The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Dr. Cate Shanahan: The Real Culprits Behind Chronic Health Issues
What if the everyday seed oils in your diet are the silent culprits behind chronic health issues? Join us for an eye-opening conversation with Dr. Cate Shanahan, a Cornell-trained physician, author, and nutrition expert. Dr. Shanahan discusses her latest book, "Dark Calories," sharing groundbreaking insights on the often overlooked connection between dietary fats, sugar addiction, and metabolic diseases.
Dr. Cate's candid discussion takes us through the shortcomings of traditional medical training and highlights the importance of whole foods and ancient nutrition in addressing modern health problems. Her insights are both profound and practical, offering a fresh perspective on how dietary choices can be transformative for overall well-being. Prepare to be enlightened by Dr. Cate's passion for root-cause medicine and her empowering message about taking control of your health through better nutrition. Don't miss this engaging episode packed with valuable information and actionable advice.
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Welcome everybody to an interview today with Dr Kate Shanahan. She is an MD, she's a three-time author, she's a Cornell-trained physician, scientist whose work has most recently come into the realm of talking about seed oils and the impact they have on human health. She teamed up with Gary Vitti of the LA Lakers and formed a program called Pro Nutrition and he was the very first one to kind of take Kate seriously. Dr Shanahan seriously like okay, your book Deep Nutrition got my attention. I remember in her book Dark Calories that we're going to talk about today, she shares a story that he's saying you know what? Everyone who's ever written a diet book has sent me a copy. Yours is the only one that I actually like. This is going to change my team. This is going to change our competitive edge. So he worked with her and one of the main things that she was bringing to the table is about getting back to basics with our food, like whole foods and ancient nutrition, but the role that seed oils is playing in our epic health demise.
Florence:What else to say about her? She is really very optimistic and powerful and empowering in her message. She's like we need to get the information. She has a website called drkatecom. She's a telemedicine practice and her website's full of information and her books are gobsmacking. So I haven't read her other two books. I've read the darks calories book, which is her latest, and it I said to Kate before I turned on the camera it was literally a page turner, like it's so clear and incisive and it moves so fast. And she goes into the history of seed oils and how like you're just like, no, no, like things you thought maybe you would have heard. So far you haven't. And then she gets into something what she's calling metabolic sugar addiction and we're going to talk a lot about that today where she believes there's a whole new kind of sugar addiction that's coming into play. And so buckle up, this is going to be fun. Welcome everybody, welcome Dr Shannon.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Well, thank you so much, Florence. My brand is Dr Kate, but you can call me Kate, you can skip it Okay, dr Kate, I like that. It's great to talk with you. I can't wait to have this discussion.
Florence:Yeah, thank you so much. And in your book, dark Calories, which everyone has to go and get it just came out, so go get your copy you share a little bit about your story how, as an MD, you got sick and it was a mystery condition and how this put you on the path of looking at nutrition and, in particular, poly. Just a second I'm so used to saying polysaccharides, but poly- polyunsaturated polyunsaturated fatty acids. Tell us a little bit about your story and how an MD from Cornell got got into this, this space.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Yeah. So I went to medical school because I'm a root cause person. I wanted to selfishly understand why I myself was chronically plagued as an athlete on the cross country team and the track teams, and I was a serious athlete, I'd gotten scholarships but I was letting my team down because I was always injured and I couldn't. I really wanted to know why. So I wanted to go to medical school to get to that root cause. I wanted to find out why do people get shin splints, why do people get tendonitis and bursitis and all these itises? And I wanted to like really understand. I was so sure that that was going to happen in medical school but it didn't, because in medical school there are so many things that doctors just sort of label as idiopathic or family history. Bad luck. We kind of take a very lazy, I felt, approach to diving down into what's really going on and we were satisfied. I was trained instead to be satisfied with just naming it. Yes, that pain in your hip is a bursitis or no, it's a hip pointer or a torn labrum. That's so helpful to the person to have a name for it. No, not really, because the treatment was always pretty much the same. Rest, anti-inflammatories don't do what hurts and some physical therapy of some sort, and I was just like, yeah, I can't do better than that. I mean, that's not what I wanted. So I left medical school and went into family medicine because I just love the whole lifespan, helping people across the whole life cycle. And even though I didn't know I wouldn't really help much with the root cause, at least I could help people identify the right thing. Because, let's say, you go to an orthopedic surgeon with hip pain, they're going to think it's something in your bones. But the truth is and this is what family practice and GPs, what you call them in Canada we know it can be a lot of stuff. We know it could even be referred from, you know, from a cancer happening in your spine or you know scary stuff, or abdominal pain you can feel it in your shoulder right. So like, at least that was like the unraveling the mystery for people and helping them, you know, save them the trouble of unnecessary tests and interventions and stuff. So that was like where I was getting my love of it. But I still felt unsatisfied because 30% of my practice was just doling out drugs for managing risk factors like blood pressure and diabetes and cholesterol, which is now my least favorite risk factor of all. And so it wasn't until I actually got sick that I I guess I should say that I felt that there was something missing. I had no idea what it was, and so I didn't know even where to look, until I myself got sick and my husband, like, pointed out hey, you know, you eat a lot of sugar. Maybe there's something that you don't know about nutrition out there. And previously I just blown him off and said something I don't know. I went to medical school, hello. Previously I just blown him off and said something I don't know. I went to medical school, hello. And.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:And so one, I was kind of, you know, immobilized because I had a serious infection in my knee and in my spinal cord and it was giving me fevers. It was I couldn't walk, so it was threatening my job. So I really had to, like humble, be humble here, and so he gave me a book, and what that did was it introduced me to a term that was a biochemistry term, and before medical school I'd wanted to be somebody who solved the plastic problem. So I went to Cornell first as a biochemist, but that seemed like we were way off from that, not going to happen anytime soon. So I ditched and went to medical school.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:So anyway, here I was, coming back with biochemistry turns and it was kind of like gee, there's biochemistry in nutrition and then there's this whole world of nutrition that I hadn't really thought about, and so that was how my two desires like to get to the root cause and be a healer instead of a medicator. Finally, like I saw, I saw the potential there, and immediately, as soon as I looked into vegetable oils and their chemistry, I recognized that these vegetable oils were something to study more in detail, because I don't think I learned the truth about fats. I don't think I learned the truth about fats. I don't think I learned the truth about these oils. I didn't. I was having reason to doubt that they were heart healthy, and so from there I just went down these several deep rabbit holes.
Florence:And linking it back to your own journey. So you had this medical condition that was almost threatening your career. So how I remember in your book you were saying that at first you thought maybe you needed more polysaccharide Sorry, I'm so used to talking about the sugars polyunsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fatty acids that you thought, oh, maybe I need more of those. And then you start to study them and you're like, oh my gosh, there's a whole underbelly to this topic here. Do you want to share more about how you recovered by unearthing the poly fatty acid issue?
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Yeah. So, like I, at first I thought really it was sugar that was the problem, since that's what everyone talks about. You know, that's what the vast majority of the nutrition research was really about, and everyone was talking about it. And yes, I was a big, big time sugar addict. I would put like a quarter cup of coffee, a quarter cup of sugar, in my coffee every morning. I would have to make a special caramel sauce to get that much sugar in there. So I was a major sugaraholic my whole life. You know, I was somebody that if there was a gram of chocolate in my house I was going to hunt it down, make sure to snarf it up. So that you know, I never, I never realized I that that could be a problem. And so, like that's, what I focused on first was the harms of sugar. But in the meantime I was still continuing to do research on the polyunsaturated. So the thing is, what I did was I cut out the oils and included butter, because I was like I think I learned wrong about that and that's really what I did first, and I didn't realize that until years after I'd already written the book Deep Nutrition about that. I was like you know what I actually was still eating a ton of sugar. It's not like I just cut out sugar, but as soon as I learned the thing about fats, I switched those out because I wasn't addicted to polyunsaturated fatty acids. Who is no one? You can't be. I don't think so. And then I realized that that that was what enabled me to start thinking about cutting down on sugar, because it completely rewired my brain, my appetites, my cravings. It just started completely rewiring my thoughts, my food thoughts, what I even wanted to eat. And I didn't realize that at the time because I was so excited that I was just able to cut down on sugar when I decided to and I was like, well, maybe it's not that hard to do that, Maybe the hardest part is just deciding that you need to do that. And that's what I said for years. But then I realized something much more profound had happened to me and that I realized that, even though I didn't have a particular weight problem, you know, I was probably 10 pounds overweight, you know, and you know like that's these days. That's good, Of course. What woman doesn't want to be thinner than she is? So you know, I was happy to lose those 10 pounds, but I never realized I had a metabolic problem until I started working more deeply on my other books and focusing on how do these vegetable oils affect our metabolism? Not just the inflammation, not just the aging, not just the genetics. That's what I kind of talked more about in my first books. How do they affect our metabolism, and I started seeing all kinds of evidence that they cause insulin resistance, not sugar, right Like?
Dr. Cate Shanahan:I don't know where you are in your thought process on driving insulin resistance, if it's still like what we originally learned, which is it's idiopathic or genetic or multifactorial, from weight gain itself or lack of exercise, or in the low carb community. I know a lot of them. They focus first and foremost on sugar itself and carbohydrates themselves. A lot of them. They focus first and foremost on sugar itself and carbohydrates themselves, but the picture was becoming clearer and clearer to me that it was none of all those.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:What all those had in common, though, was oxidative stress, and that's a chemical term that I never would have really understood had I not gone to Cornell and so dark calories like. I had to write that so that people could understand what the heck is that. It's an abstract concept. No one's talking about it yet, but vegetable oils in our diet are the main drivers of oxidative stress by far. Sugar in excess can drive it too, but vegetable oils are probably, you know, 90% of between the two of them. It's 90% vegetable oils, 10% sugar, believe it or not, and you know so. If you're interested in that, I want to talk about that.
Florence:Yeah, I know, and I caught that line in your book where you're like, oh, I used to think it was a sugar, but I know I think it's a seed oils and I'm like, oh, dr Kate, don't do that, don't do that, don't let. We can't take her eyeballs off sugar.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Oh, gosh Right no.
Florence:Right, yeah, I don't want to do that. Both are ultra processed, Both are so, so destructive to our mitochondria and our metabolism and I don't I don't know that I want to play the you know which is worse game, because they both seem so bad. It just seems like we should. Just they're in the really bad category. Both of them are in the doghouse. Right, Need to be in the doghouse. But seed oils is a new, is a newcomer to the conversation around processed, ultra processed foods. So I definitely don't want sugar to crowd it out or it to crowd out sugar, because refined carb, refined white sugar, like that's terrible, for it's terrible.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:It's terribly addicting. Anything sweet, honestly, I think, is terribly addicting. So I don't give a pass to things like dates in terms of addiction. What do you? What about you? Like, I mean, I know they have some more nutrition, but like, in terms of your relationship with food, is still going to drive some unhealthy stuff. So you know, as a sugar addict, I absolutely 100% agree. We don't want to in any way, shape or form imply that don't worry about sugar. But what I came to understand once I understand. Here's what happened.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:I didn't realize that I had a metabolic relationship with sugar, meaning a metabolic addiction to sugar, and that my whole brain had been wired around sugar because of vegetable oil. Vegetable oil drove me to crave sugar, and it didn't work the other way around. Obviously, does sugar crave? Have you ever heard anyone say you know what? I'm just craving some canola oil right now? Nobody craves that, nobody craves vegetable oil, and so it's not the other way around. And so that's why I've started to prioritize it, because it helps people right, not because of some academic exercise or anything like that, but because it lets them understand what's really been going on in their minds, this black box in our heads that we carry around, that makes us want things that we know are bad for us.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:And so I, like I said, I didn't think I was a sugar addict. You know, I didn't think I had a problem. I mean, it was a totally typical addict, right? I literally one time drove 200 miles to get a Starbucks mocha frappuccino and, um well, guess what? The lady in front of me ordered the last batch and so I didn't get it and I just stood there like if I was on a sitcom. My, you know, everybody behind me would have gone, oh, grumble, grumble, and there would have been a big laugh track. Because I just stood there like I, I didn't process what the what she was saying to me and I wouldn't move. I didn't move for an inappropriate amount of time and let the next person come and I drove home and my whole week was ruined. And I still did not believe that I had a addiction to sugar.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Now, that was what we all know as the typical sugar addiction for taste, for pleasure. We call it a hedonistic addiction. Right, that's a fancy term for it, because it gives you pleasure. But what I discovered was that I was also suffering from a metabolic addiction and that my brain needed it for energy. My brain needed it for energy. My brain cells were all focusing on the appetite. Portion of our brain called the hypothalamus was all geared towards.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Sugar is energy, and so every single one of my food thoughts involved sweetness, or, you know, the wanting of getting that sweetness. Eventually, right, like so I would just eat breakfast and I would always want to put more sugar on my. My, my favorite cereal for like 20 years had been I haven't had it so long I can't remember Flakes with raisins. What are those? Called Raisin bread? Yeah, that's it. So, yeah, so I always wanted to put more sugar on there, but I didn't. And and so, like I always had felt unsatisfied sugar on there, but I didn't. And so, like I always had felt unsatisfied, you know. And then you go on in your day till you're like, okay, finally, I'm going to get the dessert after dinner, right, and so, like I would just plow through the dinner. It was like, oh, I'll eat it, you know.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:But my whole brain had been wired around wanting that sugar. And so that's why, even though I was a major, I had recovered. I was a major exerciser. I would bike for two hours a day, and I was still always felt like I was battling an extra 10, 20 pounds, and I knew where it was coming from, but I just didn't think I had a metabolic problem, so I didn't care to do anything about it until I actually got physically sick and realized oops, my metabolic problem actually is now manifesting in an immune system problem, and I wasn't able to fight off this infection that everyone else just about in the world is easily able to fight off, and so it got into my joints, whereas normally that doesn't happen, and so that's why I. So I want to talk about how that happens. Right, I want to talk more about what is this metabolic sugar addiction? How do you know you have it? And, if you're interested, I can talk about how it develops too.
Florence:I would love that let's back up a little bit. I just want to say, okay, dark calories is the title of the book, because we're talking about seed oils. So let's go back and do the basics. So you call them the hateful eight and you say they're dark calories for three reasons, and then maybe, maybe, we'll just say the groundwork when we talk about seed oils and then we'll move into the metabolic sugar.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Right, yeah, so there there, um. So the hateful eight are as follows um, corn, canola or rapeseed, cott, cotton seed. So canola and rapeseed are the same. So that's only three Soy, sunflower, safflower, and those are six that you need to memorize because those are the ones that are going to be on ingredients lists. They're also in restaurants, but the next two, rice bran and grapeseed, are pretty much limited to being only in restaurants now fairly higher end restaurants, not like in McDonald's, because they have this glow of being healthy, but they're also equally toxic. So all eight of those oils are extraordinarily toxic. They are unlike anything else in the food supply. They powerfully promote this condition called oxidative stress, which is the driver of insulin resistance, and they are unique because they were never meant to be human food Like, for example, cottonseed oil was just a byproduct of the textile industry and was originally used as machine oil, and then it was hydrogenated to make solids like soap and candles, and then canola oil thanks to Canada, you guys grew a lot of that for World War II, for machine oil, and then they modified it a little bit to make it lower in this toxin called this fatty acid, called eruic acid, which has the human body can't metabolize much of that, so they modified it to lower that.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:And that's how canola came about. Canola stands for Canadian low aruic acid oil and it's a rape seed that has been modified so it wasn't called canola during the war effort. But then they just decided, hey well, why don't we, now that we did that, let's start feeding it to people? Decided, hey well, why don't we? You know, now that we did that, let's start feeding it to people. And so all of these oils entered the food supply early on, early enough in time, where there really wasn't any testing, there really wasn't any kind of like concern about health. They kind of got grandfathered in and they are now, you know, listed under generally under grass status, generally regarded as safe. But here's the thing, here's what makes them different than oils that humans have been using for thousands of years, like coconut and olive. Coconut and olive oil.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:You use very minimal gentle processing to get the oil and the key, key thing is that the crude oil initially extracted is edible. That's what you eat. You don't need to do anything else to it. I mean, if there's dirt got in there somehow, maybe you'll filter that out right. Or if there's particles that you don't want, you'll filter it through some kind of a silk sieve or something like that. So that is not the case with the hayflate, your soy oil, your canola oil.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Even if it's organic, the crude oil, the initial extraction there, it's been already subjected to heat and pressure because these oils, these seeds, were never bred to be oily enough yet to be used. So the gentle extraction methods don't yield much oil, so they have to use this high heat and pressure. And just when you do that, you destroy nutrients. You destroy the easily oxidized stuff, which is guess what the antioxidants and also the polyunsaturated fatty acids. Heat doesn't destroy saturated fats. It doesn't easily destroy monounsaturated fats either. So those are the three categories of fats. And so this heat instability, basically the oxidation, means that the crude oil is toxic, it's inedible.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:They don't say it's toxic in the industry. They say it's inedible. And I asked why it's toxic in the industry? They say it's inedible. And I asked why? So I, you know, I did a lot of interviewing for this and I said why is it inedible? And they said well, it's got, um, you know, aldehydes and toxic ketones and waxes, and on and on.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:They went about all the things that you couldn't. That would make your eyes water. Um, if you were hovering over a big vat of it, um, that would make your nose burn if you breathe it in and that would make your eyes water If you were hovering over a big vat of it. That would make your nose burn if you breathe it in and that would, if you were forced to swallow a swig of it, would make your mouth and your esophagus and your stomach burn, and it would be so violent you would probably just regurgitate it back up. That's your body's protective measure Literally inedible. Your body will reject it. So there's nothing else in the food supply like that. Period hands down.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:And these oils combined eight of them combined to equal 30% of the average US American's person's diet. I imagine it's very similar in Canada and it's becoming more like that all around the world 30% of their total calories and 80% of their fat calories. We're having very few fat calories coming from actual food anymore. Most of our fat calories are coming from these oils that are toxic initially, and so the factory refining. A lot of people say oh, that's why they're the problem. The factory problem. The factory refining makes them edible. The factory refining, you know is is the best part of these oils. It cannot clean up all the toxins and there are some new toxins that form and these are measurable.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:So when a bottle of expeller-pressed organic canola comes out of the factory, even if it's supposedly the healthy high oleic acid kind, testing has found that it contains up to 5% abnormal fatty acids that can have toxic properties. You know, abnormal meaning doesn't exist in nature. They have a bond called the trans bond, which is difficult for our body. Some of these are difficult for our body to process and some of them, some of these trans fats, are highly, highly, highly toxic to cells. So, for example, 4-hydroxynonanol that's a infamous toxin that has a listing 4-hydroxynonanol.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:If you are working with that in an industrial setting, because it is an industrial compound, you have to wear one of those yellow suits, and if you get any in your eyes, you have to wear one of those yellow suits, and if you get any in your eyes, you got to go to the eyewash station and see an eye doctor immediately. So that's how toxic some of these so-called minor contaminants are in these oils, and so there's nothing else in the food supply that you can say that about. Not even like pesticides they're. They're not as toxic as these. As these, I mean, they are also toxic, but they're not quite as toxic.
Florence:Incredible, shocking. So so when, when you see in health food stores where it says, uh, first cold press sunflower oil highly, oh, is that it are all, are all straight across the board, all sunflower oils, for example toxic.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:If they are refined, they are toxic, so it's really the. It's not the refining that makes them toxic. It's the fact that they needed to be refined extensively that makes them toxic, right, and so they don't even disclose what kind of refining process, right. But generally, if you see the words refined, avoid it, and this is true for olive oil. Olive oil is not one of my hateful eight, for reasons that have to do with its more complicated levels of chemistry. It simply doesn't have those polyunsaturates, as many of them, and so it's not as oxidized, it's not as full of toxins. But refined olive oil is nowhere near as healthy as virgin of them, and so it's not as oxidized. It's not as full of toxins, but refined olive oil is nowhere near as healthy as virgin olive oil, unrefined. Totally. If there were such a thing as a healthy sunflower, it would have to be virgin sunflower.
Florence:Got it Okay, cause I'm like we eat sunflower seeds, like I always was the. I was surprised that sunflower was one of the hateful eight, because you know I eat sunflower seeds, I know there's oils in them and I think they're not toxic to begin with, but you're saying they become toxic through the refinement process because of the heating of a polyunsaturated fat.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Yes, yes, exactly. I mean you can make bad olive oil too if you abuse olives, right. I mean you can make bad olive oil too if you abuse olives, right. So it's really the thermal abuse that's bad. But these oils are particularly bad because of the high polyunsatis. You know, I would never recommend go and seek out refined olive oil either. I never recommend seeking out any refined oil, you know. But some of the refined oils are still, nevertheless, okay. I actually have three categories I have. These are good for you, just enjoy it. Um, uh, these are toxic and I'll do it this way. Uh, the hateful eight. And then the middle category is the okay, but not great. And so those are the refined oils that are more stable. So it's going to be like your refined coconut, your refined palm palm is pretty darn stable and refined olive, yeah. And I kind of go back and forth on where does refined peanut belong? Right now, I think I have it in the middle category. It's not one of the hateful eights.
Florence:Got it. Got it Now. What about avocado oil?
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Oh yeah, if it's refined, that too right, that that would be in the middle category. That was. I knew there was one more in the middle category. That's a popular oil that I should mention. I couldn't think of it, but yeah, so unrefined olive oil is a healthy oil, right?
Florence:It's not one of the hateful eights, just the the eight, the hateful eight. That's it. Those are the bad ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah got it. So I have had the pleasure of of trying the chosen avocado oil. Typically, if I ever fry something which is very, very rarely I will use that. Um, and I've tried the uh extra virgin avocado oil that I got at the health food store in a dark bottle and when I poured it out it was was so smelly, bad, horrible, I couldn't eat it. Wow, I don't know if it was one-off bad oil or if I was just like oh, maybe they need to refine it or it's just it goes funky like that. I don't know if it was just a bad bottle, but anyway, yes.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:But because you can have bad batches right If the olives are.
Florence:It wasn't olives avocado.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Oh, I'm sorry. Avocado oh, I personally don't like avocado, so I can't comment.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Maybe it's just not you don't like avocado either I don't mind it, real whole avocados, but the yeah, so it's a it's a little bit.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:You know, avocado oil is very fashionable and trendy now, but it was never bred to specifically be an oil source and so, while molecularly it's better, it's more stable, testing shows it doesn't have the toxins and technically it's good as far as the flavor goes, a lot of you're not the only one that finds it off putting, and and it still is the case that, like if the avocados are like partly moldy or like a bruised, or you know they've been sitting for a long time before they ended up getting refined, they will still have, you know, lots of off flavors in there, and if they don't refine it, then it might be off-putting and maybe it shouldn't be consumed and maybe it should be, you know, like refined Right.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:But that doesn't mean it's the healthiest oil, Right. That means maybe you want to. There's not a lot as many standards as olive oil has been around for a long time. It's very regulated. They test the levels of all kinds of things in there to determine what grade it is, and so you know, any olive oil that's been through any kind of testing is very rigorous testing. For the most part it's going to. It's forced to be superior quality in a way that avocado oil probably hasn't just evolved into yet.
Florence:Yes, and I did read an article last night actually, about how there's only two companies right now that the testing when they did testing on it was actually just avocado oil, that the vast majority of the avocado oils on the market are cut with seed oils. Oh my God, it's the same scandal that we had with olive oil before we started to bring in the legislation right it was just cut with seed oils. Okay, all right. So now we've got our heads wrapped around. So what science? What evidence is there, dr Kate, that these oils like I know you're saying you know a bit of science term, but what scientific evidence research is there to show that your claims that these hateful aid are truly harmful to our mitochondria and our cells, right to our mitochondria.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:So well, first of all, the contaminants are known toxins to mitochondria, right? So the contaminants that form, if you're on board with the idea that they form in significant amounts, then there's that evidence is indisputable. So, and here's the thing, when they leave the factory, all of those contaminants, they are accelerants or catalysts for further oxidation, because the oils have been stripped of all the antioxidants and there's no protection now of those PUFAs. So just light you have to keep them in the dark just light can start to damage and oxidize, and that's true for any oil. But without the antioxidants, you know, it's even worse. And then these minor contaminants become, they attack, they accelerate the whole process of oxidation when you open the bottle or when you cook with it. So it creates food that also then will have these serious toxic contaminants.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:These are not theoretical toxins and I just can't emphasize that enough that, even though I'm not right now yet citing human studies on this stuff, the fact is a toxin is identified as a toxin by animal studies. We can't do these studies on this stuff. The fact is, a toxin is identified as a toxin by animal studies. We can't do these studies on humans and we use those animal studies to guide doctors and toxicologists and first responders on how to mitigate the toxicity. So it is in no way shape or form theoretical. It is as solid as any kind of science can be.
Florence:And ironically you're saying that it wouldn't be ethical to even do tests of these seed oils on humans because there's known toxins in them. Like it's so ironic that we can't even probably test them because we can show that those toxins are present and they wouldn't be legally, ethically allowed to put those toxins in humans to study them Right, the toxins themselves, right.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Of course you know we could do a we and we have done studies on humans and seed oils and those studies get suppressed. But I cite a bunch of them and I go through them in the book itself. But they do not get exposed, they do not get the exposure that they deserve and they in fact. People will come up from the trusted health authorities at the institutions like Harvard and Tufts. The deans of schools who are cardiologists will come up in defense of the oils, of the oils, and they don't disclose that their research on how healthy these oils are is funded by companies like Unilever and Monsanto and companies that sell vegetable oils, right. So they don't disclose that. So that means they are already lying to us.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:And just on that alone, why should we trust their research? Just on that alone, why should we trust their research? And when you look at it you see that first of all they don't design the studies right. And that's a whole other conversation that's kind of more high level. But you know I do, because I do want to talk about what these things are doing and how they, you know, are driving insulin resistance and changing our appetites. But I do if you're interested. I definitely talk about it in the book Dark Calories.
Florence:There's a ton of references to you guys can go back. Okay, We've established the groundwork. The hateful eight they've come into. Oh my gosh, there's this incredible graph in your book where you show the escalation of seed oils into, and correlate it with, heart disease. And very fascinating. So we're just going to take Dr Kate at face value. That the hateful eight, the science and the research that she's been doing for decades now is solid ground. And now let's connect it to how it creates a sugar addiction problem.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Yeah. So I mean, if you don't want to take it on faith because I don't want to leave people dangling a little too maybe I can give just a little bit of evidence. And the evidence is we've been running the study on the human population and when you just look at the correlations of vegetable oil versus the natural animal fats and other healthy oils like olive oil, the only correlation with disease and consumption is with vegetable oil, right? So in terms of fats, it's the best candidate for disease, right? You need people say correlation is not causation, right? So that's why I want to give you the next piece of evidence. You need to have correlation for there to be causation piece of evidence. You need to have correlation for there to be causation.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:And so now the next piece of evidence is what's happening with our sugar consumption. Over the last 20 years it has been flat and in fact it's declined somewhat maybe 5% to 10%, depending on which data set you're looking at and over the past 20 years our obesity rates have doubled or tripled. And of course, our insulin resistance and diabetes has gone up in parallel with all that. So that is an important piece of evidence. And again, I don't hear anybody talking about that. Do you think we should just ignore that? Do you think it's just a coincidence? I mean, I'm seriously asking what are your thoughts on that?
Florence:Well, I saw your chart. It was very compelling. I think they work together. I don't think that. I don't think, if we took the seed oils out of the equation, that sugar still couldn't create insulin resistance and contribute to diabetes and obesity, because I think there's people who aren't eating seed oils.
Florence:In my practice, in my life, I couldn't tell you the last time I've had a seed oil. I mean, I eat everything from home and I haven't had a seed oil in probably decades, rare exceptions aside, god forbid. When I have to eat out, I know it's in there, I know it's in there. If I eat out, it's in there, right, even though I'll say, please don't cook anything in oil. It's on the grill, it's everywhere. So I'm sure there's some in my bloodstream over years. But yeah, I don't know that.
Florence:Um, I don't know how they're working together, but I I don't. I don't think you know what this reminds me of, and this I'm I'm open-minded woman and I'm open to being persuaded otherwise. But it reminds me of when the fur ansel keys came in and said it's saturated fats, they're the problem, don't worry about the sugar, don't worry about the sugar. And now it's like don't worry about the sugar, it's the polyunsaturated, hateful eight oils. It's still the fat, we're still focusing on the fat, but I don't want to give sugar, ever, ever give sugar a pass white refined.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:No, I don't either, though. So that's what makes me different from Ancel Keys. I'm not saying don't look at the sugar. I'm not saying don't ignore it. I'm saying it's a nine to one ratio. If we were to remove vegetable oils and leave all the sugar, we'd have 10%, just for the sake of argument way less of the problems that we do.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:And let's not forget that alcohol also drives type two diabetes too, because when it was first described in the medical literature, it was originally described in people who were heavy drinkers. Right, but how does it do that? Well, it's still the same answer oxidative stress. It's just that vegetable oil promotes oxidative stress really powerfully because of all those toxins. Sugar promotes oxidative stress as well, mainly, though, through substituting for other healthy calories that help us control oxidative stress. It's got no nutrients in it.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:There are two things that drive oxidative stress, and this is important and it's a very simple concept. Two things drive oxidative stress toxicity, toxins, smoking, cigarette, smoke. Right, it's not just vegetable oils. Again, different from me and Ansel no, I'm not another Ansel Keys coming along here, so I'm glad you brought that up, because other people probably think that too and so other things that drive toxicity cigarette, smoking, alcohol itself, obviously, other toxins in the food supply, even simple things like lack of sleep, lack of exercise, those have toxic effects, right. So all of that drives oxidative stress. So toxicity is one of the two things.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:What's the other big thing? Nutritional deficiency, because we need nutrients to make antioxidants that control oxidative stress in our body. And if we don't get enough protein, if we don't get enough vitamins, if we don't get enough minerals, if we don't get another enough, if we don't get enough vitamins, if we don't get enough minerals, if we don't get enough of the other minor components of our food that we need to get from our diet, then we cannot create enough of the antioxidants and that leads to oxidative stress. So, but oxidative stress is pretty much anybody who studies chemistry of cells and cell death and dying and cellular disease at that level, that microscopic level where it all begins. Life begins in the cell. So does death, so does disease.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:It's pretty much undisputed that oxidative stress plays a role and very often people come to the conclusion that it is the driving factor. It's not a byproduct, it's the driver. So I'm just going to run with that for now, because we don't have a better explanation. It makes sense to me. I'm a chemist at heart and I trust the chemistry, so there's other factors and the role that sugar plays is displacing. If know, if you have 200, 300 calories of sugar, refined carbohydrates 600, a lot of people have that many then that's 600 empty calories that your body has to deal with and does not come along with any of the nutritional equipment to deal with and that induces oxidative stress.
Florence:Got it. So the seed oils have come in and they're giving us, they're creating insulin resistance, and how are they doing that? Oxidative stress.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:So I've been on other podcasts and somebody said why are you really harping on oxidative stress? And I said yeah, and I'm going to keep harping on it until we stop dying from it.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:on it until we stop dying from it. I guess that's not that funny. But seriously though, this is the process. And how do they do it? What does it feel like? What they do is they damage our mitochondria and our mitochondria. When our mitochondria are damaged from our body fat, they damage our mitochondria, mostly between meals. Mostly because what's happening is our body fat has been reformulated. Our body fat is now high too high in polyunsaturates between meals. We have to burn our body fat. We're supposed to right so after we've metabolized the food that came in from our digestive system. We've burned some of that, we've oxidized some of that for energy. We've put some else in storage or using it for building blocks. Now we're supposed to be releasing our body fat, and we do release our body fat, and even when we're insulin resistant I know some people say that when you're insulin resistant, you don't release your body fat that is not true, because our triglycerides are high.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Why are they high? Because we've been releasing free fatty acids. People with diabetes type two diabetes have abnormally high levels of free fatty acids in their bloodstream all the time, and so the fat is not locked in the fat closet by insulin, contrary to what you hear all the time. I don't know why people say that. I mean, I, I used to, I used to buy into it too, so maybe I do know why people say it. It makes some sense, but actually when you look at the data, that's not what you see. So, um, so now we have this fat that's being released and our and it's got so much polyunsaturate.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Polyunsaturates damage mitochondria. They're easily oxidized. Mitochondria use oxygen. They are the most concentrated place where oxygen concentrates in our cell. That's why we breathe, because of mitochondria. They need oxygen. That's how they burn calories for us. That's how they generate energy. So you combine polyunsaturates from body fat with oxygen starts damaging the mitochondria and energy production falls off. And I have a graph in chapter three that shows that study. That's really groundbreaking research. I think and you know it's so important I think if more people knew about that research that it would change everything about the conversation about nutrition, because it shows plain as day that unsaturates can damage mitochondria and that monounsaturates do not do that and saturates do not do that.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:So what's the cell going to do between meals now, when it's trying to burn your body fat, not getting energy? Your cell is going to die if it does not get enough energy, die if it does not get enough energy. So your cell, fortunately, can use a backup fuel, which is sugar, which is always in our bloodstream, right, we always have at least a small amount, usually a very small amount, of sugar in our bloodstream. It's about a teaspoon, about three, four grams when we have a normal blood sugar level. Fasting it's not enough. So what happens is, as more cells start drying down that sugar and it's not enough for the whole body to use as a primary fuel. That's why we have body fat. Right, we're supposed to use body fat as our primary fuel between meals, but these vegetable oils make that impossible.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Our cells have to turn to sugar. That drops our blood sugar levels. We start to feel bad, we start to feel hypoglycemic, we start to get extremely hungry. We call that hangry. So we eat and we're not hungry for steaks at this point.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Generally, most people, we're hungry for things that we know are going to raise our blood sugar. We instinctively know because our brain's appetite center has sorted this all out for us. Our brain's appetite center has been wired around sugar equates to energy. So we know to crave things that taste sweet or that are very starchy, because they will raise our blood sugar, and so this is our experience, this is the lived experience of I don't know how many of patients that I have worked with, that they have taken to eating frequent small meals or snacking or having something on hand to allay that bad feeling. And over years of doing that, the energy balance just works against them because you can't perfectly balance we can't do that You're always going to err on the side of getting a little bit more energy in so your cells don't die of starvation. So slowly, slowly, slowly, we overeat and we gain weight and eventually we gain more and more weight and we become outright diabetic, type 2 diabetic. The process just keeps getting worse and worse and we need to have more sugar in our bloodstream. So I show in Dark Calories the process of developing diabetes is not type 2 diabetes is not a disease of blood sugar spikes. We know that sugar is going to spike our blood sugar. You can have a healthy metabolism and you'll still get blood sugar spikes. So type 2 diabetes is a disease of an elevated baseline need for sugar and that's why we diagnose it with a fasting blood sugar as well, and our fasting blood sugar creeps higher and higher over time and we get more and more metabolically damaged and less and less we burn less and less body fat as that happens.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:So some people who do the kind of metabolic testing you need to do to know whether or not you're burning body fat or carbohydrate you know what your cells are actually burning, what your mitochondria are actually burning. They've started finding that people with more severe diabetes and or obesity really talking about insulin resistance here don't even burn. They almost never burn body fat. They're always burning sugar. Where's all that sugar coming from? Even when they're fasting they're burning sugar. Where is it all coming from? It's coming from gluconeogenesis. Our liver makes it from protein. It's coming from protein either in the diet or, tragically, also in our muscles and our lean tissue. And this is why we're seeing people on Ozempic who are burning body fat in spite of the fact that their cells really don't wanna burn it. They are developing extreme high amounts of, like, lean tissue loss.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:I don't know if you know who Peter Atiyah is, but he was recently talking about how either he or somebody else has found that the lean body mass, the percentage of weight lost, say. If you lose, say you lose a hundred pounds. Just to make math easy here. Normally you would expect to lose maybe 20, 25 pounds from muscle. Still seems high to me. 20, 25 pounds from muscle still seems high to me. But he's finding they're finding some people 50 to 60 pounds and it can't be that much. It's not going to be like if you have 100 pounds, it's got to cap off at some point because we only have so much lean tissue. So maybe that was a bad example. I should have used 10 pounds. But you get the idea right. It's where we're burning our body's vital organs and tissues to fuel ourselves, when we're forcing our bodies to burn some of that body fat off. So this is why we need a wholesale new approach to weight loss and metabolic disease.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Because metabolic disease you cannot test that on a scale. You cannot even test that with your body composition. When I was working with the Los Angeles Lakers, they had eight and 10% body fat right. By any measure no one would call them metabolically damaged just looking at them that way. But when you look at their triglycerides and their HDL and their blood pressure and their fasting blood sugar levels, you see all the other signs of metabolic disease. They had pretty advanced insulin resistance, undiagnosed normal body weight. Why? Because their body fat was reformulated and it was too high in PUFA and their whole bodies were just exposed to oxidative stress all the time. And that's why one of them that I was working working with very closely his name was Dwight Howard.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:He had had surgery and all the oxidative stress was driving inflammation. He was not recovering from his surgery. He was, you know, continue. He had back surgery and he was continuing to have the same nerve problem and nerve damage. That was the whole reason he got the back surgery. So he was not healing and that's because of oxidative stress. It was driving his insulin resistance and it was driving his back problems and his nerve problems and his nerve damage and it was making it hard for his body to heal. And it was also, you know, it's not good for athletes. They need to not have inflammation or they can't really perform right. If your muscles are stiff and swollen and sore, you're not going to be able to practice the next day, right. So getting the vegetable oils out was an absolute centerpiece of what we did and what results did you see?
Dr. Cate Shanahan:It made the headlines, people who had no idea what we'd done with Dwight Howard, whose nickname was Superman because he was seven feet tall and broad shoulders and he was super strong and he had been underperforming the entire season after a surgery because he never healed, so we changed his diet. Two weeks later, the headlines literally read Superman is back. I don't know what gets better than that Like, if that's not evidence that this, that this is, you know, important enough to pay attention to, like I don't know what it is, and, in fact, half the teams, or a lot of teams in the NBA. They sniffed out what we were doing and they started doing similar things, in fact, famously, the Warriors and the Villanova Raptors, who they won their first championship in history two years after adopting the diet.
Florence:Okay, so I'm going to summarize here. So what's happening is we've had these seed oils infiltrate our food supply and 70 to 80% of us are getting our fat calories from the hateful eight. That fat is being stored body fat, but it's. It's a form of body fat that, when the body goes to break it down and burn it between meals, as it should, um, it's a poofa, it's. It's a.
Florence:It's a toxic form of fat that collides with oxygen in the mitochondria, creating oxidative stress. That oxidative stress is damaging the mitochondria, creating oxidative stress. That oxidative stress is damaging the mitochondria and that means you're not generating the energy that they need. The body knows the mitochondria know that oil that's being broken down, being sent to me, that's that. That doesn't work for me, that's making me. You know that's creating cell death, can't work with that oil. That that quality of fat, it's toxic. So now it's crying out for sugar. So now we're eating sugar and it's all contributing to insulin resistance. So we need more sugar, more sugar, and our base level of the amount of sugar that we need is just every day, just to function, to keep ourselves energized, just keeps rising, and that is. That is, in essence, the issue with obesity and diabetes. You got that, perfectly, absolutely, and that is, that is, in essence, the issue with obesity and diabetes.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:You got that perfectly, absolutely. And one more thing I would just say is, now that you described it so well, it's making me like clarify the toxicity here. The polyunsaturates are not toxic to everything, but they are toxic to mitochondria because there's all that oxygen in there, right? So we need polyunsaturates. We have polyunsaturates in every cell in our body. It's composed of quite a lot of polyunsaturates in our cell membranes. Our brain is composed of polyunsaturates right, that's what omega-3 is. Our brain tissue, our nervous tissue, is something like 40 to 50% highly polyunsaturated fatty acids, both omega-3 and omega-6 category types. You know, it's not just fish oil, it's something like 40 to 50% highly polyunsaturated fatty acids, both omega-3 and omega-6 category types. It's not just fish oil, it's also polyunsaturates that are omega-6 as well. So we definitely need polyunsaturates, and they aren't toxic in every situation, but they certainly are inside our mitochondria when our poor little mitochondria are forced to burn such a high portion of them for fuel, got it? So you've got that perfectly, thank you.
Florence:Okay, and that helps me understand it a bit better. So on the shelf we put oils or should be putting oils in dark bottles because we don't want the light and the oxygen to be exposed to it because it oxidizes. And what you're saying is there's so much oxygen in our mitochondria and then this really refined PUFA oils, polyunsaturated fatty acids, come in and that creates this massive amount of oxidative stress. And then that's when you see diseases like what you had, the burstitis and that like this, all these sort of mitochondrial malfunctioning in various different ways that can show up in the body as chronic disease.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Yeah, absolutely Okay. Oxidative stress triggers inflammation. It triggers the inflammatory response. Part of the inflammatory response is activating enzymes that chew up collagen.
Florence:Wow, Do you know what? I wonder if this is in related to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:I don't know. That's a genetic where they don't develop the right amount of collagen in the right tissues. But certainly in that genetic you're already genetically disadvantaged, right? You don't have a lot of the right kind of elasticity. It's called well.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:There's different types of collagen, but you're missing one of them or you have very little of one, or it's malformed. There's different types of erythroloz. There's like eight or nine yes, I can't say that word erythroloz, delos, but yeah. So in addition, if you are also promoting this oxidative stress all the time and you're activating these enzymes that will kill what little bit of that kind of collagen that you have, you're going to be in big trouble. So it's so, so, so important. And I've gotten letters from people who have erlos, danlos, even though they have never made me say it correctly, so I apologize for not saying it right, but they say that this was so, so life-changing for them because it took down some of the level of pain that they were always experiencing in their joints, right, because inflammation also promotes, activates the pain nerve endings, right, the pain sensors, right. So it really helped.
Florence:Oh my gosh, it's right how you tie it with chronic pain. Okay, so we're just bear with us here, because I'm following along as we go as well. So we understand the hateful eight. We understand how they're refined. We understand now what's happening at the level of the mitochondria. We understand why that's driving the body's cravings for sugar. Give me sugar because I need energy, because we know from Dr Chris Palmer, when our cells do not have enough energy, everything malfunctions. Right, when our metabolism malfunctions, every system in the body malfunctions, because every cell, every tissue, every system hormones, everything requires our mitochondria to be working well. So now we've got all this sugar coming in, these refined carbohydrates, and I think there's more to the sugar story than just empty calories.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:I think it's glycation, all kinds of other things.
Florence:It's extremely acidic. We know it paralyzes the immune system. We know it spikes not one but four different neurotransmitter systems in the brain, burning out our dopamine cells. You know, if you read the Hacking of the American Mind, dr Lustig. So that little rascal sugar is now coming in, it's required, it's like we're all craving it, like no kidding, we're all addicted. I get, I get your thesis here. Your argument is is that the PUFAs are making an already sugar addiction problem that existed long before there were PUFAs, because we can see that the slave trade, oh right, like 300 years of pulling slaves out of Africa to work the sugar plantation, because there was this appetite for sugar, right, and it was absolutely and the truth. It's truly addictive to, truly addictive. And the more people had access to sugar, the sicker they were, the more fat they overweight they were long before pufas. Sugar is a problem in and of itself.
Florence:But now it's a double problem, because we've got these seed oils coming in that are that's creating this fat that we can't burn adequately. So now we're craving sugar, now more than ever, and it's everywhere, and it's everywhere, everywhere. And then the sugar comes in and does its damage. It's like the sucker punch.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:And I'm seeing that. Yes, sugar is definitely toxic, but we've overestimated it because people, looking at what caused disease, are totally ignoring the idea of vegetable. They just don't even know about it.
Florence:They just don't know about it.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:They may, they run the risk of misattributing things to sugar that aren't actually from sugar just because they don't consider it, and so I'm just saying we need to realize that that is a possibility scientifically, and I think it means that we need to re-examine everything.
Florence:Got it? Yeah Right, we don't, we just need to. Is it a healthy? Is it a whole food? Has anything been added? Has anything been taken away? Don't put it in your body. We all need to be on a massive trajectory of getting back to basics so we can all heal ourselves in future generations. So let's talk about the solution. Obviously, the first step is to get out all ultra processed foods sugar, flour, sweeteners, alcohol, poof, like all of all of the processed foods. But then how do we begin the journey of getting our ratio, our fat stores on our body? How do we get that ratio we optimized and how do we heal our bodies from here?
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Yeah, so in the last third of the book I have four chapters so it's a big chunk of the book that walk you through step-by-step where to start, what to do first, what to do next, what to look for. And one of the things that I want people to, I want to set this expectation, is I'm going to teach you to pay attention to hypoglycemia symptoms. I call those symptoms signs of pathologic hunger, meaning hunger that is not just something that you can easily ignore and it's perhaps not even particularly safe to ignore Right, been particularly safe to ignore, right and so it's so important to prevent that hunger from happening. Because if you consistently get this pathologic hunger between meals which most people now do they just call it hangry and they kind of laugh it off and they have some snacks or something then if you consistently are stuck doing that, you're not going to be burning your body fat and you're not going to be detoxifying your body fat. So that is the thing to do is build meals that sustain your energy level, your brain energy level, and that means you want to have healthy fats. So those are everything. That's not a hateful eight, like we discussed, and preferably one of you know, a healthy unrefined oil or a whole you know animal fat kind of food like cream or any of the dairy fats or actual animal fat, so like those are the healthy fats.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:And also, you know, I teach people the difference between the high and low glycemic carbohydrates right, and I tell people in the beginning that you maybe don't want to go zero carb because your body cells are addicted. Let's just get just a little bit of it, and not enough to spike your insulin, just enough to kind of sustain some of that energy between meals, because otherwise your cells may start using protein for energy and that's a strain on the system as well. Using protein for energy requires eliminating a lot of nitrogenous waste, because protein is high in nitrogen but nitrogen cannot go into the mitochondria and does not. So the kidneys and the liver have to eliminate the waste. And that, I think, is where we get some other sets of diseases like gout, kidney stones, kidney disease, from relying so heavily on the oxidation of proteins in our diet or, even worse, oxidation of proteins that are basically broken down, body parts, muscle, bone and so on.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:So I teach people about the macros and it's mostly, you know, it's very much similar to keto, it's just maybe a little bit more permissive on the carbs. I mean, I mean just the shade right. Like instead of 50, like a lot of low carb is 50 grams, I say maybe you could go up to 70 or maybe maybe even a hundred, you know, if you really, you know, are using some super healthy sources of these carbohydrates, like like string beans, you know, and peas and stuff like that that have a lot of vitamins and antioxidants and minerals in them, right, so you're getting all of those oxidation fighting tools in your diet.
Florence:Right, right, right. How long is there any evidence of how long it's going to take us to clear out those toxic seed oils that we've been consuming for decades?
Dr. Cate Shanahan:We don't have great evidence, and I talk about the indirect, not great evidence that we have. So, just to cut to the answer, I think it's probably four, five, six, seven years. I mean, if you're, it also depends on how much weight you have to lose, and so in some ways it's similar to well, how long is it going to take to lose 200 pounds? Right, you're not going to do that in a month. That's going to. You would expect that to take a couple of years, and so we're already in the year's timeframe. So this isn't, you know, this is just kind of giving a little bit more of a different end goal to to it all. But the thing is and this is just so empowering to people you feel better starting from day one, once you start making those meals that help sustain your energy and help your body fight oxidative stress, and a keto diet will do that right. So you know, you can follow a keto diet. You can absolutely follow a keto diet. If you want to be 20 grams of carbs, that's fine. I just tell you, please, please, pay attention to those hypoglycemia symptoms, because if you're experiencing them, if you're having the low-carb flu, don't count on just getting over it.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:We don't know why the low-carb flu goes away. We don't, and I think one possible explanation that's very important to consider that has been completely blown off is that people ramp up gluconeogenesis and they start breaking down more protein and it could be that they're breaking down muscle and one of Kevin Hall's two of Kevin Hall's studies have suggested this might be the case. If you know who Kevin Hall is, he's he. Do. You know Gary Taubes? Yes, so Gary Taubes hired Kevin Hall to do research for his organization, nusi New Science, which is now defunct. But Kevin Hall did a study that compared a high-carb to a low-carb diet and looked at fat oxidation and muscle loss and he found that the high-carb diet they lost less muscle than the high-fat diet, the keto diet.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:But here's the key and here's something that we just don't know they were using standard dietician type of keto and the standard dietitian is afraid of saturated fat, so they were low in the healthier fats and higher in PUFA. So if you do, you know, like a no vegetable oil and no seed oil form of keto, you might be fine to do extremely low carbs. You might be. You can find out, because I teach you how If you do not experience any of those symptoms, then you're probably just fine and keep enjoying your keto foods and don't worry, because I know some people are worried about like I've been avoiding carbs. I'm afraid even about like beans, you know, or peas, because of the starchiness. People are afraid of that kind of slippery slope and so if you're good, then you're good, but if you're not, you should know about it.
Florence:And, by the same token, not being afraid of carbs, right, like not just don't be afraid of keto, but don't be afraid of carbs. Like there's lots of evidence. You're suggesting that you can do a higher carb, healthy whole food meal plan as well, if you know if it's working with your blood sugars and you're thriving.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Yeah, exactly, you're thriving, that's the key.
Florence:Oh my gosh, we don't. I, every now and then I have these conversations with experts and I think we know so little where it's just it's still the wild frontier, like I feel like you're right at the bleeding edge of even more understanding of diabetes and how our food culture's malfunctioning and and killing us slowly and yeah, yeah, no, I think this is has the potential to change the conversation, and I think you know, if I'm at least we need to be talking more about it and find out.
Dr. Cate Shanahan:You know, where am I wrong? Am I wrong? Well, what? You know what's going on here? But I think it could make life a lot easier for people, and certainly it'll make a lot life a lot easier for people doing studies on keto diets, because they'll be able to design them much more effectively.
Florence:Totally. Yes, all right, everybody, we need to go out and get our copy of dark calories. We'll be it. We'll be with Kate. Dr Kate, on the, on the very edge of, we're adding all these pieces, it's like everyone's got, you know, the elephant where someone's got the trunk and the leg and they're describing it. We're going to put together the picture slowly, for future generations and hopefully within our own lifetime as well. So, thanks again. Any final words you'd like to share, dr Kate?
Dr. Cate Shanahan:Oh yeah, florence. So please visit my website, which is drkatecom D-R-C-A-T-Ecom, and scroll to the bottom where you can sign up for my newsletter, which is drcatecom D-R-C-A-T-Ecom, and scroll to the bottom where you can sign up for my newsletter, which I release about once a month, and it has also quality information that's not just like a hash of other information that's out there, much like the book Everything that I do is so hard to do because it's new, it's never been said before, it's a little bit different than anything else out there and I think it's worth your time to read it. So please sign up for my newsletter and join the Dr Kate team.
Florence:Totally. Her website's full of incredible information. I echo that. Thanks everyone for tuning in today. Thank you, florence.
