Well, hello ladies and gents. Robert Sykes, Keto savage.com
And today I've got special guest Doctor Kate Shanahan on the line
and we dive deep into the wonderful world of fat.
But I guess it's not a wonderful word 'cause we're pretty much
talking about her new book, Dark Calories, which is all about
processed seed oils, oxidative stress, all the things that
we're trying to avoid. And I thought that's a topic
that is involved in a lot of confusion, a lot of ignorance
around that. We hear about the importance of
removing sugars and processed foods from our diets and there
has certainly been talk about removing, you know, highly
inflammatory polyunsaturated fats.
But she is leading the charge, tip of the spear, as to what
that means, how we can remove that from our diet, what all
that involves from a metabolic standpoint.
So I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.
I learned a ton and I have no doubt that you will as well.
So that further delay, sit back, relax, enjoy the conversation
with Doctor Kate Shanahan. And we are live.
Doctor Kate Shanahan, how are you today?
I'm good. Thank you so much.
Robert, how are you? I'm doing wonderful well myself.
I'm excited to chat with you. You, you don't know this, but
your book Deep Nutrition was one of my wife and I's pillar reads
as we were getting ready for our first pregnancy.
That book pretty much changed how we approached our nutrition.
She's been keto, I've been keto for 8-9 years now, but really
kind of diving into all of that from an epigenetic standpoint
really laid the ground for how we wanted to go about the
pregnancy, postpartum nutrition for him now, all that.
So thank you. Oh, well, that's great to hear.
Thank you. It's music to my ears.
It's just so important to start, you know, children from the
very, very beginning on a good diet.
Absolutely. I don't think people realize
like the the epigenetic effects I feel is very widely
misunderstood. There's just a lot of ignorance,
a lot of ignorance around that. And I feel like if people
realize that what they consumed was going to have a significant
impact on their lineage 234 generations deep, they would
likely take more of an initiative to make improvements
in their own diet. Yeah, and you know, my first
book, Deep Nutrition does explain a lot of the the
science, the fascinating science of just how important it is to
to eat healthy as early as possible in the pregnancy
planning period. There's a lot of science behind
it. But yes, like you said, there's
still just generally a lot of ignorance because the whole
field of nutrition is unfortunately twisted in
distorted, which is why I called my latest book Dark Calories
because some of it is pretty sinister.
I definitely, definitely want to peel the curtain back on dark
calories 'cause there's a lot of misinformation and confusion
around seed oils as well. Before we do, though, can I get
a little back story on just what got you into the nutrition
health space to begin with? Like I'm always kind of curious
to get people's origins stored. Like what was the catalyst for
making you embark on this path? Yeah, so I think, you know,
there's a lot to it. There's a lot of things, 'cause
it was, this is not an easy path.
And I wouldn't be on it, honestly, if it weren't for the
fact that just so many things pushed me here.
And one of them is that I just always did want to get to the
root cause of what, you know, makes people sick.
Selfishly, as an athlete, I was interested in learning more
about why I suffered from so many recurring injuries, and
other people on the team didn't. And so that turned out to be
related to connective tissues, which I did not learn about
until I wrote Deep Nutrition. But so I went to medical school
to try to get to some of these root causes, but I left medical
school without learning most of them.
You know, like doctors don't really understand the root cause
of super common things like high blood pressure, even heart
attacks. We think we do, but we don't
really, we certainly don't understand the root cause.
We don't learn in school the root cause of type 2 diabetes.
When I was in school, I learned it was type 2 was genetic or
age-related. And, you know, we've seen that
epidemic explode. So certainly that was not
correct. So I, I wanted to learn these
root causes because I knew that would be the only way to really
make a difference for people. But when I left, you know, I
didn't have that information. So I was kind of, I felt like I
was sort of sentenced to refilling prescriptions for
medications that didn't seem to prevent heart attacks or really
help people with their type 2 diabetes or, you know, do very
much like even asthma medications would help with the
immediate attack, but people would be dependent on asthma
medications. So, you know, I, I was just one
of these people that was like, I know there's got to be more to
this, right? And I just didn't feel like I
was making a difference refilling the drugs.
So I sensed there was something missing and I was really kind of
not happy. Actually, as a family medicine
doctor, being stuck just not really making a difference, I'm
not sure I was really helping. So when I got sick myself and
nothing else helped me, I resorted to looking into diet.
And that was the missing piece. And it's not that I hadn't
learned about diet as a doctor, you know, you always hear that
doctors don't learn anything about nutrition.
It's that's actually not really true, that that's not really the
problem, I should say. The problem is that what doctors
do learn about nutrition is wrong.
Much of it, especially what we learn about fats.
And so, you know, that was, that's really where I, my story
starts is once 22 years ago now, my eyes were open to the idea
that saturated fats aren't actually bad for us.
That that meant I had a puzzle to solve.
And I started working on that puzzle and that's what got me
into it. I love it.
What, what do you think the, the
reason is for it to be so easy for the, the current narrative
around nutrition in the medical community to be so hardwired and
ingrained? I mean, there's, there's a, a
history component to it here, which I think is, is important
to kind of lay the foundation. But there seems to be this
status quo that it is so hard to break free from.
And as more and more research comes out, it seems like a very,
very clear, you know, deviation from what the, the norm the
current narrative is. But it seems as though Despite
that research, there's just this unwillingness to break free of
the current status quo. Why?
Why is that? Yeah, so in Dark Calories I
explain what's going on here and in a lot of detail.
So the, the big picture is that the maybe the biggest immediate
barrier to doctors understanding the truth when they hear it, you
know, basically that seed oils, these industrial byproducts are
toxic. Doctors resist that because we
believe we have learned the real truth about, you know, fats and
oils in our training, right? So that's just, that's called
like being blindsided because you, you have some information,
you are no longer willing to question the information that
you've heard. That's just human nature, right?
So if we all hear that, you know, one thing is true, we tend
to believe that we tend to resist anything to the contrary.
That's human nature. And so I was like that myself.
Like I, I learned that sugar wasn't particularly bad for you.
It wasn't a problem to eat sugar as long as you weren't
overweight. So it took myself getting sick
to even just question that basic teaching, which has now largely
been overturned. And this is an interesting
parallel here between sugar and our false narrative around sugar
that we got fed in the 70s and 80s and vegetable seed oils and
the false narrative around those, because that also came
from academic medicine. And it just came so much earlier
in time that no one's really dug it up.
Not very many people have. I have and a couple other people
have, have dug up some of these corruption, corrupted links
between researchers and industry funding the research.
So that's the sinister side of this.
I think most monitors is probably fairly well versed in
what seed oils are at least, but can we kind of give a little bit
more back story as to what those are and how they're relatively
new as as a dietary, you know, additive for us as a species?
Yeah. So let's, you know, frame this
up. So like right now that you're,
you have a keto podcast, I don't know when did your podcast
start? I started recording in 2016, so
pretty good while ago. OK, so right after that, at that
time, at that point in time, the keto diet wasn't synonymous with
avoiding seed oils. And in fact, the Atkins books
didn't. The Atkins books were the main
driver of the keto diet until right around 2017.
What was it that got you, I'm curious, into the keto diet?
Like where did you hear about it?
Yeah, yeah. So I was, I was bodybuilding.
I'm a natural bodybuilder and I've been following traditional
diets, you know, standard, you know, high carbohydrate diets up
until 2014, 2015. And I just had a struggle with
disordered eating tendencies and I just never felt good.
So I started doing carbohydrate backloading, which is basically
keto minus keto during the day and then a bunch of high
glycemic index carbs at night. And I just noticed that I felt
better without the carbs. So I cut those out.
But I didn't really know what keto was.
My first introductory to to keto as a as a term as a dietary
intervention was probably the podcast that Dom d'agostino did
with Tim Ferriss, which I guess would have been early 2015 or
something. So Tim Ferriss was an early
adapter of the idea that seed oils are not healthy.
So I don't know if maybe that's could be where you heard it
from. A lot of people don't even
remember where they first heard it.
But the, the reason I'm bringing this up is that the first keto
book to specifically warn people about the seed oils and to
specifically list out what they are, which I'm going to do here
in a second, I promise, was the Keto Reset by Mark Sisson and
Brad Kearns. And they interviewed me for that
because I've been working with them on other projects.
And I've been pointing out that, hey, we got to be talking about
these oils more because when we tell people not to eat carbs, we
got to make sure they're eating the right kinds of fats.
And vegetable oils are so prevalent in our food supply
that people need to be aware that they need to avoid them.
So but, but the term vegetable oil doesn't really cut it
because olive oil is a vegetable oil, avocado is a vegetable oil,
and those are healthy oils. So I had to create this term,
the hateful 8. And so those hateful 8 are the
ones we need to avoid and we need to memorize this list.
So it's corn, canola, cotton seed, soy, sunflower, safflower,
rice bran, and grape seed. But if you're living in the UK,
you don't know what canola oil is because they use there, they
use rapeseed. So I just need to mention that.
Gotcha, gotcha. And that's pretty much that.
That should be viewed as, relatively speaking, a a poison
in our body. There's no like instance in
which the dose makes the poison necessarily like that.
Some should be something we just avoid entirely, right?
Yeah. So that's a really like a simple
question that has kind of a a short and a long answer.
So the short answer is you're right, the dose makes the
poison. But the long answer is we have
to take into the account the fact that most of us have been
poisoned until we started avoiding these oils because
they're in so many foods. Like you, probably most people I
talk to, they kind of go into shock when they start looking at
ingredients and looking at what they've been eating all this
time. And they go into a small period
of panic when they're like, how on earth am I going to live
without these things? I can't find food that doesn't
have them. Was that your experience?
Yeah, I mean, I, I was lucky because I I started doing keto
before it was really popular and there was not a whole lot of,
you know, processed keto options at that point.
But prior to doing keto in its entirety, yeah, I was definitely
consuming foods I had, I paid no mind to, you know, using
vegetable oils in my cooking or just the foods that was
consumed. Like that was an afterthought,
if any thoughts. So yeah, I was definitely guilty
of charge there. Right.
And So what happens is that, you know, all those years that you
were eating vegetable oils, they have damaged your metabolism,
they cause insulin resistant. And chances are good that you,
Robert, were insulin resistant even though you didn't have, you
know, type 2 diabetes. And I'm pretty sure you probably
weren't obese if you weren't doing that though that kind of
competition. So what I found when I was going
back to when I was working with the Lakers in 2011 was that the
Lakers were insulin resistant. Serious professional athletes
with body compositions of 8%, body fat compositions of 8%, had
insulin resistance. And it wasn't being picked up
because doctors don't test for it.
But it was coming not from being overweight.
It wasn't coming from their carbohydrates.
It was coming from the seed oils in their diets.
And it took me a while to figure out, to figure that out like
that. It was coming from the seed oils
more so than the carbohydrates. And that's why I, I wanted,
that's what I want to talk. Spend some time talking about
that with you if you'd like. No.
Definitely, I think there's there's this constant question
or debate as to what is the driving factor for, you know,
the obesity epidemic we now find ourselves in.
And, and I don't remember what year it was, but I remember, you
know, at one point it was only the discussion around sugar and
carbohydrate and just excess calories.
And then at some point, I want to say probably 20/18/19, I
started hearing a lot more information about seed oils
being the driving factor. So yeah, I'd love to put the
curtain back on then. Yeah, so let's go back to the
beginning then, 'cause like when I, you know, shortly before I
was in medical school, in the, I was in medical school in the
90s, but a little bit before that, in the 60s, the answer to
what causes obesity was gluttony.
So it was your fault. So, you know, that clearly is
not the whole story for most people.
And by the 1970s and 80s, the answer had shifted from from
just you're a glutton to fat. Fat makes you fat and there was
no distinction between saturated or unsaturated at that point.
It was just all fat is bad, you needed to eat everything low
fat. Then a few years later, after
that advice had obviously failed to help anyone because people
were continuing to get fatter, they shifted the focus to sugar.
Now I need to clarify for a minute here that in the 70s and
80s when people were cutting out fat and having sugar, they were
cutting out saturated fat and they didn't realize that they
were getting a lot more. They were still getting a lot of
vegetable oils. The consumption of vegetable
oils did not drop in the 70s and 80s.
And in fact, it went up. It continued to go up.
So the but while we we were buying products that claimed to
be fat free and were high in sugar, we were not eating less
vegetable oils. We were eating less butter and
we were eating less of the fat on steak.
You know, we were getting less of the natural fats and more
vegetable oils during that time, in addition to getting, you
know, more carbs. So surprise, surprise, we
continue to get more obese. And so now we're at this point
where people recognize that carbohydrates can be addicting,
particularly sugar, and that insulin, they trigger insulin, a
hormone that that makes you build fat.
And that's important to understand because if you're
eating high sugary foods and you're getting these insulin
spikes, you're kind of accelerating your fat building
process there. And that is where the story now
stops for most people that carbohydrates are accelerating
fat building because of insulin. And I kept going because I was
seeing that vegetable oil was increasing even as our
carbohydrate consumption was going down.
Starting in the 2000s, we did eat less carbohydrates.
Starting the 2000s, we are eating less fructose, high
fructose corn syrup than we did in the year 2000, something like
60% less. We're eating something like 10%
less sugar. And overall, we're eating just a
little bit less carbohydrate, but we we are eating more
vegetable oil than we were in the year 2000, nearly double.
That is, that is I have seen that graph for like the the
sugar starts to dip, but that processed seed oils continues
to, you know, increase and that can be overlaid pretty pretty
eloquently to the rise in obesity.
Like if you look at all these charge, you know, in tandem,
that seems to be the common denominator there.
Right. And you know, at this point it
gets complicated, right? So we're talking about calories,
we're talking about different types of fat, and we're talking
about hormones. And this, the truth is biology
is complicated, folks. And if you want to know what's
really going on in your body, you have to put on your thinking
cap a little bit, right? And and so that is.
Part of the problem because so many folks are like, oh, OK,
right, I get it. Sugar raises insulin,
carbohydrates raise insulin. Let's cut out sugar and
carbohydrates. Problem solved, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's run with that.
And that helps. It helps a lot of people because
it gets you away from the chips that have, you know, empty
calorie carbohydrates, which are certainly not good for you.
It also, unknown to many people, gets them away from the seed
oils that are the fat that the chips are cooked in.
And the same with, with, yeah, doughnuts and crackers and you
know, most junk foods, all kinds of whether it's potato chips or
corn chips or bugles or you name it, right?
And it, it gets you away from French fries, which are 30% of
their calories come from vegetable oils, right?
But everyone's focusing on the carbohydrates and the insulin
and they're not seeing the, the role of that vegetable oils are
playing. And so I, I wanted to dive
deeper into that because I knew that they had to be doing
something bad to our bodies. And I knew this because I was a
biochemistry student before I went to medical school.
And when you look at the biochemistry of the molecules
that compose vegetable oils, you see a certain kind of fatty acid
called polyunsaturated fatty acid, and that reacts with
oxygen and turns into a variety of toxins.
This happens in our food, and the same thing happens in our
bodies. In other words, our food becomes
toxic when we cook in vegetable oils and we're eating toxins.
And what do those toxins do? They attack our cell membranes.
They intact the polyunsaturated fatty acids in our cell
membranes and that destroys our body's ability to generate
energy and it causes inflammation and causes a whole
ton of disease. It's not just about obesity here
anymore, right? So, so that's a lot of
information though, right? It's complicated.
It's a lot more complicated than, oh, just cut out carbs.
And I think that's why it's so important to read the book with
your thinking cap on and read it carefully and understand what's
really going on in your body because then you'll understand
that weight, losing weight does not mean that you're getting
healthier. And, and that's really the take
home message here and why it matters to understand that
vegetable oils are driving the metabolic disease epidemics, not
carbohydrates and sugar. I mean, certainly they both are,
but vegetable oils are the primary driver.
They're the more important factor.
And it has to do with how they shift our metabolism and the
main. Yeah.
Didn't mean to cut you after what we're saying.
What they do is they make us metabolically addicted to sugar.
Gotcha. So was the main mechanism of
action I guess with regards to the the process seed oils is
that it makes the inflammation as a that comes as a result of
consuming them increases one's overall in some resistance and
that's the primary driver. The primary just close, the
primary driver is oxidative stress and that is a chemical
process that happens in our body cells.
And when it happens in our body's cells, that's where
things fall apart for our health.
Basically, our cells cannot be healthy when our diet promotes
oxidative stress, vegetable oils promote oxidative stress, and
oxidative stress promotes inflammation, but it also
promotes degeneration. So those are two different and
very devastating processes. That's why I like to like point
us back to the real root cause here, which is this chemical
process called oxidative stress. And because oxidative stress,
oxidative stress is important because it it causes insulin
resistance, right? It causes the disruptions and to
our cellular fueling that have downstream consequences that
ultimately lead to insulin resistance.
But it's not a one step process. It's a multiple step process.
That's why I had to write a book about it.
But again, the reason it's important to understand is
because if so, people can understand that losing weight
quickly doesn't get them to health quickly.
Totally. And and to be fair, I'm not a
not a a food chemist or biochemist by any means, but if
the fats that one is consumed, even if it came from an animal
based saturated source, if that that fat source is overly heated
beyond the smoke point, that would still create free radicals
and pretty much list the same response.
Is that right? Well, yeah.
So smoke point is, is a, an industry term and it doesn't
refer to animal products. So it's a, there's a lot of
terminology here. So these are good questions
because you're raising very important points, but there's a
lot of confusion out there. And so I'm glad you're asking
these questions because I want to kind of untangle it a little
bit. So people do talk about smoke
point when they're talking about it.
If they're referring to anything other than oils, they're they're
not using the term correctly because the smoke point refers
to the term. The definition is the smoke
point is the temperature at which a thin wisp of blue or
Gray smoke emerges from an oil as it's heated.
So oils built right into the definition.
Gotcha. OK.
So it doesn't apply to animal products.
And when it comes to cooking your food, just don't burn your
food. It's really, you know, not
complicated. If you're if you're cooking with
like a, like a. If someone's deep frying with,
you know, a lard or a tallow for instance, but they get that oil
too hot, that fat too hot, is that going to create a like a
free radical environment that would lead to more inflammation?
Well you you get free radicals forming well before the smoke
point, which is which is an important concept here.
So the vegetable oil industry uses the term smoke point to
sell their oils. You do not need to worry about
smoke point at all unless you work in a restaurant and you're
reheating that oil over and over and over again in a deep fryer
situation. Because in a home situation
where you're just or cooking like, let's take deep frying out
of the equation for a second. If you're just pan frying,
you're, you're going to hear like the the meat itself, the
water in the food that you're cooking is going to start
boiling and sizzling and that's your cue to stir.
And when you stir, you reduce the temperature so nothing bad
happens. So it's a myth that you have to
cook your food in a high smoke point oil in any situation other
than a deep fryer where you set it to like a temperature of 400
and you walk away. Gotcha.
Is it bad, I'm assuming it probably is bad to have animal
based sources of fats in a deep fryer.
And certainly if you're reusing that, all that like that, that's
consistent high heat would break down the quality of those carbon
bonds, right? Yeah, it like it.
A deep frying is an expensive prospect if you're gonna do it
healthy because, you know, it takes so much fat and that's why
people tend to reuse it. But that is not that's not
healthy to reuse the oil because there's so many reactions that
happen. And it has to do with what gets
extracted from the food, right? Like a lot of minerals and
compounds come out of the food and end up in the oil, and then
there's reactions between the iron and the fats that way, and
there's all kinds of things deteriorating.
It's really a witch's brew in there.
And so that's why you probably notice if you use a deep fryer
yourself at home, after about two batches or three, maybe if
you're lucky, it starts to taste less good.
Yeah, right. So pay and sear for the wind for
sure. Yeah, yeah, just like don't,
don't reuse oil over and over again, you know, don't.
Deep frying is not good if you're reusing everything no
matter what oil you use. Totally, totally.
You mentioned that when you were working with the Lakers that you
were noticing them being insulin resistant even at a very low
body fat. Were you measuring like how was
that measured just via, you know, blood sugar levels
postprandial or how was that done?
Yeah. So the proper way to measure it
is not what I did like the, it wasn't the best way, but it was
certainly a way. So what I did was what I could,
all I could do, right. So I I was not ordering labs for
them myself. That was not part of my job
description, so I had to interpret the labs that other
doctors ordered. So I couldn't order insulin
levels, which is really what you need to do to get the degree of
insulin resistance. But you can still diagnose
insulin resistance because if somebody is a pre diabetic, they
are by definition insulin resistant and you diagnose pre
diabetes with a fasting blood sugar.
So they had elevated fasting blood sugars quite high.
They also had elevated triglycerides.
I mean, not all of them, but some were worse than others.
But they had other markers of insulin resistance.
There's a few bio, quite a few biomarkers that have been
identified as the hallmarks of insulin resistance.
Maybe you've talked about them before.
Yeah, yeah, certainly on the podcast talk about hallmarks of
the insulin resistance. I'm just curious.
Like they probably had no clue that they were registering for
being insulin resistant. Because when you're not
overweight it's it's not front of mind it seems.
Absolutely not. No, they they thought their
health was defined by the way they look in the mirror, right?
Like nobody told them otherwise. And so, you know, when I sat
down with those whose labs who you know, brought their labs for
me to review them, I said, look, this number's abnormal.
This number's abnormal. This number's abnormal.
You have pre diabetes, yeah. So and you're certainly insulin
resistant and so like that often would motivate a lot of the
guys, especially the older guys who are starting to feel their
age more to to really make a lot of changes in their home as
well. Like the what I had Dominion
over was what they were served at the training facility, what
they were served on the airplanes, and what they were
served after games. Like we controlled that.
But beyond that, they're freewheeling, freewheeled humans
who made their own choices. So not all of them were on
board. Yeah, no, totally.
It's it's hard to hard to regulate someone's someone's
intake for sure. So I, I personally avoid
process. See, there was like the plague
and it's really hard. Like I look, it's like as a
bodybuilder, I'm looking at every nutrition statement, every
ingredient list. I have my own food product
company. So I'm always analyzing
nutrition statements. And because of that, like I
literally do not walk to a grocery store without looking at
everything that's in my cart to ensure that it meets my
criteria. And I think it's in so many
foods that people don't realize that they take for granted
because a lot of times people just simply don't look at the
ingredient list. They'll just stop after the
nutrition statement. But when it comes to avoiding
these processed seed oils, you know, I feel like for me, it
makes intuitive sense simply because of the processing steps
involved. Like, I try to keep things as
simple and, you know, down to earth as possible.
When you look at the laundry list of steps that it takes to
get to extract an oil from a rapeseed, for instance, it's
pretty crazy. Like they deodorize everything.
Like it's more or less rancid oil that if it had not been
deodorized, we would not be able to get it past our nose in order
to consume it in the 1st place. But it's cheap and they
deodorize it so that it can pad their margins.
But some people are of the opinion that, you know,
obviously they think that it's only about the calories.
And I am not of that opinion. I do think calories matter for
sure. One's intake, one's fuel intake
matters. But for those individuals that
think it, it all stems from calories and thermodynamics is
the one in indoor Biome, what would you say to them as far as
like if everything was treated isocaloric?
Like not that I would recommend this type for someone, but if
someone is to have pure, you know, 100% cane sugar and then
you took another individual that was pure isocaloric, you know,
vegetable oils, like what is happening to them on a cellular
level between the two? Yeah, so calories count, but
that's not the end of the story, right?
So certainly the laws of thermodynamics apply in our
body, but we have to take in consideration the other, the
biological part of it. We're we're, you know, we're not
just physical calorimeters that become hotter when we dump food
into our bodies. That's what a calorie is, right?
It's just how much thermal energy is in the food when you
burn it? How much heat is released that's
how we define calories and so but we're not we don't heat up
when we eat right our bodies this biological effects galore.
So sugar has a addicting taste. So people who are sugar addicts,
like I was, will obsess with sugar.
And when we try to eat a healthy dinner, we're not satisfied
until we eat that sweet dessert. And even then we're not really
satisfied because you always want more sugar.
Seems like that's, I kind of felt like I lived in a state of
perpetual wanting to eat more dessert until I got the oils out
of my life. Now what do the oils do?
Well, what they do is they actually magnify our the
addictiveness of sugar by like tenfold, probably because what
they create is a shift in our metabolism where our cells need
sugar for energy. And I go into the details of how
that happens. You know, the that in the book,
because there's a mechanism. I'm not just saying this out of
the blue. I have lots of scientific
support to show that this very strange thing happens.
And, and what I'm saying is that when our diet is full of
vegetable oils, we, our body cannot use our own body fat for
fuel. So it needs more sugar.
And that makes us sugar addicts, not for the taste of sugar, but
for the energy in sugar. And that completely rewires our
relationship with food and creates all kinds of eating
disorders and disordered food relationships that are worse
than than just like this hedonistic relationship.
It it's, it's not just a matter of avoiding sugar for long
enough that you lose the taste for it.
Then you'll be addicted to carbohydrates because
carbohydrates can also give your cells that energy that they
need. But the real root problem is
that vegetable oils change your metabolism so they don't get
energy from your body fat between meals.
So if someone is following a, you know, low carb ketogenic
diet and they're trying to obtain fat metabolism, but
they're not consuming, so they're not consuming sugar or
carbohydrates, but they're only consuming predominantly seed
oils, then they're in in effect not ever going to become fully
fat adapted and their body's going to be inefficiently
deriving energy from glucose still.
Right, they'll get It's a very unhealthy thing to follow a keto
diet and get most of your fats from seed oils.
This has actually been proven in animal studies multiple times
and it's there is some evidence even in human studies done by a
gentleman named Kevin Hall who showed that keto makes people
lose a little bit more muscle than a low fat diet.
That's in the context of them consuming primarily seed oils.
Correct. Gotcha.
Because their body I'm assuming is is using gluconeogenesis to
derive glucose from the stored amino acids in the muscle they
have. Exactly.
And that hasn't been taken into account like the fact that these
oils or what's really missing from the the, the scientific
consciousness on obesity and metabolism and keto, frankly, is
the fact that polyunsaturated fatty acids do build up in our
body fat so that our body fat is a source of polyunsaturated
fatty acids. And that's a problem because our
mitochondria cannot stay healthy when they're forced to
continually oxidize. These easily oxidizable
polyunsaturates that deteriorate into toxins inside our
mitochondria I. Don't remember if it was your
content or or where I heard this but I I read somewhere that the
if you consume vegetables it stays like the half life of it
is something crazy like two years.
Like it takes you 2 plus years to metabolize that completely
from the body. Is there any truth to that?
Yes, that's from original research done.
Well, yeah, so I'm sorry, I was answering a different question
about the fact that they build up in our bodies.
So did you ask that or did you say how long they stay in our
bodies? I'm sorry.
How long they stay? Yeah.
So, OK, so we can answer that in the vague sense, but we don't
have a lot of real great data. So the only data that we have
comes from fat in general, like how long does it take for the
fat molecules in our body fat to be replaced by, you know, new
fat molecules from our diet? And the answer to that is it
takes about four to five years in a normal weight person.
Gotcha. But it, it may be, you know,
there's other things to consider like if you're way more
overweight, it it may take even longer.
But the other thing is that polyandsaturates may be
preferentially released and they do appear to be.
So that would shorten it again. So we don't really know, but
it's certainly years. And I'm assuming they would be
preferentially released because the body recognizes it as a
toxin. Yeah, that's a great question.
Of course, we don't really know. But my answer is I think it has
to do just more with their fundamental, the thermodynamics
of it all, the fact that they are more, more wiggly, they're
more, there's more Brownian motion happening.
And remember, our cells are just bags of chemicals, right?
There's it is chemicals that are guided by the laws of
thermodynamics. And so if you have a stiff
saturated fat molecule, it's basically a straight stick.
It doesn't move around as much as the polyunsaturates, which
are wiggly and bendy. So just by that rule, that kind
of explains why it does appear that they are preferentially
released into the bloodstream. Gotcha.
That makes total sense. All right.
I want to kind of talk actionable steps here.
So if someone's listening to this, they would hopefully want
to avoid those hateful 8 that you mentioned earlier.
But how would you recommend someone go about, I guess what
would you have them include into their diet as far as quality
fats go? Like, is there like a certain
mix of healthy pollen, saturated fats, monos and saturates that
you would encourage people to try and prioritize?
Yeah. So to answer that, we have to
talk about the there's good fats, bad fats, and then there's
a middle category that I call OK, but not great.
That middle category is the refined oils like refined palm
oil, refined olive oil, refined avocado oil.
Those are not great. They're empty calories.
They don't have any nutrition, but they're not outright toxic
the way the vegetable oils are. So if you're, you know, if you
got no choice, if you're looking for a mayonnaise that's seed oil
free, you're gonna have to buy refined avocado oil, mayonnaise
that's better, you know, it's better for you than mayonnaise
that's made out of soy oil, for example.
So that's important to know about that middle category.
But if you wanted to have really healthy mayonnaise, then you
would make it yourself from unrefined avocado or unrefined
virgin olive oil. Virgin and unrefined are the
same thing. And so the the healthy oils are
really everything that's not refined, period.
And refined being defined as what?
Yeah. So the meaning that the crude
oil is inedible, like you were describing earlier when you
first make soy oil, it's inedible.
You can't eat it. It's caustic.
It smells like it. Smelling it would burn your
nose, your eyes would start burning.
And if you had a a gulp of it, your esophagus would burn and it
would burn all the way down to your stomach, which would
probably make you throw it right back up.
It's that vile. So the crude oil is inevitable
and it is inedible and extensive.
Refining, meaning refining, bleaching and deodorizing.
Like some people try to say that filtering is refining, but
that's not true. That's just simple mechanical
filtering, chemical refining, bleaching, deodorizing, multiple
steps of de gumming, de waxing, and you know, on it goes, right?
Gotcha. And that's what you're trying to
avoid what what was the the good but not great category that is
just the the virgin options or that was?
The virgin options, the virgin options are the good ones
because they're they're, they don't need any refining.
Gotcha. The refining is the good but not
great. Yeah, the refined, the refined
oils that are not members of the hateful age and that's they're,
they are more monounsaturated like olive oil higher in
monounsaturates, right and lower in those polyunsaturates that
are extraordinarily easily oxidized into toxic compounds.
Gotcha. So the middle category has the
more stable fatty acids in in, in that middle category.
So that would be like your refined coconuts, which is
mostly saturated fat, but it's refined so it doesn't have any
nutritive properties. Gotcha.
OK, That makes total sense. What what, what are the what,
what are your primary fat sources throughout the day?
Like what are you? Are you doing more animal based
or more of the like the olive oil and avocado oil things of
that nature? Yeah, like I, I love dairy, so I
get a lot of dairy fat 'cause I eat cream, I drink milk, I eat a
lot of cheese, a lot of yogurt. So I'm getting a lot of, that's
probably my main animal fat plus butter.
And then of course, you know, I get whatever fat comes along
with the pieces of meat that I'm buying.
And then for the oils the the plant based I choose, my
favorites are a quality olive oil, obviously unrefined,
unrefined peanut oil. It tastes like peanuts.
Very delicious and unrefined sesame oil, which tastes
amazingly good. Nice, nice.
Out of curiosity, there's, there's a big debate, especially
in, in my community about the significance of, you know, the
foods that the animals are consuming.
And depending on whether or not you're talking about a, a
ruminant animal like a like a cow or a deer or lamb, they're
going to upcycle the nutrition they're consuming.
Whereas like a monogastric, you know, chicken or pig, it's kind
of more so a matter of you are what you eat.
That all gets stored in the fat. So if they're consuming, you
know, lots of grains or you know, seed oils, corn products,
what products, things that nature that's gonna often times
translate to the fat, how much significance do you place on
that? Or is it more of your effort
more so directed towards just the oils that we're consuming
directly? Yeah, like the main thing is to
get these oils out of your life 'cause that's hard enough.
So I, I focus first and foremost on that as far as like what you
want to avoid. And then I put everything else.
This question about what what kind of what we should be eating
falls into the category of like, get the highest quality you can
afford, right. And so when it comes to animal
products, yes, they are what they eat too, just like us.
And if you can get a higher quality animal product like a
pig that was forest fed, then that's great.
Enjoy it. The same with poultry.
The healthy birds are out there scratching around in insects and
maybe they have a little bit more polyunsaturated fatty acid
than like a, like a bovine fat, but it's going to come along
with lots of vitamins and, and you know, the antioxidant
vitamins as well. So I'm more about like focusing
on getting the highest quality you can afford.
And I want to be really clear that the vegetable oils are
what's causing people's metabolic problems, not the fact
that, you know, the pork that we eat has been fed way too much
soy in a, in a, in a inappropriate diet for the
species. And yes, it's, it's fat is
highly, highly polyunsaturated too, but that is not the driver
here. The driver is the 30% of our
calories that are coming from these toxin laden oils.
The poofas in a less optimal pork, you know, in a soy fed
pork, those poofas are intact. They're not oxidized.
Big difference. They're not going to deplete the
body's antioxidants. So you know, if you're going out
to a restaurant and you want to have with your, you want to have
a good time with your friends at a restaurant and you want to go
to like a BBQ place, enjoy the ribs, right?
As long as the sauce doesn't have anything too nasty in it.
Now that makes sense. That's a good point.
I just went to to Texas for a conference and I enjoyed a lot
of barbecue and I did not hold back.
It was all good quality stuff. Curious with all of this said,
I'm, I'm kind of curious to see what you think from a societal,
political, governmental standpoint, because from a, you
know, big food, you know, standpoint, they're going to
have much better margins if they're continuing to use these
refined seed oils that are much cheaper to produce.
And that's what's going into the main food supply chain.
How, how do we correct course here?
Like, I feel like the in a, in a perfect world, everybody would
take initiative, own their own health and avoid these foods and
vote with their dollar. But I feel like the majority of
the masses are are unfortunately not going to to just take that
step that I mean, I would hope that so, but I don't know if
that's been the case thus far. So what is going to happen from
like a what needs to happen from a political, governmental, food
supply chain standpoint to to get this ship moving in the
right direction? I think our only hope, and our
best hope is getting doctors on board because, like myself, many
doctors I know feel trapped in a job that is unrewarding.
And it's unrewarding in part because they do not learn the
root cause, and they're forced to follow guidelines that they
see with their own eyes aren't really helping people.
But they don't know what to do. They don't know what they don't
know. They don't know where to start.
Just like I felt 22 years ago when I knew there was something
missing but I had no idea what it was.
The answer is medical science has been misinforming you
doctors. Your doctor has been
misinformed, just like I was misinformed about what fats are
good and what fats are bad. And as soon as we get doctors on
board, then we can really start to see changes.
Because I think, you know, a good, a good response to this is
outrage. And that's how I felt when I
when I learned that I was lied to during my medical education.
And we didn't talk about where that light comes from, you know,
the role of the American Heart Association, accepting money
from Procter and Gamble. But that's a good story that I
think you'll really enjoy if you read the book Dark Calories.
So, so, so. But to answer the question,
doctors need to to have the right information to help their
patients. You know, nobody looks to the
processed food industry for nutrition advice, right?
When it comes down to it, if you have chest pain and you want to
know if it's at a heart attack and your doctor says, yeah, it
was a heart attack and your doctor now says you need to take
this drug. But it's the reality is that
drug is not going to help you. The reality is your heart attack
was caused by oxidative stress, but your doctor doesn't know.
Once doctors find out that they've been lying to their
patients, I think they'll be outraged.
And, and I think that, you know, there's enough, there's millions
of doctors in this country. Maybe some of them don't care.
They just want to go along, get along, prescribe drugs,
whatever. It's easier to do that, believe
me. But I think there's enough.
And I think the younger generation especially that is
starting to realize that, boy, they've been lied to about a lot
of stuff. I think they're going to be able
to tackle to to to to get it faster than my generation has.
Yeah, No, I certainly hope so. I, I, I, I share in your
optimism there. And I feel like I've had some
people in the podcast that several doctors that have come
on after just hearing repeated instances of their patients, you
know, adopting a low carb ketogenic diet or doing
something that is against the status quo and seeing results
that they couldn't deny. So do you think the main way of
opening the eyes of the doctors is to have this grassroots
movement of patients recognizing the benefit in excluding the
seed oils? Or is there a better way to
enlighten the the doctors? I think doctors can read book
dark calories, but yeah, certainly there's nothing, you
know, they can try it themselves.
There's nothing more powerful than feeling improvements
yourself. I think that even Trump's the
power of watching your patients health problems melt away.
But I think it's very important. Robert and I, I'm going to ask
you for your help with this to point out that the keto diet
doesn't work as long as people are still eating seed oils.
This has been clinically proven and I and I show the research in
a chapter of my book where I'm talking about the different
studies on the keto diets that have excluded seed oils and that
haven't. And it it, it, it doesn't help
at all when it doesn't exclude seed oils.
And the animal that's in humans, the animal studies show that
it's extraordinarily bad. The the animals develop insulin
resistance, they develop skinny fat, they lose muscle, they get
fatty liver, they get little kidney problems.
And you know, it's just, it's everything bad that they've
looked for. They've found in animals fed a
keto diet, that is where the fattest corn oil or soy oil or
one of the other hate plate. Totally.
Yeah, No, I think, I think, you know, sub experimentation is
100% the best way to go for anybody and everybody, patients,
doctors, performers, athletes, all the above.
If someone if someone's listening to this and they're
like, OK, I'm just gonna go all in, remove all processed setos
from the diet, there's gonna be no more hateful 8 in my life
whatsoever. What what are some some common
symptoms that they should just be be mindful of and kind of,
you know, look for in doing so? Oh, actually, I'm glad you
asked. So let's get back to what are
these things doing to us? Well, remember we said that they
they make, they, they give us a metabolic sugar addiction so
that our body cells use up more of the sugar in our blood.
And one of the main things that seed oils are doing to people
who are eating them is they're making them hangry just a few
hours after they ate. And hangry is not normal hunger.
And that is a really important take home message from the book.
I talk about it in two chapters. It's that important that the
absence of hanger is one of the most important biomarkers that
you should be looking for in terms of your metabolic health.
If you can go for, you know, 4681224 hours without feeling
brain fog or shaky or jittery, that's a good sign that you are,
that your metabolism is in good shape.
But there's a caution there because some people are more
able to metabolize protein into energy than others and they,
they don't strongly experience these warning symptoms.
So in that case, you have to look to the biomarkers and I lay
out what those are in the book as well.
Awesome, awesome. Well, I'm super excited for the
release of the book. I've got a copy you officially
launch in just a few days, if I recall correctly.
It'll be loud by the time this podcast goes out, but I think
it's early, early June, right? June 11, yeah.
June 11th And this is How many books again are you now?
It's the fourth title, but it's actually the 5th book because
Deep Nutrition came out initially in 2009 and then it
was updated, re released, expanded in 2017, and that was
like another 200 pages of work. Awesome, awesome.
Well, I, like I said at the very beginning, have loved all the
work you've done. I think you're a wealth of
knowledge. It's had a profound impact on,
you know, how I consume things, especially as it pertains to our
pregnancy. And I just can't thank you
enough for for fighting the good fight, putting out this
information and making it easily accessible to people that that
need to hear it and that would benefit from it.
Well, thank you Robert. I struggle to make it easily
accessible because it is really complicated, but thank you for
working through this with me. No.
My pleasure. I feel like we can probably talk
for another two hours and still barely scratch the surface on
the complexity of sea doles, but this is great.
This is great. And, and where do people go to,
to get the book, to learn more about you, to follow along your
website, all that good stuff? Yeah, please visit my website
whichisdoctorkate.com and that's spelled DRCA te.com.
And when you go there, please scroll to the bottom and sign up
to my newsletter. That way if I do a different
project, a new project, you'll be updated.
I don't send out bombard you after the like the first three
just to get to know your emails. You get, you hear from me about
once a month unless something really exciting is happening.
And the other places you can follow me is on social media
where I my handle is Doctor Kate Shanahan.
And again, it's DRCATE Shanahan, which is my last name.
And that's on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and one more
LinkedIn. Beautiful, beautiful.
Well, I will most definitely link out to all those and make
it easy for people to find you. Doctor Kate Shanahan.
Again, I really appreciate the time.
I appreciate the work you're doing.
If there's ever anything I can do to help move the needle in
any way, just let me know. Oh, I appreciate that so much.
Thank you, Robert. You bet.
Take care. Thanks.