You May Never Eat These Foods Again After Watching This | Dr. Mark Hyman

There's a great guide from the Environmental Working Group that comes out every year with a list of the dirty dozen worst contaminated fruits and vegetables and the clean 15, the least contaminated. And basically, if you follow that, you can kind of avoid the most contaminated foods. So, to come up with this year's list, the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, went through the USDA data on 46,000 samples of 46 of the most popular fruits and vegetables. they wash them, they peel them as when we do at home before testing them for pesticides. Now after washing, 75%, nearly 75% of the non-organic fresh produce sold in the United States contains residues of pesticides. That's what the report found. And so they basically score each type of produce from clean to dirty based on a percent of the samples tested with detectable pesticides. The percent of samples with two or more detectable pesticides, the average number of pesticides found in a single sample, the average amount of pesticides found, the maximum number of pesticides found in a single sample, and the total number of pesticides found in the crops. There's a lot of different ways they look at how bad is it contaminated. Basically this means that in that list it's telling you which crops were treated with the most and the highest volume and the most variety of pesticides, but it doesn't quite go to connect the dots between that and what are the health risks.

But there are, I promise you.

So what is the 2023 dirty dozen? Strawberries always top the list. So if you're not going to eat those organic, don't eat them. And I'm going to list them now, but you can see in the show notes, we're going to post it there as well. Strawberries, spinach, which we all like, kale collards and mustard greens, which are staples for people. If they're not organic, don't eat them. Peaches, pears, nectarines, apples, grapes, bell and hot peppers, cherries, blueberries, and green beans. So if those are not organic, don't eat them. Blueberries and green beans are actually new additions to this year's list. The green bean samples had residue acifate, which is a toxic pesticide that the EPA banned over 10 years ago. [Bee] Overall, more than 90% of strawberries, apples, cherries, spinach, nectarines, grapes, sample tested positive for residues of two or more pesticides. But the good news is there's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't have to buy organic that actually isn't harmful.

So the cleanest produce typically has a.

Tougher outer peel or husk or a shell that you have to remove, right? Avocados, for example, corn, pineapple, onions, papaya, sweet peas that are frozen, asparagus, honeydew melon, kiwi, cabbage, mushrooms, mangoes, sweet potatoes, watermelon, and carrots. So these are all okay to eat. If you don't want to buy a kiwi organic, it's probably okay. Or your avocado organic is too expensive, that's okay. If you don't want to buy your onions organic, okay. If you want to get a mango, it's not organic, no big deal. Same with sweet potatoes. So you can save a lot of money by actually focusing on this list. So it's important to understand that whether we like it or not, we live in a toxic world. We have to understand where those toxins come from. We have to reduce our exposures. and we have to upgrade our body's own biological detox system. And we know how to do that. It's not that hard. I've written a lot about it. You can't get rid of them from our environment, but you can reduce your exposures and you can actually do a little homework for yourself and switch to safer products for your skincare or household cleaning products, your food products, so you know how to live clean and green without a whole lot of effort. Now, we have been exposed to more and more and more number of environmental toxins than ever before in human history. And, the problem with medicine is, in medical school and today too, when I went to medical school and now, there's almost no education about the effect of environmental toxins on our health, unless it's an acute toxic exposure. Like, if you're in a factory and you jump in a vat of mercury, well, okay, they know what to do. But basically they ignore it. The truth is that low level exposure to multiple different substances over your lifetime is a huge risk factor for so many diseases, from heart disease to cancer to obesity to diabetes to dementia to Parkinson's to autism to depression. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. Infertility, I mean, I could go on and on. So, it's not just sort of a, oh, let's detox and get rid of a bunch of toxins. It's really about understanding the biology of environmental toxins, our body's own detoxification system, and how to one reduce our exposures while at the same time up leveling and upgrading our own biological detoxification systems. So we're going to talk about all that. Now, how do environmental toxins affect our health?

Well, they do it through a lot.

Of different mechanisms, but they're basically poisons and they cause inflammation, they cause oxidative stress, they cause DNA damage, they cause disruption in our mitochondria, they damage our stem cells. I mean, the whole flood of environmental toxins. There's over 80,000 of them now that have been introduced to the industrial sort of world since the early 1900s that we've never been exposed to before and we somehow have to figure out how to deal with them. Well, thank God we have a system to do it, but it's still overwhelmed. So environmental toxins, as I said, drive cancer. They are hugely impactful, for example, in blood sugar and insulin sensitivity. Most people don't realize that diabetes and prediabetes and even obesity can be driven by environmental toxins. called bisphenol A, which is a compound that's found in lining a lot of cans, plastic bottles, on paper, receipts from credit cards or gas stations. When you touch that, it goes through your skin and bisphenol A is a huge driver of insulin resistance and prediabetes independent of what you're eating. It affects cholesterol metabolism, it drives inflammation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial injury, screws up our thyroid function, effects our appetite, leptin signaling. I mean, pretty much everything gets haywire when we're exposed to too many environmental toxins. Now, the downside of living in the modern world is that we're all pre-polluted when we're born. There's 287 known environmental toxins found in the umbilical cord blood of a newborn. I mean, basically, they take out the blood of the umbilical cord, send it to a lab, and the average amount of toxins is 287, many of which have been banned for decades like DDT or PCBs or dioxin. And 217 of those are neurotoxic, meaning they're directly damaging to the brain. There's pesticides, phthalates, bisphenol A, which I just mentioned, flame retardants, heavy metals like mercury, lead, arsenic, and they have huge effects across the spectrum of human health. So, what are the ones that we should really be paying attention to? that we really want to avoid and get rid of. The first I just mentioned earlier is.

Bisphenol A, or BPA.

It's found in plastic water bottles and canned foods. It's a synthetic compound that mimics estrogen in the body. We call these xenobiotics or xenoestrogens. And they're hugely impactful in regulating hormonal health and risk increasing risk of cancer. And it's been linked BPA to breast cancer, to infertility, reproductive issues, obesity, heart disease, and it's not that hard to get rid of it in your life. Basically, don't touch credit card receipts, don't touch gas station receipts that come out of the machine, don't eat from plastic bottles unless they're BPA free or from canned foods unless they're BPA free. So make sure you look at that. You can use stainless steel, glass, boiling packaging, look for BPA canned fruits. The next compound is phthalates. Phthalates are also plasticizers and they're found in food containers, children's toys. It's banned in Europe. There's a legislation in Europe called REACH. It gets rid of most of these chemicals that are allowed in America. And when there's ever an attempt to limit by law or a bill to reduce our exposures, the food industry and chemical industry comes in hard with tons of lobbying dollars, millions and millions and millions, tens of millions of dollars to defeat Bills, it was one on this final A that got defeated. And unfortunately, it was trying to be banned, but it didn't pass because it was so much lobby against it. But it's found in children's toys. It's found in like the plastic little rubber duckies in the bathtub. So they stick it in their mouth. Bad idea. Also, makeup has a lot of phthalates in it. So get rid of all your unhealthy makeups. And we're going to talk about how to do that. But there's a beautiful website called ewg.org, the Environmental Working Group. They have a skin deep database. You can put in your product, what you like to or other products that you can find that have no contaminants and see the level of toxins and what they are and find alternatives. So they also are really bad for you because phthalates cause hormonal chaos. They're linked to different cancers, to birth defects, to thyroid problems. So make sure you check it out. And the basic rule is if you wouldn't eat it, you probably shouldn't put it in or on your body, right? So for skincare products, everything goes through the skin. When we go to the emergency room with a heart attack, what's the first thing we do? As a doctor, we slap on a toothpaste tube cream full of nitroglycerin because it goes right through the skin and it's the fastest acting, but then taking it by mouth or before we can get an IV and we just slap that on. It goes to the skin, hormone patches, testosterone gels. We know the fentanyl patch. There's all kinds of drugs that are delivered through the skin. When you're putting it on your skin, it's actually getting inside your body. so you want to make sure that if you wouldn't eat it, you shouldn't put it on your body. Like coconut oil, where you can eat that and you can put on your body. So that's a win. But there's a lot of products out there that are safe that you can use. Another one that's concerning is glycol ethers. They're in-household cleaning products, cosmetics, paints. They damage fertility, they lead to birth defects, they worsen allergies, asthma. And these are really bad because they're pretty much in all of our household cleaning products. And the Environmental Working Group, EWG, also has a whole guide on household cleaning products so you can use the least contaminated products or ones that have no toxins in them that work well. So make sure you check that out. And there are so many other toxins like heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsenic, mercury is from fish, from our fillings, from coal burning plants, pollution, lead is often found in crystal wine glasses or glazed plates. I see many, many patients have those and they get sick from that. It can be in the ground, it can be from coal burning if you live in a cement plant or a coal plant that basically goes up in the atmosphere, comes down in the soil, your kids were playing with it, it'll be dragged in the house, the baby's on the floor. So lead exposure is real. There's houses that still have leaded paint, all the leaded gasoline that was used for years, all that went in the air and goes down in the soil. It can be in vegetables. If you're growing in an urban environment, for example, you're growing greens, you think you're eating kale and being healthy, it could be full lead. Now, arsenic also is a big problem and it's found in rice many places because in the ground, it can be in pressure treated lumber that you have on your deck and get in your feet. It can actually in chicken feed to prevent the feed from going moldy, which is great for the feed and the mold, but it's not good for you and it gets in the chicken, you eat it. So it's pretty important for us to make sure that we get rid of those. So I think the key is we need to avoid toxins. And so the question is, what are the top strategies to reduce our toxic burden? Well, We can basically remove the toxins, but we also have to upregulate our detox system. So first thing is avoid plastics wherever you can. Try stainless steel like containers, I have those, or glass containers for storing food in your fridge, steel and so water bottles, glass containers are great for leftovers. Don't buy water in plastic water bottles, get a water filter. I like reverse osmosis and you can actually get a water bottle bring it with you. Make sure you detox your home. get simple cleaning products, a laundry detergent, cleaning products for windows, for counters, for dishwashers, stuff, everything. And there's a great source, Thrive Market. It's an online grocery store basically. You can get all the best cleaners from seventh generation and other eco-friendly, non-toxic food companies. And now of course check out EWG's guide on household cleaning products, on skin care products, they're great. So, I think make sure that you just are diligent about getting toxins out of your home. Second is mercury is a big one and often we don't pay attention to what we're eating and people eat tuna fish, swordfish, sushi. Sadly, all the oceans have been polluted and no matter where you get your fish from, it's pretty much pre-polluted. There's microplastics, mercury and other toxins. PCBs, farm fish can be just as bad. So there are a few kind of ways to get around it. One is to eat very small fish, sardines, mackerel, herring, anchovies. small salmon can be okay, but still that can have mercury. Also, there's a great regenerative aquaculture company called SeaTopia.Fish, and they actually provide beautiful, delicious, clean fish that you can get frozen sent to your home. It's amazing fish, actually. And also reduce your exposure to the problems that are from all the chemicals in your environment by having an air filter in your house that reduces their airborne pollution. Indoor air pollution is a real thing, whether it's mold or whether it's other things like contaminants, off-gassing from furniture or rugs. I mean, you want to obviously try to have a clean home and not full of products, but I mean, you buy a Tempur-Pedic bed and it smells awful. It's off-gassing. Those are called VOCs, volatile organic compounds. You really want to avoid those in your house. and then you want to start to learn about how to actually upgrade and increase your body's own detoxification system. And the best way to do that is by using a couple of strategies that are really important. One is maximize your intake of phytochemicals. Plant-based compounds, these nutrients in plants work on up regulating different pathways in the body, including a lot of detox pathways. There's amazing cornucopia of phytochemicals that work on boosting glutathione and boosting our detox pathways and increasing our ability to get rid of stuff. So the biggest category is the cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, collards, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts. They really upregulate glutathione in the body and help to maximize the main detoxifier. Also, there are amazing things like garlic and onions that also contain sulfur. that are great for detoxification. Also things like rosemary, curcumin, ginger, and the skin of a lemon, like if you grate lemon into a salad or something, the skin of a lemon has limonene. These all help upregulate our detox pathways. We also need the right nutrients, right? We need methylation support, B12, folate, B6. We need magnesium, selenium, zinc, and many other minerals and vitamins to actually help upregulate our detox pathways. We need amino acids and form protein to help with some of the amino acid pathways. So there's lots of ways we now understand the body's own built-in detox system and we have to support it. The next thing you can do is sweat. So your body gets rid of toxins through both exercise, increasing the lymphatic flow and circulation through exercise, increased circulation, and also saunas. So sauna is an amazing way to boost your detox system and help body remove a lot of environmental toxins which are fat soluble and you can actually measure them on the sweat.

You also want to take the right.

Supplements, as I mentioned. So you want to take additional support of a good multi, methylation support, zinc, vitamin C, glutathione boosting stuff, N-acetyl cysteine, lipoic acid, milk thistle, a lot of other herbs can be used to help boost the body's detox pathways. So I highly recommend getting on a regular support system for that.

I do because we're all exposed.

Sometimes if you have a real big.

Issue, you might need to see a.

Doctor and get treated. Like I did for mercury poisoning, I needed chelation, I needed to actually use a medication to help remove the metals from my body. If it's lead, you can use EDTA. If it's mercury, you can use DMSA. And, they're extremely effective. They need to be used properly and safely with a doctor's supervision. There's a lot of steps to properly getting rid of mercury, but you need.

A good functional medicine doctor. So, it's really, really, really important to do that. How does sugar play a role in messing up our hormones? Well, we know very clearly that insulin resistance, this phenomenon I've talked about for decades, which is where we start to accumulate fat around our organs, belly fat, is driven by sugar and starch in our diet. And that sugar and starch does a number of things. Besides just pour on the pounds and increase inflammation, it has effects in both women and men that are really bad for sex. For women, high levels of insulin and insulin resistance lead to dysfunctions in your hormones by causing higher levels of androgens, particularly DHEA and other androgens, androstenedione, that lead to hair loss on your head and hair growth on your face and acne. It's not a lot of fun and that's definitely a buzzkill. And also it affects your overall kind of mood, energy, and libido. In men, something happens quite quite different actually. What you see is a real drop in testosterone levels. This drop in testosterone levels is sort of inversely related to your insulin resistance. The more insulin resistant you are, the more belly fat you have, the more body fat you get, the more estrogen you make, the less testosterone you make, and you end up having very low testosterone which has a huge effect on libido. So if you really want to keep going for a long time and have a great sex life, you've got to cut out the starch and sugar and it's going to affect every other area of your life as well. So obviously, not only does it affect your sex life, but it affects your cardiovascular risk, your cancer, dementia, and many, many other things. So big deal, make sure you're not insulin resistant because that screws up sex hormones for both men and women and leads to impaired sexual drive and function. Also, by the way, what happens is you decrease blood flow. The more insulin resistance you have, the more vascular disease you have, the reduction in blood flow leads to decreased function in your sex organs, both in male and female sex organs. So it's really important to keep your blood flowing if you want to keep going, if you know what I mean. Now, leptin is interesting. Leptin is another hormone that we see go up and it's not directly correlated with sex drive, but it it increases when you are more insulin resistant. So leptin is the break on your appetite, but what happens is it doesn't work so much because of the insulin resistance and leptin keeps going up and that causes you to have more hunger and more leptin resistance and it's just a vicious cycle. The other hormone that really is a big factor in sex drive and function is cortisol. you know, nobody wants to be making out when you're super stressed. And cortisol has a number of effects that are quite harmful, including increasing insulin resistance. It prevents, you know, erections in men and reduces libido. And so you, you basically know that when you're stressed out, you don't want to make out. So it's better to learn how to reduce cortisol through various lifestyle strategies, including obviously things like meditation, yoga, breath work, , getting your mind right, your beliefs, your attitudes. There's a lot of work we've done in that on the podcast, but it's really important to learn how to navigate stress in your life and not be overtaken by it because a lot of the stress that we have is what happens in our minds. It's not necessarily what's happening to us, and that's something we have control over. Um, there's also some interesting, data about low fat diets as a big factor. Low fat diets were promoted for years as a way to lose weight. They clearly don't work. In fact, large trials, reviews of all the literature show that when you compare low-fat diets to low carbohydrate diets, the low-fat diets always lose. And when I say carbohydrates, I mean starch and sugar. Now, why is fat important? Because all your sex hormones are made from fat. They're made from cholesterol, in fact, all the sex hormones, the building block for all of them, is cholesterol. So, if you're really dramatically reducing your cholesterol with aggressive use of statins, that also can affect your your hormone levels too, 'cause they're all connected. So eating more fat, and particularly in men, particularly eating more saturated fat increases your testosterone levels. Also, environmental toxins are real endocrine disruptors and they definitely drive our sexual dysfunction. And the toxins that we know are we call xenoestrogens or xeno xenobiotics, they disrupt hormone function for both men and women. they've been linked to various kinds of birth defects, fertility issues, decreased sperm count, changes in birth rates due to the effect of these environmental toxins. And also, it can make you a little nuts if you ever remember Alice in Wonderland. Mercury is something that they used to create these felt hats and the Mad Hatter and the mad hatters in history were because the hat makers used mercury to stiffen the felt in the hats, which led them to be crazy or mad. Lead also has very negative effects on our mood and cognitive function and behavior. So it's really important. Also, we want to avoid hormones in our food. There's a lot of hormones in dairy naturally occurring, but also added in growth hormone. There's also a lot of hormones in in meat when they conventionally grow them and raise them through injecting estrogen pellets in their ears and other things that they do. So I think it's not something you really want to do. It's not something you want to be eating and you want to avoid those things. Sugar, as I mentioned, was a big problem, but also diet drinks are not the answer either because they lead to increased craving for sweets, they increase insulin resistance, they increase diabetes, obesity, it's quite interesting to see that these non-caloric compounds have information in them that affect your hormones and metabolism and insulin levels and that actually adds to the risk of obesity and diabetes. All right, so what do we know about how to activate your sex drive? Well, the first thing is that there's a lot of things you can do to fix it. First is your diet and diet plays such a role and our overall health, including our sexual function. So eating a healthy whole foods, phytonutrient rich, low glycemic, good fat, fiber rich diet is going to make a huge difference in your overall health and in your sexual drive and function. And it normalizes your hormone levels as well. I think that's really powerful is exercise. Exercise not only discharges stress and improves insulin sensitivity, but strength training in particular, particularly in men, actually increases testosterone and men and women both have testosterone and they both need testosterone for sexual desire and function. So getting those levels up is really important. So strength training can be helpful for both men and women in terms of desire and function as well. So also interval training helps with reducing cortisol, boosting growth hormone, improving testosterone. There's a lot of ways we can, you can work out to help you feel better. Also, a number of supplements can be very helpful. A multivitamin mineral is really important. Your sex hormones require these nutrients to function properly, vitamin D, zinc, and omega-3 fats, really, really important. And then the other thing is that sometimes you can, herbs can be helpful. Ashwagandha, there's a number of different products out there, libido stem for men and libido stem for women, contains a number of different herbs that have been formulated to actually improve sexual desire and function. Also, alcohol is probably one of the worst things. It definitely always has been taught that the more alcohol you drink, the desire goes up, but the ability goes down. So, who said that? I think William Shakespeare, it provokes the desire but takes away the performance. So, it's kind of a double-edged sword. A glass of wine may be okay, but be careful of alcohol and stress. Learn how to manage your stress response, because that plays a big role. There are some interesting things coming down the pike. Peptides are an interesting new innovation in both low sexual desire and function in both men and women. and there's a particular peptide called PT-141 that's available on the market that can be prescribed by doctors that has been shown to increase sexual desire and it works through a pathway called alpha MSH. But this pathway seems to, these melanocortin receptors seem to regulate sexual desire and function and they can be a great adjunct to anybody who's looking to up their ante on their sex drive and performance.

That would get rid of the safflower, sunflower, corn oil, peanut oil, anything that has vegetable oil. In terms of butter, lard.

Coconut oil.

Saturated fats are generally okay for most people, especially if you have poor metabolic health. They seem to do better and people are insulin resistant. There's a subset of people, they're called lean mass hyperresponders.

I'm one of them.

If I eat too much saturated fat, it actually adversely affects my lipids. And then what often happens with saturated fat, especially coconut oil, for example, raises your LDL, but also raises your HDL, which is a good cholesterol, and overall your profile gets better. So it's a little more nuanced than we were led to believe. Now, we were all taught when I was a kid that vegetable oil, and by the way, what the hell is vegetable oil? You see vegetable oil on a bottle in a store?

Go to that broccoli oil.

I mean, this does not even exist. So we're talking about seed and bean, and nut oils like soybean oil, canola oil, safflower oil, corn oil, canola oil. These are all these oils that are out there. And there is, by the way, there is something called vegetable oil which you can buy in the grocery store. I have no idea what that is. I wouldn't eat that. We're all trained that they're better for you and that we should be avoiding butter and saturated fat and animal fats. And so there's been a big push to shift our diet from consuming more saturated fats to more unsaturated fats. And saturation, unsaturation, it's a chemical classification based on how many of the.

You.

Know, sort of carbons are saturated with hydrogen on a fat molecule. So the more saturated it is, the more hard it is at room temperature, the more hydrogens there are. It's basically just basically the classification system. But basically they have different functions in your body. And basically, we're told that we should not be eating these saturated fats that cause high cholesterol. They clog our arteries and lead to heart disease. And basically we're told to swap out saturated for unsaturated fats or called PUFAs or the omega-6 fatty acids in these vegetable oils or quote vegetable oils. And they're everywhere. They're kind of clear cases. They're highly refined. They're processed with hexane. They're deodorized. I mean, they're really extremely highly processed foods. Now, some like olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, there's simple pressing.

You can do it with like a.

Machine, just like a press and it squeezes the oil out. That's a very different thing than the kind of aggressive extraction methods they use for modern processed plant oils. Now, these oils are by definition unstable, right?

If you take lard and you keep.

It at room temperature and you leave it there for two months, it's fine. If you take a plant oil and you leave it out, it's going to become oxidized. So it becomes very easily damaged. They're more unstable, more easily damaged, more oxidized, more oxidation leads to more inflammation, and they can be problematic. And so, you know, these oils can be more inflammatory, but there's certain caveats we'll talk about in that context. but the American Heart Association, the National Education and Cholesterol Program, the National Institutes of Health, and even our government's own dietary guidelines are telling us to swap out saturated fat for these unsaturated fats or these plant oils. And a lot of well respected doctors and scientists have been telling us this for a long, long time and we've been listening. It turns out it's not so clear cut. We were talking about why we should maybe change our perspective and be a little more nuanced about this. Black and white thinking is not helpful in any subject, particularly nutrition. And so really, is it all or nothing? Should we eliminate completely plant oils from our diet? Which oils should we 100% eliminate? Which oils can we include somewhat? Should we be eating only saturated fat like coconut oil and butter and lard? what is the right answer here? And I wrote a whole book about this called Eat Fat, Get Thin. If you want to go into more detail about it, but essentially we're a little bit confused and it's not surprising because there was an article, for example, in 2010 from Tufts University that concluded there's a lot of benefit from cutting out saturated fat and increasing our intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids, are the PUFAs or these plant oils. Now, the same group looked in 2014 at a meta-analysis of all the literature, kind of looking at 72 different studies. I think it was published in the.

Annals of Internal Medicine.

They found no benefit to reducing saturated fat for cardiovascular disease or increased polyunsaturated fats, except there was a benefit for increasing omega-3 fats.

So this is really key is the.

Omega-3 fat piece is really important. Omega-3 fats are basically from wild food, wild fish, wild plants. We don't eat that much anymore, but omega-3s are really important for our brain function, our skin health, our immune health, inflammation regulation, so many different things. And it usually comes from wild fish at this point. Sardines are one of the best sources. So we should be paying attention to that. But we're not easily clear about this because there's so much conflicting data and experts can't seem to agree. You've got top nutrition scientists out there who think one thing and from the NIH and another group that thinks the opposite.

So how do we even begin to.

Come up with what actually makes sense here in terms of what's the truth? That's what I want to unpack today a little bit. You know, the basic idea is that if you consume these PUFA's, these polyunsaturated fatty acids, it lowers LDL cholesterol, which is true. If you basically cut out saturated fat and you add in these plant oils, you see in bean oils, you will tend to have a lower LDL cholesterol. But is that enough to recommend that.

We should be doing this?

And I think it's confusing because lowering LDL is not necessarily the key to reversing heart disease. It has to do with a lot of factors, and some resistance, oxidation, inflammation, and so forth. There was one really quite amazing study that, and the most sort of preface is by saying that most of the studies that we're looking at these polyunsaturated fats are observational studies, population studies. Some are interventional studies where you can do a trial. get an answer about cause and effect. But they're a little hard to decipher because in studies, for example, where people are eating a lot of saturated fat, they're also eating a lot of sugar and starch. And, you know, it's very different putting butter on your bagel and putting butter on your broccoli. Because when you put butter on your bagel, you're adding starch and saturated fat, and that's deadly. Adding butter to your broccoli not so much a problem. So if you really have a low intake of starch and sugar and saturated fats, it won't necessarily be as big of an issue. And there's some genetics that has to do with who can tolerate saturated fat. I don't know if we'll have time to get into that today, but it's a little more nuanced. But basically, it's not necessarily only the saturated fat, it's what you're eating it with. So if you cut out starch and sugar, saturated fats don't seem to be the boogie man. And you can have a good look at my book. There's some increasing knowledge about this since my book was released. I think it was in 2016 maybe. You can get a sense of really where this was at by having a look at the book. But the other problem is a lot of the studies looking at Omega-6s, Omega-3s, polyunsaturated fats were confusing because they combine different types of oil. For example, certain oils like corn oil, safflower oil, peanut oil are plant oils, but they're almost entirely omega-6, whereas other oils like canola or soybean oil have a mixture of omega-6 and omega-3. So when you look at the data, people who just consumed the omega-6s but no omega-3s had far worse outcomes, had far worse outcomes in terms of heart attacks and death. We know that's not good just to have Omega-6 oils by themselves, especially in a society that's Omega-3 deficient. We basically used to eat a lot of wild stuff and have a ratio of Omega-6 to 3, about 4:1, 2:1. Now, it can be up to 20:1. I had a patient who was diabetic, heart failure, very overweight, really junk food all the time, and her ratio was 20:1, which is just a disaster. Very low Omega-3, very high Omega-6. You have to not just lump all the plant oils into one bucket. You have to be a little more nuanced. You can actually look online as a table, I think, on Wikipedia showing the ratios of omega-6 and -3 for every plant oil. You can stick away from the ones like corn oil.

There was a study that was done.

I want to talk about this for a minute. It's a really important study. It was done in the '60s. You couldn't do that study now. It's unethical, but it was done in a psychiatric hospital where they had complete.

Control over their diets.

They gave one group butter and one group as a source of fat and one group corn oil. Now the Cornell group, even though they had a lower LDL cholesterol, dramatically lower, there was a higher risk of heart attacks and stroke and death compared, and it was a randomized controlled trial, which is really hard to do on like 9,000 people. It's just impossible to do that because you have to lock people up to do this, right? And people don't want to be locked up. So this was the locked up people. basically who were able to be experimented on before ethics rules. And they found this incredible result, which was the opposite of what we thought. And it was buried by the scientists who did the study because they couldn't believe it. So they didn't actually publish it. It was funded by the government, and they should have published it. It was some guy finding a bunch of files in a basement, like 40 years later, that finally kind of assembled the data and published the study. And it was really quite impressive study. and it really showed that if you're just looking at pure Omega-6 and comparing that to saturated fat, that the Omega-6 did far worse even though they lowered the LDL cholesterol more than the set, and that was dramatic. So I think that's an important cautionary note. If you're consuming these oils, make sure you have enough Omega-3s in your diet. So you really, I think, you know, looking at historically, We used to get these omega-6 oils from foods we ate.

From beans, from seeds, from grains, from.

You know, basically we get these from the plants we ate, nuts, and they're fine. And they're fine to consume from the whole food sources. I don't have anywhere. I want to have corn. It's got corn oil in it. If you want to have, you know, peanuts, eat the peanuts. You know, don't eat the peanut oil. Don't eat the corn oil. If you want to use some expeller or cold pressed organic, non-GMO soybean or canola oil, I think it's probably okay in small amounts as long as you're getting enough Omega-3s. And Omega-3s are more in the soy and canola oil. But most canola and soybean oil are GMO. Most of them are spray with glyphosate. Most of them are highly refined deodorized and processed in ways that may make them more harmful. it's really nuanced, but it's not like, oh, soybean and canola are okay. No, they're okay if they're made in a certain way and they come from a certain place and they're not GMO and they're, they're not overly processed in certain ways that we talked about. We just talked about. So I think that's, that's an important distinction. Also, if you want to get more Omega-3s in your diet, you can eat wild fish like sardines, herring, mackerel, anchovies. If you want to eat wild food like wild bison, wild elk, wild deer. You can buy these now. They're raised and they're fed their natural diets. Regeneratively raised cows can also be higher in Omega-3s and lower in Omega-6s. It's really impossible to do that. I think it's really important. For example, wild beef contains about seven times as much Omega-3s as industrially raised animals, which have almost none. And most of what our grandparents ate were pasture-raised, regenerative, organic, grass-fed, and then get hormones, antibiotics. there was nothing else to eat. So getting refined oils in our diet has, I think, been a problem as a society, particularly because we've kind of limited Omega-3s and because we've had all these refined processes. So I would be very careful about consuming too much of just pure Omega-6 fats. You can check your ratio. You can go on, go to functionhealth.com. you can actually get a membership. And one of the tests we check for is your Omega- index, which looks at all of your essential fatty acids, omega-3s, omega-6s, and saturated fat. We can get a really picture of where you're at. You want to know what's happening and not guess. The other problem is if you eat too much of the omega-6s, it actually inhibits the conversion of the plant-based omega-3s. So, let's say you're in walnuts or chia seeds or flax seeds that have omega-3s, which have ALA or alpha-linolenic acid. it actually prevents the conversion by inhibiting an enzyme called Delta 60-saturates which is necessary for the conversion of the Omega-6s I mean Omega-3s that are in the plant form ALA to the Omega-3s that we need for our brain to regulate inflammation and for everything else which is called EPA and DHA and it can reduces that conversion. So, there's many reasons that kind of interferes with things. So, I would basically avoid consuming too much of this. There's been some population studies showing that high levels of omega-6s can contribute to more inflammatory diseases, can cause more mental illness, suicide, homicide. This is work out of the NIH. So I think Dr. Joseph Hibbeln has done a lot of this work. You can look at his research. It's quite interesting. And it's a bit nuanced, so you have to kind of dig into it. It took me a long time to figure it out because I was trying to, you know, cut through the noise of what I was hearing. you know, from this, so this paper, that paper, or this expert or that expert, and you know, I'm a researcher, contradicting everybody else. I'm like, I want to look at the literature myself. And basically, I concluded what I just shared with you. And so you want to get rid of these things. And I think we really are unfortunately overloaded in these oils.

I think we should be limiting them. We should be only probably using my.

Favorite oils, which are extra virgin olive oil, expeller pressed or cold pressed oils, extra virgin olive oil, MCTL is okay actually, has a very limited effect on your cholesterol. If at all, it's anti-inflammatory may help improve your metabolism and cholesterol. Avocados are great, grass-fed meats are great, grass-fed butter, nuts are great, walnuts, almonds, pecans, macadamia, seeds are great. Chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, all fine fatty fish, sardines, mackerel, herring, wild salmon, full of omega-3 fats.

So it's really important to get your.

Oils right in your diet to get the right kind of oil change to make sure you're not eating too much of these refined oils, to make sure you're having, if you're having any of the plant oils that you make sure they're, you know, limited quantities that you're using basically the combination oils that are soy or canola that are not GMO that are organic and so forth. And also add in, you know, you can add in different oils like macadamia oil or walnut oil or almond oil. You can cook with these things. You can use them for flavoring. They're different things, but they shouldn't be staples. And my staple oils are basically extra virgin olive oil. I use avocado oil. I use a little ghee and butter, grass-fed butter, and a little bit of coconut oil sometimes. So that's basically makes it really simple. But I think we should be aware that this is a complex topic. We're still learning about it.

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I was talking to a patient yesterday, and she was struggling with her sleep and wanted some medications. I'm like, tell me about your day. She says, well, I have new kids. I, you know, read in bed, and I I basically put them to bed, and then I work, and then I.

Get on my computer, I do emails, I deal with all my obligations, commitments.