Today, I am delighted to reconnect with the esteemed Dr. Cate Shanahan, who last joined our podcast for episode 131. She is a New York Times bestselling author and a physician-researcher who synthesizes complex scientific concepts into clear and logical insights to empower her readers to drive positive changes for a better world. Her latest book, Dark Calories, is a must-read for everyone, particularly clinicians.
Dr. Shanahan brings a wealth of knowledge to our discussion today. We explore the origins and biochemistry of seed oils, their production, and their detrimental effects on our mitochondria and overall health, diving into the concept of garbage blobs, looking at insulin resistance, stress, and hormones, and explaining why hypoglycemia is not benign. We examine the controversial role of the American Heart Association in cholesterol communication and why the keto diet is not ideal for everyone, and Dr. Shanahan also shares strategies for a seed oil-free lifestyle.
I trust you will find this conversation with Dr. Cate Shanahan as enlightening and engaging as I did when recording it.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:
How the unhealthy vegetable oils in food products negatively impact our health
Why we must become aware of the presence of unhealthy oils in our food and read ingredient labels to make informed choices
How her background in biochemistry and molecular biology helped Dr. Shanahan see that polyunsaturated oils were the problem instead of saturated fats
Why vegetable oils are unique when compared with olive and coconut oils
Which vegetable oils are the Hateful Eight?
How the oxidation process in vegetable oil production creates toxicity in our bodies
How insulin resistance affects metabolic health and causes weight gain
Tips for differentiating between normal and pathological hunger
How stress hormones break down muscle and bone and raise blood sugar levels
The importance of reducing carbohydrates gradually to avoid chronic stress and muscular breakdown
Why Dr. Shanahan believes that the medical community is corrupt
Bio:
Cate Shanahan, MD, is a Cornell-trained physician-scientist whose works have inspired entire movements involving bone broth, live-culture ferments, and seed oil-free business empires. Together with NBA legend Gary Vitti, she created the LA Lakers PRO Nutrition program, which has been emulated by elite championship teams worldwide. Dedicated to her field, she runs a telehealth practice, as well as a health-education website, DrCate.com, and lives with her family on a peaceful lake in Florida.
“There is a major disconnect when we start looking at what we are eating, and the reality of what doctors are taught, which is not a reality.”
-Dr. Cate Shanahan
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Connect with Dr Cate Shanahan
Transcript:
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:00:02] Welcome to Everyday Wellness podcast. I'm your host, Nurse Practitioner Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives.
[00:00:29] Today, I had the honor of reconnecting with the brave and incredible Dr. Cate Shanahan. She last joined me on the podcast with Episode 131, and she synthesizes complex science into logical arguments so that readers can become change makers for a better world. She is also a New York Times bestselling author and incredible physician researcher.
[00:00:53] Today, we spoke at length about the origin of seed oils, the biochemistry of different types of fats, how seed oils are produced, how seed oils degrade our mitochondria and oxidize our cells, how seed oils drive obesity, the concept of garbage blobs, insulin resistance, why hypoglycemia is not benign, and the role of stress hormones, the intentional miscommunication of cholesterol, and the role of the American Heart Association, why keto is not right for everyone. And lastly, how to navigate a seed-oil-free-aware lifestyle.
[00:01:34] Dr. Cate's newest book, Dark Calories, is a must read for everyone, especially clinicians. It will help explain why seed oils are so destructive and detrimental, and why we are seeing a metabolic health crisis here in the United States. I hope you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did recording it.
[00:01:58] Dr. Shanahan, such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. I was just saying how much I enjoyed reading your new book.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:02:03] Well, thank you, Cynthia. I never know how it's going to be received, so I'm always anxious to get the reviews from the actual readers. [laughs]
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:02:12] No. And what's interesting is as I was reading it, I was either texting my husband or I was screenshotting things. I was tweeting because I feel like we can yell it from the mountaintops. But until you really dive into the research and you understand this complex interrelationship between the advent of these commercialized seed oils or vegetable oils and the net impact on our health. And so, I found it really interesting that the kind of beginning of seed oils really stemmed from starting out as soap.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:02:44] Yeah. They stemmed as starting out from a variety of byproducts of a variety of industries. And really, the truly, that was because there were piles of cotton seeds sitting, smoldering and rancidifying in the sun that couldn't be fed to animals because they contain a toxin that was just like free money. And the chemists who could figure out what to do with it, they spun straw into gold and made soap and candles. And then they were like, "Well, golly, if we just modify the recipe a little bit, it's softer, and boy, doesn't that look like lard." Well, let's just call it something like that. You tell people that it's digestible and that was like the selling point and clean, that was another early selling point.
[00:03:30] And, there were no food regulations back in the early 1900s. And that was the beginning of the vegetable, so called the edible oil industry. It was an unregulated wild west people. It wasn't just the oil industry that was doing crazy things. The dairy industry was using sickly cows, and the milk would have to be cleaned up with things like Borax to make it look better and taste better. So, people were not being well served by a whole lot of sectors of the food industry. We think it's bad now. It's been bad ever since we've let other people feed us.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:04:11] Yeah, it's so interesting because as I was reading your book, and especially that section, I thought to myself, we have really been hoodwinked. Not just the American public, but also clinicians. And I'll read some of the statistics that I started kind of compiling as I was reading the book. So, we know ultra-processed foods are not healthy for us, but 80% of foods with an ingredient label contain at least one type of vegetable oil. And I think in many ways, as I was talking to my husband, I said, "If you do nothing else, just become aware of how proliferative these toxic oils are," And what I found interesting. And you make these connections in the book that consumptions of these oils in and of themselves contribute to all the major chronic disease states that we're seeing. And certainly, in the trajectory of your medical experience, and certainly my own, we've been heading in the wrong direction for a long period of time.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:05:09] Yeah. I like to say if you can turn the label around and read and find out what's in there, you can turn your metabolism around, because truly the vegetable oils are the worst thing in the food supply. And not just their suspicious beginnings, but the fact that now they're so prevalent that it's 30% of the average person's calories, 80% of their fat calories, and still doctors are taught that the reason we're unhealthy is because we're eating more saturated fat and more animal fat. And so, it's like there's this major disconnect between the reality we are all living in once we start looking at what we're eating and the reality that doctors are taught, which is not a reality, it's surreal.
[00:06:01] And so when I first discovered this myself about 20 something years ago now, I knew that this was very important. I knew that this was actually the missing link in my education that would not only help-- I was suffering myself from a serious health problem. I actually had insulin resistance, and I didn't know it because these vegetable oils, they cause insulin resistance, and doctors learn almost nothing about what they are. In fact, doctors are taught to tell our patients to seek them out because they're going to reduce your risk of heart disease, it's so wrong. And this is what I want, people need to get their heads wrapped around this because we are living in a topsy turvy world, and we have to protect ourselves from the advice of our well-intentioned healthcare practitioners.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:06:58] I absolutely agree. And I think perhaps starting the conversation around differentiating saturated fat from monounsaturated fat from polyunsaturated fatty acids, because that will help kind of create the perspective and then speaking to how seed oils are produced, I think those two things alone will help kind of navigate this discussion for those maybe who are not as familiarized with the different types of fats. And one thing I want to identify is that you started in a PhD program as a biochemist, correct?
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:07:32] Yeah. I went to Cornell to study biochemistry and molecular biology. So, I wanted to create microbes, genetically-engineered microbes that could digest plastic. I was just in love with chemistry. But I left the program because I realized that it was so complicated, that even microbes were way more complicated than anyone was giving them credit for. And we really could not easily modify and create life that way. It seemed like it was going to be a way long time before that dream was realized, so that's when I went to medical school. And I kind of thought I would never revisit chemistry again, but oh boy was I wrong about that, because it's vital to understanding lesson number one about nutrition, it starts with this difference in fats that you mentioned.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:08:22] Absolutely. And I think your background is so unique. That's why I wanted to kind of identify and provide listeners with that complex understanding of your unique background gives you a lens and a pathway to understanding some of this chemistry. For many of us, we had two years of chemistry, and it was done, but this is your area of expertise in particular.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:08:45] Yeah. So, without the background in biochemistry, I wouldn't really have been able to recognize so early, at least, that the problem with these oils was that they were polyunsaturated. And, that had been their selling point, that they were polyunsaturated, that was supposed to be the reason they were healthy. But once I realized that's what they were polyunsaturated, I just didn't even think about it. Like, doctors don't even think, "Okay, just, yeah, don't eat saturated fat. These oils, whatever they are, this vegetable oils got to be good." It's really as simple as that. We don't go deep into the chemistry of what we're eating in medical school, and dietitians don't either, and most nutritionists don't either.
[00:09:24] But the differences between polyunsaturated fats and saturated fats makes the difference between, a healthy oil and an unhealthy oil because of a bunch of factors that have to do-- You brought up also how they're processed and how their processing is unique. Their biochemistry and their processing are intimately related to each other because of the fact that they are polyunsaturated. That means when you try to make oils out of soy or corn or cotton seeds or sunflower seeds, you've got a toxic brew there. Because in order to extract the oil in the first place, you have to use so much heat and so much pressure, it just mutates. That heat accelerates reactions between oxygen and polyunsaturates. And that's the key piece of information that helped me understand there was something really important to be gained from diving into how vegetable oil, what even is it? And what is it chemistry? And what's in it? What are we actually eating? And so, I've figured out that we're eating toxic stuff because by the time the oils are done being extracted and then refined, they contain toxins already, and it just goes downhill from there.
[00:10:47] So, vegetable oils are unique, they're unlike olive oil, they're unlike coconut oil. Because the crude oil is inedible, it cannot be consumed until it's refined. And so, because of the biochemistry that refining is complicated and entire factories are required, you have to do things like degum it, dewax it, de-bleach it, deodorize it, and all of that makes it less toxic than it was. So, the key thing here is that the crude oil is inedible. That's not the case with olive oil. Crude olive oil is extra virgin olive oil and it is immediately edible. And the difference is that you don't have to use the high heat, you don't have to use the pressure to make olive oil. You just squeeze it because olives are oily. But soybeans were not bred that way. And none of the what I call the hateful eight vegetable seed oils are oily enough that you can efficiently extract their oil at a scale that the food processing industry needs them to do. So that's why the hateful eight vegetable oils are absolutely unique in the food supply. And there's nothing else that you can say this about.
[00:12:06] Even sugar as unhealthy as it is for us, pure raw cane sugar with pretty much zero nutrients, and it's just sucrose molecules, just fattening calories there, it doesn't have toxins in it, it just has a lot of sugar in it. But sugar is one of the macronutrients. But the oils are contaminated with toxins when they leave the factory. And then because they are polyunsaturated and those reactions with oxygen will continue, the toxicity increases as it goes from the bottle to your plate to your fork. Every time you heat, it there's more toxins that form. With just even opening the bottle, oxygen gets in there, some more toxins can form. If you leave it in the light, the UV light hits those fragile polyunsaturated molecules and does the same thing oxygen does, breaks them down and turns them into toxins. So, the key for me was understanding this toxin formation, what is it? Maybe we want to talk about that a little bit, like, how do these toxins form? Because a lot of people are talking about toxins these days. A lot of people assume it's got to do with things that are added on purpose, things like the glyphosate and stuff like that. But it's very different, it's not that at all. So, should we talk about that a little bit?
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:13:32] Yeah, I think that would be particularly interesting. And just to kind of backtrack when we're talking about the hateful eight, it's soybean, cotton seeds, sunflower, safflower.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:13:43] I'll memorize it this way, like myself. I do three C's and three S's. And then there's the other two. So, the three C's are corn, canola, cotton seed. And the three S's are soy, sunflower, safflower. And those are really the most important to memorize. So, there's like the sinister six that you want to search for on the labels, because those are the ones that are going to be in the grocery store. The other two are rice bran and grapeseed. And now those have mostly made their ways so far into restaurants, kind of like usually the sitting down restaurants, not even the fast-food restaurants, but they're no better than the others. They have this healthy glow, but they are not healthy, they do not deserve the glow.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:14:21] Absolutely.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:14:22] And by the way, if you live in the UK or Australia, you don't have canola, you have grapeseed instead. So, if you're listening outside. So those are the ones to memorize and avoid. And, the good news is everything else is fine. So, olive oil is fine. Avocado oil is fine. Palm oil is even fine. But whatever oil you're getting, it's always better if it is unrefined oil, because the refining process, even of these more stable, less polyunsaturated oils I just mentioned, the refining still strips away a lot of the nutrients, and we don't want that. Then you get more of that-- Then we're back to empty calories again, and those are just fattening, so that's not good.
[00:15:04] So, the toxicity, how do these oils, like, where's the toxins coming from? And what are these toxins doing to you? Well, let's start about where they're coming from first. So, they come from the polyunsaturates when they react with oxygen. And so polyunsaturates are long molecules that react with oxygen, and oxygen actually breaks them into smaller molecules. And these smaller molecules didn't exist in nature, they're kind of random shapes and they have toxic effects. Some of them are mildly toxic, some of them are highly, highly toxic. And what you're going to get, it kind of depends on the conditions. So, they all have, like, as they leave the factory, the bottles contain anywhere from 0.6% being the bare minimum, number of these abnormal and unnatural molecules to higher amount on the higher end is like 5.2%, which is a huge amount. So, we're talking about parts per hundred here. And this is why they're different, because they're present in parts per hundred. And other contaminants like the glyphosates and the chlorinated polyphenols, all the other things that we don't want to get are present in so much smaller amounts in part per billion or even less than that. So, these are present in millions of times higher concentration, these toxic compounds.
[00:16:22] And just to give you an example of one of the families that has been studied most extensively are called the alpha-beta unsaturated aldehydes, kind of like formaldehyde. And formaldehyde is not good for you. It belongs to a family, big family. And when you go to a restaurant and you have your French fries there, fast-food French fries, your French fries are going to have the same amount of these toxic alpha-beta unsaturated aldehydes as cigarettes on a one-to-one ratio. So, a five-ounce serving of fries is just about like smoking a pack of cigarettes. So basically, if that's what you're feeding your children, unfortunately, you are essentially forcing them to have a smoking habit in terms of their health effects. And I'm certainly not saying that you're a bad mom or anything, because it's not your job to have done the research to figure this out. It's supposed to be the American Heart Association and the doctors who are supposed to be protecting us from these toxins in our food supply, but they not only are they not doing it, they're the promoting these oils is healthy. So, you really do have to know what you're eating.
[00:17:24] And the reason I want people to understand, the reason I focused the whole book on vegetable oils, because I could have talked about a lot of other stuff that's out there that's bad for us, is because these are the worst of the worst. These put the junk in junk food. These are the reason doctors understand that processed food is bad. And a whole bunch of human studies show that the more processed food you eat, the more diseases you get, but no one has identified that these are the thing, these vegetable oils are the reason processed food is bad. And it has to do with the oxidation process and how that creates toxicity in our food and it continues to create the toxicity in our body and turn healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids in our body into more toxins. So, we have the same kinds of reactions going on in our body as it goes on in the factory, in the fry pan, and it's really horrible. And that is the reason why we have an obesity epidemic, why we have a metabolic disease epidemic. That is the reason people can't get healthy even after they lose weight. It's the reason people gain weight. It's the main thing making everyone sick.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:18:38] It's really interesting, as I was reading the book and thinking about-- listeners of this podcast are very familiar with mitochondria. And seed oils uniquely damage not just our cellular membranes, but our mitochondria. And perhaps we can touch a little bit into this, because I think that this is helpful for people to understand that the damage is not just systemic, it is down to the cellular level. And helping people understand that not only does it impact the mitochondria, it impacts our antioxidant production which also harms our bodies. And so, these are points to-- There's the macro level, and then there's this kind of micro, very detailed level. But I found this really interesting and I think listeners would as well.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:19:21] Yeah. So, in chapter two, there's a section I call the garbage blob catastrophe. Because what's going on is these toxins in our body promote oxidative stress, and they deplete our bodies of the ability to manage oxygen, what does that mean? Well, it means that parts of our cells start to oxidize, and when they oxidize, they become sticky gunk, basically, very similar to when your oven badly needs cleaning and there's that brown stuff that just doesn't get off easily. We have to use harsh chemicals and stuff like that in the oven, but our cells we can't do that. So, what happens in this garbage catastrophe scenario is that these little sticky blobs of oxidized proteins build up within cells, the long-lived cells are affected the most. And this, folks, is the root cause of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and a whole bunch of other neurologic degenerative diseases. How? Well, if you've heard of tau protein, have you talked about that before?
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:20:31] We have a little bit. I'm hoping we're going to get Dale Bredesen on the podcast at some point.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:20:36] Yeah, well, ask him what he thinks about this oxidative stress from vegetable oils, because I'd be surprised if he's even thought about them. And tell him about Dark Calories that will probably help his research. So, tau protein is basically oxidized microtubules. It's oxidized structures from inside brain cells. And tau protein is found in traumatic brain injury, where people-- The more cognitive losses you have, the more tau protein you have. When you have like the football players or the boxers. So these sticky, oxidized deposits from basically diet induced, but then you add that trauma on top of that, and you get young people with essentially symptoms of Parkinson's or symptoms of Alzheimer's or symptoms of other dementing diseases where their personalities change. And it's all from the inability, it's all from excessive oxidative stress that just makes garbage build up in our cells. And so, it's tau protein, it's amyloid beta of Alzheimer's, it's alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's and Parkinson-like disorders.
[00:21:49] So famously, Robin Williams had Lewy-body dementia. And that causes a lot of personality changes and can cause extreme depression. And he didn't know what's going on. I think he was diagnosed very late. And, tragically, ultimately he was so depressed, he ended his life. This is how these oxidized blobs of protein garbage basically build up in just one organ system of our body and cause tragic results that are affecting billions of people around the globe. Most people that we know, most of us know somebody who has some sort of neurologic degenerative disorder. And it includes things even like the movement disorders, also similar processes cause multiple sclerosis and ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. So, this is just within the nervous system.
[00:22:50] But the same kind of thing is happening in every system. The organ systems that we see getting hit the hardest most often, the liver is probably number one. Fatty liver disease is now, 50% of adults now have some form of fatty accumulation in their livers and liver disease, 50%, because the liver gets hit with the toxins first. And it's the liver's job to try to detox, but it just can't with all this oxidative stress. And our kidneys are impacted too. Our kidneys also help detoxify stuff, but that's why we have so many people, now one of the most common leading causes of death is kidney failure. People needing kidney transplants and being on dialysis. We think of this as a complication of diabetes or hypertension, but no it's a complication of oxidative stress.
[00:23:45] And so that's what Dark Calories, really, I think, hopefully, will help I think it has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about medicine, because I'm saying oxidative stress is what's causing all these diseases that medical science right now only just medicates. Can't really give a good answer for, often blames the victim, says, "Oh, you don't exercise enough, you're overweight, or it's just your family history. You were born in the wrong family. It's a tough luck, kid." But no, it's something-- you can do something about, you can prevent it, and once you understand it doesn't matter that your doctor doesn't understand it, because you're the one in control of your life.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:24:21] That's important information, Dr. Cate. And I think about in the book how you're talking about seed oils drive obesity. So, we have a metabolic health crisis. World Health Organization has identified obesity as the largest health threat facing humanity, so not unique to the United States. Can we talk about how these PUFAs, these polyunsaturated fatty acid vegetable/seed oils, how they impact body fat, contribute to insulin resistance? Because I used to tell patients, because I didn't know better in Cardiology, I just need you to exercise more and eat less. Not realizing that the toxic, MyPlate, Food Guide Pyramid, a lot of the garbage that we used to tell our patients to eat was exacerbating exactly the things we're trying to fight now.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:25:08] Yeah. So, actually, I was smiling because I call them PUFA, [Cynthia laughs] because just to help you remember, like, PUFAs go poof, right. They're the ones that kind of explode on contact with oxygen. But I like PUFA, that's very feminine.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:25:21] So, I've always said PUFA. Anyway, so, yeah, these make us gain weight because they change our metabolism. So, the epidemic of obesity is bad enough. Half the people are overweight globally, also half the people are overweight or obese. But there's another metabolic disease that is even more prevalent that goes undiagnosed and that is insulin resistance. And insulin resistance is actually 99% depending on how you define it and the way I define it, 99% of people are affected. So that's pretty much everybody has it. I had it myself 25 years ago before I changed my diet. And for me, it wasn't making me gain very much weight, because I'm a, like, compulsive exerciser, and I'm sort of OCD when it comes to not wanting to brush my teeth. So, I had an advantage there. [Cynthia laughs] Like, I didn't want to have to feel like I wanted to brush my teeth, so I didn't snack a lot. But I still, nevertheless, was about 20, 25 pounds overweight. I just figured, "Well, whatever, I'm older, I'm already married. Who cares?" [Cynthia laughs] I mean, I did care, nobody wants to be overweight, but I didn't want to do anything about it, I didn't care that much. But I didn't know I was insulin resistant.
[00:26:32] And here's the sign that I've discovered. This is my original research. I call it the energy model of insulin resistance. And in this model, when you are insulin resistant, your brain is deprived of energy between meals. As you go, just a few hours after your last meal, what happens is all the calories and the energy from your meal are done now in your bloodstream. First, they have to exit the digestive system, they enter the bloodstream, and lots of calories in there, you have lots of energy, but then the body has to make use of that, or put it in storage in your body fat. And so, you're burning those calories, and then your blood sugar dwindles, and suddenly it gets down to the point where there's not enough, and you have to make this switch over to burning your body fat. But when you are insulin resistant that doesn't happen. And instead, your blood sugar keeps dropping, and it gets to the point where you feel it, you feel hungry, you feel hypoglycemic because your blood sugar is too low to serve the needs of your body. And this is where things get a little crazy, because you can still have normal blood sugar level when you check it, but if it's not being distributed properly, because we're not meant to be running on blood sugar all the time. If we're running only on blood sugar and we can't burn our own body fat, then our brain needs our blood sugar level to be higher than nature ever intended. And this is why I say things go haywire. Nature never intended for us to have more than a teaspoon's worth of sugar in our bloodstream.
[00:28:17] And when you are insulin resistant, your brain is always telling your body to raise that blood sugar higher than it should be. And that's what's missing from this whole root cause discussion. Your body is at odds with your body's needs, your brain's needs for energy to function so you don't feel hungry or at odds with all of biology. And that is why we have an obesity and sickness epidemic. And that is why what you feel and these are the symptoms that I had. Well, I didn't have so much hunger, but many people feel hunger and they want to snack. And so, I didn't snack, but instead I got shaky, I would get really cold, my fingers would get really cold, and I would have trouble concentrating, I would get irritable, and I would lose what's called executive function, like my planning ability. It would be harder for me to answer complex questions. It would be harder for me to solve complex problems. We call this brain fog.
[00:29:21] All of this, people suffer from it, they think they're healthy. Thin people with normal body weights who are athletes suffer from this, and they think it's normal. So that's why in Dark Calories, I talk about this thing called pathologic hunger. You probably saw that section.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:29:35] I did, I did. And I think you bring up so many good points, because I remember when I was in nursing school a long time ago, hypoglycemia at that time was thought of as being benign. And I love that you clearly illuminate why that is not benign. It's oftentimes the first sign of blood sugar dysregulation. And in many instances, I found a lot of my patients when we would use continuous glucose monitors, even now, when people would tell me they thought their blood sugar was low, it was actually high.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:30:09] And that's classic with insulin resistance.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:30:11] Yeah. And so, for me, it can be very illustrative of this process of this progressive insulin resistance. We have people that they call TOFI, which is thin on the outside, fat on the inside. And I think in the book you mentioned, it's 45% of women, 60% of men. So, if you're listening to this podcast right now, this is a large proportion of our population. And so even in the book, you talk about some research that's been done around continuous glucose monitors, and when people thought, "Their blood glucose was low, it was actually high." And I think this is quite significant. I cannot tell you how often I meet people socially and they know that intermittent fasting is something that's aligned with my persona, I've written a book on it. I talk about it a lot. People tell me I can't fast because I need to snack. And that in and of itself can be a sign of significant blood sugar dysregulation.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:31:09] Yes, it is, that is, if you feel like you need to snack, that's not normal hunger. If it comes along with any of the other hypoglycemia symptoms, and there's 11 of them. I teach people to track their hunger. And I call it pathologic hunger. I had to give it a name because I want people to understand there's a difference between normal hunger and pathologic hunger. That wasn't a name, so I just made it up, pathologic hunger. We kind of overlap it a little bit with hypoglycemia, but the reality is that a lot of people don't have low blood sugar.
[00:31:41] Like people will have those symptoms because their brain needs more sugar than biology ever intended and their blood sugar level can be high even. I don't know if you work with type 2 diabetics, probably do, but a lot of them feel that their blood sugars are too low when it's 150. And just to set the stage here, a normal fasting blood sugar tops out at 90 to 100, depending what you look at, it should be somewhere around 65 to 85, and people will have twice that much and feel like it's not enough when they have very severe insulin resistance, which we call type 2 diabetes.
[00:32:16] But, yeah, so pathologic hunger is not normal hunger. Normal hunger goes away quickly. It's not something that makes your brain dysfunction. It doesn't change your mood, doesn't make you nauseated or weak. You can just drink some water. And normally, normal hunger kicks in around meal times and snack times. So, if you have a habit of snacking, you're going to have to learn how to differentiate between normal hunger, which might kick in around your normal snack time, and pathologic hunger, which is a problem. The normal hunger, you can safely ignore. The pathologic hunger, you can't really safely ignore that. So, I tell you what to do. Basically, you want to prevent it from happening. You have to build meals that prevent it from happening. Maybe we should talk about why I don't like people to just ignore pathologic hunger and push through it. Why I think that advice is really bad and really dangerous?
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:33:07] No. And actually, I like that in the book you talk about-- And I'm sure we'll get to this, why you don't encourage people to go right to ketogenic diets, and I think this is really, really important. So, for me, more often than not, when I was working in Cardiology, I would see patients with significant long-term type 2 diabetes. And they would say to me that as we were getting more aggressive with managing their blood sugar. They would tell me, "I feel low at 130 mg/dL." 120, they would get shaky, and sometimes they would sweat, and I would explain them, "You have been running so high for so long that your body has completely overridden all the normal signals to alert you to the fact that your blood sugar is high. So now when you're getting low for you, you're provoking these hypoglycemia episodes." But, yes, I absolutely want you to talk about the pathology behind this, because for anyone that's listening, and I'm sure many listeners have loved ones or friends or family members that really need this information.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:34:05] Yeah. So, the symptoms of low blood sugar are coming mostly from stress hormones, because when your brain isn't getting enough blood sugar, the brain cells can start to die. We kind of bleeped over that part of the conversation, but just real quick, because you alluded to it, when you feel like you're hypoglycemic, that's your brain cells having an energy emergency. And if you truly, you know, before you get more advanced insulin resistance, your blood sugar levels can drop to 40 or 50 or something like that. And when that is actually happening in a person, that person's brain cells are starting to malfunction and starting to experience damage and even can start to die.
[00:34:48] And, we've seen evidence of this in MRI scans, where it looks like they have teeny, tiny, little strokes all over their brain. No one can explain it. They don't remember having strokes. But it's very bad for your brain, for the cells to not have enough energy. And so, to alleviate that, the brain tells the adrenal glands to start pumping out the stress hormones, the adrenaline and the cortisol. And what those things do that helps the brain is they raise blood sugar level.
[00:35:21] The other thing that they do that nobody else, I have not heard anybody else talking about this in the keto space. And it's so important in the keto space because people in the keto space are subject to this problem. The way that they raise your blood sugar is by breaking down muscle and bone and protein, by converting protein from your bodies. We don't have protein stores. We don't have sugar stores. So, in order to raise your blood sugar, the stress hormones, they break down muscle, they break down bone, and they convert the amino acids into sugar, that's a process called gluconeogenesis. And gluconeogenesis, I think is how a lot of people get over the low-carb flu. I don't think it's good. So, what I've heard happen is a lot of people, low-carb flu gets-- If they have, it usually goes away in like three days, maybe if they are really tough and can stick it out, maybe goes away in two weeks.
[00:36:15] Some people, they can't tough it out and stick it out, so it doesn't really go away for them. They may not last the full two weeks. But what's happening in that time is they are revving up their stress hormones. They are living in a constant heightened state of what doctors call sympathetic tone, meaning the sympathetic nervous system. The fight or flight system is in overdrive. That is a state of chronic stress and it will break you down. It will break your tissues down in order to get energy to your brain, and that is very, very harmful. So that's why I recommend slowly easing your way into keto level lowering of carbohydrates. Don't lower your carbohydrates that low to like 20 or less, maybe even not to 50 or less if you're not ready. And the way that you tell if your body is ready is by tracking that pathologic hunger process.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:37:10] I think this is such important information. And actually, I took a quote out of the book specific to this, because we do talk a lot about lower carb or just being aware of carbohydrates because they've been so bastardized. We're talking about the processed carbs are the ones that we want to avoid. There are healthy carbs. You said, "Yanking away carbs from sugar dependent cells may force the liver to accelerate the process of gluconeogenesis and muscle breakdown, because those carb-deprived, overloaded PUFAs, will have no choice but to convert muscle protein into energy." This is a significant takeaway because we know muscle is this organ of longevity. That muscle is this glucose disposal unit in the body and it is very common to lose muscle with age unless you're actively working against it.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:37:57] Yeah, absolutely. And body fat is also glucose disposal. And when you are insulin resistant, your insulin levels are always high and so you build fat very rapidly. And that's why insulin resistance causes weight gain. And doctors are taught the opposite. Doctors are taught that weight gain somehow causes insulin resistance. And people have all these different theories, that there's like, "Oh, maybe it's just you wear out the system and insulin cause insulin resistance somehow," but I don't think that’s what happens. And I think that we need to be really getting our heads wrapped around oxidative stress and the concept of oxidative stress in order to be able to help ourselves. And, of course, if you're a health practitioner listening to this, help your patients, you really want to understand that energy model of insulin resistance. I think it's the only thing that makes sense to me as it explains everything that we see. Because we do know that when that insulin resistance precedes weight gain, and we do know that people who are insulin resistant, they have all these things that I've been describing. They have increased hunger, they have higher than normal blood sugar, they have increased adrenaline in their system, and they are very bad at burning their own body fat.
[00:39:12] And folks have mostly focused on, "Okay, well, it must be the high insulin that's why they're not burning their body fat." So, they've been blaming insulin for the problem and that's why there's all this focus around sugar and carbohydrates and getting every last scrap even of healthy carbohydrates. You can't have vegetables unless they're zero-carb vegetables. Don't eat broccoli, don't eat peas. And you've heard that probably. I used to kind of think that way too, before I really figured out what was actually, I think going on here, and that it's really the oxidative stress that’s the root cause, the vegetable oils are the root cause, and we actually need some carbohydrates, and insulin isn't the root cause at all. Insulin is kind of an innocent bystander caught in the crossfires.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:40:00] Yeah. And it's interesting because I think that there's so much bio individuality when we're looking at patient populations. And this can explain, because I've had people reach out to me on social media that have said, "I tried to go keto." And these are people that are probably having 300, 400 g of carbohydrates a day, trying to cut back to 30. And if they're not metabolically flexible, it can make sense as to why their body is under so much distress trying to make this shift to a lower carbohydrate or even ketogenic lifestyle. So, I'm glad that you brought that up, because it's definitely-- It's got me thinking a little bit differently than perhaps I had before.
[00:40:37] Now, one of the things that you tackle in the book that I personally love. We just finished a five-podcast series on talking about lipids and cholesterol, but one of many things that we've gotten wrong over the years, the kind of mindset around cholesterol is bad and vegetable oils are good. And I found your construction around this information in the book to be really important. And again, how many of us have prescribed statin therapy? I certainly prescribed tens of thousands of statins in the context of evidence-based medicine specific to Cardiology, I want to be clear about that. But I used to get yelled at by my colleagues when I would lower their statin dose when their total cholesterol fell under 150 mg/dL. So, let’s talk about why cholesterol is important and why too low of a cholesterol can impact our health quite significantly.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:41:30] Yeah. I think the first thing I want people to understand, Cynthia, is that this isn't that we just had gotten it wrong and we hadn't figured it out. We were lied to about this. This is an intentional miscommunication. And the origin story here is, actually, it's the biggest scandal I think in all of human history here. Certainly, it's the biggest scandal ever perpetrated on the human race by a medical organization. That medical organization is the American Heart Association. And they are the ones that insisted that smoking didn't-- They lied to us. That's another thing that will help doctors get their heads wrapped around this concept that not only is cholesterol not a problem, it's not just like we didn't go deep enough into understanding the problem and we saw cholesterol and we thought it was cholesterol, no. There was a whole concerted effort on the part of the American Heart Association to bury the information that was coming out in the 1940s and 1950s that cigarette smoking was causing heart attacks, was probably the leading cause of heart attacks. That was not made clear in America.
[00:42:44] In the United Kingdom, they issued that warning in the 1950s. The American Heart association, what did they ever say about cigarettes? Literally nothing until the 1980s, the only thing that they ever announced about cigarettes was, we shouldn't be smoking on planes, by then everybody already knew smoking was bad, so they deliberately hid the information that they were themselves collecting, showing links between smoking and heart disease, thanks to Ancel Keys. Because Ancel Keys, this giant egomaniac, he wanted to get credit for solving the problem, and he wanted everybody to think it was fat because he was basically a puritanical kind of evangelist, and he thought overweight people were sinners and sinful, and they needed to learn a lesson and they needed to learn to take care of themselves, where have we ever heard that before? And that was the thinking of the day in the 1950s and the 1960s, and it still carries over into the leadership today. You still hear the people saying, "The problem with obesity is that people just aren't exercising enough and they aren't eating enough fruits and vegetables." No, it is way deeper than that and that's why I call the book Dark Calories, because this is an evil, evil part of our history that is affecting us today more than ever, because we're all sicker than ever now. And it's because of this false fear of cholesterol that was implanted in our minds starting in the 1950s because of the American Heart Association, thanks to Ancel Keys, one of the most corrupt scientists of all time.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:44:26] Yeah, it's so interesting to me because I recall my-- So I've had a whole generations of family members that have worked in the medical community, and I remember my grandmother talking about physicians smoking on units years ago. That was a thing because they didn't think smoking was something bad. Patients that were coming out of having cardio infarctions, so having a heart attack and being put on tasteless diets that had no fat, no animal proteins, little to nothing, told to consume all these processed carbohydrates, and we really have contributed to a worsening of our health, and it's a source of endless frustration. It's interesting to me that you talk about these conflicts of interest with the seed oil industry. It also applies to the American Heart Association. The diet -heart hypothesis that you're alluding to Ancel Keys, whose been talked about in seven countries, so he has been talked about on this podcast many, many times. One thing that I think perhaps we haven't discussed on the podcast is the talking about these dietary guidelines and how much they influence the food that patients eat in the hospital, nursing home residents, prisons even, and how much money is spent on these organizations per year is astounding. Do you mind speaking to this? Because when you talk about the role of dietary guidelines for Americans, it's called the DGA. It influences all of these organizations and the foods that they choose to eat, so there is this constant conflict of interest that's ongoing, that's proliferative.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:45:57] So the American Heart Association has been leading the way on nutrition thought since the 1950s because they had money. They accepted money. I didn't mention this part that makes them so corrupt. They accepted money from the vegetable oil industry. The vegetable oils were supposed to be heart healthy because of all the polyunsaturates that lower cholesterol. So, it sounds like an airtight kind of explanation, but they had accepted money from Procter & Gamble, who sold soy and cottonseed oil. And that's why I say they're corrupt. They did this on purpose. They intentionally hid the truth about cigarette smoking.
[00:46:35] Cigarette smoking, by the way, how does that cause heart disease? Because the toxins in cigarette smoke cause oxidative stress. And so, this is why you can have a high cholesterol level and be perfectly healthy. And in fact, more and more evidence keeps piling up, showing that if you do have a high cholesterol level, you are healthier than people who have low cholesterol levels. And this includes even the so-called bad LDL cholesterol. And there's all these arguments out there about, "Oh, ApoB, and small, dense," and all that kind of nonsense. I'm sorry to say nonsense, I shouldn't say that. But the simple thing is that the root cause is oxidative stress. And you can tell if you have oxidative stress, if your HDL is low, and your triglycerides are high, that's the sign of problem. We can do all kinds of fancy other tests, spend a lot of money doing that, arguing left and right about what tests are the best to be done. And doctors are doing this. They meet at conferences every week to argue and fight about what are the best numbers to watch. And they don't understand any of it, that it's all coming from oxidized cholesterol carrying particles. When your cholesterol carrying particles are full or oxidized, either from smoking or from a vegetable oil diet, really, you can't have any cholesterol carrying particles in your bloodstream and avoid heart disease. And that's why the guidelines keep pushing that number lower with more and more drugs.
[00:47:59] I don't know what the numbers were when you were practicing, but when I first started, a bad cholesterol, the LDL level wasn't considered too high unless it was over 190. And that's been pushed down to 160, then 140, then 120, then 100, and now 70. And doctors are still saying, "You know what I think if we get it down to 20, I don't think it's going to kill people, so, let's do that." And they have three or four drug combination cocktails that they're now using to do exactly that. And it's an absolute experiment. And it's all in the name of cholesterol, which is a misguided idea.
[00:48:34] But the best institutions, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Tufts, the leaders in the world, believe this is the solution to heart disease, and that drugs are the only answer, and that cholesterol is a toxin, cholesterol is a nutrient. And when we have low levels of cholesterol, it's starting to look like we are less healthy than the people who have the higher levels, because the higher levels are associated with better ability to fight off infection, lower rates of cancer, less dementia, more fertility. And the list keeps growing of the good stuff that high cholesterol does for us.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:49:10] Yeah, I think it's so important, and certainly there's been a major shift. When I started practicing in 2000, 2001, what we were telling patients is certainly very different than where things are now. Hopefully, people are starting to realize that this lifestyle as medicine piece is so critically important. Well, if there are individuals listening to the podcast and trying to determine how to navigate eliminating seed oils from their lives or just being much more aware of them or navigating restaurants, what are some of your top recommendations so that we have actionable things, because if someone is listening and haven't even looked at their food labels to know what's in their food, it can be a little bit overwhelming, but we want to have some tangible bits of information to take away and obviously read Dr. Cate's book, which is a tour de force and certainly should be required reading for all healthcare providers. How do we navigate our lifestyles, making changes so that we can become more aware, become more proactive about these oils?
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:50:11] Well, one of the simplest things to do in terms of eating out is just go for meat. And I really think this is why the carnivore diet is so successful, is because slabs of meat, even if they are cooked in an oil, don't absorb it the way carbohydrates do. They don't have the surface area of like leafy vegetables, like spinach or broccoli or string beans, so there's not as much oil on the meat. And very often meats are grilled, so there's not really hardly any oil added or stewed or barbecued or whatever, so there's almost no oil. So, I really think that's part of the reason the carnivore diet is so successful in terms of helping people recover.
[00:50:46] So, let's just think like you're on the carnivore diet when you're out. And what I do is I say, "Do you have anything back in the kitchen that you can cook for me right now in butter?" And I don't care if it's fish or chicken or steak, but I don't want it to be breaded because that means it was probably precooked. A lot of restaurants will pre-cook every possible thing and then just last-minute warm it up, by throwing in the deep fryer, throwing it on the grill, or microwaving it. And so that's why you have to say, "Cook for me right now." So, it has to be like a thin piece, or you just have to say, "That's okay, I'll wait. I don't mind."
[00:51:19] But yeah, so that's like one of the probably simplest, very actionable takeaways. And of course, if you want some vegetables, if you want a salad to go along with it, definitely don't have anything that is fried. Obviously, that's the worst of the worst. You don't know what they cook it in. Chances are it's a nasty oil. So just get something with no oil. If they can just steam something or throw a salad together, and then you put toppings on it that make it so it doesn't need a dressing. So, like avocado and cheese. And I have other ideas in the book, but you can ask for enough toppings on your salad so that you don't even need to worry about is it real olive oil that they're going to try and serve you, since it may not be.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:52:04] It's probably an olive oil blend that has been my-- When I ask, they'll-- If they go back to the kitchen and they ask, it's usually an olive oil blend, which means it's probably 1% olive oil and 99.9% seed oils.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:52:19] Exactly. Because it's way cheaper and customers are not yet savvy enough. But I see that there's a lot of conversation, a lot more people talking about this now than when I first started, like it's amazing how many people on Twitter and Instagram out there after I put something up about seed oils, they're like, they try to school me up in the comments [Dr. Cate laughs] [unintelligible 00:52:38] don’t know that. I've been talking about this for 20 years, guys. So, yeah, I probably know, if you think you're trying-
[00:52:47] -to educate me. But, yeah, so there's seed-oil free products. There's apps now. So, I put resources together in the back of Dark Calories for you to help you where to go to find the best seed oil free products. What apps are out there to help you find restaurants that are leading the way in returning to healthy fats and going seed oil free. Because I'm excited to see that this is really starting to take root.
[00:53:14] When we used to go to Costco, even just five years ago, like the cooking sprays, the PAM's and stuff like that, it was all vegetable oil, canola, soy, whatever. Now there's just a tiny little bit of them. Most of them are olive oil or coconut oil or something. Avocado oil is healthier. Because the change is happening and the more that you educate your server, like have a little-- I think I go into a little bit of a sermon towards the end of the book where I'm like, "Let's make this movement be about positivity. When you go out to eat, think of it. Don't think of it as you're inconveniencing your friends, even though you might be." Don't focus on that part.
[00:53:54] Focus on the part where you're educating more people in the restaurant industry, because they're the ones feeding us. And the more of them that learn, maybe the more of them will be inspired to do the harder thing, which is the right thing.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:54:06] Well, and I so appreciate the hard work that you do. As I stated, I think this is a book that everyone should read to build awareness around the dangers and concerns around seed oils. Please let listeners know how to connect with you outside of this podcast, how to get your new book, and how to follow you on social media, work with you, etc.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:54:27] Yeah, great. Thanks, Cynthia. So, my website is drcate.com. The book is called Dark Calories, please buy it. You can learn a little bit more about it from my website. And if you scroll to the bottom of any page on my website, you can sign up for my monthly newsletter, which sometimes comes out twice a month, sometimes I skip a month, but I don't bother you that much, that's my point. And I really try to make it be a new value-added piece of data entering your inbox. I'm not just going to barrage you, I promise. So that will help you stay up to date when I do-- I'm working on like more practical stuff to help people really implement this and just get their skills up cooking and understand what's happening in their body, so I'm working on that, and I'll be releasing information about that. But also, I'm on social media @drcateshanahan which is the same spelling as my website and then Shanahan my last name which spell it out, sounded out, no doubles, but that's on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn,-
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:55:33] Instagram.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:55:34] -Instagram. Thank you.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:55:37] Well thank you again Dr. Cate. It's always a pleasure to connect with you and thank you for the work that you're doing.
Dr. Cate Shanahan: [00:55:41] Thank you so much for the opportunity to meet with you and talk about this and with your audience. Thank you for the work you're doing.
Cynthia Thurlow: [00:55:51] Thank you.
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