How To Use Food As Your Body's Fat Loss Language

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Foreign. Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And if you're listening to this podcast when it comes out, you may know that just last week over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, i released an article called 21 Steps to Optimizing youg Diet and 11 Foods yous Need to Stop Eating Now. And that entire article was influenced by a book that I've recently read called Deep Nutrition. Now the subtitle of Deep Nutrition is why your genes need Traditional Food. It was written by a physician, Dr. Kate Shanahan. And Dr. Shanahan goes into a ton of extremely interesting and useful and practical nutrition information. In this book she covers from the Maasai to the ancient Egyptian to the Japanese, the French, kind of how we can base our diet using the foundation of some of the healthiest components of all these other diets. But it does so in this really scientific way, using a lot of research in physiology and research in genetics. And you'd think that all of this just has to do with like health or longevity. But what I like is she actually gets into things like how we can use these concepts to enhance our beauty, like the length of our limbs and the shape of our eyes. And even what we're going to talk about today, that is fat loss and the way that your body interprets the food that you eat to either help you to gain fat or lose fat, depending on the choices that you make. So it's really non run of the mill information when it comes to fat loss. That's why I wanted to get Dr. Kate on the show today to talk about this stuff because a lot of what you're going to learn today when it comes to optimizing your body for fat loss kind of flies under the radar. So, Dr. Kate, thank you so much for coming on the call today.

Oh, my pleasure, Ben. I'm so excited to be on your show.

So, you know, I was telling you before we recorded, like your book is so jam packed with information. I have, I'm looking at it right now. There's literally like, I think about 40 pages folded over things that I wanted to ask you. And finally, as I got towards the end of the book, I was like, man, we gotta focus on just one thing here. Cause there's so much. So I decided that we. What I really wanted to go after today was your excellent chapter. It's chapter 10 in the book Deep Nutrition called Beyond Using Food as a Language to Achieve Ideal Body Weight. So I think that a place that would be really, really good for us to start off is your whole talk about this energy balance formula and kind of like energy versus information. Because you start off talking about why calories don't count. So. So let's just jump right in there. Dr. K. Why don't calories count?

Okay, well, you know, we're all familiar with the energy balance equation, right? Calories in versus calories out equals weight gained or lost. You know, I learned that in medical school, too. And I bowed down to the simplicity of its truth. Until in practice, I met patients who. I like to talk to my patients and listen. And they told me that they were doing X amount of exercise and eating X amount of calories and still not losing weight time and time again. So I had no choice but to believe them. I talked to my colleagues about it, and there was just a giant question mark over the whole thing. And some of my colleagues just resorted to, well, they're not telling the truth. And that's a real common reaction. But it just. It didn't seem right. And so ultimately, when I opened my eyes to the reality of what nutrition really does, during my great reformation, somewhere in the. Right around the millennium, I came across the idea that food was actually information. It's chemical information, and it's chemical information that communicates with our DNA, our genetics, and builds us. And so the idea that you can just turn it into numbers and caloric value and somehow that translates into a human being is way oversimplified, obviously. So when we're talking about food as information, what we can then understand is that the food that we eat contains instructions for our DNA. And those instructions affect our metabolism to build fat or to burn or to reduce the amount of fat and build muscle in any combination. Those things are not necessarily occurring at the same time. So when you look at it that way, you can start to understand how people can do things like train for a marathon and yet eat 1200 calories a day and still not lose weight. And it just boils down to the fact that they're instructing their body to hang onto that fat with every ounce of energy that the body has. And so this is all very abstract. So let me give You a specific example. Back in 1995, a journalist named Jo Robinson was wandering around a medical laboratory, research laboratory, and she happened to strike up a conversation while she was waiting to talk with somebody else. And she struck up a conversation with a scientist who was examining a biologic process called apoptosis. This is a kind of cell suicide. It's very complicated process in which a damaged cell recognizes that it's not working properly, that something's missing, or it's just time to shut itself down. And it does so in a really organized way. It very quietly takes itself apart so that any useful pieces can be recycled by the body. It doesn't cause inflammation, it doesn't cause white blood cells, it doesn't attract white blood cells. It's just a very quiet, polite process. And so what this scientist was telling Joe Robinson, the journalist who she actually went on to write a very popular book, because this scientist was studying something that we all have heard of now called Omega 3. And he told her that he was noticing that he was studying cancer cells and he found that when they added omega 3 fatty acids, like what you would get from flax oil or fish oil to these cancer cells, then the cancer cells would undergo the process of apoptosis. And conversely, when you fed these cancer cells omega 6 fatty acids, another kind of essential fatty acid, the cancer cells would grow. And so Jo Robinson was like so struck by that that 10 years later, when I had the chance to talk to her in her house, she relived the moment and tears almost came to her eyes because it was such a powerful thing to see that you could actually change. You can talk to cells. And so the caloric value there of the Omega 3 versus the Omega 6 doesn't play into it at all. Right. I mean, it's a completely parallel and opposite non intersecting thought process to say that the omega 3 somehow promotes caloric gain. That somehow has to do with shutting or caloric. It's caloric gain, but yet it kills cells. Right. It reduces the number of these kinds of cells. So, so there's obviously that in that sense, it helps you to start to build this understanding of what exactly is chemical information. So it's information that the body interprets and does stuff with it. It is, it is instructions.

Right. A lot of times the analogy that you hear are like, you know, the difference between an Oreo snack pack and an apple. But you know, I like the way that you lay it out in terms of even going deeper and looking at like just something as simple as omega 3 fatty acid. Content versus omega 6 fatty acid content affecting something like cancer. And obviously we're going to talk more about fat loss than cancer today. But you know, in that, in that section of the book you go into this idea of getting rid of inflammation that blocks cellular communication and eating foods that enable you to convert your fat cells into healthier tissue. Now converting fat cells into healthier tissue is not something that you hear talked about a lot, but that's what you call the deep nutrition formula for weight loss. Can you kind of go into why you chose that as the formula?

Because it is the simplest way of describing what happens when people are trapped in this cycle where they exercise all that they can and they restrict their calories and yet they still don't, they still fail to lose the fat mass. What's happened often is that they've been in a pro inflammatory state. Their body has chemicals circulating that are a result of inflammation, that can come from stresses, that can come from infection, that can come from a pro inflammatory diet from lack of sleep. And those chemicals actually are static, blocking the signals that the exercise is creating. When we exercise, we generate all kinds of signals. As a bodybuilder, I'm sure you, Ben, are very familiar with the fact that you generate growth hormones and there's all kinds of signaling cascades that have to do with fancy segments of genes that we've understood like MTOR and stuff like this that turn on the genes for creating proteins that help build more muscle. Well, all of that can get blocked by inflammatory chemicals. And so once you so an essential first step to being able to actually reduce your fat mass, burn fat effectively, is getting rid of that inflammation and then the exercise. Only once you've really cleared out as much of the inflammation as possible can the exercise and all that hard work that you do give you the results that you want.

And I think later on we're probably going to talk about some of those foods that would tend to really cause inflammation and, or fight inflammation. But I can tell you like for me, from personal experience, I don't know if you've noticed this, but when I'm working with someone who's had a lot of resistance to fat loss and we specifically actually do blood testing to look at like hscrp, kind of a classic marker of inflammation, or cytokines are another one that you can look at or interleukins a lot of times in folks who can't lose weight, these inflammatory molecules are through the roof. And it's just something that people don't even think about. They Think about, like we mentioned starting off the calories, but they don't think about all that underlying inflammation that can be dealt with using some of the stuff that I think we're going to get into here.

Absolutely.

So before we do that though, something that kind of shocked me as I was reading this chapter of your book was you start off by talking about appreciating what fat does for you and even going as far as to say that you'd never get on Baywatch without body fat. So can you say what you mean by that?

So for those of you who don't originate from the same vintage and have no idea what Baywatch is, I think it was a TV show that came out in, what was it, the 80s or 90s or something? I can't even remember. They all blend after a while.

Just the red swimsuit, Pam Anderson running down the beach. Like, that's what I remember.

Yes, Basically that's all I remember too. And I think it was written and directed plastic surgeons, because there wasn't much to the plot. But so if you, even if you were to deflate Pam Anderson's boobs, you would still appreciate what fat is doing for her visually because she still has those full, feminine, luscious lips. She still has attractive fat pads under her eyes, under her nose. So fat is making us look youthful when we're youthful. And one of the things that happens as we age, you know, we all hear how we gain fat as we age. Well, actually we lose fat under our skin fat. We don't actually really gain fat. It ends up in the wrong places. And so what fat does for us when we're young is it sits in places where it goes away when you're approaching my age. So a lot of folks who get plastic surgery or collagen injections know the term nasolabial fold, right? It's like the bane of the 30 something year olds where when you smile, instead of just having a pretty smile, there's like this droop underneath the cheeks. And that's actually because fat has been lost at the fold there of the nose, just under the cheeks. And when we wake up in the morning, we start to see like wrinkles and puffiness under our eyes. That's because fat has been lost from under the eyes. And another funny example, maybe about five years ago, there was a picture of Madonna, you know, really thin, carrying something, grocery bags. And the caption was Clint Eastwood's penis arms or something like that. Kiss her. Her biceps had no fat around them and they were overly defined in A wrinkly, kind of deflated looking way. And so the fat, even under the skin and in between our muscle, helps us look youthful and shapely and curvy. But it's not just appearances. Paradoxically, if you don't have enough fat and if you have way too much fat, you get many of the same problems. And we know this because they've bred mice to be genetically prone to fatlessness, is what they call it. So they call them fatless mice. And these mice develop many of the same problems that mice genetically bred to be obese develop. And that is hyperphagia, which is the medical term for eating too much. Weight gain, insulin resistance, fatty liver, high triglyceride levels, and glucose intolerance. So all the hormones that fat cells produce help mediate those things. And that when you have no fat, you don't have those hormones and they don't help you balance out your energy and you end up being sick. And then just to, just to restate, this is kind of a little bit weird that if you are. How can a fatless mouse develop weight gain? Well, what, what they do, they actually gain weight in other tissues. So they, they gain weight in their liver, they gain weight in their muscles, so their muscles become malformed. You know, you're not supposed to have fat interloculated with your muscle fibers. They won't contract well. So, so fat cells help prevent that problem as, as well as help keep you look youthful. When they're in the right place, diet and lifestyle is such that they stay in the right place for longer.

So does this, this reason that body fat is essential and this kind of concept, that you don't actually lose fat cells, they just move around. Does this relate to why you say that supplements really aren't that effective?

Yeah, absolutely, because supplements, you know, we always think that we come across supplements are developed often because somebody in a lab discovered something really cool and they get overly think, oh, this is the answer to everything, right? Because how many times have we heard that, oh, they've discovered this new compound and it's the answer to obesity or cancer. So the example that we talk about in our book Deep Nutrition is the example of leptin, because it was discovered back in 1995 when they found that when researchers who were working with a breed of mice that were just naturally overweight discovered that that breed lacked a chemical called leptin. So, you know, bing cha, ching, the dollar signs go up. Leptin, that's the answer to obesity. So, you know, 10 years later, fast forward 10 years it took him to realize that long, to do all the more research to figure out why the supplements weren't working. And it has to do with the fact that you can't just take excessive amounts of a hormone that your body needs when the rest of the house is not in order, and particularly when you have that inflammation. Because no matter how much leptin they give people who are overweight, the body can't respond to it properly. And that's partly because of the inflammation.

Gotcha. Gotcha. So your strategy shouldn't necessarily be to get rid of all your fat cells. Your strategy is basically to send the right chemical signal to your body to use the energy that's in those fat cells in the right way. Is that kind of where we're going?

Absolutely. That's absolutely right. Because there's. There is useful stuff stored in there, and your body can make use of those cells.

Gotcha. And the only way you're gonna send that message to your body to use the energy that's in those existing fat cells that you're not actually gonna get rid of. You're just going to burn through some of the energy that's available in them is to make sure that you are not resistant to leptin.

Right, okay. Exactly.

Got it. And it's inflammation that makes you resistant to leptin.

Yes. And of course, it's not just leptin that you're resistant to. It's multiple imbalances and multiple resistances. A lot of folks have heard of the term insulin resistance and that, you know, is related to the diabetes disorder and that many people who are overweight are insulin resistant. So they're also resistant to sex hormones, which is why a lot of women who are overweight have polycystic ovarian disease. So all of these resistances come in part from the inflammation blocking the hormones as they circulate. And they don't end up in the right place or for a variety of complicated reasons, they just can't transmit the signal. They never get to the DNA to tell the DNA exactly what it's supposed to do.

Okay, got it. So unlocking our potential for fat loss once again, kind of comes full circle to this inflammation. And one of the things that you talk about as far as something that is extremely pro inflammatory, are distorted fats. Can you talk about what you mean by distorted fats and why those in particular would be one of the most damaging things in this scenario?

In chapter eight of our book, Deep Nutrition, we go over good fats and bad. And the simplest Way to distinguish good fats from bad is that nature doesn't make bad fats, factories do. And what factories do to make bad fats is they distort natural fats. And so distorted fats is my shortcut term for any kind of a mutated fatty acid that is completely foreign to your body, has absolutely no ability to do anything positive in your body. It's like a toxin, and it promotes inflammation because it confuses the normal natural order of things. It's like, I guess if you're running traffic, if you're looking at the nice flow of traffic through a city, inflammation would be anything that would disrupt that, like massive number of potholes or a couple bridges being closed. These fatty acids work in the same way to disrupt the normal order of function in your body at a cellular level, and then that extends to the tissue level. So that distorted fats, we know some specific things that they do. One of them is, well, the most familiar distorted fat probably is the trans fat that we've all heard of. You don't want to have hydrogenated oils in your food or margarine because it contains trans fat. Well, what's bad about this trans fat anyway? It's deformed, it's distorted. It is not something that your body is capable of dealing with. It's not what your body expects. And so when the enzymes that normally modify the fatty acids, either burning them or extending them or changing their shape, pick them up, these enzymes actually can't let go of them. So it's like a Chinese finger trap for your fat burning enzymes, and it takes them out. And having all these enzymes taken out can actually lead to a very dysfunctional adipose cell that's going to be producing all kinds of other inflammatory chemicals like tumor necrosis factor and things that make people who are overweight feel tired and sluggish and sick and depressed. And a lot of it comes from these distorted fats and that harmful interaction with enzymes.

Okay, gotcha. So basically, when you're consuming trans fats, it's limiting your ability to burn free fatty acids and making the fat cells actually, is it making the fat cells become more full of fatty acids, or is it more affecting the liver's ability to actually burn fats? Or both.

It depends where. Yeah, both, because it depends where they are. You know, the trans fats can end up in all of our tissues, even our brain. And so they will cause inflammatory problems in some tissues. And then if they end up in the fat cells, it makes it difficult for those fat cells to burn fat Properly when the time comes. Because of those reasons, the enzymes have been disrupted. Maybe there's too much inflammation in the cells just not working properly. So it makes it very hard to lose weight when you've got a whole bunch of that type of fat in your body. It's a completely different process for eliminating that cell. A cell full of these distorted fats versus just burning, calories, running, and the normal process of weight loss. I think this is a big reason a lot of people go through plateaus, actually, where they have a hard time losing weight.

Yeah. And something you mentioned in the book that I actually wasn't aware of was that vegetable oils, which are pretty much in every packaged food on the face of the planet, you know, canola oil and safflower oil and sunflower oil and all of these, they can actually deform into these type of distorted fatty acids.

So, yeah, thank you, Ben, for bringing that up, because, yeah, there's six very common vegetable oils that everybody should know to look for. I'll just list them out real quick, if that's okay.

Yeah, definitely.

So it's corn, cottonseed, canola, soy, sunflower, safflower. And those are definitely on my website as well as in the books. But those are, as you said, in so many processed and packaged goods that it's depressing, honestly, when you try to go shopping once, you realize these things are bad for you. So I tell people, you know, if they're not in the top six ingredients, then it's probably okay. But, you know, if you can't find an alternative, because sometimes you're, you know, you've got to get something that's. You don't have time to cook and you gotta do something. So it's better than going for Twinkies or McDonald's french fries.

Yeah. And, you know, by the way, we mentioned all of those oils over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com in the article that I wrote last week that was derived from your book, the 11 Foods to Avoid. One of the things, though, that we've kind of talked about is how you can't really get rid of fat cells, but you do talk about how you can transform them into other types of cells and the concept of stem cells and where they fit in with this. So can you talk about stem cells and how those can be used to kind of like coerce fat cells into becoming other, perhaps more helpful cells?

So cells in the body are a lot more flexible than we used to think? Right. We used to think that, you know, the sperm the all kinds of potential there, all those are stem cells for a while, then they start differentiating. And as you mature, it's a one way street. Suddenly you have heart cells and those are heart cells forever. But it turns out that all kinds of cells in the body can be coerced into reversing that maturing route and going backwards and going from becoming a muscle cell or a bone cell or a fat cell and turning into a stem cell. And we're not sure exactly how much of that process is occurs before a fat cell can undergo apoptosis, but they actually can. You actually can get rid of fat cells. It's just really been in the context of the pro inflammatory diet that we've all heard that you can't get rid of fat cells, but you can, it's very hard when there's inflammation laying around. It'll block this complicated process. But the stem cells that you can turn, fat cells, you know, you can reverse course and have them go back into stem cells and then, you know, from there they can become more, much more useful types of cells. Not any type of cell, but any, it seems like any connective tissue type of cell. So there's four body types that are called connective tissue. Fat is one, muscle is another, bone is one, and, and white blood cells is another. But actually, you know what, I'm correcting myself.

Is it nerve cells?

Yeah, you can actually turn fat cells into nerve cells, even though those are not strictly speaking, connective tissue. So we have to rewrite the whole understanding of human physiology and embryology. And so the fact that we need to do that. Sometimes I trip myself up because I forget that that needs to happen. So let me just give you a really interesting example of what fat cells can do. There's an article titled Improvement of neurological deficits by Intracerebral transplantation of Human Adipose. So adipose is fat. So what they did was they went to a liposuction clinic, I guess, and got human fat cells. They said it was from liposuction and they treated it with some DNA modifying chemicals which were mostly nutrients for a little while to get it to a certain state of de differentiation. And then they injected those formerly fat cells into the part of the brain called the ventricle, which is like the fluidy part of the brain, that from there fluid can flow to other parts of the brain. This was into mice that had been given small strokes. Right. And so what these former fat cells did was swim around to all different parts of the brain, including the damaged part of the brain and, and were able to actually improve the physical coordination of the mice where they had lost function from the stroke, they started to improve. So fat cells can become like anything. So mostly, I mean, they can be really put to good use. But obviously mostly what we would want would be let's get rid of some cellulite. Right? So it gives me great hope for the idea of when you have that cellulite on your thighs or wherever it is, if you do the right kind of exercise and eat well, what's happening is that you just reverse the process of those fat cells that you go, you turn them back into stem cells and then they can become pre myocyte cells. And they do this has also been shown in the lab. And then those pre myocytes can become muscle cells. So it would obviously to do this. And I've seen it happen in my own flabby legs where I had a whole bunch of cellulite. And then I really watched my diet and exercise and it was gone and it was just muscle.

Wow.

It was like pretty quick that it happens. And I think it's because, you know, you're having this weird transformation where former fat just reverses. You're not really burning it all off, you're just allowing it to turn into muscle cells. And so it's pretty cool.

Well, I know that one of the things we're going to talk about is the type of exercise that actually can cause fat cells to become other cells. And again, I think it's important to differentiate between the fact that we're not saying that the cells disappear. They just take on the characteristics of or become cells that are of a different type than the storage based fat cells or the cellulite cells or something of that nature. Before we talk about the type of exercise that could actually do something like that, I know that one thing that you say is one of the ways that you don't make fat cells give up all their fat or disappear is low calorie diets or extreme amounts of caloric moderation or very small food portions. Why is that approach not a good idea?

Well, that approach, the calorie restriction approach, basically does shrink your fat cells down a little bit, but it doesn't shut them down for good. And the reason it doesn't shut them down for good is if you were eating a diet that was unhealthy enough to make you gain weight and you just start eating less of that same diet. This is the everything in moderation approach that I hear so often. And people who are struggling to lose weight. So they're eating the same foods that cause them to gain weight just a little bit less of them. You're not getting the blend of nutrients that are capable of sending the signals for the fat cell to undergo that complicated process of apoptosis. That very polite cell suicide where it just takes itself apart quietly is no longer a fat cell or the other. The other possibility is where it turns into a muscle cell. So both of those require a lot of complex nutrients and signaling to be generated. And if you are not going to change significantly the quality of your diet, you're just going to restrict it. You can't possibly expect to generate different compounds and chemicals than you were when you were eating more of the same unhealthy foods.

Gotcha. So is there an issue here with caloric restriction and extreme moderation in terms of that potentially having the ability to make you fatter?

It can definitely block fat loss. Like if you are overweight and you're trying to lose weight and you restrict so severely that you block your body's ability to generate these signals that empty out your fat cells, yes, you will suffer from a weight loss plateau. And whether or not you can continue gaining weight in those circumstances, it's certainly possible if you have the right, or I should say wrong, combination of inflammation and, you know, from lack of sleep or stress or other factors affecting your health, maybe certain medications and combined with even a low calorie. But a unhealthy, macronutrient, imbalanced diet, lacking nutrients, that kind of thing, your body can be so, like imbalanced that all it can do is continue to make fat out of the food that you're eating.

So once you do start eating, like let's say you go on a calorie restricted diet and then you start to amp up the calories again or maybe fall off the diet bandwagon like a lot of people do, your body's more likely to put that energy into fat cell storage.

Yeah, I mean, it's very possible. That happens a lot. And that is the explanation is that you've generated signals that make your body panic about energy. And it's like, okay, if I get anything, protein, fat, sugar, whatever, I'm going to turn that into fat because I need to have a certain amount of it around. Because, you know, that's just the body knows it needs to have a certain balance of tissues. And if you get to that unhealthy state, you can convince your body that you don't have enough fat laying around. Even though, even though you do it, it can't tell. And this is the role of inflammation that it blocks the signals that your fat cells are trying to send, saying, look, there's plenty of us around. So there's all kinds of different ways in which inflammation can interfere with the process of losing weight and make it very. While simultaneously making it very easy to gain weight. So getting rid of the inflammation just makes all of those potentials irrelevant.

Yeah. And I think it's really interesting because when you talk about caloric moderation, you mentioned how your body winds up getting force when you're just being hungry all the time to mine other tissues for things like vitamins and minerals and protein and essential fats and kind of break down everything from muscle to other connective tissue to even your brain. And I thought that was interesting because that's almost related to something else you talk about at a different part of the book in relation to beauty and how women who want to have more beautiful children or who want to kind of increase the symmetrical appearance of their children or give their children really a step up in life should actually take like a couple years between kids to actually allow their body to restore a lot of those nutrients and vitamins and minerals. So I think, you know, that's obviously a whole different part of the book, but it seems like when it comes down to it being beautiful, burning fat, et cetera, it's not really a case of depriving the body of all these nutrients and vitamins and minerals.

You're absolutely right, Ben. And I'm glad you brought up that discussion of making healthy and beautiful children, because it does take a complex array of nutrients, just like weight loss does. So the same diet that helps you lose weight, if you wanted to do that before conceiving, is going to be better for the baby that you ultimately would conceive.

Yeah. And I know that you lay out, like I mentioned, I talked about some of the foods you mentioned in the article at Ben Greenfield Fitness. I know you lay out a ton more foods like that that kind of allow you to get extreme nutrient density with even smaller portions of food in kind of like the ancestral eating parts of the book. And I would encourage people to go check that out. But I want to delve now into some of the factors that you talk about, because in the book you talk about six factors that make you build fat and six factors that eliminate fat. Now, you already talked about omega 6 fatty acids as one of the factors that makes you build fat. You talked about insulin as well. Now, there are a few others and you've got an entire table on page 248. But there's one that is. That's a common type of diabetes medication that ironically, you say can actually make you fat. Can you go into that one and explain how that works?

The types of these prescription medications are called thiazolidine diones. I love saying it when I get it right.

Thiazolidine diones, yes.

And so this would be like Avandia, Rosiglitazone, Pioglitazone. They actually stimulate fat cell division and increase fat storage. They were actually, you know, when drugs get developed, the people developing them really have no clue what the chemical is going to end up being marketed as. They just try to fiddle around with it and see what it does. And these drugs were actually going to. Were in development early on to be weight loss pills because they thought that they would increase a cell's metabolism enough to burn weight. But it turns out that if somebody's insulin resistant, it makes the insulin resistance worse. They've also been associated with a higher rate of heart attacks. And so now some of them have been taken off the market, actually. So they're less common than they were when I wrote the book, but they're still very common. I get patients every week from other doctors who are still on them. But one of the interesting things that's come out about these drugs in terms of just how one type of cell can be converted into another, based on information, these drugs have been found to convert bone cells into fat cells.

Wow.

And we know this because people were coming in with unusual fractures. And I actually had a patient who went on a hike. She just kind of had a slight misstep and she completely shattered her ankle. Both of the leg bones broke and it took her over a year to recover. And she had been on this very medication of India. And so she herself had come across the research that shows that it promotes fractures. And she brought it to my attention that that had actually happened back in 2009. And I did some more looking into it and it. I found that it was known, it was long known that these drugs actually promoted bone cell conversion to fat cell. And they're still on the market.

Wow. So six factors that can make you build fat are omega 6 fatty acids, insulin, sugars, glucocorticoids, which in the book you talk about how stress and sleep deprivation are two of the biggest ways to increase those. And then trans fats, which we already talked about. And then ironically, some fat loss drugs, which is crazy. Now you also talk about Six factors that eliminate fat. One of the factors that you talk about that eliminates fat is conjugated linoleic acid or what's also known as cla. How does that help you to eliminate fat and what is it?

Well, conjugated linoleic acid is actually a fatty acid that comes from the milk or the. Yeah, the milk of cows fed grass. So if you have pastured dairy products that you're getting, you're getting some of this very special fatty acid. It's a long chain fatty acid. It's a polyunsaturated fatty acid and it is actually a trans fatty acid. And so just to digress for a minute, there's a lot of spin going on by the vegetable oil industry that, you know, there's trans fats are present. The same trans, same word is used to describe the trans fats that we want to avoid from hydrogenating vegetable oils. And they call this conjugated linoleic acid. Now it's also called the trans fat simply because it has a certain shape bond in it. But the rest of the entire conjugated linoleic acid molecule is completely natural and has none of the effects of the distorted, unnatural, factory made trans fat. So it's totally different. And one of the effects that it has is this process of apoptosis so that it reduces fat cell number. And the only source in nature comes from ungulates. Right. So it's not just the dairy fat, it's also present in their fat. And that's a misprint in our book. I said the only source is milk fat. I don't know what I was thinking. It's in all of their fat. So even if you have grass fed hamburger, the fat in there is going to contain some conjugate linoleic acid.

Interesting. So like the studies that I've seen lately that have talked about how people who eat full fat dairy tend to be leaner than people who eat low fat dairy. Part of that could be due to CLA content.

Absolutely. Because even if it is not pastured, it seems as though there's enough of the hay or grass going into these other cows that are also fed grain where they do get some conjugated linoleic acid. So even regular off the shelf, you know, dairy that I don't recommend to anybody is going to have some. So that's how the studies can show something like that.

Interesting. So one of the things that I wanted to clarify, and I think I may even have said this wrong earlier in our interview, was about fat cells being able to get converted into other cells, but not ever really disappearing. When you talk about fat cell apoptosis, you really are saying that these cells completely can go away?

Absolutely, yes. They shut themselves down and disappear. It's like they never were there. So, you know, we've always heard that you can create more fat cells, but you can't turn down that number. You can't shut them down. That's simply not true. It's just that those studies where people, where the scientists concluded that were done on these kind of starvation, rapid weight loss diets, and that's exactly what happened, is that the fat cell number didn't go down. They just went from. The fat cells went from being plump and happy to skinny, mean, and hungry.

Wow. So in a state where you shut down inflammation and you've put the right nutrients into the body and you're also exercising in a way that we're about to talk about, you can actually get fat cell apoptosis or fat cell death.

Exactly.

Wow. Well, you heard it here, folks. I actually learned something completely new because I was apparently one of those people that was brainwashed into thinking that fat cells could just get converted into other type of cells but never completely disappear. So there you have it. Apparently they can actually go away. So cool. I love learning new things.

I'm so happy you picked out this chapter, because this is one of my favorites, because it's so. There's like. It just shows how amazing our biology is and how we've underestimated the capacity of the body to regenerate, to heal, to stay youthful, all these things.

Well, I have a master's degree in exercise physiology, and they never taught me that about fat cells, so that's really good to know. Okay, so let's. Speaking of exercise, go ahead and delve into this. You talk about the type of exercise that works really well for burning fat and the things that you found to really work well from both an aerobic and an anaerobic exercise standpoint. One of the first things that you go into when you jump into exercise is that you need to make sure to feel it when it comes to aerobic exercise. Now, I know you're not one of those people, I don't think, who are out doing CrossFit sessions every day, so I don't think you're incredibly masochistic. But when you say you need to feel your aerobic exercise, what exactly do you mean by that?

I mean, so why do you need to feel it? Well, first of all, to get the aerobic benefit. Right. And so what do I mean by feel it? But I'm talking about the people that we've all seen them in the gym, where they're like, they're going to the gym and they're all dressed up nice and they got all the accoutrements and everything, and they're sort of sitting on the bicycle and no sweat anywhere, and they're just reading an article and looks like they're having a great time. Could be at the beach, except for that their legs are rotating around in circles on the bicycle underneath them. So that's what I'm talking about, because maybe things have changed, but the gyms that I go to, I still see a lot of that. And that's really not going to give people the effect that they're presumably looking for when they're doing cardio, which is getting their cardiac system into great shape. Where your heart beats efficiently, the circulatory system is so healthy that it invests all your muscles with enough blood to go and go and go without getting short of breath. And it just keeps. This is what keeps us healthy and keeps us young, the feeling of it with the aerobic exercise.

Yeah, I was really nodding my head as I read that part of your book, because I know a lot of triathletes and marathoners and folks like that listening to this show. And I've of course, been that person who has ridden a bike while watching a movie. And I think that what's important to realize is that that type of aerobic exercise, where you're able to zone out and read a book or watch a movie or something like that may indeed help you if you're going to go, let's say, do an Ironman triathlon, where you need to ride a bike for five hours or spend four hours on your feet during a marathon. But I don't think people should get fooled into thinking that that's the type of exercise that is going to make them look better or burn a significant.

Amount of fat, and it doesn't push their envelope. And that's what I'm talking about with the feeling. It. You need to feel something to push your envelope, right? To get into better shape. And so that you need to be conscious of what you're doing. And there's all different theories, schools of thought that I'm sure you're more well versed in than I am about what levels of exercise get you, what benefit and need to be accomplished. But the bottom line is, what they all have in common is that you're concentrating on it. And that has an effect on your body in all kinds of ways. You know, first of all, the nervous system becomes invested in those muscles so that those muscles will now work for you. Next time you do it, it will be a little more mindless, but you're getting better and better. And what you this latest craze in exercises, you know, minimalist exercise. Right. So that if you want to get your cardio system into really good shape, you can, it seems, at least this school of thought suggests that you can do a minimum of cardio exercise, but just make it real mindful and then boom, you're getting your cardiac system into great shape without the wear and tear on your connective tissue, which you're only like 19, Ben, so you don't even have to think about that at this point. But at my stage of life, I want to do exercise that gets the results I want without making me limp around the next morning when I wake up. So that's what the feeling it comes from. And then you can do less.

Yeah. And I think what's important to realize, I think it was one of Jeff Volek and Steve Finney's two, they're low carb researchers, but in one of their books, I think it was the Low Carb Performance book, they highlight a study that even shows that this really long aerobic cardio can, in a similar way that caloric restriction can decrease your metabolism in some cases by up to 30% as the body goes into that energy conservation mode. So, you know, I like how you highlight the fact in the book that aerobic exercise, if it's getting to the point where your aerobic exercise is kind of mindless, it's probably at too low of an intensity. So I think that's really interesting. You also talk about anaerobic exercise, though, and why intensity matters. And you use this concept of high intensity interval training, but you use a specific example in the book for a specific number of minutes per week that are much lower than what I think a lot of people would think. Can you talk about anaerobic exercise, intense exercise, and how much you would need to actually burn fat?

Yeah, believe it or not, if you do eight minutes a week, you can get incredible results. So this comes from research at the Exercise Metabolism Research Group in Canada, Ontario, Canada. And they had, they actually wanted to do the research because they felt like what you just suggested, that you can get chronic fatigue from daily training. And they wanted to find a way to avoid that while still being able to improve your level of fitness. So I'll just Describe this study here. What they had was the test subject started with four intervals and gradually increased to seven intervals over a two week period of training. So this is four intervals a day up to seven. The intervals were only performed on three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And they consisted of 30 seconds of all out cycling with a generous four minute rest period. And so it was just a total of 15 minutes at the beginning. Over the first two weeks, by the end of the entire trial, which, what was it? I think it was just two weeks. Yes, that's right. Okay. On a daily basis, they increased from four intervals to seven. And so after the two weeks, they had increased their exercise capacity as measured by the VO2 Max by 100%.

Wow.

And what it just tells me as we're all in this ancestral movement, is let's go back to why we would have to run that hard. Running for 30 seconds as fast as you can is basically running for your life. And why would you do that? Either to run away from something that was going to eat you, or because you were running after something you wanted to eat real bad. And so that is a great way to tell your body we really need to be stronger here to run for your life. Because if you made it, if you escaped, then your body wants to make it a little bit easier to do that next time. And it will. So it makes you strong. That's the best way to, to get yourself stronger is to do what people did when they needed to be strong, you know, back in the day, and presumably they didn't have to run for their lives, you know, that many days a week. So. Right. It's not going to be a multiple times a day kind of a thing. Maybe once a couple of days.

So like every other day you could do like a 30 second burst with a four minute rest period in between each burst and do like three or four of those and just a few times a week that's adequate. When we're talking about just like, remember folks, we're talking about fat loss, we're not necessarily talking about you getting in shape for a two day soccer tournament or something like that. We're talking about like what you need to make your body look good. It's less than what you would think.

Absolutely, yes. It's really important to point out, it depends what your goals are, of course. Right. But it's something, it's definitely food for thought. What else can you do by minimizing and concentrating your workouts? What else can be accomplished? So that's why this newest craze in exercise medicine. This minimalist fitness, I think is really fascinating, has a lot of promise.

Yeah. And in your book you actually talk about three habits of successful exercisers. Can you give us an overview of what those three habits are?

Yeah. So the first one is mindfulness. And this is where I was talking about earlier with feel it, right? You want to feel it when you exercise. You want to be concentrating when you're learning a new sport or a new skill. So you want to be conscious of your motion. And what that does is keeps that nervous system in a state of learning and a state of building. Right. So you're building new skills. It's actually been shown that when you do a new kind of exercise, your certain lobes of your brain increase in mass and it's carried out through the entire nervous system that, you know, you get more robust nerve endings all the way through to the muscle. And it also is where you get all of the feel good chemicals from exercises from that mindfulness. So that's what reinforces your desire to do more exercise. So again, it goes to, you know, do doing new things. So whether it's dancing or learning how to play volleyball or shuffleboard, or even just concentrating really hard because you're doing interval work that is going to give you that benefit. And then the second one is time management because as anyone who works and tries to exercise knows, if you want to do a lot of exercise, you know, aerobic, cardio exercise, it takes time, right. It's at least 20 to 30 minute workout. For most of us who do that kind of workout, you have to have good time management techniques so that you can get your sleep. That's another hugely important aspect. And of course so that you don't have to eat junk food all the time and eat on the go, you want to be able to have plan out your meals as well. And then the third one is pushing yourself. So when you want to get this into the aerobic, I'm sorry, into the anaerobic zone, that's where you really need to be pushing yourself to that point of exhaustion. Now that's not something you have to necessarily do every day, but as we just talked about with the interval training, you should definitely do it periodically. So whether it's pushing yourself with cardio or pushing yourself with weights and lifting really heavy stuff, you're going to get those, those benefits.

Yeah, that, that's actually those, those three habits of successful exercise is kind of like the time management, the mindfulness and the intensity piece. You know, that's why I'VE liked lately the fact that I've been training for obstacle racing because you gotta be somewhat intense, but then you also have to really focus as you're doing things like climbing over walls or, you know, navigating over a balance beam or, you know, carrying a heavy rock. And then of course there's, there's some time management involved with going out and doing the actual workouts as well. So that, that one's actually been pretty fun for me. And as a matter of fact, as we're recording this interview, I've got a huge like egg sized bruise on my left thigh from having not been mindful enough during exercise and, and slipped off and, and fell. Well, I fell off a playground. I work out on playgrounds now for this and landed on a big log and kind of messed up my leg. But for the most part it's actually a good way to train for fat loss. The other thing I should mention is, of course, everything that you're talking about A, means that you're not the person watching TV on the elliptical trainer at the gym if you really are serious about fat loss. And then B, I think that any of the things that we've talked about with exercise kind of come full circle. You know, you mentioned sleep and stress when you were talking about time management. Here it comes full circle to this idea that inflammation basically makes fat cells. Like cancer is kind of the way you describe it in your book. And so if you're somehow able to shut down inflammation, that probably like that was the biggest message I got from your fat loss chapter. Like if you can shut down inflammation, you're going to be giving yourself a huge step up when it comes to fat loss.

Absolutely. So those six factors will definitely get you rolling in that direction.

Yep. And like I mentioned, those are on, I think page 248 of your book. Those six factors, everything that we just went over is outlined in, believe it or not, even way more detail in chapter 10 of this book. Definitely. I think that anybody who wants to kind of enhance their beauty, their fat loss, and also their longevity should add this one to your reading list for this month. So it's called Deep nutrition why your genes need traditional food. And my guest today is Dr. Kate Shanahan. And Dr. Kate, I think a lot of people may not realize this, but you actually are one of the influential folks on the roster of the LA Lakers professional basketball team right now. Am I correct?

Yeah, I'm one of their trainers, actually. I'm a consultant. And we got them eating a diet called the Pro nutrition program. It stands for performance recovery and orthogenesis, which refers to building new bone. And so we've got them following a deep nutrition kind of a diet. And those who are following it to the, the closer they follow it, they're really telling me that they're experiencing a lot of benefits and they're, they're loving it. They're, you know, into it for life. You know, the guys who've really adopted it.

Awesome. Well, Dr. Kate has a ton of resources in her book and on her website. I'm going to link to all that stuff over on the show notes for this episode. And you can always find the show notes just by. Well, if you're@BenGreenfieldFitness.com, you could just do a search for Dr. Cate or you could go to the most recent podcast if you're listening to this when it comes out. If you are listening to this on the app, just click on the show notes right there in the app and it'll link you over to Dr. Cate's book and all the other good stuff that we talked about. And you could also visit her website, which I think is DrKate.com, right?

That's correct. D, R C A T e. It's not Dr. Spelled out right.

D R C, not K-R-A T E.com so, Dr. K, thank you so much for your time today and for coming on the call.

Thank you, Ben. It was really a lot of fun and you have excellent time management techniques because we got through all of your questions.

Awesome. In exactly one hour. So until next time, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Dr. Kate Shanahan signing.

Out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

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