Exposing the Truth: How Vegetable Oils Cause Oxidative Stress and Disease with Dr. Cate Shanahan
In this groundbreaking episode, Dr. Cate Shanahan, author of "Dark Calories," reveals the shocking truth about the relationship between oxidative stress, disease, and the consumption of vegetable oils. Dr. Shanahan exposes the lies and corruption that have led to the promotion of harmful industrial oils and the demonization of healthy, traditional fats like butter, lard, and coconut oil.
We'll hear how Ancel Keys, the father of the diet-heart hypothesis, bullied his colleagues and cherry-picked data to push his agenda, despite evidence to the contrary. You'll also hear about the American Heart Association's role in promoting vegetable oils while being funded by the companies that profit from their sale.
Dr. Shanahan explains the difference between healthy and unhealthy fats, and how polyunsaturated fats cause oxidative stress, which is at the root of numerous diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer's. She shares practical tips for eliminating vegetable oils from your diet and embracing nourishing, healthy fats.
This episode will change the way you think about food and health. Don't miss this eye-opening conversation that could revolutionize your understanding of nutrition and its impact on your well-being. Tune in now and discover the truth about oxidative stress, vegetable oils, and the importance of healthy fats in your diet.
People discussed in this interview:
Denham Harman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denham_Harman
Edward Bernays: https://antonabroad.com/edward-bernays-article/
Links:
Web: https://drcate.com
Instagram: @DrCateShanahan
=======================
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from Philip Ovadia.
Exposing the Truth: How Vegetable Oils Cause Oxidative Stress and Disease with Dr. Cate Shanahan
In this groundbreaking episode, Dr. Cate Shanahan, author of "Dark Calories," reveals the shocking truth about the relationship between oxidative stress, disease, and the consumption of vegetable oils. Dr. Shanahan exposes the lies and corruption that have led to the promotion of harmful industrial oils and the demonization of healthy, traditional fats like butter, lard, and coconut oil.
We'll hear how Ancel Keys, the father of the diet-heart hypothesis, bullied his colleagues and cherry-picked data to push his agenda, despite evidence to the contrary. You'll also hear about the American Heart Association's role in promoting vegetable oils while being funded by the companies that profit from their sale.
Dr. Shanahan explains the difference between healthy and unhealthy fats, and how polyunsaturated fats cause oxidative stress, which is at the root of numerous diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer's. She shares practical tips for eliminating vegetable oils from your diet and embracing nourishing, healthy fats.
This episode will change the way you think about food and health. Don't miss this eye-opening conversation that could revolutionize your understanding of nutrition and its impact on your well-being. Tune in now and discover the truth about oxidative stress, vegetable oils, and the importance of healthy fats in your diet.
People discussed in this interview:
Denham Harman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denham_Harman
Edward Bernays: https://antonabroad.com/edward-bernays-article/
Links:
Web: https://drcate.com
Instagram: @DrCateShanahan
=======================
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from Philip Ovadia.
Well, welcome back folks. It's the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast with Dr Philip Ovedia. I've been reading up a little bit on our guest today, phil, or more accurately, reading up on her latest book, and I'm particularly very interested in this. I'm particularly very interested in this and I think most of our listeners are going to really want to know about this as well.
Speaker 2:So with that, introduce her for us. Yeah, really honored today to have Dr Kate Shanahan on with us is. She's one of the OGs and I would put her first book, deep Nutrition, on the must-read list for anyone that's interested in how what we eat influences our health. And she has a new book coming out that I'm very excited about as well. I've been fortunate to get a preview copy of it. It's called Dark Calories and really excited for that book as well. But before we jump in, kate, why don't you kind of give your background to our audience? How'd you get interested in nutrition and its impact on our health?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, thank you for having me on your show, guys. I was interested in nutrition because, before I even knew, nutrition was the answer, I was asking the questions that only nutrition could answer, which is what is the reason that all my patients have these problems that we can't really that we call idiopathic. Like meaning idiopathic meaning we don't know what the cause is. Like simple.
Speaker 1:I love that. I have a friend who was diagnosed with an idiopathic sickness and I told her it was just because she was an idiot and she didn't think that was right. So I've I, I I loved that you identified that, as we don't know what it is, but we're going to give it a scientific name for our utter ignorance Idiopathic. Thank you, Sorry for the interruption.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, I mean, you're right, it should be translated as your doctor is an idiot and they don't know what the root cause is, because we really should know, should know, and so you know, I went to medical school because I wanted to get to the root cause of selfishly, my own, my own recurring and chronic connective tissue problems. Cause I was an athlete and you know I can't. I kept breaking down, I was constantly getting bursitis and tendonitis and shin splints and every kind of itis, and other people on the team weren't, and I just didn't understand why. Me, like what was different, what was wrong. So I was hoping to learn some of that in medical school. But I'm laughing because you know, and I now know, that medical school just doesn't help us get with that root cause scenario, and I'd pretty much.
Speaker 3:After I went to finish medical school, I learned a lot about how the human body ticks. I learned a lot about how the human body converts different nutrients into the human body and you know the metabolism of proteins and some basic stuff about metabolism. But I did not get to that root cause of really much of anything. And so as a then I went into family medicine and as a grad, new graduate family medicine doctor, I just found myself feeling really hollow and empty and asking myself what am I doing for people? Because my patients were such lovely people and I was practicing on Hawaii at the time and they would come in and they would apologize for me that their blood pressure was still high because, oh, I forgot to take my medicine. And I'd ask them why, and they said, well, it didn't make me feel any better and you know, I'd have to go through the routine of, well, hypertension is what we call a silent killer. You're not going to feel it until it's too late, that kind of scenario. And I felt eventually, though, after enough of my patients still had you know, who were taking their drugs, still had strokes, still had heart attacks, what was I doing? Why was I insisting they were taking these drugs? And there were wasn't just blood pressure medicines, it was to manage all sorts of things. That never really made them better, it just made them come back for refills, right, and so that was just so dissatisfying.
Speaker 3:You know, I'm in primary care, you're a surgeon, Dr Phil, you probably get a little bit more satisfaction because you actually get to do stuff, but you know you people can't go under the knife. Knife and they come out and they're different and you know, hopefully most of the time they're way better. But with primary care it's all about the little things, and you know so many little things. People were having Allergies. I'd have to refill allergy prescriptions. Asthma, Lots of asthma prescriptions, lots of kids with allergies, chronic pain what was that all about?
Speaker 3:Fibromyalgia and it was just so like dissatisfying that I knew there was something else that was linking all this stuff. There was more that I could do for my patients but honestly, I had zero clue that it was nutrition. I had no idea. I had no idea where to go, what to do. I just knew there was this thing missing and it wasn't until I actually myself got really sick. And then my husband said you know, maybe all that sugar you eat isn't so great that I started questioning my diet and everything I learned about nutrition. The moment I started questioning, it pretty much came unraveling and I realized that the reason my patients were sick is because doctors don't learn the truth about diet and nutrition, and particularly what we learn wrong is that saturated fats are unhealthy and vegetable oils are healthy. We get that backwards and it was the other way around and that was so eye-opening.
Speaker 1:Okay, real quick. I've heard this most of my adult life. Is there a quick heuristic to remind me which are saturated fats and which are? I think the phrase is polyunsaturated and I don't really know what any of that means. So the good stuff is X, the bad stuff is Y. One's saturated one's not. How do I know?
Speaker 3:Well, let's make it even simpler, without even any of the chemical terms. The good stuff is stuff that was around before the industrial era. The good stuff is stuff that was around before the industrial era, and so that was your things, like your butter, your olive oil, a few other traditional vegetable fats included peanut and sesame oil, coconut oil, and then lots of animal fats. There's the lard, the tallow, and then all the high fat dairy foods and just fatty cuts of meat. Those are the good fats.
Speaker 1:And is that the saturated?
Speaker 3:Yes, those are more on the saturated and monounsaturated side and, to help you remember it, maybe like saturated means that they are fully saturated with hydrogen. I mean, I don't know if this will help you, but this is the chemical truth. So every bond in there is fully saturated and that makes the molecule straight. When the molecule is missing a saturation with hydrogen, it has a kink in it and that makes it bend and because of that it makes it more liquidy. The straightness makes it stackable. So butter stays solid and stiff at room temperature and every bend or kink due to the unsaturations makes it more liquid, like an oil, right, and so olive oil is an okay one, even though it has a few of those unsaturations. But the ones that didn't exist before the industrial era are really the problem, and yes, it's because of their chemistry. But maybe even easier is just to remember that the ones that didn't exist before the industrial era are the problem.
Speaker 3:These are the factory oils and they are the industrialless, high smoke point refined bleach, deodorized oils that are really the defining feature of processed food. And there's eight of them. There's a collection of eight, so I can go over those oh yeah, before.
Speaker 2:yeah, well, I think we definitely should jump into that, but before we get too deep, uh, into the, the vegetable oils and stuff, I did want to kind of go back to your story a little bit and you know I've asked a number of practitioners on this program but I'd love to hear your perspective on you know, you it sounds like pretty early on in your career realized that something was amiss.
Speaker 2:You know what you were doing wasn't working. Admittedly, you know it took me a lot longer, and maybe the fact that I'm a surgeon, so I was sort of getting the appearance of doing stuff, but I'm not sure I was actually doing stuff that was useful in the end. You know, on the big picture, the long term, and, of course, talking to many other you know primary care physicians, many of them, it took a long time and, quite frankly, for the vast majority of physicians they never wake up to this fact that you know we're just not doing anything. We're just kind of shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, but we're not really doing anything. So what, you know, what do you think it is that allowed you to see this so early, so quickly, and then, even beyond that, to then take action and figure out what it was that we were missing, Because, again, many doctors just aren't able to do that.
Speaker 3:Well, I never would have figured it out if it weren't for my biochemistry training Before I went to medical school. I went to Cornell University because I wanted to be a biochemist and molecular biologist and mess with the genes of bacteria so that we could design a bacteria that would digest plastic right, because at the time this was the 80s the garbage piles of baby diapers were like the biggest problem with plastic. So I wanted to be able to genetically modify things. Now I had to give up on that because that was just like way too far off. But I did learn one principle that is what changed my life when I started questioning diet and that was that polyunsaturated fats, because they have two of those double bonds that makes them very weak and prone to reacting with oxygen. So pretty much the moment I started questioning diet and then I looked around and I realized what I was eating and the fats that I was told were the healthy heart healthy kind. You know, the corn uh, mazzola corn oil says heart healthy, right on there. There are lots of polyunsaturated fats in there and that went against the basic principle of chemistry that I'd learned and that was the key. That basic principle of chemistry had to do with oxidation, and it meant that those oils would react with oxygen. And when polyunsaturates react with oxygen, they become toxins. They become a whole mess of what chemists call lipid oxidation products, or they call them LOPs for short. And all of those LOPs are not designed by nature, our body doesn't need them and many of them are extremely toxic. And so that's what the key was.
Speaker 3:It was pretty much as soon as I realized what the heck I'd been eating all this time, I was like, oh my God, vegetable oils are making were making me sick Because, like, I had a serious infection in my nervous system that was giving me fevers and affecting my joints. It was a rare form of a neurotrophic virus that was threatening my ability to work because I really literally could barely walk. So that was kind of another huge factor, right, like it wasn't just curiosity, it was desperation that led me to question my medical education. Part of the fats appeared lock solid, like lockbox truth, and rock solid, right, we learned saturated fat causes heart attacks. But when I started applying, like bringing the two halves of my life together the medical, where I wanted to get to the underlying cause, and the biochemistry, where I understood what our food was doing to us in our bodies. I was like there's no way saturated fat can be causing heart attacks. It just doesn't make chemical sense because it's stable and it resists oxidation. And that's really important because the lipoproteins are flowing through our bloodstream, which is loaded with oxygen, and that's where we get the problem, where the vegetable oils were actually causing heart attacks.
Speaker 3:And the insanity of it all just so blew my mind and just made me keep going farther and farther down this rabbit hole of nutrition, where I found so much healing information and so much of the exact kind of truths that I was hoping I would have learned in medical school but were hidden from us, seemingly intentionally, and I couldn't quite figure out the story there, but it was so at the time.
Speaker 3:I tell the story in dark calories, but it was so obvious I, I, I knew that there was something there and and I you know, I had to change the way I practiced and change my advice, and when I did it, it just made a world of difference. It helped me. I was able to get like pretty much miraculously better. It took a while, but I was also able to finally help my patients in ways that I never had before and they would come back and, instead of apologizing to me for, you know, having high blood pressure, they would be thanking me for telling me oh yeah, I can eat my own favorite, like traditional Filipino cuisines, because on Hawaii that's what everybody was. Where I live, most of people were Filipino and they wanted to eat their high fat foods. They wanted to eat lots of eggs and liver and you know, all the traditional things that were taken from them by this radical theory that doctors learn, as if it's the gospel truth, that saturated fat is bad.
Speaker 2:All right, you know this sounds a little unbelievable, right, and I'm, you know, it still sounds unbelievable to me, honestly, even though we know it.
Speaker 2:But so, you know how, how did we get here? And I think you touched on a very important part of this in that doctors don't really understand that biochemistry. You know, yes, we all took it, you know, in our undergrad, and we all took OCHEM, and you know this, all stuff was mentioned, but somehow it doesn't translate over to medical school like this foundational biological, biochemical understanding of what polyunsaturated fats are. And you know, like you said, when you go into the biochem literature, textbooks, it's not debatable Polyunsaturated fats are a bad thing, they're prone to this oxidation, they're prone to the damage that you talked about, and yet somehow we then, you know, move over to medical school and this gets totally flipped around. And you know, you go buy the Mazzola corn oil, like you said, with the American Heart Association stamp of approval on it, and this is now supposed to, you know, save all of our lives. So you know, maybe let's get into a little bit about how did that happen.
Speaker 3:That is such an important question because answering that question like kept driving me to move forward with the research, because everything I've talked about like I kind of built that into my other books. But what made this book Dark Calories different is that I wanted to make it crystal clear to doctors, dieticians, nutritionists and, of course, our patients and everyone in the public that it was all based on a bully who lied to his colleagues about how much data he had and he was just a complete egomaniac. I'm talking, of course, about someone you might have brought up before, whose name is Ansel Keys and he's considered the father of the diet heart hypothesis, the guy that the American Heart Association celebrates as discovering the true roots of the link between cholesterol and heart attacks back in the 40s or 50s. They're kind of vague about when it all went down, but he was nothing but a bully and he was very influential in the American Heart Association, very influential with the top leaders of the day. He rubbed elbows with President Eisenhower's personal physician, paul Dudley White, who was a cardiologist who basically was credited with saving Eisenhower's life after he had a heart attack. And so Ancel Keys was very influential and he was extremely driven to seemingly get attention, like to get attention for being the man who identified the root cause of heart disease, and his heart was sort of in the right place. Like he, he wanted to make the world a better place and he believed that diet was the answer. He didn't believe it was just bad luck and supposedly that was the prevailing thought of the day. I say supposedly, because I think there were a lot of doctors whose voices have been kind of just never like survived history, that were saying no, clearly there's something that we're doing differently. But they didn't identify what he identified.
Speaker 3:Keyes claimed that saturated fat was the problem, but when you listen to his so-called evidence there's a huge disconnect. So Ansel Keys was interviewed in 1961 for Time magazine. He was on the cover of Time magazine man of the Year, which was basically the ultimate social proof. It was like having 100 million followers on Twitter or YouTube. It was like the biggest you could get, the most successful pinnacle of your career. And in that interview he reveals some really dark features of his personality.
Speaker 3:He goes on about how the fat man needs to be basically shamed into taking better care of his health and he also makes the not him, but the journalist says something very revealing that no one has picked up on it. So the journalist points out that the journalist had interviewed other people. As they do for these sorts of articles, they don't just get one man's opinion. Keyes was saying oh, I've discovered it's saturated fat that causes heart attacks. The journalist actually did a better way, better job than the American Heart Association was doing. The journalist interviewed other people who are saying well, you know, I think it could be cigarette smoking, because that really makes a lot more sense in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3:But the journalist also said that when you try to talk with Keyes about what's wrong with his theory, he doesn't listen, he just bullies you. Some people use the term. He would just flatten you and basically say shut you down with this claim I have 5,000 cases, meaning heart attack cases. How many do you have? And that's in the historical record that he said that. Now this was 1961. And so I looked it up how many cases did he actually have? How many did he have published? And it was like a handful, maybe 12. How many could he possibly have had that were unpublished? And I looked at that and ultimately I found at that time it was probably less than 200, based on his other publications.
Speaker 3:So he used his force of personality to convince all these other very smart people that he had data to back up his theory that saturated fat, not cigarettes, were causing heart attacks.
Speaker 3:And now, with hindsight of course, we know cigarette smoking is the strongest predictor of heart attacks, and not just any heart attacks, but fatal heart attacks. The most deadly kind of heart attacks is and not just any heart attacks, but fatal heart attacks. The most deadly kind of heart attacks is cigarette smoking. And with hindsight we can go back and look at Ansel Keys' seven-country study and we'll see he actually collected that data. He just didn't emphasize it, he downplayed it. The other authors tried to emphasize it, but Keys had the first word and the last word on the seven-country study. And unless you read all the little details you don't see that these other authors were actually trying to strongly disagree with him and his theory and the American Heart Association just ignored every other perspective and every other opinion. And there was it's not just that they were in love with Keyes or infatuated with this strong man with such a force of personality it was that they were getting money from company a company called Procter and Gamble that sold oh my God, it's, it's just.
Speaker 2:It really is paid for.
Speaker 1:Yeah it really is amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it really is amazing. And you know, you, you, you do such a great job of pointing out, uh in the book, um, that you know, when you try and and I I've done this as well, uh, I wasn't able to complete it. I commend that you did such a good job of it. But when you try and actually go through the seven countries study, it's, you know, most people think of scientific studies, publications, as you know, here's the hypothesis, here's our methods. You know here are the results and you know here's some discussion on it. And you know it's usually a couple of pages long. You know, maybe we get 10 or 12 pages in. Really, you know, deep studies.
Speaker 2:The seven countries study is honestly just sort of a rambling mess with very little actual science in it, data in it. It's really, when you go through it, it's just Ansel's keys kind of opinions about things, and yet somehow this became the whole basis for our entire, you know, treatment strategy around heart disease. And you know, and the other thing to point out is that you know, true science is repeatable. You know one scientist does it and then another scientist does it and gets the similar results, and another scientist gets similar results, and again. You know what is put forth in the seven countries study and in much of Keyes' work. The other subsequent studies and even Keyes' own studies show it not to be true.
Speaker 3:And people pointed this out from time to time in the intervening years from between 1961 and today, and like, for example, one of them was George Mann, who actually ran the Framingham set of studies for more than 20 years, and the Framingham studies for those who don't know, those are used also as evidence to support this theory that you know, cardiologists, primary care doctors, every doctor learns it as if it's gospel truth. And yet the director, george Mann, said this publicly and it was quoted many times. After 20 years and millions of dollars, it's been a colossal waste of money. There is no link and and yeah, but nobody apologized, right Like he the director says that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the director of the Framingham study. See the nutrition arm. He designed it.
Speaker 1:I'm a I'm just Joe six pack and I've heard of the Framingham study and heard it quoted as if it's Moses coming down from on high with the tablets from God.
Speaker 3:There's very little in there that can make a link right. There's very little association between high cholesterol and heart disease. And the reason we're fooled you guys and Phil you brought this up is basically you're asking this question how did doctors get fooled? Well, they changed the subject right, because biochemistry doesn't give the answer. That pleased the American Heart Association and their benefactors companies selling vegetable oil Association and their benefactors, companies selling vegetable oil. They started using statistics and statisticians to make their case.
Speaker 3:And you know, think about it Like how much do we learn about statistics in medical school versus how much we learned before medical school about the basic biochemistry? And you know the answer I, at least, learned a whole lot because my medical school required we have a lot of those basics. We had a one credit course on statistics. I didn't understand. I don't know how I passed it. Statistics is another language and, yes, statisticians have the facility with this language that you and I and most doctors don't, and they can make things look like they line up in the data panels with all kinds of tricks.
Speaker 3:And you know, I've spoken to people who are researchers at the NIH and who have been involved in major studies.
Speaker 3:One was the Women's Health Initiative, which is one of the most well-respected studies, and she told me off the record, so I can't say her name that she saw one of the investigators, and I'm not even going to say what school he came from she didn't want me to give that away, but it was a very prestigious school who basically did and this is her quote everything possible short of making up numbers to make the results come out the way he expected them to.
Speaker 3:And that's not science Like if you go into it expecting a result, you're not a scientist anymore, you are a religious zealot, and in this case the religion is the cholesterol theory of heart disease, and the American Heart Association is peopled with religious zealots who believe in this false and disproven theory, and yet they run the conversation because of money, and that relationship has destroyed human health during the course of the past 70 years and that fact needs to be understood and exposed in depth, and that's why I wrote Dark Calories and why I called it dark. We haven't seen it, we haven't talked about it and it's truly an evil situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely so. And, and you know, beyond Ansel Keys, you actually you know, I think, bring light to another kind of figure who I was familiar with, but not really the full story. You know the marketing executive that basically then worked with the American Heart Association to or worked originally, I think, with Procter Gamble and then bought in the American Heart Association to promote their product. And you know that was sort of the original motivation here was just to sell more of this kind of newly introduced to the market oil, and maybe we can talk a little bit about him as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so his name was Ed Bernays and he is the nephew of none other than Sigmund Freud nephew of none other than Sigmund Freud, considered the father of psychology. And as a teenager he idolized his uncle and he was fascinated with the concept of manipulating people based on their emotions, and so he pretty much invented the science of public relations, where a huge company would hire a firm or an individual to make their products look irresistible, to manipulate consumers. And so that's what he did for his client, which wasn't the American Heart Association, it was Procter Gamble, who sold Crisco made with cottonseed oil, and they sold liquid cottonseed oil and soy oil. And so what his genius was is that he knew he didn't even have to ever. Probably. I don't know if he ever met with Ansel Keys, but he knew that money talks. He understood psychology, he was a mastermind. He understood psychology, he was a mastermind. You know, by the way, he like, if you've heard of the Banana Republic and you know the 50s, that was him behind all that no-transcript. So he totally was a mastermind. So what he knew was that the doctor's an authority figure and in any group or organization, if you wave enough money around, some doctor is going to reach up and grab that dollar, and because that doctor will be. And then that doctor will become basically a tool for your company, because he will find a way and this is what Keys did to make your products appear palatable so that you can keep getting more money. And that's exactly what happened, because the American Heart Association continues to this day to get money from companies that sell vegetable oil.
Speaker 3:And what Ancel Keys did was the hook was that vegetable oils lower cholesterol, and that's why he was interested in it, because he was so convinced cholesterol was the problem and vegetable oils lower cholesterol, therefore they must be good. Now think about that. Over 70 years, very few people in medicine have ever asked wait a second, why? Who says what? If cholesterol isn't the cause of heart disease, how do they lower cholesterol? Oh, by the way, the answer is they lower cholesterol by oxidizing your lipoprotein particles, by basically burning them, and that will damage your arteries, and this is backed up by science. Many scientists have found the same thing, looking at the problem from different directions.
Speaker 3:So, over 70 years. Because doctors are so convinced by the statisticians and the Framingham studies and the repeated magazine journals that the American Heart Association keeps publishing they actually publish 14 journals and thousands of articles every year to reinforce what is essentially just marketing propaganda for the processed food industry, which relies now on vegetable oil. So the American Heart Association is essentially nothing more than a marketing arm of the processed food industry and that's why everybody in this country is living now on vegetable oils 30% of our diet, 30% by calories, and that's why everybody in this country is just slowly getting sicker and sicker and sicker as we eat fewer and fewer real foods and more and more processed foods. It's the American Heart Association and what they've done to science and how they've misled doctors for 70 years.
Speaker 2:And you know, continuing in, I guess, the tradition of Ansel Keys. You know these 14 journals, which are essentially you know, and some of the bigger ones are really you know, essentially you know, and some of the bigger ones are really you know, all that doctors may have a chance to even read. You know you can't really get beyond that because they're such prominent journals, they have all the high ratings. They, you know, simply won't publish studies that go against this, studies that go against this. So now we're in a situation where the only science and that's in air quotes for people listening that is even allowed to be put out there is the science that supports this foregone conclusion.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and sometimes you can kind of tell that it's an article that is not even worth reading because it'll start out with it has been established that you know, cholesterol and saturated fat cause heart disease. True, scientists don't talk like that, especially when it hasn't been established, been established. But that's like their little tell. It's like they just want to remind you that unless you want to be called out as a quack, you better get in line and believe this, like the rest of us cool kids here who work at places like Harvard and Tufts and we get published in magazines and we're the fancy doctors. So you better listen to us. You know there's hierarchies in doctors, right, like there's the doctors that the doctors look up to, because these doctors create the guidelines that we all get, you know, have to read and obey, right. So we look up to these guys and they are in these positions of authority and very frequently they have been paid by the vegetable oil industry. But it's hard to follow the money, it's hard to see that, but still to this day we have just armies and scads of these conflicted health authorities getting oodles of money from the processed food industry and continuing to educate new generations of doctors, or I should say miseducate us so that we continue in believing this lie, because there's evidence, what they call evidence-based medicine, to back it up.
Speaker 3:I don't know how you feel about the term evidence-based medicine, but I hate it. I think it wasn't a term back when I was in school and I've seen it be thrown around by people trying to mislead other people more often than not, because the evidence is very selected. It's statistical crap created by statisticians. You never get to see what are their statistical methods or adjustments. That's never published, no one ever questions them or their ethics, and you know so. We are just all being bedazzled by these complex statistics as doctors, and we are forbidden from using any of the basic science that we spent so much money learning during our education and lost so much sleep to memorize for the exams. And that's what we should trust, because that is the truth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, we're about the same age and went through and graduated medical school about the same time, and you're right, I remember the introduction of evidence-based medicine as it got rolled out in the early parts of our careers. Uh, and it, you know it, it really is exactly the opposite of what you're supposed to do in science, because there's always new evidence coming out, uh, and you know we can go back through the many, many examples of things that were thought to be absolutely proven, uh, that end up, you know, uh, getting uh disproven. With. You know, as we learn more and as scientists and really as physicians, I think it's incumbent on us to be constantly asking you know, what am I getting wrong? What did I get wrong today?
Speaker 2:The, you know the quip that we've all heard about. You know, half of what you learn in medical school is going to be proven to be wrong. We just don't know which half. And yet when you get out there, you know, all of a sudden it becomes well, you know, we know this Absolutely. This one can't be questioned, and that that really should be raising alarm bells for physicians if we're told that we can't question something.
Speaker 3:Right, because you have to make the picture bigger, you keep questioning it, you bring in more data, make sure that it all lines up. And I did that myself because I wanted to get to the root cause. And I found out that someone else did that too, years before I did. His name was Denim Harmon and he invented the field of free radical biology and he said you know, follow the free radicals and you will find the root cause of death and disease.
Speaker 1:Whoa yeah, Bill, we're 150 some odd episodes into this show and I've never heard this name or that phrase.
Speaker 3:Well, that's my phrase actually. But he published a paper that, yeah, it was a four-page paper and this was in the 50s and it was just a very simple question he was asking, but it was so important. He said what kills us, why do we die? And he thought through it and he said, okay, well, it starts at the cell, because the cell is like the unit of life. So then he said what kills the cell? And he thought about it some more and it took a few months, but he came up and he realized free radicals. Now, he too was a chemist before he went to medical school and he knew free radicals were very dangerous high energy particles that promote something called oxidative stress inside a cell. And so in chapter two of Dark Calories I talk about oxidative stress so that people can understand that all of the science that we have points to oxidative stress as the root cause of you name it insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, cancer, alzheimer's, depression, even obesity, mental disorders. So we know as much as we can know anything that oxidative stress is at the root of this stuff. Now how do we link that to diet? And that's one thing that Denham Harmon didn't do. He couldn't do because he just didn't know anything about vegetable oils. And that's again in Dark Calories. I say okay.
Speaker 3:Vegetable oils are the most powerful promoter of oxidative stress in our diets today. They are 30% of our daily calories, 80% of our fat calories. They are industrial products. They promote oxidative stress through their inherent toxicity. That's a result of processing and just reactions with oxygen and if you take away, so in other words, vegetable oils are oxidative stress in a bottle. They deliver oxidative stress to our cells and oxidative stress is the thing that makes us sick and kills us and that is not disputed by anybody in science at all.
Speaker 3:There's not really another side to that. There was, but they've kind of settled it. The majority of the science says no, oxidative stress is a root cause, it's not a consequence. That was the only question Is it a cause or is it a result? So now more and more people are saying it's a cause. It's a cause. And instead of looking at vegetable oil because we can't, because we know vegetable oil is heart healthy, they've looked at other solutions which have failed to work over 70 years because they just can't. They can't combat the degree of toxicity that we get from eating all the vegetable oil that we get today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the whole concept of, well, if we eat enough or get enough antioxidants, right, we're going to be able to sort of overcome this. But, like you said, it clearly hasn't been working. Now, how do you kind of synthesize, let's say, the, you know, some of the other things that we think goes into this? You know, so we talk a lot about sugar and highly processed carbohydrates, and you know, uh, you know, does that contradict the vegetable oil story? Do they work together? How do you kind of, you know, put together this information? Uh, uh, and you know, from a practical standpoint, do you think that people can do a diet that is high in carbohydrates but not inclusive of vegetable and seed oils? And, you know, is that going to be okay?
Speaker 3:Right. So very important question because a lot of people are talking about sugar and a lot of folks are having a lot of great results by doing keto and other low carb diets, but those diets only work to the like. I've done the research and I lay it all out in dark calories that it turns out that keto for diabetes, which is the most well-studied keto disease reversal body of research that we have keto only works for diabetes when you have dieticians who have lost their fear of cholesterol and advise against vegetable oils. So we have about six studies on keto from high vegetable oil, type keto and six studies on keto from high animal fat, real food based fats and the studies that use the keto with the real fats, the cheeses, the eggs, the butter. Those reverse. Those work better than the standard ADA diet, which is called MyPlate, and the standard ADA diet is high in carbohydrate. But when you have vegetable oil in the mix with the keto diet and very little saturated fat because most dietitians won't design a study that has more than 10% saturated fat, which is very little, means you got to eat a lot of vegetable oil Then keto does not work any better for reversing diabetes and lowering blood sugar than does the regular high-carb diet. So, in other words, you can do a low-carb diet and you don't reverse insulin resistance, right?
Speaker 3:That's just one piece of powerful evidence suggesting that it's the oxidative stress driven by mostly vegetable oil that causes diabetes. Well, it causes insulin resistance. That's how and I go through the process of how that happens in dark calories. So that's one piece of evidence. But so many people are talking about sugar as if it's worse than vegetable oil. But the thing we have to realize is that sugar, when you eat too much sugar, it's a problem because it has no nutrition. It's a problem because it can spike your blood sugar temporarily and it will spike your insulin levels temporarily. But that insulin is building all the sugar into normal body fat that your body can use for energy.
Speaker 3:That's what your body fat is for. It's supposed to give you energy between meals, right? You're supposed to be able to go for hours and hours. If you have plenty of body fat, you should be able to go for a long time before you get hungry. But if your body fat has been reformulated based on these industrial vegetable oils and your body itself has very little antioxidants, you're going to be subjected to oxidative stress and that's going to change your cells fueling strategy from body fat, because it won't work. Your body fat is now rendered useless almost as a fuel for yourselves when you have, when it's reformulated. Useless almost as a fuel for yourselves when you have when it's reformulated in the image of vegetable oil. Body fat doesn't work, so our cells need sugar, so the long and short of it is vegetable oils drive sugar addictions.
Speaker 1:Because the body fat situation that you just described is not otherwise providing fuel to the cell.
Speaker 3:Correct, and so our cells will die if they don't get another fuel, and they have to gobble up our blood sugar, which makes us hungry. So we eat more. So it's not that we're eating too many calories. It's not that we're eating too many calories, it's that we're building body fat in the image of vegetable oil. That can't do its job. It can't fuel ourselves, so we get hungry. In other words, we can build body fat, but we can't burn it.
Speaker 2:That's a simple explanation for why everyone's sick. Yeah, that's actually one of the best explanations I've heard of that, and I think it really does bring this together, and in my mind, it's sort of the situation where the vegetable and seed oils are creating the environment that the carbohydrates then become toxic in.
Speaker 3:Essentially, that makes so much sense, much sense yeah, we have a toxic dependence on the carbohydrates and you know. Then it raises our blood sugar and we have, then it has its own toxicity because of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah but sorry I interrupted you, I grew up in the 70s and we ate massive amounts of processed carbs I think of breakfast cereals and we put sugar on our cereal.
Speaker 3:You do.
Speaker 1:And I can go back to my high school yearbooks and we had no fat people. There were two people in my entire high school who would be qualified as borderline fat and I remember something changed in the 80s and I've been trying to wrap my head around it. What happened? What changed? And I think and this is just my completely unscientific hypothesis that was when I became aware of this massive push for heart healthy foods and getting rid of the types of fats that we'd been consuming all along, because we didn't have. We had Crisco, I remember that, but we didn't use it like, and I think maybe what you're describing is a valid explanation for the phenomena I observed, which was in the 80s.
Speaker 3:People just started getting fat and we're getting fatter and fatter and fatter. Yep Jack, you hit the nail on the head. And when you look at the amount of vegetable oil we were consuming over the past hundred years, you see that at certain key points it just takes a flying leap up. So in the 1940s and 50s it was about like one. It was a fraction of what it is today, something like one like a seventh or eighth, and it kind of slowly was drizzling upward. And in the sixties it was about, you know, 10 to 15% of our calories, but by the eighties it it had jumped up quite a bit. I'm sorry, in the in the sixties it was less than 10% to 15%, but it had jumped up significantly by the 80s and then it jumped up again between the year 2010 and 2020.
Speaker 3:So every time you see the vegetable oil just taking a bit of a surge, you then see a surge in obesity and metabolic disease and all sorts of disease inflammatory diseases inflammation is all linked to this oxidative stress, degenerative diseases. And something really interesting happened, especially between oh and, by the way, so when I was a kid, the rate of severe obesity, obesity itself was rare and there was almost nobody I don't remember anybody who was like 100 pounds overweight in my college or high school. But you know, today 10% of Americans are 100 pounds overweight. You know, we talk about obesity being common, and certainly is. But 100 pounds overweight, like a you know, a woman, five foot five, that's a BMI of 40 or more, and generally at that BMI of 40 or more, that means you've got a hundred extra pounds you're carrying around.
Speaker 3:That is an insane amount of weight to lose. And people feel so lost and so hopeless and they can't help but blame themselves. And they have no idea that vegetable oil has rewired their cravings so that it's not a flaw of their character. It's not that they are weak-willed, it's that since they were children, their brains have equated sugar and starchy foods and sweet foods and so on with energy. And that has absolutely changed everything about their relationship with food and made it basically impossible for them to have a healthy relationship with food. And yet just knowing that is so empowering to people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so let's maybe end this on a high note and talk about, you know, how do we get out of this, where do we go from here, what you know, what can the individual do, and then, what do you think maybe can be accomplished on a societal level to help us turn this ship around?
Speaker 3:Yeah, very important. What can you do? What's the practical? Well, the practical is for most people, just, on the individual level prioritize avoiding vegetable oil as your number one, right? Because everyone's out there telling you that, oh, you just need to do this for your health. We've heard everything right. We've heard like you need red light therapy, you need cold plunges, you need my protein powder, you need to cut sugar. You need to protein powder. You need to cut sugar. You need to go keto. You need to intermittent fast. No, now you need to carnivore. Oh gosh, you know what. You need to be vegan. You need to reduce oxidative stress and to do that, you need to avoid vegetable oils.
Speaker 3:And it's so important to have that as a hierarchy because, first of all, it is the most important thing, it will give you the most bang for your buck, and the moment you do that, you then create all this space in your calorie budget for healthy foods that will give you energy. That's the first thing I pay attention to. For my patients, it's not their weight, it's how much energy they have. Do they experience that hunger between meals? That is an abnormal hunger, and I teach people to look out for what I call pathologic hunger and things like brain fog and feeling hangry. That is your trigger, that you did something in your previous meal that you could tweak for your next meal so it doesn't happen again, so you don't need to snack. And once you get control over that and you do that by, of course, avoiding vegetable oils and then eating other foods that nourish you, and I teach you what those are then you start being able to take more control of your life. Because if you're hungry every two to four hours, there's really no way you're going to sustain a long-term relationship with healthy food in a world where, well, let's face it, everyone is trying to feed you their processed junk food, right? So vegetable oil first, get healthy food in your diet. And then, as far as the society, I think we want to.
Speaker 3:I think we need to change the conversation. We need to start telling our doctors that, look, there's this. I mean, I've done this. I hate to say this. I have no other answer other than your doctor needs to know what's in my books. That's like the only answer I can give you, because if your doctor, if I knew this 20 years ago, I wouldn't have to write these books. I would have been able to help my patients, I wouldn't have to write these books. I would have been able to help my patients. I wouldn't have had that hollow, empty feeling, and it will help your doctor be a better doctor and it will help him like his job more, because it's not very fun feeling useless or questioning your job. So there's probably a better answer I could think of. I should have thought of already. But honestly, yeah, the doctors do need to understand that the root cause of everything is oxidative stress and we can help our patients so much by controlling oxidative stress through better diet.
Speaker 2:No, I think that's exactly true, and I guess what I would add, ultimately is you know, it's dollars that got us into this mess and I think it's dollars that will get us out of this mess. And when people stop buying this crap that's being sold to us as food, you know the industry is going to have to respond to that. I mean, and that's the power that us as individuals hold. I mean, and that's the power that us as individuals hold. You know, the voting with our wallets is where I think we're going to be able to turn this around ultimately.
Speaker 3:That is like so true, dr Abadi, because you know and I've already seen like little signs of it where now, when I go to Costco, it used to all just be like vegetable oil cooking spray. Right Well, now they've got avocado oil and coconut oil. That wasn't around before, that wasn't available, and there are like lots of little companies that are springing up all over the place that are seed oil free. They're using tallow instead. So it's already starting. It's just, for my mind, taking way too long. It's been a long time ago. But yes, I'm glad it's starting and let's keep the ball rolling. You're doing a world of good with your message and your podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you, and you know exactly, the more that we all keep pushing this message out here, the better we're all going to end up. So thank you for all that you're doing. The book again, it's called Dark Calories. As we're recording this, it's available on pre-order, but by the time the episode is released, the book will have been released. So go get it at all the usual places. Where else can people find you and connect with you? Kate?
Speaker 3:Please come to my website, which is drkatecom and that's D-R-C-A-T-E dot com and scroll down to the footer where it says you can sign up for some free resources. That'll get you my newsletter and you can stay up to date with other projects and things that I'm creating and you know all the latest research that I've been doing Anything interesting, basically, please visit basically, please visit um.
Speaker 1:As I've sat here listening, I've thought this is the single most important episode we've ever done well, thank you and the reason I say that is because I think for the first time we've had somebody very explicitly say here is the root cause of all this stuff that we've that we're trying to address, and here's one simple step anybody can take to untangle this Gordian knot. Thanks for thanks for this. This has been really really good for me. I'm going to send a copy of this episode to some family members that I've been having these discussions with. They're going to get it before anybody else because I can do that. It's good it's. It's been really good to have you on the show. Thanks so much.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you so much and I really appreciate that it resonates with you, because that's exactly what I'm what I'm hoping and it's exactly, frankly, what we all I think, what's what we need to heal this country.
Speaker 1:Very good Well for Dr Philip Ovadia and Dr Kate Shanahan. This has been the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast. All the information we've discussed will be available in the show notes. Thanks for joining us and we will talk to you next time.