The Truth About SMART FAT

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where I talk nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle. Some of the coolest people in the world. And I give you tips that you can put into fast action to uplevel your health so you can go out there and live the big life you're meant to live. Now today's show is all about fat. Smart fat, that is. In fact, it's about smart fats. How to eat more fat, lose more weight and get healthy Now. And I have one of my dear friends. I've known him for, gosh, I think 15 years now. It's Dr. Steven Masley, the phenomenon on public television with his 30 Day Heart tune up show. He's just coming out with his new book with my buddy Johnny Bowden, Smart Fats. Let me tell you a little bit about Stephen. First off, he's a physician and fellow with the American Heart association, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American College of Nutrition. In fact, that's where I met him. He and I were taking our certified nutrition specialist exam together and we've been fast friends there and friends ever since. Now he's unique because he is also, besides being a physician and a certified nutritionist, he also completed a chef internship at the Four Seasons Resort in Seattle. And he has been doing now he makes amazing meals. If you ever get the chance to eat anything he has cooked, take advantage of it. I've gotten to do that and I've also gotten to cook with him, which has been super fun. But he's done cooking demonstrations at Canyon Ranch, the Pritikin Longevity center, and for multiple television appearances. He has devoted his medical career to the study of heart disease, nutrition and aging and has published numerous cutting edge research articles on these subjects in leading medical journals. And his passion is empowering people to achieve optimal health through comprehensive medical assessments and lifestyle changes. Currently, he's the president of Masley Optimal Health center in St. Petersburg, Florida. He's also a clinical professor, assistant professor at the University of South Florida, and teachers programs at Eckerd College and he's received several awards for his lifestyle related research. He sees patients from all over, people fly in from all over to go see Stephen. He is that good. He's got a bunch of books out including 10 years younger in the 30 day heart tune Up. And now of course, smart Fat. His work's been featured on the Discovery Channel, the Today show and in more than 350 media interviews. And he has the top rated TV health show on public television. With his 30 days to a Younger Heart. He is literally awesome. And what you are going to love today is he, he actually when I was reading his book because I got the chance to review it early, I learned some things that I was doing wrong. So he is going to share some of those things, some fats that you may have thought that you should be eating that you shouldn't and vice versa. And we're going to have a new favorite fat that he's going to bring up on the show. So you're going to love. I'm so excited to share Dr. Steven Masley with you. So let's do it. Dr. Steven Masley, welcome to the show. I am so glad you're here with me today.

I'm delighted to be here.

Now this is such a cool topic because the thing that makes me crazy, crazy, crazy, and I know you too is all of this nonsense about cutting the fat out of your diet. And I can't believe this still prevails nowadays, right?

Well, it should be way past its expiration date. But you know, years ago I promoted a low fat diet. I was wrong. I get it. But 15 or more years it's been obvious that was not what we should be doing, right?

I mean, we all did it, we all admit to it, but then you realize, I mean you realize just by doing it for yourself. So you know, I'm a low fat diet recoverer. I actually used to be a personal trainer out of the Pritikin Center. So I was 10% calories from fat. In fact, I took it to the extreme where I was trying to count my fat grams per day and keep them to 10 grams of fat a day. So you can imagine what a mess that made me. So let's talk first since we are going to get everybody being no longer being fat phobic by the end of this, this interview is what is the difference? Because your book is called Smart Fat, such a great title too is what's the difference between Smart, Neutral and Damaging Fats? And most importantly, how can you tell one from the Other, well, bad fats.

I mean, there are bad fats out there. We should enjoy, we should avoid.

I was going to say we should.

Enjoy, avoid, like hydrogenated, partially hydrogenated fat. They're toxic. The food industry use them to extend the shelf life of food and they kill us if we eat them. So you've hated these for years. I have too. Clearly you don't want hydrogenated fat. But the second group is the hidden fats. That's the toxic fats we get from animals fed in feedlots where they give them growth hormone and pesticide and roundup enriched grains and corn and soy and it's a mess. And so we really have to focus on clean fat and get away from bad toxic fat. So that means grass fed, wild, cage free things you've been promoting for years.

So what are your favorite fats?

So smart fats to me are ones that have been proven to have clinical benefit. So up high up there, there's a whole bunch of them is the good news. So olive oil, all the nuts, I love nut oils with them. Wild seafood, you know, fatty cold water seafood like salmon and sardines. I like coconut oil. I know you do too. And so dark chocolate, cage free, organic egg yolks. All those to me have proven clinical benefit and we should be eating more of them.

Okay, did everyone hear that? Egg yolks. I was just sitting somewhere last night and again it came up, someone said, well, I'm just eating the egg whites and I just am like, oh gosh, there is another one that just won't seem to die. You actually absorb more protein when you eat the egg yolk. And why is the egg yolk so important, Stephen? What's so good about it?

It's got all these nutrients in it. It's got lutein and choline and all these things that are really important for us. They're nourishing our brain, they lower inflammation. But again, you have to say if you're eating regular eggs that are hormone and pesticide enriched, you should skip them. So eggs can be smart and they can be dumb. You have to buy the right eggs. That's the critical.

Isn't it incredible too, is it would be a great science experiment for a kid to do is you take the bad eggs, just those commercial factory farmed eggs, and you crack open one of those and look at that yolk. As compared to the pastured chickens, the cage free, it's a totally different color. I mean, one's this beautiful.

Yeah, nutrients, all that, all the choline and lutein and all those nutrients in there really makes a huge difference.

So let's talk about the other food groups that help with weight loss. We're just, you know, we're obviously going to hit fat a lot here. But what about the other food groups that can help with weight loss and de aging?

Well, in addition to smart fats? If you want to make it smarter, we want clean protein like we just talked about. Wild, cage free, grass fed, there's no harm. You know, all this data for years said we couldn't eat saturated fat and it turned out to be incorrect. There's no compelling evidence. And multiple big studies have shown that we can eat more clean protein. And we should. It suppresses appetite and it revs our metabolism, especially like a protein shake in the morning. You know, adding clean protein is an awesome thing to do. So smart fat, clean protein and fiber. Fiber is just absolutely essential. It's 10 times smarter if you eat your smart fat and clean protein and add more fiber to it. But here, what you'll like to hear is we're not talking about fiber from flour or bread or crackers. We're talking about fiber from vegetable, fruit, beans and nuts. That's the fiber that has a low glycemic load and we want to eat much more of it.

Okay, so you're talking all my favorite things here. With the healthy fats you mentioned and the high fiber foods you mentioned, what are some of your favorite clean lean protein sources?

Well, wild salmon, grass fed beef, organic. If you're not dairy intolerant, I think yogurt that is grass fed, no hormones, I'm fine with that. For those people who are dairy free. But really we're talking about cage free organic chicken and eggs. We're talking wild seafood, we're talking grass fed meats. Those are great sources of protein that we can enjoy and there's no harm or worry about having them.

All right, so what shouldn't we be having?

Well, sugar and flour. I think we've spent all this time for the last 20 years avoiding saturated fat in a misguided way. Now the dirty stuff, I'm totally for cutting out and you are too, cutting out dirty animal protein. But for clean animal protein we can have more. But we need to be avoiding sugar and flour. Those are the two things that got overemphasized. Thinking whole wheat flour was a good thing.

Wrong.

There's no difference between whole wheat flour, white flour and sugar. They're all the same thing in a glycemic response, blood sugar response. So absolutely essential to Cut those out to cut out toxic fats. And our food's going to still taste awesome because smart fat, clean protein, lots of vegetable, fruit, beans, and nuts. And then flavor. That's my fourth food group. With spices and herbs. We want lots of more flavor because it lowers inflammation and it makes our food taste awesome.

Well, you know all about making food taste awesome because I have been the lucky person to be able to enjoy your incredible meals and actually cook with you. And you're an amazing chef. And so let's talk a little bit about that because it's super confusing out there with these healthy fats to know which one should you cook with, which you shouldn't cook with? So let's talk about how you know, you know which ones you should heat, the smoke points, all that stuff. Can you kind of break through that confusion for us?

Well, this is a huge area of confusion. And I have to admit, until just, you know, I researched this book and was studying it five years ago, I probably would have given you the wrong information. But fortunately, I now have this state of the art exact information. And you said smoke point. Jj, you're absolutely right. When an oil or any fat gets to its smoke point, it's being damaged. We're converting it from smart fat to toxic fat, just like when you convert vegetable oil into hydrogenated fat. So, for example, a big surprise to me was coconut oil has a smoke point of 350 degrees. That's pretty much medium, low cooking and high heat, something I would have recommended in the past. I now realize this could harm it. So here's oils. Let me share some oils with you we can use for high heat. Avocado oil and pecan oil are awesome. They're smart.

Wow, I never heard about that.

And a couple of natural ones, not harmful at all. And okay to cook with. And very safe to cook with would be ghee, clarified butter, not regular butter, and grapeseed oil. All four of those can tolerate pretty high heat.

Wow. Yeah, I know. When I was looking over your book smart Fat, and I saw that about coconut oil, I was blown away because I had always heard that you could. And I've talked about the fact that you could cook at higher heats with coconut oil because it's saturated. I'm like, ugh.

But it turned out to be a myth.

Darn it. Don't you hate it?

But anyway, now we're getting it right.

Now we're getting it right.

Avocado pecan oil, my favorite high heat oils. Medium high heat, you can use virgin olive oil, not extra Virgin and almond oil or hazelnut oil or macadamia oil. Those are good. Now, I love using coconut sesame oil, extra virgin olive oil. But here's the trick. You can saute like meat or vegetable or something like that with avocado oil and then you reduce it to simmer low heat and then you can add your coconut oil, your extra virgin olive oil or your sesame oil for flavor and they won't be damaged. Your food will taste fantastic and it'll be really good for you.

And you know, I've been seeing a lot more avocado oil out in the store. Just throw a couple great things about avocado oil. I mean, we're all big fans of avocado.

It's monounsaturated, it's super healthy. Avocados are like this super fantastic, smart fat, high fiber food we should eat a lot more of. And the oils in avocado oil have a beautiful chemistry profile to them. And it has a very high smoke point, like around 500 degrees. So you don't damage it with just normal cooking. So it's my preferred higher heat if I want to get a little sear on chicken or fish when I'm cooking it or on a vegetable. So it has a nice al dente texture. It's my go to oil.

That is a, that's like the great big takeaway. So today's big takeaway is avocado oil. Now, smart fat. I love the tagline how to eat more fat, lose more weight and get healthy now. And you've got two phases. So you've got a program, you've got the Smart Fat 30 day plan. And in that you've got two phases. Can you just describe what those are?

Well, we have phase one and phase two. And you've actually helped me a lot with this, jj. So we know a lot of people have sugar intolerance, they're insulin resistance and they're leptin resistant, meaning they can't control blood sugar and they can't control appetite and they have cravings. So for the really what I'm trying to do and what I've learned also from you is we want to cut out those sugar cravings, that leptin insulin abnormal hormone response. And to do that, you really want to get sugar out of your totally out of your diet and any even medium or high glycemic load, medium sugar load foods.

Amen.

So we're focusing for the first 10 days on, you know, smart fat, clean protein, 10 servings of fiber. But there's no and lots of herbs and spices to make your food taste awesome. But really no glycemic load foods. None for those 10 days. And I found in my clinic, people's blood sugar levels plummet back to normal in a 10 day period. Their appetite gets better so they can still eat awesome food. And then after that time, I'm okay with some medium glycemic food, like maybe a sweet potato, quinoa, other things that have a medium glycemic load after those 10 days and then you can tolerate them. I also take alcohol out in phase one and phase two. In just phase one, you can add some back in phase two. And there's of course no potatoes in phase one, so that should be music to your ears that we're doing a really low glycemic load to correct that hormone imbalance for the first 10 days and then we tolerate it for the rest of the month in phase two.

Well, don't you find too, as you're bringing the fat up, it's such a great trigger for the reward center that you stop craving the sugar. So there's that, that whole wonderful experience. Now what happens in phase two?

Well, in phase two, your insulin leptin receptors are now working normally. So we're going to continue. And here's this. It couldn't be easier. We're looking at in both phases, five servings of Smart Fat, five of clean protein, and 10 servings of fiber every day. Five, five and 10. It's that easy. You don't have to count anything else. Really simple. And then in phase two, we let people add back a glass of wine with dinner. They can have a sweet potato, they can have quinoa, you know, those things they can add back in phase two.

So, and I always love when we just simplify these things down because in reality, you've done two things here that are so important. You've made it delicious and simple. So incredible.

That worked.

Yeah. Because that's something you can do for the long haul.

16 foods you had to eat every day. That's impossible.

Well, you know, we keep learning, don't we? We've known each other a long time and I think when we first started, we're doing things a lot different than we did then. So I just want to remind everybody that the, the book that I was, I got to review your book early, which was fantastic because that's when I found out that I was wrong on the smoke points. And I was like, oh my gosh. And so there's some incredible surprises. This is one of those books you want to have for your success Library and Smart Fats, how to Eat More Fat, Lose More Weight and Get Healthy Now And I your website for this, it's smart fat.com not plural, right? Smart fat fat smart fat fat.com smartfat.com remember that. So we're going to be eating more fat. And Dr. Steven Masley, thank you so much for joining me today. And again, I want to mind everyone listening to go to smartfat.com he's got a lot more great information there. Now after, after the break, I'm going to be answering a listener's question. So be sure to stick with me.

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Welcome back. Now this is the time where I answer a listener's question. And today's question is kind of fun. It's from Irene. Go ahead and listen to this.

Hi jj, I was wondering if you had seen that new research on cooking or rice with coconut oil to convert more of the starches to resistant starches. And if you have seen that it's brand new research, it's out from the, from the College of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka. And so anyway, it's actual bonafide research. And anyway, if you have seen that research, what you think of it in terms of the virgin diet.

Alrighty. So you can't really bind up carbs by cooking them in fat. And that's why I loved this question today since we had the fat expert Dr. Stephen Masley on. And also we just learned that you don't want to put coconut oil in a higher heat. Now you're not going to get a higher heat, of course, with a, if you're cooking rice now at a very low temperature. But still the idea of putting coconut oil and rice to bind up the carbohydrates and actually doesn't work. It might give it a little better flavor though. But let's go back to the original question. You're looking at how do I bind up carbs? The first thing is we want to make sure that you're eating the right amount of carbs, I think we become carb phobic, just like fat phobic. And it's not about eating no carbs, it's about eating slow, low carbs, carbs that slowly release their energy so you have a nice steady release of blood sugar. That means carbs super high in fiber. Like Dr. Steven Masley just talked about. Wild rice, squashes, pumpkin, legumes, nuts and seeds or nuts and seeds are fat, sorry, not carbs. But all of those things are low sugar impact, loads of fiber, slow sugar release. And you really want to watch the amount that you have go crazy on the non starchy vegetables. Have a small amount, about a half a cup of the legumes or the wild rice or a cup of pumpkin and different squashes and then you won't have an issue. So with that you don't need to be binding up those carbs. Well, I'll let you in on a little secret. My digestive enzymes product actually has something in there called white kidney bean extract. And so I've got enzymes in there to help you digest protein better because so many people struggle with that, myself included, especially if you're over the age of 35 or under any amount of stress. And I'm just like, check both those boxes. So there's a protein enzyme to help you digest protein better. But I also have white kidney bean extract in there because it actually blocks the release of amylase enzyme in the mouth. So you slow down or block carbohydrate absorption. Now you're not going to block all of it and you don't want to, you don't want to eat a no carb diet unless you're doing it for health reasons due to something like epilepsy or cancer. But for everyone else, little bit of carbohydrates, especially in the evening can help make testosterone in men and also are good for your adrenals. No, carbohydrates tend to over time raise your fasting blood sugar. But if you're looking to block a little bit of them and get a little bit more blood sugar balance, white kidney bean extract that is in the digestive enzymes can work really well. Plus I've got a little green tea, green coffee bean extract in there for a little metabolic boost. That was one of my key secrets. When I went off to Italy I took a gluten, a gluten enzyme and then I also so that I could have some of the different gluten containing grains, although they don't tend to bug me in Italy and then I used my white kidney bean extract in my digestive enzymes so that I got a little bit of a block. But again, this is not a license to go crazy. So the first thing I do when I look at all this is go, let's just make sure we're eating the right quality. Just like you heard today in the talk about smart fats, right quality of these slow, low carbs, high in fiber, as whole foods as possible. Now if you'd like to submit a question, just go to jjvirgin.com ask and you can leave a voicemail for me. I can't wait to hear from you. And one more way I'd love to hear to hear from you. I would hugely appreciate it if you could jump on Stitcher or itunes and leave a review for me. You know it helps a bunch. And be sure to subscribe and share the show with your friends. This is JJ Virgin signing off and reminding you that you are worthy Dare to live a life that matters.

Foreign.

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