PNTV: Eat Fat, Get Thin by Mark Hyman (#326)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Eat Fat, get thin by Dr. Mark Hyman. Eat Fat, Get Thin Subtitle why the fat we eat is the key to sustained weight loss and vibrant health. This is an awesome book. It is ridiculously packed with big ideas. This was an even more challenging book to distill into a philosopher's note. We've got a bunch of big ideas. Five of my favorites we're going to cover soon. But Mark Hyman is one of the world's leading functional medicine doctors. He's the chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine and he's the director of the Cleveland Clinic's Focus on Functional Medicine. He's also a number one New York Times bestselling author of like a dozen books and has treated over 20,000 patients over the course of his career. He he's an extraordinary human being and packed a ton of wisdom into this book. I'm excited to share some of my favorite ideas. Let's jump in. I will say that let's connect this back to Always Hungry by Dr. David Ludwig, who is one of Dr. Hyman's colleagues. Check out that book as well. Dr. Ludwig performed a lot of the underlying research that Dr. Hyman and others in the field used to make this case, which is fat is awesome. He says the number one thing you can do to boost your health and well being, remove your risk of chronic disease, live longer, more energized, et cetera, is to add fat, eat fat. To put it very directly, first words of the book, number one thing you can do. So anyway, let's start with this. Calories are not created equally. A calorie does not equal a calorie. We have this myth that a calorie equals a calorie. Hey, they're just all the same. And it's true that, that a calorie from, say 100 calories from coconut oil, when in a lab, in a vacuum and it's burned, it will equal, it will give off as much energy as 100 calories, say of honey, right? Those calories in a vacuum are equal, but our bodies are not a vacuum. When you put coconut oil or fat into your body vis a vis sugar into your body, your body responds to those very differently. And this is a really, really important point that is lost among a lot of the nutritionists and dietitians in the world these days. We've been looking at this backwards over the last 50 years and Mark and David Ludwig and others say this has Gotten us into a lot of trouble. When we think that calories are created equally, then we tend to have what they call an energy balance hypothesis. And then if you want to reach your ideal weight, as we discussed in Always Hungry, you, you basically need to balance your calories in and your calories out. How much you eat vis a vis how much you work out, move your body, et cetera. That'd be awesome if it was true, but it is not. The energy balance hypothesis has been trumped by the metabolic hypothesis or the hormonal hypothesis. And that accounts for the different effects that sugar vis a vis fat have on our bodies. Fat does not release insulin, which is the fat storage hormone, whereas sugar does and processed carbs do. So we need to start with this. A calorie does not equal a calorie. That affects how we see things significantly. Once we recognize that, then we realize, let's eat fat. Fat is awesome. Fat is not what leads to fat in our body. So we have this myth that if you eat fat, you're going to get fat. And, and again, if you have a all calories are equal perspective, then that can make some sense because calories have more energy to them than a carb, for example. But again, we need to look at it metabolically and see that sugar and fat pull different metabolic triggers and know that what we're eating is not. The fat that we're eating is not what's making us fat. It's not what's making our bodies or our blood fat filled with fat. Right. What does the carbs do? The carbs are what's triggering the insulin, as I just mentioned. We want to pay attention to that. Mark talks about some research that David Ludwig talks about in his book the Two Studies in 2013. I think it was the New England Journal of Medicine that talked about two low fat studies in the same 12 month period. Right. One was basically trying to prove that low fat diets are awesome and it had to be stopped because they were getting no results. Right. It was clear that the low fat diets were never going to produce any results, so they stopped the study prematurely. Then there was another study that was essentially trying to establish the fact that Mediterranean based high fat diets are awesome and they had to stop that study early as well. The first one was stopped for futility. Right. And the second one was stopped because the high fat diet was working so well relative to the low fat diet that it was unethical to continue the this study. As Dr. Ludwig said, that should be what seals the coffin of the low fat diet phenomenon. Third big idea. All that begs the question, okay, so what are good fats and what are bad fats? And we'll make a little caveat here that Mark makes throughout the book. If you're going to increase your fat intake, a focus on good fats. We're going to talk about that in a moment. And B, you need to reduce your refined carbs. Fats can get you in trouble if you're eating a ton of fat and you're eating a ton of processed carbs and sugar. Not a winning combination. And if your Omega 3 is imbalanced, you're also going to have problems if you're eating a lot of carbs. So, I'm sorry, eating a lot of fat. So if you're going to increase your fat, you need to reduce your refined carbs, and you need to get your omega 3s balanced, which is tied to our good and bad fats. So what are good fats? What are bad fats? Let's start with the Everyone agrees with evil fat, which is trans fat. Right? Trans fat. So look on your label. Partially hydrogenated oil. If anything in your pantry has that as an ingredient. Partially hydrogenated oil equals trans fat equals throw it in your trash and quit eating it. Everyone agrees. You're still going to have nutritionists and dietitians and people watching this who will comment saying, I can't believe this fat are going to say that this isn't. They disagree with a lot of these ideas. Right? That's fine. No one's going to disagree with, yeah, you should have more partially hydrogenated oil in your diet. That's awesome. Trans fats are great. Trans fats are toxic. Remove them from your diet, period. That's our universally accepted bad fat. The good fats, Mark tells us, include olive oil. He calls that liquid gold olive oil. Tons of research done on the benefits of olive oil. And then we have coconut oil. I should say extra virgin olive oil. Kind of a fun fact. I never knew the fact that you can get oil out of olives via multiple pressings, right? So you can take the pit out, then press olive, you get some oil, and you can keep on pressing it and get more and more oil. Well, apparently that first press is the best press. That's what's called extra virgin olive oil. You want to focus on that organic and then keep it in a dark, cool space. Tiny little pro tip, I just moved our olive oil from the cupboard by the stove to the pantry so it wasn't near that heat. You want to keep it nice and cool so it stays fresh. Olive oil. Awesome. Extra virgin coconut oil. Awesome. Something called MCT oil they call super fuel for your cells. I eat a ton of both. A lot of the MCT oil. Whole other long conversation there and then avocados, nuts and seeds, etc. Those are good fats. We want more of those in our diet as we reduce the refined carbs and as we reduce our bad fats. What are bad fats in addition to the partially hydrogenated oil and trans fats? Vegetable oils. Vegetable oils are ubiquitous, but they didn't exist really in the food supply at the turn of the last century. It's a new modern industrialized thing. Hey, we can get oil from soybeans. Awesome. Now guess what. What would you guess is the total consumption of soybean oil in the United States? If you had to guess in terms of. It's hard to guess the billions of of pounds of soybean oil. So I'll give it to you. £18 billion of soybean oil is what's consumed on an annual basis in the us. Guess what percent of calories the average American consumes in the form of soybean oil? What would you guess? 1%? 2%? 5%? 10%? How about 20%? Mark tells us that 20% of the average American's caloric intake consists of soybean oil. That's insane. Again, didn't exist 100 plus years ago. Now we consume 18 billion pounds of it, 20% of our calories. Soybean oil is in everything, which would be great if it was great for us, but it's not. Soybean oil and other vegetable oils are high in omega 6s. This is outside the scope of this chat right now, but Mark walks us through how we need to have a balance between our omega 3s and our omega 6s. The good fats and other aspects of his diet help us build the Omega 3 profile, which is anti inflammatory. Whereas the vegetable oils are dense with omega 6 fatty acids, which are inflammatory. Not a good thing. So you want to reduce your vegetable oil and balance out that ratio. Omega 3, Omega 6, fourth. Big idea. What are quality carbs? So fun science fact. You can exist with no carbs, right? So there are essential fats and there are essential proteins. There are no amino acids, there are no essential carbs. Amazing thing, right? You think about it, you actually could sustain yourself with no carb intake. You could not do that with no fatty acids, particular fatty acids and particular amino acids. Having said that, this obviously is not a no carb approach, and it's not even a very low carb approach. He says, look, by volume, like something like 70 or 80% of your calories are going to be from carbs. But they're quality carbs. What are quality carbs? He says quality carbs are phytonutrient and fiber rich. Phytonutrient and fiber rich. Basically they're plants, right? And they are not processed much. He says there needs to be a short distance between the farm, the field and your fork. Things like broccoli. Think about broccoli. Broccoli goes from the farm and before it gets to your fork, what needs to happen? Well, you need to get it off of the stalk, right? Saute it or cook it, however you're going to cook it, right, steam it, and voila, boom, there's your broccoli, right? Not a lot of steps. You want to reduce the number of steps of processing in your quality carbs. Michael Pollan has a great line. He says, if it's a plant, awesome, eat it. If it was produced in a plant, not so awesome, don't eat it. It's a simple rule. Reduce the number of steps of processing. It's going to be closer to real food and healthier for you. And then you want to avoid any carbs that have added flour, added sugar, added preservatives, added sweeteners, added all that stuff that makes it less food and more, as Michael Pollan says, edible food, like substances. You want real food, phytonutrient, fiber rich and minimally processed, then you want to load up on that good stuff. It's also going to have a low glycemic load, etc. Fifth big idea is going Pegan. So Mark approaches the research on meat, right? And the more surprising truths around meat. There's not been solid research that makes a connection between any kind of meat other than highly processed conventional bacon and hot dogs and stuff like that, and disease. The fact is that all the research done that correlates the meat with disease has confounding variables. Meat eaters in these studies tend to be people who also smoke more, drink more, eat more sugar, more processed carbs, and generally don't live a healthier lifestyle than the vegetarians with whom they were compared. They call this a healthy user effect. If you're a vegetarian, you tend to do a lot of things really, really well. If you're eating meat, then you tend to just in general do a lot of the other things that are not health giving. So fascinating research on that front But Mark basically says look, we want to do a 21 day reboot where we really simplify our approach, get really quality nutrients in and then we want to transition into a sustainable longer term plan which might model the 21 days that actually works long term as well. Or you can go to what he calls the Pegan approach. And for him a pegan approach is integrating, which is what he does, which integrates the best of vegan and the best of Paleo. What does that look like? Well that's going to be among other things, it's going to be ideally organic, fresh, local foods, that's low in the glycemic load, low on the veggie oils, a lot of vegetables and fruits. Right. And overall real food, moderate protein. Obviously the vegans and the Paleo's will differ on whether animals will be part of the equation or not. And in no scenario should we have any animal product from an industrial factory farm, period. For all kinds of reasons from the ethical and the humane side to the Omega 6s. You look at what animals are fed in these factory farms, it's insane. We want grass fed, wild caught, pasture raised, et cetera, healthy food if we are going to eat meat. And he also just approaches that section with a really a deep level of grace. Mark was vegan and vegetarian for years. I was vegan and vegetarian for years. And he basically steps back and says look, this is a very personalized decision. Obviously you can get into discussion about veganism and Paleo and it becomes religiously fervent. We all need to make our own decisions on that. His personal approach is the Pegan. And again I love the way that he walked us through the virtue of creating that as a sustainable long term plan. Having said that, you look at guys like Rich roll, unbelievable high performance athlete, something like five ironmans in seven days. He's vegan and guess what, he's high fat vegan. They've done research on low fat versus high fat vegans and the high fat vegans, they call them ego. Atkins in this study outperformed, were just in better health by all the different metrics they used in that study they than the low fat vegans. So if you're going to go vegan, awesome. Do so in a high fat way. And also make sure you focus on the good fats, not all of the veggie oils, which is one of the challenges. When I was vegan they weren't emphasizing a lot of the things that Paleo movement talks about, veggie oils just not helpful. Right. So we need to bring a mindfulness to a lot of these issues, no matter what we're doing nutritionally. So there you go. Going vegan Quality carbs, fresh local, low glycemic, not highly processed, etc. We want a short distance between the field and our fork. Think about your good fat. Olive oil, coconut oil, MCT oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, etc. And then we have our bad fat, unquestionably trans fats. Get rid of everything that's partially hydrogenated in your life and then eat a lot of the good fats while reducing your refined carbs. Getting your Omega 3s dialed in and know that the fat you eat is not what leads to the fat on your body. It's super weird. I still wrap my brain around that. So conditioned to believe it, but it's just not true. We need to remember that calorie does not equal a calorie. Sugar and carbs affect you differently than fat does. It's the sugar and carbs that flip the metabolic switches that help you store fat in ways you don't want to store fat. So there you go. Eat fat, get thin. Thank you Mark for the great wisdom and look forward to exploring more in an interview. And I hope you enjoyed if you did check out the book. As I said, it's ridiculously packed with good ideas. I barely scratched the surface of everything it goes through and I think you will enjoy it if you enjoyed this. For now, what resonated? What can you do about it? And have another awesome day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up. Yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. 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