The Pegan Diet: Have Fats With Every Meal

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Do not eat saturated fat in combo with starch and sugar, which is mostly how people consume them. That causes weight gain, inflammation, diabetes, dementia, heart disease, you name it. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, that's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, and this is a special episode, a little part of a mini episode series on my new book, the Pegan Diet, 21 practical principles for reclaiming your health in a nutritionally confusing world. You can order right now, go to pegan.com, check it out. I'm super excited about it. It breaks down all the nonsense and the wars around diet. Pegan is kind of paleo vegan, it's sort of a joke, but it talks about what are the things we all agree on and how are we far more alike in our perspective and principles than we are with the traditional American diet or the sad, standard American diet. Today's episode, we're going to discuss the principle seven, which is have fats with every meal. All right, well, fat, you know, I've written a lot about and eat fat, get thin. And fat has been unfairly vilified for decades. It clogs your arteries. It makes you fat, they said. It has more than twice the calories per gram compared to carbs and protein, we were warned. We followed the low-fat advice. We did, and the government told us to, the experts told us to, and we did it for 40 years. And guess what? We got fat and diabetic big time. Obesity rates went from 5% when I was born to 42%. That's an 800% increase. Now, when I started eating fats with every meal, I became happier, stronger, I got more energy. See, the right fats can make you lean and healthy. it can fuel your brain, and the wrong fats can be deadly. Unlike sugar, which is pretty much all bad, fats are complicated. The Pegan diet respects and honors that we are all different, metabolically, genetically, culturally, and what is medicine to one may be poison to another. Some people thrive on a high fat diet. Their cholesterol drops, their waistline shrink, their diabetes goes away, even their heart failure can get better. Others gain weight and struggle with bad cholesterol. The best way to know how different foods might impact your body is to experiment and test. Your body knows you should listen to your body. There's no dogma or study that's going to tell you what works for you. Studies are for populations and for specific people. They're not about studying you. And you can study you, and it's very easy. You do something, you try it, you see how you feel, you see what happens to your body, you see what happens to your blood tests. The smartest doctor in the room is your own body. Roger Williams, the father of biochemical individuality, said, and this is the idea that we're all genetically and biochemically unique, he said, statistical humans are of little interest. I am interested in real humans. Me too. All right, so let's get into it. What about this whole omega-6, omega-3 ratio? debate. What do we know? Well, except for a few low-fat evangelists who still warn about the dangers of avocados, nuts, and olive oil, their advice contradicts an overwhelming body of evidence on these protective foods. Certain fats are essential for life. Whole foods that contain mostly monounsaturated fats like olive oil, nuts and seeds and avocados Well, they help prevent heart disease. They lower blood pressure. They improve insulin sensitivity. So there is no debate about avocados, nuts and seeds, and olive oil. These monounsaturated fats are the bomb. The next category of fats is polyunsaturated fats, and those are omega-6 and omega-3s, which are the building blocks of life, and you cannot make them. You have to get them from food, and you have to eat the right amounts of each one. Now, we used to eat tons more Omega-3s because we foraged on wild plants which have Omega-3s and eat wild animals which have Omega-3s. And we would get some nuts and seeds and forage for stuff and we would get Omega-6s but from whole foods we wouldn't be eating gallons and gallons and gallons of refined oils, which we are now in America. Now, there are a lot of debates still about plant-based oils, soybean, canola, safflower, grapeseed, all that stuff. But there's no debate about eating Omega-6 Fats from real whole foods like beans, grains, nuts and seeds. Eat the soybeans, skip the soybean oil. Now, it's important to know that if you're eating omega-6 fats, you gotta get enough omega-3s. And if you're a vegan, for example, you're not getting any because they come from wild fish mostly. And you need a lot more omega-3s. Now, where do you get them from? Wild fish, small fish, pasture raised eggs, flax seeds, chia seeds, hemp seeds, grass fed meat. Now, the plant-based sources of omega-3s like hemp, flax, and chia seeds, they're in the form of something called ALA, which is not easily converted into DHA and EPA, which is the form our bodies actually need and use. Ideally, you want to stick also to whole food sources of omega-6 fats, lots of nuts and seeds, grains and beans. Now, you can use cold-pressed, unrefined Non-GMO oils, things like sesame, high-oak lake sunflower occasionally, that's okay. But stay away from all those industrial processed heat and solvent extracted oxidized oils. They're bad for you. For high temperature cooking, I like avocado oil, coconut oil and ghee, because they have a high smoke point. For low heat cooking, like tomato sauce, I like olive oil and salads, obviously. I like olive oil, but also almond oil, macadamia oil, sesame seed oil, tahini, flaxseed oil, hemp oil, all those are great. Okay, what about saturated fat? We covered monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. What about saturated fat? Well, they're found in dairy, meat, coconut oil, and many plant foods, including nuts and olives and avocados. Even olive oil, which is heart-healthy and has been shown to reduce heart attacks at the same rate as statin drugs, is 20% saturated fat. Unfortunately, the government and American Heart Association and medical experts, quote experts, which shouldn't, medical expert in nutrition shouldn't be in the same sentence because doctors really know nothing about nutrition unless they've been studying it their whole lives. But they basically said saturated fat is bad. We're told it's the number one cause of heart disease. But it's not really as bad as we thought. There's only one that's super bad and that's the trans fats or hydrogenated fat and that's basically where they take plant oils and make them into shortening. It's not good. And you know why they call it shortening, right? It shortens your life. Now, there are lots of different saturated fats and they have different effects on your body. They're not all homogenous. So dairy saturated fats are different than that from beef are different from that than coconut are different from that. All these different fats are different. So here's a take home on saturated fat. It is deadly, but only under one condition, that you eat it with starch and sugar. I mean, butter on your cookies could be deadly, but butter on your broccoli might be actually helpful. So here's the take home. Do not eat saturated fat in combo with starch and sugar, which is mostly how people consume them. That causes weight gain, inflammation, diabetes, dementia, heart disease, you name it. And of course, there's a lot of variation in our body's genetic response to saturated fats. I had a patient who could not lose weight, his cholesterol was terrible and was struggling for years. I put him on a ketogenic diet with coconut oil and butter pretty much as the main source of her calories and her cholesterol dropped 100 points or triglycerides dropped 200 points. She lost 20 pounds. She could never lose. It was awesome for her. Another guy was a avid bike racer in his fifties, pretty healthy guy. He's what we call a lean mass hyper responder. I'm one of those. And the high saturated fat diet actually caused his cholesterol to get worse. So you need to kind of look at your cholesterol profile in a very specific way. We call this NMR from LabCorp or Cardio IQ from Quest. These are something your doctor can order. I would encourage you to do that. Certain groups also who perhaps have genetic issues like risk for Alzheimer's, if you have the APOE4 gene, probably not a good idea to eat too much saturated fat. So bottom line, what should we be eating? What is the fats we should be eating? Well, it's not that hard. Here's the things I love: Organic extra virgin olive oil, organic avocado oil, walnut oil, macadamia oil, almond oil, unrefined sesame oil, tahini, which is sesame seed paste, flax oil, hemp oil, avocados, olives, nuts and seeds, butter from grass-fed pastured cows or goats, grass-fed ghee, and even organic regeneratively raised grass-fed humanely raised tallow, lard, duck fat or chicken fat. And of course coconut oil, MCT oil can be great for some people. What you shouldn't eat? Soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, peanut oil, vegetable oil, whatever the heck that is, not broccoli oil, grapeseed oil, vegetable shortening, never eat anything shortening, margarine and butter substitutes and anything that says hydrogenated on the label. So here's a take home from principle seven. Don't fear fat. Eat the right fats with every meal. Fat won't make you fat unless you eat it with starch and sugar, which is how most Americans usually eat it. Eat about three to five servings a day. Eat fats mostly with veggies. Unless it's trans fat, it will not cause heart disease. Even the new dietary guidelines in 2020 said, We no longer have to worry about total fat as a risk for heart disease or for weight gain. Get that, it's not about the calories, it's about the information in food. Now my favorite fats are avocados, olives, nuts and seeds and traditional oils like extra virgin olive oil and even avocado oil. Small amounts of butter, grass fed ghee, coconut, MCT oil are great for most of us. If you're eating a high fat diet and are curious about how it's affecting your body, for sure check the NMR particle size cholesterol test. Make sure your doctor does that. So that's all for today about fat. And make sure you eat fat as your medicine because we know the benefits of eating enough fat in your diet and those who eat low fat diets have trouble. So I hope you liked this special mini episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy on my Pegan diet principles. Make sure you check out my new book, Pegan Diet. You can go to PeganDiet.com, that's P-E-G-A-N-Diet.com, and I hope you like this podcast. And we'll see you next time for another little mini-isode on the Pegan Diet. See you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning in to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. 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