Why Oil is bad for you

Hey everyone, welcome to my weekly house call, your chance to ask me your questions. And this week's question comes from a reader who writes, Dr. Hyman, I grew up in a house where we used vegetable oil every day to cook with. My mom still uses it and I'm trying to convince her to switch to coconut or olive oil. Any advice? Well, chances are that like most of us, your mother was convinced by the government and the food industry that vegetable oils are safe to use. and that they're even good for you. Unfortunately, this advice turned out to be completely wrong. Just as we were being told to avoid saturated fat, another message was being spread. Eat more PUFAs or polyunsaturated fatty acids, especially omega-6 fats. Well, we know these oils well. They're the common vegetable oils we all grew up on found in your typical grocery store. These clear, tasteless oils that are highly refined and processed, including corn oil, soybean oil, canola oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, and on and on and on. This has been given a gigantic push by advisory groups such as the American Heart Association, the National Cholesterol Education Program, the National Institute of Health, and even the government's dietary guidelines, even from many well-respected scientists, to stop the saturated fats and to use the polyunsaturated fats instead. Now, in a 2010 review by Dr. Mazafarian from Tufts University, he concluded that pooling all studies together, well, not all, as we'll see in a moment, that there seemed to be a big benefit from cutting out saturated fat and increasing our intake of polyunsaturated fats. However, in 2014, the same scientist reviewed all the literature again. Now, that mega-study by the same scientist of 72 other studies, which was a meta-analysis, found no benefit to reducing saturated fats or increasing polyunsaturated fats except for omega-3 fats. No wonder we're confused. If the experts can't agree, if they even change their own perspective every few years, What are the rest of us to do? Well, let me help you through this confusing story. The perspective that vegetable oils were better than saturated fats like butter and lard came from the fact that they lower total and LDL cholesterol and so presumably reduce overall risk of heart disease. This advice means swapping out butter, meat, and lard for vegetable oils including corn, soybean, sunflower, canola, and safflower oils, all of which are mostly omega-6 polyunsaturated fats. That's right, those dangerous inflammatory fats. Now, for most of human history, we consumed much more omega-3 fats and much less omega-6 fats. We ate about equal amounts of omega-6 and omega-3 fats, a ratio about one to one. You see, wild foods are rich in omega-3s, and the main source of the omega-3s in the 21st century is fish, but wild game and wild plants used to be a big part of our diet, and they're also high in omega-3 fats. Wild meat has about 4% of its fat as omega-3 fats. and industrially raised animals have almost none, although grass-fed beef has more. All the beef and animal products your great grandparents ate? Well, they were all pasture raised, they were all organic, they were all grass-fed, and they had no hormones or antibiotics. There wasn't anything else. It was just what they ate. With the introduction of refined oils and our shift away from grass-fed and wild animals to industrial animal production, our dietary omega-6 fats from corn and soy and cottonseed and canola oil have skyrocketed, while omega-3 fats have actually declined, with most Americans deficient in this essential fatty acid. Now, omega-6 fats fuel the inflammatory pathways in the body, while the omega-3 fats are anti-inflammatory. Most importantly, omega-6 fats also reduce the availability of these anti-inflammatory omega-3 fats in our tissues, leading to even more inflammation. And they prevent the conversion of the plant-based omega-3 fats called ALA into the active form of omega-3s called EPA DHA in the body by about 40%. That means even if you eat omega-3 fats, if you eat a lot of omega-6 fats, the omega-3 fats don't work so well. The increase in omega-6 fats in our diet increases all these inflammatory diseases. More striking is the link to mental illness, suicide, and homicide. Yes, mental illness is often related to inflammation in the brain. See, the work of Dr. Joseph Hibbeln from the National Institute of Health has researched the impact of omega-6 oils on our health. He explains that the overconsumption of omega-6 fats and the underconsumption of omega-3 fats has significant consequences for our health, including but not limited to increases in heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome or prediabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel syndrome, macular degeneration, which is eye damage and blindness, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, cancer, and psychiatric disorders, even autoimmune disease. So as you can see, a diet high in omega-6s is not ideal for optimal health, but we can't blame ourselves. It was preached to most of us from a young age, and unfortunately, the consequence is the worst epidemic of chronic disease in history with global explosions of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and cancer. So the bottom line is, it's important to move away from those inflammatory oils. Choose the oils that protect your brain and your heart and reduce inflammation like coconut and olive oil and grass-fed butter. My upcoming book, Eat Fat, Get Thin will uproot all the lies we've been told about oils and fats and which foods cause disease and illness. I've created a plan that will help you achieve optimal health while providing you with all the studies and the research to prove that certain fats and foods that have been demonized do in fact have a place in our diet. So stay tuned and if you like this video be sure to share with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter and submit your questions to DrHyman.com and maybe next week I'll make a house call to you.