interest in things like bone broth and collagen. And, you know, she was certainly inspirational early on in raising our awareness of the value of increasing the production in our bodies of dietary ketones. So she's assisted a number of companies with optimizing the health of their employees. And she has served in that role as an independent advisor to dozens of companies, working with, as I mentioned, sports teams including the LA Lakers, Villanova basketball team, and various other actual companies. She's been featured on multiple documentaries that you may have seen, like The Magic Pill. I think I was in that one, not sure. And we've seen her on CNN. in Men's Journal, Sports Illustrated, Scientific American. She's been on Good Morning America, recently featured on Bill Maher's program. She's been in Vogue, National Geographic, GQ, New York Post, Women's World, People magazine, and we're delighted to have her join us today on the program. So let's get started. Well, hello, Dr. Shanahan. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Dr. Perlmutter. Thank you for having me back on.

I'm delighted, and What we're talking about today, for so many of us, we kind of get it that fat plays such an important role in our diets, but what's your experience in terms of where we are today with respect to just the general perception of dietary fat? Where are we? And then maybe where do we need to go?

We are in the dark ages still, because when we talk about fat, we don't make the most important distinction, which is what kind of fat. And we still, on the one hand, have places like Harvard and Tufts recommending more vegetable oils and more seed oils, which is inconceivable to me. And then on the other hand, we have kind of the low-carb movement, the keto movement, the doctors who actually really truly care about metabolic health and their patients' health saying that, no, no, stop eating those things. And we want to get back to eating the fats that people have always eaten, which is butter, eggs, cheese, of course coconut, wherever we could get our hands on fat. But it certainly was not out of a factory bottle of

We're just going to dance around a little bit. Why not canola oil? I mean, because restaurants are using it, even very popular health food stores, not to mention any one name, are using it on their salad bars. What's your objection to canola oil?

Canola oil is a seed oil. And so it's one of 8, I call them the hateful 8. And it's really no better, no worse than the other hateful 8. But the reason that the canola oil industry will tell you that it is better than soy and corn is because it has omega-3 in there. And omega-3 is one of the 2 essential polyunsaturated fatty acids that we need. We need it for brain health. We do need to consume some. But the reason I have a problem with canola oil has to do with the processing and It all boils down to this, the fact that whether it's omega-3 or omega-6, it's an unstable fat. And that's why we can't be eating so many seed oils and plant oils as we are right now, because they are high in these unstable fats. And the chemical term is the polyunsaturated fats. And you can break the polys down into omega-3 and omega-6, which have opposing effects in our body. They're not meant to be used for fuel. They're meant to really to be signaling molecules in a, you know, in a certain amount in our cell membrane so that when we get a cut, for example, in our skin, we can have, you know, clotting and healing start to occur. We can, if we get like an infection, these signaling molecules help fight off infections. And it's playing a big role in what's happening with the coronavirus and people's immune systems not being able to fight off the infection due to so much inflammation. But they promote inflammation, right? So canola oil, just like soy and corn, promotes inflammation because it's unstable. And the amount that we consume these seed oils in these days is the problem. If we could dial back our consumption of omega-3 and omega-6, ensure that it only comes from food, whole food, not factory-processed oils, we'd be fine. We'd be back where we were 100 years ago when our consumption was about a 10th or a 20th or a 30th, depending on who you are, of what it is now. But we're having 10, 20, 30 times more than our bodies can handle. And it builds up in our body fat. It acts like a toxin, and it makes it so that our body fat is inflammatory. And it has huge implications for every aspect of our health. And this is why the metabolic health of Americans in our country today, when we're talking about the obesity epidemic, we're talking about metabolic health. When we're talking about diabetes, we're talking about metabolic health. If you want to point the finger at one enemy, it's these unstable PUFAs in the seed oils, the hateful 8.

You know, you're too young to remember this, but when I was a kid, and I watched a fair amount of television, I have to say, I remember the ads on television saying that— I think I'm just going to say a name. It was Mazola oil. And they had— anyway, the tagline was higher in polyunsaturates, like that was a good thing. Yeah. And now, how quickly we learned, you know, that really isn't what we have always consumed traditionally, and certainly not what's good for us. But I think a lot of people would think, as a residual from the messaging from years gone by, that eating fat makes you fat. And early in your book, you talk about the role of fat in terms of appetite hormones, ghrelin, leptin. So maybe you can just walk us through how dietary fat actually plays a role in regulating our appetite and what role that might have in terms of obesity.

So it's our body fat that acts as an organ that helps to regulate it. So when we have fat in our diet, Very often it ends up in our body fat. When we have too much of anything, actually, or an excess of anything, it can end up in our body fat. So as you know, when we eat too much carbohydrate, too much wheat, it ends up as body fat, right? And that's okay. It's okay as long as we're not obese or overweight. If our diet is healthy, it's okay for something to end up in your body fat. Your body fat is this— is the hugest organ in your body. Even if you're at a healthy weight, it weighs 10, 20, 30, 40 pounds depending on your age and your height. Certainly, it's a humongous organ if you're overweight. And what it's doing, what it's supposed to be doing, is sending signals to your brain that there's plenty of energy on board and that you don't need to be hungry. And it's supposed to work so well that you almost never really feel hunger during the day. It's become the norm now. We don't have like the experience of normal hunger anymore. I mean, people are almost afraid of hunger now. Like, you hear the way people talk about you've got to— you don't want to let yourselves get hungry. I mean, literally, dietitians especially sports nutritionists, they're telling people you can't let yourself get hungry. It's going to slow down your metabolism. That's absolute nonsense. But the truth is, if you're healthy, if your body fat is doing its job, you are not going to be hungry because the reason it has these hormones and leptin is, you know, one of the key hormones that your body fat sends directly to the appetite centers of your brain. Just, it's a constant signal saying, yep, there's plenty here, plenty of energy here that charges The synapse, the nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system, which is the get-up-and-go nervous system. So it charges it literally, and it gives you get-up-and-go. So not only do you not have hunger, you have energy. And this is how we are supposed to wake up in the morning because we have been burning our body fat. We're supposed to feel Energized, not hungry. And nature does it this way because that's— we're actually supposed to have to work pretty hard for our food. So we have to have lots of energy to hunt it down. But when your body fat is loaded with these hateful 8 seed oils and it's pro-inflammatory, it can't send that leptin energizing signal to your brain. It can't energize your nervous system. And so it does 2 big things, 2 bad things. It makes you always a little bit more tired than you should be. You don't really have a get up and go. And you don't— particularly important is you don't have this compensatory get-up-and-go. Like, if you eat too many calories, it's actually supposed to energize you the next day so that you want to burn them off. And studies show that when people have a healthy metabolism, that's what happens. You can— you eat a bunch of extra calories, you can burn off hundreds of extra calories without even, like, thinking about it as being an on-purpose kind of thing. It happens spontaneously. Because you're that much more energized.

Well, I do think we tend to go into conservation mode when we are calorie or nutrient deprived, in addition to doing other things to prepare us for a more prolonged period of caloric restriction. We enhance the brain's ability to function, we enhance production of ketones to power the brain, BDNF, etc. You talk about really being So careful, and you talk about the dangerous fats, but in terms of the foods that we eat, being very careful in terms of how these fats are actually ultimately purveyed to us, how they're processed, are they processed at all? If you could just sort of walk us through what it's like for Dr. Shanahan to walk down the aisle of a grocery store, pick up a bottle of oil/fat, and what is it you're looking for? How do you determine if it's— Yeah. A go or no-go?

Yeah, you look for the hateful 8 seed oils. So on my website, drkate.com, I have an infographic. You could take a picture of it on your— keep it on your phone. So I'm only— I'm really just looking for the 8 vegetable oils. So there's 3 that start with C: corn, canola, cottonseed, and 3 that start with S: soy, sunflower, safflower. And those are the main ones you're going to find in the grocery store. The other 2 great Seed and rice bran you find mostly in restaurants. But when you walk in, I'm glad you talked about the grocery store. When you walk into the grocery store, you're usually very often, you're greeted with a table of buy one, get one free. And I challenge—

The first table you're greeted with now is gloves and a mask.

But after that— Yeah, right. So, so I guess I haven't been in a grocery store in a couple of weeks. My husband's doing that. So yeah, so you look at the buy one, get one free stuff, and you'd be hard pressed to find one that doesn't have—

Hard pressed, seed oil. I like it.

Yeah, right. No pun intended. To find something on that table that doesn't have a seed oil in it. If it has any kind of fat, chances are really good it's going to be one of the seed oils. Chances are also good it's going to have sugar and flour in it. So this is what the manufacturers are inviting you To do first and foremost, don't miss this opportunity to make yourself sick walking into a store. If you want to save money, you're going to— you're going to— I mean, who doesn't want to save money, right? So it's kind of hard not to at least start looking through that table. And this is how they lure you into the world of chronic disease by cost savings. That's what— that's what we're talking about most of the time when people are talking about food, it's about how little they spent. And then the other world, when people are talking about food, the other experts in our world who are basically— Dr. Perlmutter, you are and I, like, our competition, if you will, you know, for truth, right? We're saying kind of the opposite of what I'm guessing you learned in medical school, the same kind of stuff I learned. saturated fat's bad, butter's bad. And we have to go through this process. I call it like walk through the looking glass and realize that everything that we were taught about nutrition in medical school was exactly backwards. And so now there's this cadre of doctors who are saying the opposite of our— the most respected institutions like Harvard and Tufts and Yale. You know, it leaves people in the middle. And what I want to do is I like to just highlight that this is not accidental and see what you think about that. I mean, because I think that these folks are mouthpieces for the processed food industry and they want you to eat their garbage. I was going to say something else. But, you know, they care nothing about your health, and they really don't even acknowledge that there's another side of the story because we're actually dangerous, right? They just pretend like nothing's happening.

Right. They're not advocating increasing dietary fat. And they will tell us that we are only basing our commentary— they are— on what the peer-reviewed science is telling us. And the reality is As was revealed in both JAMA and then the New York Times, is that even beginning in the late 1960s, that industry had these researchers at many of the institutions you just mentioned in the palm of their hands, compensating them to write articles in favor of increasing refined carbohydrates and reducing fat of all kinds across the board. That's how it entered the gestalt and became so— Right. Ingrained. Ingrained. Did I mean to say that? In terms of our practice. And I would just say for our viewers that when you call attention to the fact that what I've learned in my later life, in comparison to what I learned in medical school, that there was this disparity. I didn't learn anything about nutrition in medical school except where I could find snacks in the middle of the night when I was on call. We learn nothing in medical school about nutrition. I didn't have 1 hour in nutrition, but a year's worth of pharmacology. So, I didn't— I guess, you know, I didn't have that many bad things to unlearn, but yet— and I think it's pervasive today. I think that any meaningful education in medical school is only being— with respect to nutrition, is only being accomplished in less than 30% of the American schools in America today. And yet every veterinary school 100% requires extensive education as it relates to nutrition for the animals for which these doctors will then care. So who knew? But I think that you are correct that what we are up against in terms of industry is profound. Dr. Mark Hyman, as you know, recently published a book called Food Fix and explores the depth of the influence that these major food corporations have on the global consumption of food. In other words, this westernization of the global diet and the chronic long-term health consequences that we see that are unfolding, bankrupting our ability to care for patients globally, just based upon What we're seeing. And I guess I went off a little bit there, but what can I say? It was important. What I'd like to cover, you mentioned the 5 rules, and I think rule number 1, it gets back to vegetable oil. And let's just emphasize, because I think that's going to take quite a bit of undoing for people when you, you know, you're talking about the 8 oils that we should avoid. Yeah. Then where should we get our good fat?

We should get it from dairy fat. It's a super potentially healthy source of fat. Unfortunately, we have to also— I mean, I can't pretend that the dairy industry does a great job of raising and feeding animals and that it's in any way pleasant for a lot of people to think about or what it's good What it does to the environment is good. But also, but that's, that's the, you know, there we are, right? We're presented with either a horrible treatment of animals situation or we have to go vegan. It's like a Sophie's choice of bad, bad options. But to continue with like that, so the animal fats, like full-fat hamburger, if you can get it from pasture-raised animals, if you can get it, your dairy from cows that eat grass, it's a better, healthier food chain. It's a farmer that you want support. And of course, then all the plant fats that are in whole foods, I'm totally behind, right? So the seed oils are bad because of the concentration, the extraction, the instability, and the damage that occurs during the processing. But if you want to eat seeds, if you want to eat sunflower seeds or nuts, peanuts, peanut oil, the flavorful fats and the fats from whole foods are really the best way to go.

Let's be clear. When you say the fats from whole foods, what do you mean by whole foods? Because I think some people might think— you mean foods that have not been processed. Not the store.

Yes. I mean foods that are intact still, that they look like what they came out of the ground as, seeds and nuts. And ideally, if we're going to do any kind of pure fat, it's been minimally processed. So like butter, right? That came from cream that rose to the top of milk. It was mechanically churned. Churned, minimal processing. Coconut oil, the coconuts are so fatty you don't have to do a lot of processing. And the same with the other oils that I recommend, like olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, almond oil. This is also all on my website, and I have some infographics right up front on my website that's easy for people to find. And it's really like the most important piece of information I think anybody could just have on their phone to refer to when they're going shopping.

There is a new— several brands of safflower oil that apparently have the same level of monounsaturated fatty acids as avocado oil, rather as olive oil. So yet you have them on your list. So maybe that being on the list is a bit conditional with respect to these new—

Very. Yeah, very much so. Because for one thing, the manufacturers are not yet identifying consistently that these whether or not these safflower, also sunflower, the same idea, and even canola, like the same idea. They supposedly have a high mono version of canola. But so there's— I can't really recommend them wholeheartedly at this point just because it's not always clear what you're getting. And the other thing is it's still refined, right? So the refining strips away all of the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and generally the bleaching process that occurs after that, any polyunsaturated fatty acids that are in there are going to be converted into toxins, including trans fats and some serious cellular cytotoxic things that damage DNA. Not the case with most kind of olive oil, right? Because olive oil, we've got this awareness of at least the better grades of olive oil is extra virgin, right? There's quite a lot of grades of olive oil, and the lowest grade, which is lampenite, is not something I recommend either. So you can get a little bit complicated, but generally, when you're buying olive oil, when you're getting a product from the store, it's not going to have olive oil in it. It's just too expensive. So it's not really an issue. It's just when you're buying your own olive oil, you just want to make sure you get the good stuff.

I always caution— People about asking for olive oil in a restaurant. I mean, I don't think that I've ever really tasted olive oil in a restaurant that was real olive oil. And oftentimes, I'll say, you know, after they bring it out, I'll say, can you bring me the bottle that it came out of so I can just see? And if it's 51% olive oil, and who knows what the rest of it is, typically canola, that they're allowed to say it's olive oil. And so— What my wife and I do in the day when we used to go out to restaurants, we bring our own little bottle of olive oil. My wife would put it in her purse or I would carry it. There you go. I know that seems strange, but these days especially, you're allowed to do strange things and get away with it. Number 2, carbs. And you are really very emphatic about, you know, the rates of digestion. Blood sugar elevation from highly refined carbohydrates. Tell us about that.

So the sugars, anything sweet tasting, is going to bump up your blood sugar and going to affect your hormones, your insulin, in ways that can make you hungry and tired later. It can make you eat too much at the time. Same with refined flour, just because it bumps up your blood sugar very quickly, it gets digested very quickly. So you hit the nail right on the head. It's all about how fast does it get broken down by the digestive system? And that impacts how fast it gets into your bloodstream, which impacts your blood sugar spike, which impacts your insulin spike. And so if you can have the— like, if we want to contrast, for example, the carbohydrate that's in like a bean versus the carbohydrate that comes from wheat flour, the bean is not going to get into your bloodstream For sometimes an hour, sometimes 2 hours, and the blood sugar spike that you see when consuming the same exact quantity in calories is minimal. And I've been using continuous glucometer devices where we are constantly reading somebody's blood sugar and it creates a constant little graph after you eat anything, you get a little bump or you don't. And so we can determine and we can show people the vast difference between the different kinds of carbohydrate-containing foods. So I encourage people, if you want to have carbohydrates in your diet, then definitely have them again in the form of the whole foods or the whole grain. I'm not totally against grains.

Against the grain.

Yeah.

You know, again, so what you're saying is that the notion of avoiding all carbs can be a Actually problematic if people are avoiding dietary fiber, which by definition is a carbohydrate, but it's that more refined carbohydrates that you're talking about that play havoc in terms of insulin sensitivity, elevating blood sugar, and all the downstream effects related to that.

Absolutely. So that messes up your hormones. And that's the key because so many people who have weight issues and so many Americans have something called insulin resistance. And when you have insulin resistance, there's a mismatch between your actual blood sugar level and your hormone, your hormone efficacy. So what happens is your insulin stays up too high too long, and it pushes your blood sugar down below where your brain is comfortable. And so you get hypoglycemia symptoms. which are brain energy crisis symptoms. And I have somebody in the hospital right now misdiagnosed, I think, as a TIA, when I think all she had was a serious hypoglycemia episode. And this is a big deal because it could change her life. She's going to be forced to be on statins and possibly blood thinners, possibly, you know, get a stent implanted in her artery. Hypoglycemia occurs in people who are insulin resistant much more commonly after eating these These sweets and these refined flours and carbohydrates.

You then talk about something I think that needs so much attention, and that is water. I mean, why do not more people talk about water? And you bring it up, and I think it's really important.

Yeah, it's really so helpful. It helps you lose weight in so many different ways because for one thing, it helps fill up your stomach while you're eating. And, you know, the whole reason that the dietitians Want us to eat more fiber. And the whole reason, that rationale they gave us in the first place for saying fat was bad is because they're saying it doesn't mechanically distend your stomach because it's so calorie dense, right? So if you want to mechanically distend your stomach, according to the dietitians, you have to eat flour or bread or pasta. But you could also just do it with water because that mechanical distension helps your brain recognize that you're full. And it's The more metabolically damaged you are, and in other words, if you have type 2 diabetes, you may need this kind of mechanical distension with water in order for your brain to register, oh, okay, I got something in here now, because you have so much inflammation that your appetite regulation centers can't sense the beneficial chemicals that normally would make you feel full, like normally the saturated fats and the cholesterol-rich foods. Make you feel powerfully sated and powerfully full and help you stop eating after you've had just 2 or 3 eggs, which is less than 200 calories versus, you know, if you have a chocolate cake, you can guzzle that whole 400 calories worth of the slice down and want another slice because there's almost no cholesterol in it anymore and very little saturated fat anymore.

Yeah, it's often been said that people don't binge on high-fat, high-protein foods. I mean, who binges on steak or avocados? And yet, you know, you can eat chocolate, as you say, chocolate cake, and it just keeps happening, right? Or the glazed doughnut, and people just don't know when to quit. You were talking in your book about supplements, and I think that section you talked about things like vitamin D and collagen, etc. So supplements are supplemental by definition, but yet you seem to have identified at least a core group of supplements that you feel are very important. Can you walk us through those?

So absolutely. I feel like everybody should take a multivitamin that has pretty close to 100% of the RDA of everything, which is actually shockingly, there are not very many of those on the market. So I identify one of my website and in the book. And the reason I want that is because there's— what is the benefit of taking like 3,000 times the RDA of one vitamin and 10% the RDA of another vitamin? It just makes no sense to me. So just sort of as a cover your bases, let's try to get at least what we think is the best vitamin, you know, levels of vitamins in our diet. So that's essential for vitamins. And then minerals is another category. So vitamins are things like A, B, C, D. And actually, on the topic of D, that is another one which, because we don't eat a lot of liver, we don't eat very much fatty fish, and when we do, very often it's farmed and not wild. Those are the food sources of vitamin D. There are very few other food sources of vitamin D. We used to get it entirely, almost entirely from the sun. We have to have enough cholesterol in our skin and enough sunlight on our skin, which we just don't get. Like, I'm in Florida right now and right outside there's lots of sun, but I haven't been out there all day. So I want everybody to supplement with somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 international units of D, just because doing tests over a number of years, I found that that is the range that gets you in blood range. And then—

Go ahead. I'm sorry.

I was just going to touch on minerals really quick. Okay. And I recommend supplementing them separately just because, first of all, zinc and magnesium are the 2 minerals that I've found over the years of analyzing what the average person eats, they're not getting enough, probably because our soil is relatively depleted, so our food is relatively low. So zinc and magnesium. And then another one that if you don't do dairy, because a lot of people have allergies of one sort or another, calcium, you want to consider getting a supplemental amount of that. Not the full RDA, but a supplemental amount because your body actually doesn't really know what to do with minerals when they don't come in in the form of food. They're not used anywhere near as efficiently. And so things like calcium may actually cause kidney stones if you have more than something like half the RDA that comes just in the supplemental form.

These days, there seems to be a big push in terms of supplements in doing genome analysis on the front end and determining really specifically what people might need with reference to things like B vitamins, methylated B vitamins, vitamin D based on their polymorphisms for the vitamin D receptor. So, do you spend much time looking at personalized medicine or genetic uniqueness in terms of What you might recommend?

Personally, I have found that most of what I most try to do is get folks to understand what they've been eating. So I analyze what they've actually been doing and where are their deficiencies, just to get them up to that presumed baseline. And then I don't have a lot of faith just yet, personally, in the value of correlating these genome markers with an actual need. I just, I'm not sure the science is there yet. And when you're— if you're talking about maybe just doubling up on your RDA or something like that, I don't see it as a harmful idea. But if you're going to be talking about doing 1,000 times the RDA, I Don't, you know, think that's a— that's not a direction I would recommend, personally.

Finally, I'd like to just explore the notion that I think you make it very clear that if you want to lose weight, and if you want to lose fat, you should eat more fat. I mean, that sounds incredibly paradoxical. But yet, you know, that is something that you talk about. And certainly, you're not alone in bringing that to our attention. How does that possibly make sense?

Well, it's all about calories. Like, when you're eating too much of anything, it's going to be stored as body fat. So whether it's fat or sugar, I don't want you eating too much of anything. But it's very difficult to eat too much of the kinds of fats our bodies are designed to consume, from whole foods, from animal products. It's very difficult because of what we already talked about. They're satiating. And they don't impact your hormones in ways that make you— that give you these snack attacks and make you hangry. So you have a better chance at matching your calorie intake to your calorie needs. And I think that's where we talk about calories so often. And it's in just shaming people. Oh, we eat way too many calories. We're gluttons. We're lazy. We don't move enough and we eat too much. But our bodies are supposed to naturally, perfectly match our calorie intake to our calorie needs. And they can't do that if we're not eating the foods that our bodies expect, which simply put, are high in fat. It's just, it's what we need. It's what we're designed to eat. To do. And the only idea that, you know, fat makes you fat, it's just so like— I guess if you want to talk about food that way, you know, it sounds maybe like it could make some sense. But the fact is, people did not used to talk about food that way. They used to talk about food like, where was this animal raised? What did it eat? How healthy was it? How was it cooked? And in my first book, Deep Nutrition, And I try to kind of reframe the whole conversation. And, you know, I find people get a little bit obsessive about macros and counting everything. And food shouldn't be a source of stress. It shouldn't be like a hobby to, you know, have to analyze everything that you're putting into your body. That's why we have a big chunk of our brain dedicated to the communication between our body fat and our brain. And our muscles and our bones, they all communicate. They are all sending signals to help us, to help us know what tastes good. That's part of how our appetites are defined is through this communication. And when you get the inflammation out of your diet, which you will when you stop eating those hateful 8 seed oils, then that communication can start to take place. And I don't know how many people have written to tell me, you know, I enjoy food. I enjoy food so much more now. I taste food in a way I never thought I could. And I, P.S., the big win for me is I don't have a sweet tooth anymore, which is like a miracle. As someone myself, I'm a recovering sugarholic. It's like a miracle to not be ruled by that. At 11 o'clock in the morning, I had my mocha frappuccino, and by 11:30, I was counting the minutes till 11 o'clock the next day before I could have another one. You know, that's what it's— that's what you can leave behind. And you can actually look forward to having a steak and a salad and, you know, all the whole world of food that's available to us at the edges of the grocery store.

Shopping the periphery. Well, again, here's the book for everybody. And it's certainly great information. It certainly upends the status quo level of knowledge about what we should and shouldn't be eating. And what a great way for people to really get some good information about what makes sense, as opposed to being victimized, dare I say, by people who want you to buy their products without having your health in mind. So thanks for being with us today.

Thanks so much for having me on.

Okay. We'll talk soon. Bye for now. Bye. What did we learn today? We learned that again, dietary fat is a good thing for us, but we have to be so careful in terms of the types of dietary fats that we consume, how they've been processed, for example, really very important. The importance of drinking good water is— she stressed how valuable it is. And once again, We focus on why we've got to do our very best to be very much aware of the damaging effects of refined carbohydrates in our diets. It's certainly a choice that we can make. Thank you for joining me today on The Empowering Neurologist. I'll be back soon. Bye for now.