#153 - AMA #21: Deep dive into olive oil, high-intensity exercise, book update, and more

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Hey everyone, welcome to a Sneak Peek, Ask Me Anything or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to Peteratti md.com subscribe so without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.

Hey everyone. Welcome to Ask me anything episode 21. I'm once again joined by the one and only Bob the Cap Kaplan. In today's episode, we do a super deep dive into all things olive oil, which starts from a very simple question. I think the question was something to the effect of what's the best kind of olive oil to buy? Or how do you know how to source good olive oil? And then gets into sort of a tour de force explanation around what it means to be extra virgin. And basically we get into all types of oils and the differences between things that are high in saturated fat versus things that are not and the polyunsaturated components and all these other things. So if you've ever really had a question about vegetable oils, lard, tallow, certainly olive oil, it's probably going to be answered here. And we do of course really double down on the olive oil issues specifically. So how do you know you're not getting robbed? How do you check that you're buying the right stuff? What should you be looking for on the label? And of course, what should it taste like, smell like, et cetera? We took so much time on that that we spent the small remainder of our time together doing a rapid fire Q and A from some quote unquote simple question about what's going on with my book. We talk about Zone 5 training, which was a great thing to get into because we're normally talking so deep about Zone two, but we get into Zone five. We talk about massage guns and foam rollers and professional massage, standing desk versus sitting desk, lactate meters, and a little bit around electrolyte supplementation and ketosis. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 21.

Hello, Peter.

Hey, Bob.

You ready for an exciting ama?

I sure am, man. Yeah.

I think we have a couple of really good topics here to get going. We got a couple of really interesting questions around olive oil and nicotine Together. Yeah, well, no, not together. Dipping your cigarettes in after we talk about it. Maybe. Maybe we might do some infusions here. On the olive oil front, I think we got a couple questions just around. We always hear that olive oil is really healthy for us. It's heart protective. They wanted to know why is that and is it true? Is it cardio protective? So curious about your take on olive oil, Peter.

This is one of those topics, I think, like many others, where at the surface it's pretty straightforward. But as is generally the theme of our podcast, the further you get from shore, the deeper the water gets. And I think it's difficult to have a discussion like this in total isolation from the broader discussion of fatty acids, period. But to take your question, where does this perceived benefit of olive oil come from? And I say perceived not because we're going to necessarily refute that, but I don't want to take anything for granted, and I'd like to sort of make march down the path. So it really stems primarily from, first and foremost, the observational data of the Mediterranean diet. Now, this goes back quite a ways. So I think for many folks listening to this, the name Ancel Keys will ring a bell, right? Ancel Keys became one of the first people to utilize and incorporate an assay for measuring serum blood cholesterol. So again, something we totally take for granted today is something that in the 1950s, the early 1950s, if my memory serves me correctly, it was sort of 51, 52, 53. Keyes and his wife traveled abroad and began observing societies and asking a very simple question, which was, does the total serum cholesterol, which is the only thing that could be measured at that time? So that means you would take a tube of blood and you would spin it down, fractionate it, such that at the time, they didn't know that there were various lipoproteins, but you were sort of breaking all the lipoproteins open, and you would have the total amount of cholesterol that was being carried by those lipoproteins. And that number, when people talk about my total cholesterol today, is 200 milligrams per deciliter. That's what Keys was measuring in the early 50s. And he was asking a question which was, does that number correlate with heart disease? And the answer was, yes, it did. It wasn't the strongest correlation on Earth. And obviously, as time would go on.

And we would learn that there were.

Different fractions of cholesterol, the LDL cholesterol, the HDL cholesterol, non HDL cholesterol, et cetera, we could refine that thinking. But at the simplest level, when you took the bottom 5 percentile of people's total cholesterol and the top 5 percentiles, people with total cholesterol, that clearly created a wide enough degree that you could predict those with higher cholesterol had more heart disease, et cetera. So the idea that what you ate could influence that became the next and obvious thing to look at. And it was really Ancel Key's observation. I shouldn't say observation. I think this is getting a little off topic. But the way he presented his data would suggest that the more saturated fat that was in the diet, the higher the cholesterol, the higher the incidence of heart disease. There's a 0th order truth to that, but it turns out the devil's in the details and maybe we can save that for another podcast. Let's fast forward a little bit. Ancel keys, by the 1970s, was really coming to an observation that a diet that was high in a different type of fat from a saturated fat called a monounsaturated fat, would actually be more heart healthy. So he believed that fats or food sources that were high in saturated fats were the problem, whereas those that were high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats were going to be cardio protective. So you could say about 50 years ago is when this idea started. And I guess maybe. Bob, before we go further, I know we've had a couple of podcasts recently that talk about what those fats are, but do you want to talk about the difference between those three broad categories of fat? Or do you. Did we get any questions about that or should we just keep marching along the mufa olive oil story?

No, I think it makes sense to just stop and talk about the. At least the three main. You've got the saturated fats, the monounsaturated fats, and polyunsaturated fats. And when we say saturated fats, you think like saturated with what it's hydrogens, I guess is. So you've got a long chain. Fatty acid is just. It's a string of carbon atoms, at least that's one part of it. And depending on the number of carbons, that's in part how we classify it in terms of whether it's. We'll get into this a little later, but palmitic acid, let's say, versus stearic acid, which are both saturated fats, but all those carbon to carbon bonds are single bonds. And if you have single bonds on those carbons, then you're going to have your chemistry. You're going to have hydrogen sticking off of of each one of those carbon atoms as well. And then when you get into something like a monounsaturated fat, it means mono, which is one, and it is an unsaturated fat, which means more or less, it's less saturated with hydrogens. And so when you have that carbon to carbon, if you have a double bond, you actually, you're going to be removing hydrogen there because you're adding the carbon to carbon bond. And then with the polyunsaturated fats, you've got more than one double bond. So if you have more than one double bond, you're going to have even. It's going to be more unsaturated than a monounsaturated fat. And I don't know if we're going to get into this, but that also changes the configuration or the structure of those atoms as well. Where you have a. If you look at a saturated fat, normally it's relatively. The chain would be straighter. Monounsaturated fat kind of has like a little crank in where the double bond is. And then PUFAs have the same thing going on, but if they have multiple double bonds, you're going to get multiple little crinks in that chain.

Yeah. And the nomenclature is not trivial. So you mentioned a saturated fat a moment ago, palmitic acid. And in sort of chemistry speak, we would reference that with two numbers. So we would say, well, we wouldn't expect people to remember the structure of palmitic acid. So we would denote it 160 or 16 0. And what that tells you is it's got 16 carbons in it and it has 0 double bonds. And therefore, you know, it's a saturated fat. And you also mentioned, I believe, stearic acid, which is also a saturated fat. But if you couldn't remember that, if you could remember that it was 18 0, you would know that it's got 18 carbons and 0 double bonds. Now, let's contrast that with oleic acid. Oleic acid now has another designation. It's 18 1. So it's 18 carbons, one double bond. But you have to add an additional piece of information, which is where is that double bond? And it's denoted N9, which means that it's the ninth carbon. And I'm sure the astute listener is saying, well, which side are you counting from? Because the 9th and the 10th carbons, even though right next to each other, could each be considered the ninth carbon, depending on which side you count from. And you always count from the carboxylicide. Now, I realized as that was coming out of my mouth, I'm going to have to explain what the carboxylic side is. I'm not going to for the sake of time. Just suffice it to say there's a clear nomenclature for which side you begin the counting and therefore you can have an 18 1N7 and an 18 1N9 that are both monounsaturated fats of the same length, but they're going to have different properties because the double bond is in a different place. And to your point, that might mean that they kink a slightly different way, et cetera. So let's go back to olive oil. What is olive oil, Bob? What makes up olive oil?

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Sam.