Why Seed Oils Are Sabotaging Your Health with Dr. Cate Shanahan

Dr. Cate Shanahan, I'm super excited to dive into what I think is a very polarizing, emotional topic with you. We are going to talk about seed oils today, so welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, JJ. This is, uh, the first time I'm meeting you, and this is just so exciting to be here with you today.

Well, I followed you for a while. Your book Deep Nutrition is one that I think everybody needs in their S Library. It reminds me of when I first read Nourishing Traditions, what, like 20 years ago, and my mind was blown. So these are like great foundational things that you don't think of coming from an MD, a family practice MD traditionally. And I think your story of how you started to get into all of this is really interesting. So how did you go from like being the traditional doctor over to getting deep into nutrition?

Yeah, my whole life I wanted to be a doctor and I wanted to be a doctor because I wanted to be able to resolve people's worries about things that come up with their health. And that means you have to understand the underlying root cause, right? And really to be able to really resolve the worry because it doesn't make people feel so good to say, like what we do say now, like, about why am I hypertensive or why do I have recurring migraines? And doctors say, oh, it's just, you know, bad luck or bad genes or we don't really know, medical science hasn't figured it out. That doesn't really alleviate it, right? It's nice to know what it's called, but people still worry. Well, maybe it's something else. Maybe there's something else wrong. Maybe something else will go wrong. So it was not satisfying to me to be a, newly minted family practice doctor as I was early in my career when all I did was— I mean, not all I did, but I felt like a lot of what I did was just see people for refills.

Yeah, that would not feel very satisfying.

No, and they didn't, they didn't love that either. They would come in and they would apologize, oh, sorry, I have high blood pressure. I'm like, "Well, it's not your fault." And I say, "Maybe have you not been taking your medicine?" And they were like, "Yeah, exactly, doc, because they didn't make me feel any better." And then of course doctors are pre-programmed to have a response to that to scare them back onto their drugs because we're pre-programmed with this phrase, "Hypertension is a silent killer," or whatever.

I was just going to say that, but hypertension is a silent killer. Oh my gosh, these talk lines.

Exactly. And we don't realize how we're just programmed, you know? And it's all in the intention of doing the right thing. But when I got sick myself, then I had to dive into a new way of thinking about nutrition because nothing else was working. I tried surgery. I tried even seeing a true Hawaiian kahuna.

Who— What's a Hawaiian kahuna?

That is a wise person who is a healer. And so he took me into his room, which was really just a carport. So many things happen in carports in Hawaii. And he'd got like all the medical benches there and everything. And I jumped up on the bench, or I didn't jump up, I climbed up slowly because my knee was hurting. And he did like a whole bunch of cool stuff over me with energy work and blowing on my knee and very sincerely praying for me, but it didn't help. But it was cool. It was a great experience. And I just will never forget that man's face because he was so earnest. And I'm sure he helps a lot of people, but it couldn't help me. So I had to listen to my husband who told me— it was like the hardest thing ever is for me listening to people who've been giving me advice that I just disagree with, right? And I had to realize maybe he was right. As he'd been saying for a long time that my sugar habit, which was very enormous, was probably not good. Like he compared my diet—

I've got to ask Kate, how enormous was your sugar habit?

He compared my diet to that of an army of ants, right? I guess like insects, I guess I eat a lot of sugar. But I would have a quarter cup of sugar in my coffee every day. A quarter cup. And what I had to do to get it to dissolve was make my own caramel sauce. So on the island, I was living on the island of Kauai, Hawaii at that time. Zero Starbucks. Zero like any kind of coffee places. And that was my preferred— that was my addiction of choice, was the two addictive substances, caffeine plus sugar. So, like, I had nothing better to do with my time because my injury, my problem was preventing me from walking. It was very severe. And I had been spending most of my free time doing fun things on the island, like going swimming or hiking or mountain biking. So I had nothing to do for hours on my days off, and he had given me this book, and it was called Spontaneous Healing, and in there, Andrew Weil, the author, mentioned vegetable oils. And I was like, "Oh, yeah, okay." They are uniquely— unique for their chemistry, he said. That triggered my inner chemist because before I went to medical school, I was actually a chemist. I was gonna be a biochemist. I was getting my PhD, studying for it. And what I wanted to do with it was design bacteria that would digest plastic. Now, how this relates to vegetable oil at all is that plastic is a polymer, meaning it's one big molecule made out of small molecules. And the process of polymerization requires chemistry that is similar to what I saw in the fatty acids of the vegetable oils once I started diving into what are these vegetable oils that Andrew Weil was recommending. And I saw, what I saw in the chemistry was like, oh my God, these things, these vegetable oils have bonds that could make them all polymerize together through something called a free radical chain reaction, which is an out-of-control reaction. Not a problem when you're trying to like paint a liquid, polyurethane onto your table to prevent it from getting, you know, water damage, right? You want a plastic polymer. Big problem if it might be happening in your cell membranes. And so just looking at that, I knew from what I had learned there could be something major going on here with our health. Maybe my health, maybe that was affecting me too. And so I was fascinated from that moment on, and I just dove into reading an entire biochemistry textbook that I had not read during my previous careers and just everything I could get my hands on about fat. Because, you know, we learn that these oils are healthy, right? Like these vegetable oils, doctors do learn that something about nutrition, we learn vegetable oils lower your cholesterol and supposedly prevent heart attacks, right? So what we learn about nutrition is wrong. And that was the thing that I was, you know, back in— this was 2002 when I first encountered this. That was what I was wrestling with. And it took a year or two for me to wrestle with Was I really just outright miseducated? Why? How did that happen? What really causes heart disease? So all of that was driving me, and it took a total of 6 to 8 years, depending how you count it, to get that book Deep Nutrition done because there was so much I discovered that I thought everybody needs to know.

So along the way, because you were sick when you started to write it, you were injured or sick or suffering, did you heal yourself by making these shifts?

Yes, I did. It took a long time. Like, you know, I stopped eating the two things that I identify in Deep Nutrition as problematic were the sugar, of course, and the vegetable oils and I started eating healthier fats and healthier carbohydrate, like whole food-based carbs instead of sugar-based carbs. And not only did that help me heal my immune system, which is what fought off the thing that was trying to kill me, which was a virus, that it also radically changed my, It killed my sweet tooth. Like, I never thought, I don't know if you ever struggled with food addictions or sugar addictions or carb or any kind of flavor addiction, but I did, obviously, and I never thought I'd get over it, ever. I just thought it was me. But after a couple years, I realized, Now I knew I shouldn't be eating sugar, but I realized I didn't even crave, I didn't even care. My husband could bring home chocolates that were my favorite Christmas chocolates, those little balls that you can get from Costco that have hazelnuts in them and that kind of crunchy thing and a soft chocolate center, the most heavenly things I could imagine. He actually brought them home and I had forgotten that he brought them home. Like, normally I would have been obsessing about them. And that was when I realized something important had happened. And that was after I'd written "Deep Nutrition." And so I started writing other books to explain how getting off seed oils can change our cravings so powerfully that we can get rid of a lifetime of food addictions in just a year or two.

So one of the reasons I— there was a variety of reasons I wanted to unpack this with you specifically. I loved your interview that you did with my buddy Dr. David Perlmutter because you're very science-based. And on the internet, it is like, it is ridiculous. It is like, it is like you have two religious factions yelling at each other. And I go, I always just want to go, well, what's Just show me, let's look at the research and let's really look at the research because, you know, we all know you can cherry-pick studies. I've done it myself back before I knew better, so mea culpa. But when I was studying nutrition, biochemistry is basically nutrition, right? That's the, when I was studying it, okay, so we need omega-3s and omega-6s. And when I started to hear the seed oil issues, I did not understand the real issue with them. I thought the issue with them, because We have omega-6 fatty acids and omega-3 fatty acids. We— they're both considered essential, that our body needs them. And historically, 1,000+ years ago, maybe 200 years ago, our ratio between 6s and 3s was apparently like 4:1, and now it's 20:1, and it's putting us in a pro-inflammatory state and blah blah blah. That's what I thought the issue was. And so I was like, well, you know, as long as you are, you know, prioritizing so that you've got that ratio right, you know, that's where I thought the issue was, and that maybe some of them were oxidizing. Then I heard your, your interview, and I'm like, oh nope, I do not have this right. And that's what I really want to talk about, is what the real issue is in these. And when we're talking about these, because I've heard you talk about the Hateful Eight, which I love, and we'll get a link to too. But, you know, which are these and what is the real problem behind them since it's, it's not what I thought it was?

I am so glad that you, uh, picked up on that because that is the point. That is like why I've been so excited about sharing this information since the year 2002 because I was never concerned about that ratio business. Like And that was an interesting side effect, I mean, an interesting rabbit hole that I had seen some research go down, but I had also seen it been kind of debunked. And I think that the conversation around seed oils has been impaired negatively by that continuing to focus on that ratio concept., and not focusing on what I think is the real issue, which is this oxidation. And that's what I talk about in Dark Calories. That's what I wanted to make clear in Dark Calories, which is my latest book, which focuses— Dark calories are the hateful 8. And it focuses on why they're bad, how they're made, why they're bad, what they do to our bodies. And it's really an attempt to correct the 70 years of misinformation information that the medical associations have been pumping out because of the wrong-headed idea that somebody had— the American Heart Association, Ancel Keys and the American Heart Association promoted back in the 1950s, '40s and '50s where they started talking about saturated fat being harmful for us. And that's when they started promoting these oils as heart healthy and doctors have learned that for the past 3 generations. And what that has done is not just make us eat a lot of them, right? It's not just miseducating doctors. It's keeping us from seeing that all of these metabolic diseases that we are experiencing now in epidemic proportions stem from a simple root cause called oxidative stress, and that vegetable oils in our food supply are the number one driver of that. Vegetable oils are the reason processed food is unhealthy, and they put the junk in junk food. And why that's controversial is because it was a lie to begin with that these oils are healthy. We've all been fed this lie and believed that there was evidence to support this lie in the first place, which there was not.

Was it that there was like— there was— oh, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off on that. Was it that it was a liar? Did they just not know? Did they not know better, or did they know better and they duped us.

Yeah, yeah. So I, I thought about that really hard, and I just kept digging and finding more evidence that, yeah, it was a lie. I think they absolutely knew better. And when I say they, I mean chiefly Ancel Keys and a few of the very high-up people in the American Heart Association who were promoting vegetable oils as heart-healthy, who were benefiting from personally just from the publicity. Like, they wanted to be famous is what I think drove them. Ancel Keys and a couple other people. And the reason I say that is I give some of the historical details about this in the middle section of Dark Calories. And one of the things that kind of convinced me that Ancel Keys was, was his heart was not in the right place from the beginning, was that he lied about how much experience he'd had working with heart attack victims and asking them about their diets. He lied about that on you know, every media opportunity and every opportunity he had to interact with colleagues who gave him pushback, he would say this. He would say, "I have 5,000 heart attack cases. How many do you have?" As if to say the other people who were questioning his evidence base had no basis to question his evidence base. But did he really have 5,000 cases? The answer I found was not even close. When he started saying that, he maybe had 12.

Wow. I know that I went through this in my— when I wrote Sugar Impact Diet, because I was looking at all the work of John Yudkin, who got decreded— decredited by Ancel Keys, because Ancel Keys was all about it's saturated fat that's creating the problem. And sugar that's creating the problem and went after him. And so, yep, same thing. Um, all right, so these seed oils in question, because this is what I want to really dig into, is which ones are they, where are they, and what are they doing to us? So what are the Hateful Eight?

So the Hateful Eight seed oils are the following: corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower. So there's 3 C's to memorize, 3 S's, and then there's like the sometimes Y, um, you know, with A, E, I, O, U. Remember that from Schoolhouse Rock? Um, the sometimes Y are 2 more: rice bran and grapeseed. And those are mostly in restaurants. They're not often found. I've not really seen them on labels and food labels when I'm going grocery shopping. So of the Hateful Eight, the first six are the most important to memorize.

And why are these so problematic?

Yeah, so these are uniquely problematic because of a couple of factors. And frankly, Answering that simple question requires a whole ton of scientific knowledge because right now in the debate around seed oils, you've got people all over the place with what is a seed oil. Like they're just saying anything that has the word seed in front of it or could be a seed, right? Like, so some people are saying sesame seed oil is bad or peanuts. Well, those are seeds. They should be bad, right?

Peanuts are legumes. They're really actually, and so is soy. So I actually think it's kind of, I was confused with seed oils too. That's where I got the omega-6 thing, Cate. I was like, oh, it must be the omega-6 and pro-inflammatory and the ratio's out of balance because soy's not a seed. Corn, it's like corn's not really a seed. Like, I don't know what a canola is. So I'm like, wasn't it rapeseed? So, you know, but when I heard you talk about the processing, that's when it really made sense to me. So I don't even know if we have to even worry so much about the seed oil, although I just saw another fight —right before, I was like, I'm glad we're doing this interview because it was another person citing all this research on heart disease and how seed oils are the preferential oils. So I think using the Hateful 8 is actually more helpful because then you understand which ones you could touch.

Yeah, I never even thought about that, like various confusion over— so botanically they are seeds, right? Legumes, anything that could be planted in the ground and grow. Is botanically a seed. So like wheat germ, wheat berries, wheat germ oil, that could be seed oil too, right? Flax oil. It's just way too—

I mean, it's like—

It's a stupid term. It is a stupid term because the seed is not the problem. The problem is more complicated than that. The problem is a combination of variables that overlap to create a devastatingly unhealthy final product. And the key variables here are the fact that these specific seeds have a lot of unstable fatty acids. Those are called the polyunsaturated fatty acids, which react with oxygen, right? They're unstable. Unstable in what scenario? Unstable around oxygen. So they will easily react with oxygen. That's why they polymerize. That's why we— when we make, in the olden days, Linseed oil, seed oil, linseed oil was used to form like a shellac or a lacquer over paint and over furniture. Linseed oil, because it's got the right chemistry. What they had to do to make it do that is heat it, so they boiled it. So boiled linseed oil is basically a pre-plastic polymer, right? Now, we heat these seed oils in factories too. And the other things that we do in factories makes it so that when we buy a bottle of soy oil or corn oil, that should be considered a potentially pre-plastic polymer too because when you fry with it, it forms plastic-like polymers. You actually do get polymerization. That's why It's a different kind of crispiness that you get on your fries when they are fried in seed oils than when they are fried in tallow, because when they fry in seed oils, they have polymerized. But that polymerization will also occur in our own bodily tissues. It really truly does. And that polymerization is devastating to our health. And the seed oils, they can do this because of those two factors, like I said. One is they have the unstable fatty acids, and two is what the processing does. Now, a lot of people, JJ, think that the processing adds chemicals, like hexane, people have heard of hexane, and they assume that there's other chemicals added in a factory, right? But the toxins in the Hafalei oils are not added. They are developed out of the reactions that occur during the processing steps, right? So it's those polyunsaturated fatty acids that react with oxygen that become toxins. And a way of thinking about this is like a glass is fragile, right? Like I've got one right here. It's a glass of water. Fragile, but useful. Now, if I were to take a hammer and smash it, it would break into 1,000 shards, no longer useful, and actually dangerous, right? I would have to be careful where I'm walking around here. So think of the polyunsaturated fatty acids like that fragile glass, and then oxygen like a hammer, because oxygen breaks those molecules into, uh, different little chemical shards that are very dangerous to our biological tissues. And when we eat these bottles of the hateful 8 oils, we are eating these dangerous shards. And there's more to it than that. It's just unbelievably complicated. Um, the— those— a little bit of toxin in a bottle can multiply before you open it. So that what's a part per billion of toxin and something that some academic might go, "Oh, part per billion, poo poo, who cares?" It will multiply when you open it and when you cook with it so that by the time you're eating a French fry cooked in corn oil in a deep fryer, you're getting as much toxicity from a single French fry as you would from smoking an entire tobacco cigarette. Yeah, I heard you saying that.

It's like the pack of French fries, like a pack of cigarettes. I'm like, okay, now you're sitting and you're eating French fries. You've just like mimicked a lot of smoking. What's the— going back to the oils and the processing though, is there a way, is there any way to take these Hateful 8 and process them so that they aren't hateful? Or is the only way these things can be processed into an oil creates these toxic byproducts?

LYDIA GRAY] So the only way that they enter our food supply en masse in processed foods is through these factory-intense refining processes that I was talking about because that's cost-effective and that's what drives our economy, right? Mm-hmm. So 99.99% of the canola oil, for example, that's out there is terrible for us. There is a way that you can make canola oil be less toxic. Now, is it going to be healthy? I don't think so. And I have to say that I don't think so because there's very few people actually testing the oil in the way that it needs to be tested, which is you have to test it for stability over time and you have to test it what happens when you open it. You have to test what happens when you cook it with you have to test what happens as it's consumed by an organism, an animal, a person, or a lab rat.

So then in a perfect world, they could take some of these oils and do a better version of them, but this is not happening because it would be super duper expensive to do it. And it kind of reminds me of maybe olive oil, because you can get beautiful versions of extra virgin olive oil because it's this gourmet amazing thing. However, most of it out there that you're seeing, someone was just flashing on social media recently, literally the label said extra virgin olive oil and you flipped over and it was like, you know, 80% canola oil. You're like, wow, how can you even say this?

I know, it's really shocking what they can get away with now. But yeah, so the other part of it is that the fatty acid, We don't need that many polyunsaturated fatty acids probably in our diet. And certainly being imbalanced, like, that is probably not good either. But that consideration is far down the road, right? And from the most primary first and foremost reality that the oxidation makes them toxic and that has many, many more effects than this ratio business. Got it. Because the body is not stupid. The body doesn't count on us to eat a certain amount of omega-6 or omega-3 in order to be able to regulate the inflammatory processes in our body. It doesn't immediately go from our diet to inflammation or anti-inflammation. And that idea is just very flawed. It's been debunked, and that's part of the problem here, you see, 'cause JJ, what I'm talking about is actually new research, right? The omega imbalance idea came from a researcher at the National Institute of Health named Artemis Zimmopoulos. That's why that was promulgated and proposed many years ago. And that's why it's so popular, because it's tied to a— what academics would call real researcher, right? I'm a family practice doctor, and I don't work at a think tank or the National Institutes of Health or even a university, right? So, um, what I'm doing here is I'm trying to get the world to understand really pretty high-level science that should be taught in medical school. Schools, but isn't, from my living room. And this isn't really a fair fight, frankly. It's me versus academia versus all the debunkers. And I am just so grateful that in spite of all that, now the White House has their eye on seed oils. Right? Like RFK joining up with Trump. Has created this powerful alliance. And for the first time, I am hearing people who have power to do something about this say they want to do something about this. And I'm the mother of the no seed oil movement. This is my baby. I have been nurturing this for 20 years. And I never, in my wildest dreams, expected it to make it to the White House. So I'm thrilled that it has, and I want to make sure it survives because what I see is a lot of great intentions but a lot of like pent-up energy of, wow, we gotta, we gotta talk about so many things now that we haven't talked about. And I'm a little worried that seed oils are going to get lost in the mix when they are the most important driver of disease. There's a lot of drivers of disease now, right? We've got the dyes and coloring agents and artificial flavors and pesticides and herbicides. That's just the drivers of disease in our food. There's many others, but of all of them, the seed oil issue is bigger than all of them. It's bigger than cigarette smoking.

Let's unpack that, because that's what I want to know is, first of all, don't sell yourself short. I love the fact, like, I'm just a family practice doc in my living room. You have been making your dent. And it just takes continuing to chip away at these things where people— what is it that first they think you're crazy, and then they think you're the savior, right? I mean, it's just that process. Where you have to go through this where people like, that woman is crazy, and they're like, wait a minute, you know. So thank you. When you talk about these seed oils and the fact— and again, I feel like here I've been studying nutrition for 30-plus years, I went, wait, I thought it was a 6:3 ratio, and I totally had it wrong. Totally had it wrong. Didn't realize the toxicity piece of it. Then I'm like, oh my gosh. What does, you know, consuming these toxic oils— and maybe that's the way to really frame them for people to understand, is they're toxic, they've got toxic byproducts in them— what does consuming these toxic oils, what are the different things that it can lead to? I know one of them is that it can perturb insulin resistance. What are some of the things?

Yeah, so let's talk about what sickness actually is. It's cellular dysfunction. Cellular dysfunction. If we have healthy cells, we aren't sick. We can't be because our cells are functioning. On the other hand, if our cells are dysfunctional, well then we are likely to get sick. And what is the number one driver of cellular dysfunction turns out to be free radicals and oxidative stress. The number one driver. That's what all of the free radical and anti-aging research has shown for many, many years. And the thing is that all of that free radical and anti-aging research has never just simply linked it to our food supply. And what the vegetable oils do is they set us up for oxidative stress. Vegetable oils you can think of as oxidative stress in a bottle. And oxidative stress is the root cause of disease and death. So vegetable oils are really death in a bottle, accelerated aging in a bottle. They, they promote literally everything we don't want. They promote inflammatory disease, they promote joint pain, they promote mental illness, they promote autoimmune diseases, they promote all the metabolic diseases. And they do this because of the many ways that they can damage our cellular function because they promote oxidative stress, which is the root cause of every known disease. That is not even controversial. It is so widely accepted by the people, the doctors' doctors. So the— who are the doctors' doctors? They're called pathologists. Those are the subspecialty of medicine where they When you get a biopsy, it gets— you know, if you're worried you have breast cancer or something on your skin, that biopsy gets sent off to the pathologists. They're doctors who live in labs and look at microscopes all day long. And what are they looking for are signs of, like, what kind of disease is this? And when the pathologists look for disease, in many cases, they see toxic fat blobs as part of the disease process. That's what Alzheimer's disease is, those tau proteins and beta amyloid, that is toxic fat blobs that have formed in a brain cell because of oxidative stress causing these little polymers to form that the cell can't use, so they have to like take out this damaged part of this damaged polymer and they have to kind of turn it and kind of pack it all into a certain part of the cell. Those blobs show up in so many disease states like liver cirrhosis, kidney, um, end-stage kidney disease, um, skin diseases.

So we've been seeing this for years.

We've been seeing it for years and we haven't connected it to vegetable oils in our diet.

Wow. And is there a way before you get the disease, like, I don't know if there's any— I, I was looking at things like taking omega-3 index tests where they look at 6:3 ratios and they can dig, and I don't know if that's reliable at all, or if you could just look at an oxidative stress panel. Like, is there a way to look at these things to see where you're at now? Like, let's say someone's listening, they go, okay, I'm going to first look at my diet and look at all the places seed oils are sneaking in, which we'll talk about, and replace them with better swaps. But I also want to see where I am now because it doesn't— some of this thing get into your cell membranes, and it's not like you can just stop eating the seed oils and you just get rid of the buildup, right?

Well, you could stop eating the seed oils and you do get immediate benefits because you stop bringing toxins into your body. And then if you start nourishing your body then your body can start handling the oxidative stress better. And so what is actually building up in our body is— it's not the toxins. The toxins actually get eliminated for the most part, except for, like I was saying, those plastic-like polymers that we see in our brain cells, in our nervous system, in organs that are damaged from disease. Chronically diseased organs, yeah, they have a little bit of this stuff in them. But the vast majority of the toxic oils that we've eaten and the toxins, our body actually eliminates that stuff. It does a lot of work. That's what inflammation is. Inflammation cleans out all of the toxic damage, or the vast majority of it, and takes it out of our body through the liver, which ends up in our bile, or through the kidney, which ends up in the urine. So our bodies actually eliminate the worst stuff to the extent that they can. And that process involves inflammation. And so I've just explained to you why we have such an inflammatory problem, so many inflammatory diseases. And it's not the ratio. It's the oxidation. Oxidation drives inflammation. And so when you ask, what is the sign, I have to tell you that, like, True, truly. Medical science is 70 years back. We have not learned anything. And my books try to make up for the fact that we've all— doctors have been wrong about this for 70 years and we've been missing opportunities left and right. You know, earlier when I was talking about how I was not satisfied just managing my patients' blood pressure because I didn't know what the root cause was. Well, it's oxidative stress. And so when you ask, what are these signs of oxidative stress in your body? It's all of these things that we call risk factors right now. We call hypertension a risk factor. We call high blood sugar a risk factor. We call diabetes itself another disease. We call diabetes a risk factor for heart attack and stroke and a whole bunch of cancers that we know are associated with— with diabetes. Diabetes is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.

Yeah, but these are progressive. This is the reason I'm asking. So you don't wake up one day and overnight you have gotten Alzheimer's or diabetes. So prior to that, there was, what, a decade or more of bad behavior, you know, or misinformed behavior creating this issue. And is there a way to show someone see this here, like, because I think for a lot of people, Kate, like, I think of people really trying to do the right thing. They're not even aware that if they go out to a restaurant and they order the olive oil and vinegar for their salad, that what they got likely wasn't olive oil, right? That what they got was canola oil with a hint of olive oil so they could call it that. That, you know, there's so many situations where people don't really have any idea that they're consuming the level of what they're consuming. I just wonder if there's something you could look at ahead of time before you get diabetes, cancer, heart disease, where you can say, see this, see this test, or see this, these are indicators of this diet. Or is it just purely, you know, I'm a big food tracking person, but, you know, read your labels, do your food tracking, focus on extra virgin olive oil and ghee. And beef tallow and leave it at that. I don't know. What is it?

JJ Virgin, what I'm saying is that everything that doctors call a risk factor is an indicator that seed oils have damaged your body because nothing else does it like as efficiently.

But it doesn't damage it overnight, right? It damages over time. Correct. Are there any early warning damage signs?

Hypertension, right? The silent killer, right? We have hypertension for decades. Before we ever have a heart attack or a stroke, if we ever get one. Or we have hypertension for decades before we have the kidney failure, right? So hypertension is a huge red flag that your body is not able to deal with oxidative stress, that seed oils have depleted your body's antioxidants, and you need to do something right away. So is high blood sugar. If your blood sugar is high, That's not because you've been eating too many carbohydrates, although that doesn't help because— I shouldn't say carbohydrates as a blanket term. I need to specifically say refined carbohydrates, right? Because just like the refined oils, the whole food isn't bad. Sunflowers aren't bad. Soy isn't bad. And whole wheat berries are not bad. But the refined is— Empty calories, that's bad, right? So the things in our diet that are killing us are the seed oils, number 1, and that's the Hateful 8. And then number 2 is the refined carbohydrates, the refined flours and the added sugars, all of those added sugars, whether it's high fructose corn syrup or cane sugar or date sugar, whatever, all those refined sugars. That is not a whole food. That is not good for you. Those two things combine to cause all the diseases. So if you have prediabetes, that is a sign that your diet has damaged your health and you are on the path to getting some of these more end-stage diseases, right? Like you said, you definitely don't develop Alzheimer's overnight. You've had— by the time you develop Alzheimer's, you've probably been prediabetic for a long time. You've probably— and if you didn't have high blood sugar before you developed your Alzheimer's, chances are you had hypertension or kidney problems or, you know, some other illness, right? These— the earliest, earliest signs in some people is just a sugar craving.

That was for me. I love— I view diets as tools. And I love using them as a tool to take people through a process to basically help them create, become aware of what's working for them and what's not working for them, right? And I especially like to focus on one thing at a time, like I did food elimination. It was really about leaky gut and, and what I saw were the biggest, most reactive foods. The funny thing is, Kate, when I did that diet, which was pull out gluten, dairy, eggs, corn, soy, peanuts, sugar, and artificial sweeteners, Basically, it eliminated the seed oils for most people because they weren't eating processed food and they felt remarkable. I always wondered now, like, after writing that book, I'm like, was it, was it the fact that I was helping heal their leaky gut because gluten was attacking, or was it the fact that I got them off of processed foods, which was probably more of it? The, um, I did a similar thing with sugar to help people really kind of identify how much sugar was sneaking in, you know, what the different types of carbs were, what worked for them. I really view this as something where it sounds like if someone pulls these out of their diet, and I sure hope that when listening to this you make a commitment to do this, that you are starting to read the labels. And, and I'll, I'll tell you my school of thought. You know, you may poo-poo it, but that's what I want to hear. So I'd love to have you coach me with everybody listening, but I'll tell you how I approach it, but it sounds like to me that you would have some noticeable improvements in your health fairly quickly if you— if a lot of these are sneaking in and you make that shift and get it down as close to zero as possible. You're going to notice some things fairly quickly because of the inflammatory response to it.

Yes, yes, you're going to notice it from day one when it comes to your energy levels. And so in the The back part, the back third of Dark Calories, I walk people through exactly the steps to take to build what I call energizing meals because the way, the most common way people have like an outward sign of inward damage from seed oils is hangry. Being hangry when they don't eat.

Which is a thing now. Like hangry wasn't a thing when I was growing up. I never even heard hangry. Now hangry is like a thing.

Right. Right. We are also not coincidentally eating about 4 times as much seed oils in the year 2020 as we did when I was growing up, which was around the 1970s. 4 times the most toxic thing in the food supply. Supply. Wow. And that's why, that's why.

Why did they eat so much in 2020?

Well, that's a great question. So, um, remember trans fat? Mm-hmm. Um, trans fat is no longer in the food supply.

It's been replaced by seed oils.

You got it right, because they thought that trans fat was, you know, super duper toxic, which it's not good for us, but is not as bad as the seed oils. Wow. And like that is a key, key point that our public health officials have no clue. They are clueless. It's not like these public health officials are out there trying to make us sick. The public health officials are miseducated, 70 years of medical miseducation, and I'm trying to make up for it with books, a few books, right? So that's why I'm so grateful for folks like you who have a huge platform and a huge mass respect, audience who massively respects you. It's so helpful to get this information out this way. But it shouldn't be reverse engineered like this. It should be through doctors. The doctors and dietitians should be learning this. And frankly, I'm getting a lot of great feedback from doctors and dietitians about this book. But those authorities who haven't read the book are out there saying, oh, this is just a fad. It's going to blow over. It will never blowover because this is the original sin that medicine committed in the 1950s when they lied to us intentionally to help sell seed oils because that's who their— that was who was funding their research. And if you want to become a famous researcher, you need a lot of money. And Procter Gamble paid the American Heart Association to do research. And human nature being what it is, They found a way to support their benefactors so they would keep getting more money. It's so corrupt. The American Heart Association to this day has not been called out for what is the biggest lie in probably human history because in terms of harms to individual living beings, I can't think of anything that's been worse. There's billions and billions of us now who are living on seed oils and it's harming our health in every way possible. And so just to get back to the hangry conversation, if you are hangry, that means you are insulin resistant. 'Cause hangry is not normal hunger. It's common now. Everybody thinks it's, oh, we just need to eat. It's just tiredness. Time to eat. No, hangry happens when you can't burn your body fat because your body is so overwhelmed with oxidative stress that your mitochondria can't burn your own body fat. Oh, and P.S., your body fat is chemically less stable because of the polyunsaturates. It's a radical shift from the normal state of human health. And so one of the first Like if you want to know, if you want to tell people like, how do they know if they have this damage? Ask them if they're hangry. And then in Dark Calories, in chapter 3, I have a list of a total of 11 symptoms that you want to look for that are actually signs of insulin resistance. And insulin resistance is kind of one of the deep, deep first consequences. Of eating too many seed oils. We become insulin resistant decades before we develop prediabetes. Decades before.

Well, it really is when you look at, as they're talking now of less than 7% of us being metabolically healthy, that is basic insulin resistance. Like you look at it and go, okay, poor blood sugar, bigger waist circumference, more visceral adipose tissue, poor triglycerides. All of that, hypertension. So it is at the core of that. So if you look at that and go, okay, we have less than 7% of the population now who is metabolically healthy. It would be really interesting if we, and I know we never can, diet studies are the hardest things to fund, but boy, wouldn't it be interesting if you could actually peek into that less than 7% who are adults, not kids,, you know, and look at them and say, what's their diet look like versus what are the other ones? And then the nice thing with this is once you understand it, you know, it's harder to eat out. Although, do you know Ben Azadi? Oh yeah, okay. So Ben gave me that card, he gave me cards, I gave him to all the whole— our whole Mindshare Mastermind member, all the doctors. I'm like, here, grab the card so you can take them out to restaurants. So for those of you listening, you can listen to my podcast with Ben, but basically he has these, these Hateful 8 seed oil cards that you can give to the waiter to take to the chef so that you don't get the seed oils in your food. And because it, it is challenging eating out, though I'm happy to say here in Tampa, and I know in Austin, I know in LA, like, that now restaurants are making it part of their marketing that they aren't using seed oils. So there are places that you can find, um, what's the What's the big kind of, um, it's not, it's fast food, but fast casual restaurant that's no seed oils that I keep blanking on. Oh yeah, is it Sweetgreen? Yes, Sweetgreen.

They just got rid of their seed oils recently. Yeah, they just, what, they just recently eliminated? Oh, I thought you said they just started back.

I'm like, what? You know, so yeah, but I mean, these are, we need to also make sure we're supporting these companies. So at home, because Obviously at home's the most important, it's where we can control it the most. I also travel with real extra virgin olive oil packets that I got sent from Cassandrinos. So you can get those too. I travel with that and my sea salt and my coffee. I'm like a high maintenance traveler. But what are the oils that we would wanna be focusing on at home?

So in the book, I have what I call the delightful dozen. And, but for myself, I'll just list out my favorite 5. My favorite is butter, hands down. I just love butter. And I also really enjoy peanut oil, sesame oil, olive oil, of course olive oil, and coconut oil. Like, those are the ones I always have on hand. Because they're so useful for everything. Now there's others, like you can get tree nut oils, like pecan oil, hazelnut oil, walnut oil. And of course you can use lard, right? Traditional lard. You can save your bacon fat. You don't wanna save these things too many times 'cause you should only reuse them maybe like twice most. Tallow, very healthy. Tallow is having a bit of a comeback.

It is. We have tallow at home, so.

Yeah, and so when you cook, actually you'll notice if you're used to making like chicken fried steak or home fries in a vegetable oil, if you switch over to like something like tallow, you'll notice it's much lighter and flakier because you're not getting that polymerization reaction. You're just getting a nice little surface kind of Maillard sort of reaction, different kind of reaction, and it's more on the surface. It's not polymerization, it's not creating toxins, and it's going to have flavor. Like, it allows you to— it has its own flavor. Whereas I think seed oils actually kill flavor because there's no flavor components in them. And they're so liquidy and they go all around your little taste bud and kind of coat it up and block flavor. So they're called neutral. Like chefs who swear by their neutral oils, they love seed oils. But that's because they don't have any flavor, right? Well, if you're a lazy chef, I guess, then you can't figure out whether to use olive oil or coconut or tallow or lard, then you need a neutral oil. But it's not a good culinary practice. It is certainly not nutritious.

What do we need to worry about? Because we can control our home environment, so that's great. But going out, what are some of the things— and I know a lot of this— we'll link to your book in the show notes, Dark Calories, and also your first book, Deep Nutrition, along with all of your social and sites and your new membership that you're launching. But what would we need to look out for at restaurants? What are some specific things? Like olive oil blends, obviously a big one. What else would we know to not do?

Almost anything will have seed oils unless it's an extraordinary chef. Let me tell you, when I worked with the Los Angeles Lakers for 6 seasons, most of my time was spent trying to figure out what foods on the menus at the fancy hotels they would stay at, like Four Seasons and 5-star hotels, $1,000 a night hotels, fancy restaurants, what in that restaurant did not have seed oils. And it was a crapshoot, but because it could be anything, so there's no blanket answer to that. But for the most part, the most of them said almost everything is made with seed oils. Even if you have like a soup, they will sauté the vegetables in seed oils, right? Even if you have like a chicken, a roast chicken, they will marinate the chicken in some kind of a vegetable oil, and if there's any kind of a sauce, chances are it's a kind of a vegetable oil. So this is how, this is why when people go on vacation, they come back and they don't feel so good, even if they went to fancy restaurants, and they often just blame themselves, "Oh, too much alcohol," or "I just overate." it's that you are eating a bunch of seed oils and you didn't know it. Like, if you— especially if you've been trying to avoid them and you go out, you're just trying to have a good time on vacation, uh, you're going to be getting seed oils. And so if you want to avoid them, you have to be that aggressive, take over the conversation person and say something like this: Is there anything you can make with me from scratch— you can make for me from scratch with butter because butter they're not going to fake. And you can always specify, I mean real butter, not butter oil, which is a thing, tastes like butter. Yeah, so you do have to say that. And not margarine, right? So I can't believe margarine is even a thing anymore.

Yeah, I know.

Or that I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, you know, the spreads, that kind of stuff. Plant spreads they call them now. But yeah, so it's only 2 things that that person has to remember. No butter oil and no margarine, right? And then usually they'll be able to find something because most restaurants, even as bad as things are now, will have butter.

I also think we should really look for those— I was just in LA and I went to the same restaurant for dinner twice in a row with friends because they don't use seed oils. And I'll shout it out, Matu, their Wagyu Australian— it was amazing. They served beef bone broth as your starter, like incredible beef tallow fries. I don't normally eat fries, but I felt like I needed to test them just for research purposes. The final question here, I'm just wondering, as I heard you say that, I always think of when I go to Europe and I will tell you, I thought it was the fact that, you know, they don't, that they don't use all the pesticides and herbicides that we do. And everything's grass-fed, grass-finished, 'cause I'm so careful at home, but we eat out, we travel a lot. But we go to Europe, we feel great. And I'm assuming, and it blows my mind as I start to look at what's allowed in Europe and what's not allowed in Europe, what is it, do they do seed oils in Europe or not? Or is it country by country?

GAIL SIMMONS] It's going to be country by country because it's going to depend. If you're going to a high-end restaurant, very often they're proud of their tradition. Traditions and they're going to use butter if that's the traditional thing or use the olive oil if that's the traditional thing, right? And then they also do have totally different kinds of breads as well. Like the way that they make bread is radically different over there than the way that we make bread. So it's multiple factors. Yeah. But certainly the infusion of seed oils started in America decades and decades before it started over there. And the chefs just have become dependent on them here, whereas many chefs do not depend on— they know how to work with something else still over there.

Well, it's hard over here too, just in defense of all of this, being in the food industry before. I thought I was going to be a chef, uh, until I realized how angry people get around their food and weird and everything else. I'm like, yeah, I don't want to do this. But, um, it's very hard when you have to compete against other, other restaurants in on price and they're using all the cheap stuff. It's just like that in the supplement world. I mean, it's like, you know, if the public doesn't know— that's why this is so important. I love, Kate, things that you can do with diet or lifestyle that will make the biggest impact on your health, you know, like getting a good night's sleep, making sure you're lifting weights, moving more throughout the day, and swapping. And I always like to look at, like, could we start to say, now I'm going to focus on using— at home I'll use extra virgin olive oil, and I'll use— I use grass-fed. I love this grass-fed pink Himalayan salt ghee. It's like, to me, the yummiest thing. So, you know, what are the things that you could use at home? I also love sesame oil. I don't use it as much. I use it when I'm doing Asian things, but I just love the flavor of it. So what are those things that you could do at home and then just get better at either choosing, choosing things like Sweet Greens, 'cause we wanna support these restaurants that are making the effort, or, you know, ordering better when you go out to eat at these restaurants, which it can be done. It was, here's the funniest part. We were out to dinner the other night at a place in Carefree, Arizona that is a spa restaurant, a wellness spa restaurant. We had Ben's card. I was with another couple. He's like, I have not eaten seed oils now for X amount of time. I'm like, well, we don't eat seed oils. I'm sure this place will be great because it's a spa and it's a wellness restaurant. Oh no, no, no. It was a whole thing. It took them like an hour. Then like the whole— I go, you're a wellness restaurant.

Not everyone's gotten the memo yet. I mean, it is, it is out there. The, you know, RFK has been talking about it, but, you know, many people who are following politics didn't catch the few times where RFK actually talked about seed oil. So it's, it's still, um, you know, a very niche market right now, but it's growing. 25% of people are aware that seed oils are unhealthy. I saw on a recent survey, a restaurant survey, they're becoming concerned about it. Nice. But yeah, so what are the actionable things that you can do? And well, that's what I wrote about. The back third of the book is a lot of actionable things there. Yeah. So, um, but you know, one of them— thank you— one of the easiest things is to like learn to make your own breakfasts and lunches not from processed food. You know, it's not that hard. I have tons of ideas in there. Just to give you an example of how stupid simple or simple extra, very simple it could be is for lunch, just take 2 stalks of celery, slather them up with your favorite seed oil-free peanut butter. I like natural peanut butter. Maybe stick a couple raisins on there for the whole ants on a log childhood memory experience and bring a thermos of milk. That is an extremely healthy, very energizing meal It's not too heavy, it's not going to bog you down, but it will sustain your energy all the way to dinner and you won't need to snack. Right? Whole milk. So very simple things like that are like what I like because if you get a quality peanut butter and, you know, fresh celery and you like those two flavors together, you know, it's a really tasty thing. I feel that like that is a treat. And if you don't like celery, well, just put it on an apple, cut an apple in half.

And do the same thing. But the bottom line is, like, this is what we do. We have our freezer, pantry, pantry well stocked, our freezer well stocked. We get fresh vegetables and fruit each week. Easy. Not a hard thing to do. We make extra dinner every night so that we have it for lunch. You know, it's like, it is easy. So it just, it's just a little bit of effort at the beginning as you learn to swap things out, but Again, I love, I love the whole concept of swaps. It's how I've built a lot of my programs. So I would just look at this and go into your pantry after listening to this, go do a little reconnaissance mission in your pantry, get rid of the, the seed oils. And I don't say give them to someone else unless there's someone who you really don't like, but that's mean. So just get rid of them. I remember when I was telling people, okay, clean out all these processed foods. I'm like, don't give— just get rid of them. Like, I can't— don't want you to give anyone the, you know.

Exactly. It's hard to say, well, put this toxin into some other body.

Well, and someone will go, oh, but you know, they're, you know, someone who doesn't have, you know, is lower income. I'm like, that's an even worse place to go. Like, you know, then certainly you don't want them having to go into disease care. So let's, let's go for getting— clearing out these things, starting with your home. And, you know, look at if you are doing fast casual, check out Sweetgreen. I'm going to call them out because I know they're doing this, or some of the restaurants that have made the commitment. I think Smashburger just made the commitment to do everything in beef tallow too. So they're out there now and doing it. Now you have a bunch of resources. So first of all, you have your book, Stark Calories and Deep Nutrition. These are both ones you're going to want to have. You have put together for everybody, I think, The Hateful Eight list and some other great resources you can get right away. You'll get your book on Amazon in 2 days, but in the interim you can get this right away too. So I'm going to put the resources that you're giving everyone at jjvirgin.com/kate. C-A-T-E. What are some of the things? Because I saw you had your PDFs, you had like your, your Hateful Eight challenge, and I'm assuming that is the challenge to get people to swap out Yes, and take them out.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, and there's a 2-week menu of, you know, here's just some sample ideas of what you can eat. I'm sorry, it's 1 week in the book. This is 2 weeks. And then another thing is how to count carbohydrates, right? Because I don't want people having too much of the empty calorie carbohydrates. And I've got a little resource that tells you, well, what are the healthy carbohydrates and like roughly how much carb are you you're getting and roughly how much is too much. So you don't have to use an app. You don't have to do weights and measures. I teach you how to eyeball some stuff, just basic stuff. So, you know, like, you know, should you probably not eat 5 bananas a day? Like that kind of thing. It's probably too much.

But— If you're asking that, you probably know the answer. Yeah, exactly. I always love it when people come and ask me questions. I'm like, if you're asking me that, you already knew the answer to that question.

Exactly. They just need you. Yeah, they need you to say, "It's going to be worth it, so do it." So yeah, so those are the free— some of the free resources that you're going to get. And then, you know, what we've been talking about together is probably a little overwhelming for some folks, right, who don't really feel feel comfortable in the kitchen at all. So what I've done, and this is very exciting for me, is I've put together, finally after years, I put together like a learning community where there's a course inside the community and people can help each other gain the skills in a very gradual, simple, user-friendly way. It's a 6-week course And by the end, you will be able to meal plan for meals that you actually like and coordinate your shopping and your shopping list and everything so that you don't have to spend all day Sunday doing meal prep. You just spend a few minutes writing out a shopping list that you may already be spending doing. You're just going to do it more in coordination with what you're going to eat. In mind. So it's taken me many years to get this thing together, but it's based on, you know, so many years of working with people and knowing what I've been telling them one-on-one to do and how to get them to change their habits in the most, like, simple way, right? Habit change is always hard, but we got to start small, and that's what I do. I teach you how to start with the smallest little steps that will give you huge results. Well, that's what I love.

These are small things, seemingly small, but they have big dividends. And so, you know, it's the little hinge swinging the big door. So I love that. So again, I'm going to put this at jjvirgin.com/kate, C-A-T-E, for Dr. Kate. And I appreciate your time. I know I took you, kept you, kept you over, and I was going to— I'd keep going, but I've got to honor your time here. I appreciate all the work that you're doing. And you just keep— you, you think you're, you're not doing much from your living room as a family practice doctor. You're making a huge dent. And it is like this whole movement, you founded this whole thing and now it's catching fire. So it is very exciting. Go you. Because I know when you take on something like this, the, the media does everything they can to make you sound like you're a crazy human. And that this is silly and ridiculous and everything else. And, you know, they'll look back another 10, 20 years and go, that woman saved countless lives. And so thank you for your courage.

Well, well, thank you. Thank you so much for your support. It means the world to me. It really does. Thank you.