The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #300 -  Cate Shanahan, MD

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Cate Shanahan, MD
I recognize that the chemistry of these fatty acids could be very dangerous. There are eight bad oils, corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower, rice bran and grape seed.

Only the refined oils have these high smoke points, right? It is a selling point for busy restaurants so that they can cook everything on extremely high heat and just throw stuff into a deep fryer without worrying about it boiling over.

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying here in.

So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this. Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. Friends, we have a legend on the show today. You've probably heard about the dangers of seed oils. If you have, that is because of the incredible Dr. Kate Shanahan. And in her newest book, Dark Calories, you will learn and understand more about why these certain types of oils can be potentially so bad for our bodies. In today's show, we talk about how vegetable oils destroy your health, what the hateful eight are, the concept of inflammatory body fat, whether or not you should do PUFA depletion, the role of vitamin E supplementation, the four pillars of nutrition, and so much more.

I cannot wait to hear what you guys think. These show notes for today's episode will be at Melanie Avalon.com slash dark calories. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about. So definitely check that out. There will be two episode giveaways for this episode. One will be in my Facebook group. I have biohackers, intermittent fasting plus the real foods plus life. Comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love. And then check out my Instagram, find the Friday announcement post. And again, comment there to enter to win something that I love. All right. I think that's all the things. Without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous conversation with Dr. Kate Shanahan. Hi friends. Welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I'm about to have. It is with a repeat guest. That's how you know it's somebody that I absolutely adore and love. And it's about a topic that, man, it's, it's been a hot topic for a while. We actually talked about it last time. This wonderful guest is on the show. It's even more of a hot topic now and it's also something I've been interested in for, now that I think about it, probably over a decade. So I am here with Dr. Kate Shanahan. The backstory on this is I actually first read her book, Deep Nutrition, when that came out, which was, when did that book come out? Deep Nutrition?

Cate Shanahan, MD
Well the original was two thousand and eight and then the republished version was expanded and so much for your cover was twenty seventeen.

Melanie Avalon
Okay. It would have been that version that I read because it wasn't 2008 because I know, yeah, I wasn't into this stuff yet. But I read Deep Nutrition and it absolutely blew my mind. It's really appropriate that the word deep is in the title because it was the deepest dive ever into what is the most appropriate diet for us nutritionally and ancestrally and all the things.

And then since then, Dr. Shanahan has released quite a few books. I had her on in 2020. We were which was equally mind blowing and really started to dive deep into the role of seed oils in our diet and how things like polyunsaturated fatty acids actually affect our mitochondria and how and why people can't seem to burn fat and how to fix that, the fat burn fix. And her newest book is called Dark Calories, how vegetable oils destroy our health and how we get back. And it dives even deeper into this concept. And I know, okay, so a few quick thoughts. One, I know seed oils are largely thanks to Dr. Shanahan's work. People are becoming more and more aware of the potential issues there. And a lot of people will do seed oil free diets now. And they're very wary. I still think there's a lot of education that can happen there. And reading this book really explains why there are all these problems with seed oils and also how we got there as in the history and the drama behind all of that.

And then for me personally, I actually started doing a, it's called like a PUFA depletion diet. I started actively avoiding PUFAs and my diet with the exception of omega-3s, which we can maybe talk about probably around 2014. So I've been personally implementing this for over a decade as well.

So I loved this newest book. I have so many questions. Dr. Shanahan, thank you so much for being here.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Thank you Melanie Avalon for inviting me back on and saying all those nice things about dark calories. One thing that I just want to get you and your guests excited about is I recently realized that I should just call myself the mother of the no seed oil movement because I don't know who is better for that title. And I have been nurturing this baby since 2002. So I guess I feel like I am the mother of this now.

Huge and exciting. It's getting exciting because it's in the White House now.

Melanie Avalon
That's insane. Like legally and politically, what's happening with it now?

Cate Shanahan, MD
Our president trump he's working with Rfk who is robert f kennedy jr.

You know the son of the deceased president and rfk is former environmental lawyer who's very interested in Health he's always been interested in health just started out in the environment and then he's shifted to human health And he had been you know concerned about contaminants in vaccines but now he's concerned about seed oils in the food supply as one of the worst drivers of our metabolic and chronic disease epidemic and he is correct, you know And so he's working with people who have read my books with people who have you know been influenced by What i've been saying about these oils for 20 something years and so it's just it's very exciting and hopefully i'll get to meet the folks in the white house Personally well, actually I already did I I already met rfk at a luncheon But I mean, hopefully i'll get to work with him in a more official type capacity Where you know, we can really really get this message out and actually Make policies that are going to help solve the problem for real this time

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, this is so exciting. In December, I got to interview Del Bigtree, who leads the Make America Healthy, the Maha Alliance. It was really exciting to feel the genuineness behind this movement, if that makes sense, because I know things become so politicized and people have a lot of opinions, which I respect, everybody can have their own opinions. And all of that said, it's hard for me to understand how people can't see all the good that is coming from this movement to radically change the health of America.

Like, it's so exciting. And there's so much, like I just said, so much genuine passion and understanding. Like, it doesn't feel political. It feels very real. Like, we're trying to make changes.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Yeah, I mean the people who are leading it are activists, you know, they're not heavily into selling things, you know, like, yeah, sure, they got to make a living and they do sell some things unlike me, you know, I sell books, you don't really make a living selling books. I'll tell you that warning, fair warning.

But yeah, so like, these are genuine people, they're not like slicksters, or, you know, they're not, they're not like owning multimillion dollar companies, they're not out there, you don't see their faces on YouTube ads saying, you know, just drink this, you know, lemon peel, and it's going to magically cure your pink, your prostate or whatever. Like, these are not those people. And I understand that there is a natural suspicion of those people who are kind of like, seemingly into natural things, but it's really they're also selling a bunch of stuff. But these are not those people. These are people who are passionate and who have sacrificed and, you know, and including RFK himself. And so that's why I agree with you. This is like that we are at a moment in history, where for the first time, we may be able to correct the wrongs that were imposed upon us. Once upon a time in 1948, which is a very important pivotal time that we'll probably get to talk about it, because it's kind of the centerpiece of my latest book, Dark Calories. It's a historical nutritional thriller.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, I love that. Yeah, no, I cannot agree more. And I know it can seem like a big change to make. For example, if we were to actually make policies surrounding vegetable oils, but it's been done before like with trans fats, which interestingly, you point out in the book, having the trans fat ban actually had the negative effect of increasing vegetable oil consumption. So that's a little bit ironic.

But bringing everything back, because I have, so like we've been saying, this awareness is clearly growing. People are suspicious of seed oils. People are actively avoiding seed oils in their diet. But there's actual science behind all of this and history. And I have so many questions. So I know we talked about this a little bit last time. But like you said, you are the mother of all of this. When did you have this epiphany or realization about the problem with seed oils and vegetable oils?

Cate Shanahan, MD
So back in 2002, I was struggling with a health condition and nothing helped. So I was desperate enough to consider listening to my husband who had long told me that my diet wasn't very healthy.

I ate a lot of sugar. He gave me a book called Spontaneous Healing by a guru of, well, the supplement industry named Andrew Weil. But Andrew Weil talked about essential fatty acids and in vegetable oils. And I had been a chemist. And I recognized that the chemistry of these fatty acids could be very dangerous. Andrew Weil was saying, well, we need some of them. And I honestly don't remember what else he was saying about it. But that was the first time I started thinking about their chemistry.

And the only reason I thought that was because before I had gone to medical school, so back in the 80s, I wanted to be a genetic engineer designing bacteria that could digest plastic.

Melanie Avalon
I was just gonna ask you about that, actually. I was like, that is so cool.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Yeah, because at that point in time, we did not have the plastic problem that we do right now. The big thing was, get this, it was disposable baby diapers building up in landfills, like that is such like a fraction of the degree of the problem that we currently have.

Wow. Yeah. So anyway, it was a problem then plastic and I wanted to solve it. And the reason it's connected to vegetable oils is because plastic is a polymer, meaning it's a huge molecule that's made out of little molecules that form in a chain reaction. So what am I talking about? So if you have ever like used epoxy glue or put polyurethane on furniture, this is a liquid that is separated molecules that connects together and harden as they dry due to a process that has a lot to do with vegetable oils called oxidation. So I had learned about the reaction between certain compounds and oxygen before I went to medical school. And when I looked at the chemistry of these essential fatty acids, after reading that book, I was like, what are these things? I wanna know more about this. This seems, I learned a little bit, but it seems kind of important because I realized that we were eating a lot of these vegetable oils and a lot of these potentially polymerizing fats in our diet. And so that's where I started getting really interested because it was fascinating. Could we be eating fats that can polymerize our cell membranes? What else could they do? And the answer I found was good God, yes, we are and yes, they can and they can do even worse than that and that is what's killing us.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, this is so crazy. And so the potential of these different fats to oxidize in our bodies, do all fats do that? To what extent?

And then if it's just these polyunsaturated fatty acids, does it matter if they're in whole foods form versus a processed form?

Cate Shanahan, MD
So let's answer that by talking about exactly what are the problematic oils because we have to understand that before we can go any further with our understanding of what these things are doing to us. I used to use the word vegetable oil. I no longer use that. It's not precise enough.

I realized that we need to be exactly clear on which oils we're talking about and I created this term called the hateful eight. The hateful eight because there are eight bad oils and I'm going to list them out for you and then I'm going to tell you how I picked these eight because that is the key to understand.

So from there we can start to understand what they do to our bodies. So the eight are corn, canola, cotton seed, soy, sunflower, safflower, rice bran, and grape seed. So I didn't list sesame and I didn't list peanut. A lot of people think you have to avoid those. I would disagree if we're talking about, there's a caveat, if we're talking about unrefined peanut oil and unrefined sesame oil, those are part of a healthy diet. Now we can get into later like, okay, but what about the total poof of content and all that sort of stuff? That's something to talk about later. First, let's understand why I picked those out and it has to do with the fact that other than possibly sunflower oil, none of the eight are historical food, like are historical oils, right? None of the eight oil seeds, the corn, canola, cotton seeds, soy, sunflower, safflower, rice bran, and grape seeds, none of those eight, some of them we might have eaten as the seed, right? We ate soy and we ate sunflower, but we didn't eat the oils to any degree until the industrial era.

Why is that? Well, that's because you can't easily extract an edible oil from these things. You need machinery and generally you need dangerously high heat. And often they use solvents to make it more efficient. And of course, the solvents are hexane, which are toxic. But the hexane and the added things are not the problem. That's not the source of the toxin. So what happens is that in the factory, because of the heat and because of the other things that are removed from the oil, that are not removed from virgin olive oil or virgin peanut oil, what you get is a naked triglycerides. Naked triglycerides. You're not getting a real oil. So human beings have never consumed naked triglycerides. Triglycerides are just the fat.

What other things does olive oil have and traditional fats have other than triglycerides? Very important things that prevent oxidation. That's what we call them. They've got a bunch of names. Some of them are just called antioxidants. We call them also phytonutrients, phytosterols related to cholesterol molecules, lecithins, phospholipids, cholines, vitamins. All of those things, even minerals, all of those things with the possible exception of minerals help to stabilize and protect the triglyceride fat from being oxidized, okay? But all of that's gone in these hateful eight.

Cate Shanahan, MD
That is not the case for olive oil. It's not the case for unrefined peanut oil. It's not the case for unrefined sesame oil, right? All of those unrefined virgin oils that are edible have these protective factors that slow down oxidation to the extent that the oil will last a year before you get significant, or more even, before you get significant amounts of problematic amounts of deterioration of those triglyceride fats.

And this has to do with the polyunsaturates, right? So polyunsaturates is probably a term that your audience is familiar with. So those polyunsaturates, they oxidize easily, right? They react with oxygen easily. That's the source of the toxin in the hateful eight seed oils. When the polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are fragile, they basically break when they react with oxygen and they break into, it's kind of like breaking a glass. That's the analogy I make. Like a glass that you drink water from is useful, but it's fragile. The polyunsaturates in canola oil, corn oil, et cetera, are useful to our bodies when consumed in reasonable amounts, but they're fragile. And when you, it's like smashing a glass, like oxygen does to them what a hammer does to a glass. It creates shards that are no longer useful and actually quite dangerous. You don't want to be walking on broken glass. You don't want to be eating those broken molecules. You don't want them in your food, right? So it doesn't occur in oils like olive because of several reasons that have to do with the breeding, thousands and thousands of years of careful breeding so that we created oils. I mean, we created olive fruit that yielded its oil without high heat, plus the olive oil itself has fewer polyunsaturated, fewer of those fragile polyunsaturated fatty acids. It's less prone to oxidizing into toxins.

And then it has all those stabilizing factors. So it's not in any way familiar or similar to canola oil, but the dieticians and nutritionists say, well, if you can't afford olive oil, just buy canola. That is wrong. That is nutritionally inaccurate. And it's absurd that the dieticians and nutritionists are not educated properly. And it's absurd that they aren't curious. To dig down a little bit deeper into why is Dr. Kate saying this about oxidation? What is all this business about oxidation? They're not doing it. That makes them irresponsible.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, I have so many questions here. One quick question.

You're talking about, you know, the only oils from that list that we would have been eating historically was what you said sunflower or safflower, which one sunflower, sunflower, what about I actually haven't aired it yet, but I recently did an article an episode on therapeutic supplemental seed oils. So things like amaranth, black cumin, milk thistle, what about those sort of seed oils?

Cate Shanahan, MD
Well, it depends if they are refined, bleached, and deodorized, and a lot of times they are, and I would definitely steer clear. I'm sorry to say, you know, this is why I can't get rich selling supplements.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, these are all like cold pressed. It was with a company that is making them for very therapeutic health reasons.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Yeah, so if they're cold pressed then they can have some nutritional value and you're not going to be cooking with them So even if they are high in polyunsaturates and so on It doesn't matter that much now I would have to ask though like why do we need to supplement when we're already getting so many polyunsaturated fatty acids in our diet? What what is the magical thing in here that is missing from our diet that we can't get from actual food, right?

Maybe we're not better off getting it from actual food like black cumin seed comes from like cumin which is a spice why not just eat the spice like I just I kind of like don't love that way of Processing what would otherwise be a delicious edible food into a capsule That's not delicious

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I honestly am. I'm really haunted by this.

And this is what I was asking them. They were providing them in like dark glass bottles like as an oil and saying that the therapeutic benefits are, you know, get really concentrated in the oil form and that civilizations have been using these oils for, I don't know how long

Cate Shanahan, MD
Not long, I guarantee that like no civilization was using teeny tiny seeds unless they tasted really good like sesame so you know maybe cumin seed tastes pretty good and we might have been using that and I just. I happen haven't looked into it, but what I did look into one particular brand and it was refined bleached and deodorized so not all of these are equally quality.

Melanie Avalon
Okay. Yeah. This is so interesting to me.

And I actually would like to talk about, you mentioned that the peanut and the two that we, that you include that people are suspicious about was, was peanut and what was the other one? Sesame. Sesame. Yes. It's not on the chart that I'm looking at right now. So like I'm looking at a chart where it talks about the breakdown of the different, you know, fatty acids and canola oil seems to be a lot of oleic actually, oleic acid. And then peanut oil has, you know, more, and you mentioned this, like more poofa than some of those other oils. So is it really the processing that's the issue here?

Cate Shanahan, MD
So two things about canola oil. Canola oil can be manipulated so that that oleic level is higher or lower. And so to put a chart up and show canola oil has a lot of oleic as if that represents all the bottles of canola oil that are in the food supply is misleading, right? So there's quite the variation of oleic acid in canola oil and it's going to vary depending on where it was grown and what seed was, what seed plant was bred for. So that's one just huge caveat because you can easily mislead people with charts like that but then you're still feeding people the canola oil that's very much higher in these unstable fatty acids, oleic acid being relatively stable.

So that's one big caveat. The other one is to answer your question directly. Is it really the refining? Well, yes, absolutely because what the refining does is it removes the things that were in the seed that were stabilizing the seed and that's bad. You can't do that and tell people you've got anything in there that's healthy. What is in there that's healthy? I seriously am asking. It's only triglyceride. There is no phospholipid, there's no phytosterols, there's almost no vitamins, there's no minerals anymore. Why would that be nutritious? It's empty calories. The only thing it offers that's relatively rare in the food supply is a type of omega-3 fatty acid called linolenic, alpha linolenic acid. But you can get that from so many other foods, you definitely do not need to eat canola oil to get it. So that's the one selling point is, yeah, it's got some omega-3 fatty acid but that doesn't make it a nutritious oil by any stretch of the imagination and the nutritionists that claim that it does, again, wildly ignorant.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, and for listeners for terminology, so linoleic acid is the omega-6 PUFA, alpha linolenic acid is the omega-3 polyunsaturated fat PUFA, and then oleic is the monounsaturated fat. If we take these oils in there, just to clarify, if we take them in their unrefined form, like an olive oil, for example, which does have some PUFA, even though it's highly oleic, or that peanut oil that you mentioned, do those oxidize in our bodies?

Like, if you just Google and look for studies where it's talking about comparing saturated fat to polyunsaturated fat in diet, it's really confusing because, like, the majority that come up seem to show that, you know, choosing PUFA over saturated fat or replacing one or the other, or if it's like a overeating situation and they add extra calories in either saturated or PUFA, seems to show that, like, PUFA is better for insulin resistance and diabetes, and even maybe weight loss, and so what's happening there? Like, why is that happening?

Cate Shanahan, MD
it's bad studies just what there's many many bad studies i have been reading so many bad studies it's sickening so one of one of the things they do is they just lie and one of the things they often lie about is that when they're doing observational studies meaning they're not like randomized they're not controlling what people are doing or even when they are doing observational controlling what people are doing in their diets they don't control for cigarette smoking and so if you have one group of people who's smoking like chimneys and you give them one diet and then you have another group of people who doesn't smoke at all or who smokes quite a bit less and you give them a different diet and you do a very short-term study looking to see some biomarker outcome rather than a real hard outcome like developing cancer which would take many thousands of people and many years so you cannot do that kind of study you have to save money do biomarker studies those are probably the bulk of the kinds of studies that you see i mean that is the bulk of the studies that you see they're biomarkers so they're saying well like it's supposedly improving insulin resistance stuff like that which is not a hard outcome it's not like death or have a tumor in the brain or you know something that you can't argue about so the the studies will if you're looking at people who are doing other unhealthy things like they don't exercise or they don't smoke or they don't sleep or what you know any of that sort of thing and then you give them saturated fat for a 12-week study compared to people who never smoked and who do have better lifestyles but you give them seed oils for 12 weeks you're not going to see much of a difference in 12 weeks okay of whatever the whatever important outcome it is so that's that's i give you an exaggerated example but a less exaggerated example i see this over and over again is that is smoking where there's a vast difference in the amount of smoking going on between one group and another and that is not properly called out as a flaw in the study why does smoking matter smoking promotes oxidation and we've been talking about these oils are bad for us because they oxidize right so smoking promotes cancer and bone loss and heart attacks and strokes because it promotes oxidation and it's so important to understand oxidation that i you know i wrote an entire chapter in dark calories about it's chapter two called the all you can eat buffet of chronic disease because when you have a diet that promotes oxidation that diet is an all you can eat buffet of chronic disease because oxidation is the root cause of all of these diseases all of them i'm talking about diabetes autism things we don't even think of are related to diet including obc including insulin resistance right so and then so i can i mean i could go on and on because all of these studies have flaws and there are multiple different types of flaws it's not just that one another huge flaw and one that occurred that made it made it look like seed oils reduce insulin resistance or at least they don't cause insulin resistance was the flaw of not understanding the baseline diet and so they took people who were eating a lot of seed oils they gave them two diets one they called a high seed oil or high linoleic acid diet high poofa diet and a low poofa diet and both of them improved their biomarkers of inflammation and oxidative stress so they were able to say but it wasn't clear that they were comparing to the baseline diet you see and it was totally not even mentioned that the baseline diet had you know was the standard american diet right and had more poly and saturates than either of the little bit too abstract to be talking about without like models and stuff to be looking at and point but the point i'm making i'm hoping i'm making it clear is that i have examined these studies that suppose that claim to support the idea that it's okay to eat these seed oils or even healthier to eat these seed oils and all of them that i have looked at have serious serious flaws like what i just mentioned

Melanie Avalon
Well, it was interesting, the smoking part, I realized this is not what you were saying with these studies, but in the book you talk about, you know, the history of the support of all of this and the AHA, how they kind of just for a long time just ignored the role of smoking and heart disease in order to demonize, you know, other things, cholesterol, saturated fat and such.

So because you mentioned that these, if again, if we have these oils in a healthier form like olive oil and things like that, that they come with these antioxidant potential that, you know, protects them from oxidation. Do the antioxidants kind of just cancel out? Antioxidants found within those oils get quote, used up protecting the oxidation of themselves or do they extend an added benefit beyond that? I guess like my question is, do the antioxidants in these oils that do exist, do they get used up once there's an oxidation that occurs?

Cate Shanahan, MD
They can be, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the chemistry would predict that they can be, right?

Now we're entering into the realm of, what does Dr. Kate think about the chemistry? Because you can't, like these studies are, no one's really tested this, right? Like you would have to test every single individual type of oil in multiple different cooking scenarios, and then at multiple different points between your plate and wherever that fatty acid ends up in your body, right? Like in your bloodstream, in your digestive system, and maybe it's gonna go through your liver for a little while, you see what I mean? We're talking about what's happening to, you're really asking, is a linoleic acid or an alpha-linolenic acid, are these PUFAs protected by the antioxidants in, say, olives, right? I mean, it applies to food as well as to the oil, and the answer is that it is protected, that Dr. Kate believes, you know, because like I say, we only have studies outside the body. And outside the body, it's pretty clear that they do protect the oil, up to a point. You can abuse any oil and the antioxidant. The way these antioxidants work is that they are taking the hit, so you run out of them. In other words, like they react with oxygen before the oil, right, but when that happens, now you don't have an antioxidant there anymore.

Melanie Avalon
What happens when it takes a hit? Is it just an inert substance now?

Cate Shanahan, MD
Yeah, it's usually something that the body is not toxic, but the body has to eliminate it so it won't have a lot of benefits to our health anymore.

Melanie Avalon
No, I'm literally haunted by this. I was reading your book and I was like, well, I wonder if when the oil gets to like the part of our bodies without oxygen, then is it not a problem anymore, like in our colon?

Cate Shanahan, MD
Well, right. Yeah. So all parts of our living body have oxygen, right? Like even the colon, there's oxygen in those cells. The cells have a blood supply. They use oxygen. They have mitochondria. They need oxygen to function.

So our cells all have oxygen. Now, there are deep parts within the poop layer that don't have oxygen. So we have what's called anaerobic bacteria in there. But yeah, so only in there would it would it be safe.

Melanie Avalon
And so literally as I was thinking about that, I was like, what about the anaerobic bacteria? What about this is really, I think this might be surprising people.

What is the role of smoke point with these oils? How is it possibly a little bit misleading how we think a high smoke point makes it safer?

Cate Shanahan, MD
Right. So only the refined oils have these high smoke points, right? It is a selling point for busy restaurants so that they can cook everything on extremely high heat and just throw stuff into a deep fryer without worrying about it boiling over.

It has zero bearing on human health because the smoke point is only related to whether or not there's free fatty acids in there and free fatty acids have a lower ignition temperature than triglyceride fats. It's just a byproduct of the processing that you remove these things that will smoke. That does not make the oil healthier. And in fact, if you have an olive oil that you're smoking, you know, you turned up the temperature and it's smoking, that's warning you that you might be damaging the non-free fatty acids. You might be oxidizing the oil itself. So it's important to have the things that will smoke in your oil. And by the way, olive oil, you know, quality really influences the smoke point. A good quality olive oil might have a high smoke point because it has so many antioxidants that even protect the easily ignitable free fatty acids. Like a good quality olive oil might have a smoke point of 425. Canola smoke point, I don't think is that even that high.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. Okay.

Another question about these oils. So I mentioned earlier that I've been consciously trying to do a quote, poof a depletion diet for like a decade. How do these oils when we take them in and burn them for energy, what actually happens with them getting burned for energy? Do they, you know, produce energy? And then when they're stored in the body fat, how does it change? How does it change our body fat? And how long does that take?

Cate Shanahan, MD
So those are two related questions. Let's start with somebody, the imaginary person, who has never eaten seed oils, and now they're going to sit down to non-oxidized salad dressing, lots of poofas in there.

Can those poofas fuel their mitochondria for energy? Can somebody's healthy, and they have a lot of normal antioxidant protection systems in their mitochondria. So the mitochondria is where we burn things, right? That's why we breathe, because mitochondria use the oxygen that we breathe in. They use it. They have the technology to use oxygen to break bonds and capture energy from those bonds. It's incredible technology in mitochondria. So a healthy mitochondria can handle some poofa, because even though it's highly easily oxidizable, if any were to get oxidized accidentally, instead of starting a huge, big chain reaction of damage with plenty of antioxidants in a healthy mitochondria and a healthy cell, it's a teeny tiny chain reaction, if any. Maybe there's no damage. Maybe it just generates energy normally.

Melanie Avalon
So that is possible.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Yes, but you have to be metabolically, incredibly healthy, and you cannot – this gets to the second question – you cannot have high poof of body fat.

Melanie Avalon
What happens when you have high PUFA body fat and why does that affect the mitochondria's ability to handle things now?

Cate Shanahan, MD
Let's talk about how you get that high proof of body fat So these days when 80% of the fat calories in our food supply come from the hateful 8 we're getting Somewhere around, you know 10 15 20 percent of our total calories from The poly and saturates that is historically Novel for humans. I mean it probably is There might be other populations that ate a ton of fish and it wasn't an issue for them for complicated reasons But it's this this is something that you know We don't want to do when we're eating these oils from the hateful 8 not from whole foods because they don't have the necessary antioxidants and they do contain toxins and What does that do?

Well as as we have, you know, 10% body fat we mean, you know up from five Historical might be 2% might be 3% might be 5% maybe Eskimos had, you know, higher percentages of poly and saturates in their body fat We don't know anything about Eskimos, you know, there's a lot of questions in this field But let's let's say that as you go from 5% to 10% that's getting out of the realm of healthy well, you are also depleting your vitamin E as you do that because those unstable poly and saturates are just going to be knocked off by oxygen and just going to require taking out a molecule of vitamin E Right now it's a little more complicated than that because the vitamin E can restore itself But the idea is that antioxidants get depleted and that is shown in numerous studies that if you eat more of these seed oils the more you eat the less vitamin E you have in your system and actually the more you need to eat in order to Keep even the vitamin E level normal in your bloodstream. That's how much it depletes, right?

This is even this is so non-controversial that it is built into the recommended daily allowance of vitamin E Which was based on having a certain amount of corn oil in the diet, right? It was known in the 50s and 60s that if there was no corn oil in the diet People only needed it about like two or four milligrams of vitamin E a day But when their diets contained poly and cetrus the very smart people working back then we're like well That's gonna burn up our vitamin E. How much do we need so they did studies and it that's how we got our vitamin E Set at something like I think it's like I can't remember. I think it's like 12 milligrams, so it's significantly higher because of the corn oil in our diet.

That's how non-controversial This is and again how ignorant the dietitians and nutritionists are when they're saying now these things are perfectly safe There's no evidence that they're unhealthy

Melanie Avalon
This is fascinating. Some more questions from what you just said.

So the vitamin E piece, I have two questions there. One is what is the role of supplemental vitamin E? And in particular, another episode I did this week was with somebody who specializes in genetics. My genetic test showed that I would not benefit, like that I should not take vitamin E supplements. What is the role of vitamin E supplements? And then I have a question about genetics, but yeah, vitamin E.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Yeah, so you don't need it if your diet has very little poofa, you don't probably don't need to supplement But you know probably doesn't hurt to supplement. I actually do take wheat germ oil Every other day or so just to supplement and that's because I feel like because we cook our food now You know, even whatever historically we did we obviously didn't supplement vitamin e historically Even though I try to follow a fairly ancestral diet A lot of it's cooked and reheated and every time you do that you are Oxidizing it and reducing its nutritional value and increasing Basically your need for vitamin e among other things when you do that So I supplement and that's I chose vitamin e because I spoke to the world's leading expert in Vitamin e supplementation and she says all of this stuff about tocotrienols and everything like that is nonsense Tocotrienols have to be eliminated by the body.

They can't help us. They do nothing beneficial So the form of vitamin e that we need to supplement with is alpha tocopherols And she is the world's leading expert respected by other like experts in nutrition PhDs, you know the kind of people who? Create guide who do studies that like are rock solid not biased basic studies that define Research for the next 40 years, right? So like this woman's name is maret trebor and she is out of oregon. I believe it's corvallis Yeah, so she says tocotrienols, which are all the rage. There was a bunch of people going around promoting them She says they serve no value on the body and they must be eliminated And I bring this up to tell you to warn your listeners that everybody is selling something if they have something to sell They're selling it, you know, even me i'm selling my books.

Although I hardly hardly make any money from selling books It really sucks because they don't unlike supplements you sell a subscription for supplements, right? Okay. Are you going to keep buying my book every month? That's why it's like much more lucrative to sell supplements and that's why the field is much more corrupt

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating about the vitamin E. I'm going to have to look deeper into why my genetic results said that about, you know, actively not supplementing.

Cate Shanahan, MD
And by the way, the genetic stuff is one of those things. It's not ready for prime time. We have no outcomes data. They're just theorizing. And they're just theorizing so that they can try to sell you a supplement often. But certainly, they want to sell you a test and pretend they've got some answer and give you something to be busy about.

But those genetic tests are interesting. They're just really fascinating. But just because you have some gene doesn't mean you have a disease and certainly doesn't mean you need to do anything about it. These are called variants. And they're calling variants mutations. And that is not scientifically correct. That is misinformation.

Melanie Avalon
Now that's one of the things that'll often recommend with the different platforms, it'll recommend whether or not you may be more suited to like a higher PUFA or a higher saturated fat diet. What do you think genetically is going on there?

Like it's causation correlation, like why would genetically somebody seemingly be better with a higher PUFA diet?

Cate Shanahan, MD
Yeah, that's a good question. I would suppose if their ancestors, I don't know that they would be better off with it, but they might be able to tolerate it better, right? Like they might have upregulated more their bodies, their DNA might upregulate more of the antioxidant enzymes, which are really the front line, more so than either even vitamin E, it's a series of enzymes that capture free radicals. So they may be more able to tolerate it.

But I wouldn't say that there's any reason to think anybody actually needs it.

Melanie Avalon
Okay. And I wanted to clarify because you were talking about how you take the vitamin E because, you know, you are still like heating, reheating food.

So is the concern there oxidizing whatever minute amount of PUFA or maybe more than minute, but whatever amount of PUFA is naturally in that food or are you concerned about does heating also have concerning effects on monounsaturated fats and saturated fats in food?

Cate Shanahan, MD
heat destroys nutrition of all kinds, right? So it's not just the fats, it also affects the proteins as well. So it can change the proteins and then the proteins may attack the polyunsaturated fatty acids. It's just, you know, more of a stress, the more that we cook our food, the more we lose nutrition and develop toxins in it.

So it's just kind of a CYA. Plus, I, you know, I, I mean, maybe I don't really even need it because my diet is very low PUFA or reasonably low PUFA compared to the probably average Americans. But so you know, what my RDA, I might be able to meet it. But when I look, so my RDA is probably lower. In other words, like I maybe only need like six milligrams a day, whereas the average person might need eight or 12 or something like that. But when I add up how much I was actually getting, I was struggling to get even four milligrams per day. So you know, it's one of those things that's just not really in our food supply. And it's made me question like, where did we used to get it? And the it's the answer I came up with was we used to eat nervous tissue. Nervous tissue is the best source. And you know, so if we don't eat brain, right? We don't eat spinal cord, but our ancestors, they ate absolutely every last little thing. It was all finger licking good to them.

Melanie Avalon
It's so funny. Whenever I get like a full fish at a restaurant, when they'll cook like the full fish, I get excited. I'm like, oh, I get to actually try these random parts, like the fish brain and stuff. It's interesting how in our brains or in our culture and society, we decide certain parts of animals are like good to eat and not gross and other parts are gross. Like, I don't know, like why do we make that distinction? It's a rhetorical question.

Well, I actually have an answer.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Oh, okay, I'm excited. It's called Game Theory. I mean, this is my theory, but it's based on a comment I can't remember her name. She traveled throughout Africa and spoke to a lot of tribes and made this fascinating comment. She said that, she was talking to primary cultures who basically really are doing more or less almost exactly what people could have done there a hundred years ago or so, diet-wise. And so their beliefs in one tribe would be, we can't eat alligators because our ancestors live in alligators. Then you go to the next tribe and they say, we can't eat monkeys or chinchillas or whatever because our ancestors live in chinchillas. But we eat alligators. Now, why would that help people? Because it's Game Theory, right? Now you have two groups of people who need to eat, but you don't have them fighting over the same food source. So that's just my Game Theory.

Her comment just was so fascinating about that. I was like, why would that be? Well, actually then I saw birds do the same thing. They've got those, Darwin famously talked about the different beak shapes guide birds to specific foods or specific nuts and flowers and so on. But that's Game Theory too. That's so that the birds aren't busy expending their resources battling each other over the same food. They're just naturally driven to eat different foods. You see? Yeah, isn't that cool?

Melanie Avalon
I wonder how much that infiltrates the subconscious. I'm very fascinated by this because, like, I have cleaned up, cleaned up, I don't know.

I eat a very whole foods, unprocessed diet. I love meat and seafood with the brain example. Like when I had a fish at a restaurant last year and it had the brain in it. I don't think I've eaten, consciously eaten brain before, but I was like, I'm going to eat the brain. I'm sure it'll taste great. And it did taste great. But I've also had experiences where it's a food that, it seems like it should be highly nutritious. So I should like it. And I don't understand why I don't. So, like, when I was severely anemic, I was like, I'm going to have some liver. And I bought some liver. And I was like, this should taste really good because it should. It's what I need. And it tasted horrible. Or then, like, a few months ago, I decided to have oysters for the third time I tried. And I was like, this should be so nutritious. I should like the taste of this. And it tasted repulsive to me. And I don't understand why. Like, I'm like, is this subconscious? Like, why would this not taste good?

Cate Shanahan, MD
Well, one reason is just because some of our food totally is crap, like oysters, you know, from certain...

Melanie Avalon
This was like a Michelin guide restaurant, so it was probably like.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Oh, not from like a contaminated area. I don't even like, you know, some seafood anymore because to me it tastes like sewage now. I mean, there's so much.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I was like, it tastes like everything bad in the ocean and like a bite does not taste good.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Well, and that makes sense because oysters are filter feeders, right? So they are living on garbage. Now, the more garbage is in our ocean, the more yucky they're going to taste even at the best restaurants.

And I eat it plain, like nothing on it. Oh, yeah. So that's part. That's one of the answers. But the other thing is that taste is actually an acquired, you know the term acquired taste. Well, we learn, right? Our brain has to learn what is this thing? Like, is it good for me or bad for me? And if you've never had anything before, if you've never had anything like it before, your brain might be naturally suspicious, right? So like, I remember back many years ago when I shifted from whole milk or 2% milk to skim milk, because that's supposed to be healthy. And at first, it was gross. It was watery and disgusting. Then I got used to it. And then I went back to the whole milk, and it tasted like just too much. So no, right? And then, you know, of course, you get used to that too. And then you like it. So we as humans are as omnivores, really, I mean, our taste isn't all that well developed. It doesn't guide us the way I think other creatures do to the exact foods that they need. We depend on culture. We depend on our parents and our family and our, when we used to live in village, members of our village to tell us what we're supposed to eat. And we are supposed to eat that, you know, throughout our lives. And we grow up eating it, and we eat it in these new foods are often introduced in a setting of joy and love. And that matters because your state of mind when you first try a food like the people who try to help children with autism become more diverse in their diets. They know this they are leading the research on this and they say like the state of mind that a child is in when they first try a food affects whether or not they're going to like it.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, that's why Funfetti birthday cake forever has power over me, I guess. So, because you mentioned earlier how if a person has not been eating all these poofas, hateful late their whole life and, you know, they have a little bit, maybe they're okay with burning it.

Another person might be eating a high, hateful late diet. They have highly poofa saturated, no pun intended. So, body fat high in polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are oxidizing. Is the body fat, if a person is not burning body fat, and you talk in the book about how it makes it hard to burn this body fat when it's high in poofa, if they're not burning it, is that body fat inert? Like, is it only when you try to burn it that it creates further oxidation? And if so, does that mean if you try to lose weight with high poofa that you create oxidative byproducts as you lose weight? Yes.

Cate Shanahan, MD
So let me tell you what I'm saying. Yes, too.

So it the poofa sitting in your body fat will slowly oxidize in fat tissue because there's some oxygen there and It will but it will way more rapidly oxidize in your bloodstream Because there's a lot more oxygen there and it will super duper badly oxidize in your mitochondria Because there's not ordinary oxygen. There's this high energy oxygen That's more likely to react with it So the the fact that our body fat is full of poofa is Bad for our body fat.

It's not inert It's why and I try to make the case for this that I show some evidence to support this theory It's why we have what's called inflammatory body fat or you know The kind of body fat that is crawling with white blood cells and that is associated with not producing the normal hormones Not being able to produce leptin normally not having the right kind of adipokines that help induce satiety When you have high poof of body fat and you have been eating seed oils and you're depleted of antioxidants Your body fat isn't diseased tissue I mean it behaves like it's diseased because in some people because it's crawling with white blood cells because your body thinks that there's an infection in there somewhere and It's got like Many many times the normal amount of white blood cells in some people 50% of the cells in their adipose fat is not just fat cells anymore But white blood cells which don't really belong there in that concentration

Melanie Avalon
Oh, wow. How long does it take those cells to turn over and change? So if I started 10 years ago cutting out all these oils, like how long does it take? Do you have any work left?

Cate Shanahan, MD
So, before I answer that, I just want to say that this subject area is so huge to really cover just what I've learned over the past 20 years would take several college or medical school courses. Okay. So, just I'm saying this not to say that we need to up a 500-hour podcast, although that would probably be fun, you know, the marathon, the Guinness Book World of Records for podcasting. But to say that, that is how behind the times medical science is. There's so much that dietitians, nutritionists, doctors do not learn. And I'm talking about doctors at top universities. I'm talking about people at Stanford and Harvard and Yale, people who are educating dietitians, people who are educating doctors, people who are creating guidelines for the government. They don't know what we've been talking about today. They are so clueless. They don't know probably anything that we have covered today. And if you have found this important, then that means they don't know some very, very important things.

And they're out there saying that I am a quack and that, you know, people who have read my books and are kind of repeating the message are just following a fad. That is wrong. And that's why I keep going on podcasts because, you know, please help me get that message out that the people leading the conversation, if they haven't read my books, they don't have a clue about some of the key things pertaining to nutrition science, the science that makes us healthy. And if they don't know anything about that, then they can't make us healthy and they're probably going to make us sick. OK, so now I'm going to answer your question.

Melanie Avalon
Oh no, I love it. It's amazing, I support.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Thank you. So how long do you have? Well, this is a fascinating question. Everybody wants to know how long am I gonna, you know, how long am I gonna have this toxic inflammatory horrible body fat?

And the thing is that there's two things at play here. One is that it's not just a matter of getting rid of these things. It's also a matter of fortifying your antioxidant system. And I talk about this, the entire back third of dark calories helps people understand that you're going to start improving your health in a fundamental way from day one, just like stopping adding the toxins in and starting to get more nutrients that help control oxidative stress, more things that support your body's ability to prevent oxidative stress, which I'm calling antioxidants in the antioxidant systems that include the things like vitamin E and enzymes that fight off free radicals. So that's going to help even if you even as you still have lots of high poof of body fat, that's going to help everywhere in your body that you're eating more nutritious food and you're no longer eating the toxins. So it takes the half life of a single fatty acid or in our body fat, it stays there for about a year and a half, right? So if we want to get rid of all of it, if we want to replace all of it, it takes about four half lives. So that's about like six years, right? But it's faster than that because these polyunsaturates are freed up to be burned faster than the saturates and the monounsaturates. So the answer is less than 10 years, almost for sure. Of course, this is considering that if you're not eating any seed oils, but probably more than a year or two. And I can tell you from personal experience where I started to feel like profoundly different and better was, you know, I started feeling better right away. I started craving sugar way less often. I started having better moods, but I feel like my brain changes. My brain kept improving. It's like my brain function has like dramatically improved where I have more like mental stamina and can handle irritating things like my crazy neighbor, not understanding that I'm obviously on a podcast and she doesn't care. It took about a year and a half before I really noticed some profound brain changes, but I continued noticing them for at least four years.

Melanie Avalon
Why did the polyunsaturated fatty acids get freed up to be burned quicker than saturated and monounsaturated?

Cate Shanahan, MD
That's just what the tests show, like it just happens to be that when the light paces, which are the enzymes that sit in our fat cells, that it's their job to snip off a fatty acid from storage and kick it out into the bloodstream so that it can get used and burned for energy. So these are enzymes that basically mobilize our body fat by snipping it out of the triglyceride that it's in one at a time.

The whole triglyceride doesn't go in there. Just one fatty acid of the three in the triglyceride at a time get kicked into the bloodstream. And there's a positional element to it. And it so happens that the body stores polyunsaturates in a certain position. And it so happens based on enzymes, right? And it also so happens that the enzymes that free fatty acids prefer a certain position. And it tends to be that that's more often polyunsaturates than mono or saturates. That's just the way that the biology looks to be.

Melanie Avalon
All right, yeah, this is fascinating. And I'm so glad personally, I definitely didn't realize the extent to the science behind it, but I'm really glad that I made that decision like a decade ago to not have these oils in my diet.

I would pay so much money to do like a biopsy of my body fat and see like the composition of it. Cause in the book at the beginning, you start talking about these like lipid scientists. I was like, I need to talk to a lipid scientist. I think I could talk to them for hours. It would be so much fun. I have so many questions for them.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you know what? A lot of them don't know this stuff. I found out that, you know, some of them, many of them don't know what the other guys are saying.

Like they're all in their little mini silos. Like one of them that I talked to was ridiculing the idea that polyunsaturates could oxidize in your bloodstream.

Melanie Avalon
Interesting, but we have data showing that.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Yeah, and he was totally unaware of that and he was like a hundred percent sure he said well if that happened We would spontaneously combust like that was his reasoning like it wasn't any data or reading or anything He was like it just can't happen because in my mind. This is how it would go down

Melanie Avalon
Wow, that's really funny. Oh my goodness, you must have so many stories.

Yeah, which speaking of I just have to thank you for all of the research you put into this and we didn't even touch on listeners. Get the book now. Kate goes into the crazy history of how we even started using these oils and you know the industry behind them and then all of the a lot of gaslighting with science and such with Ansel Keys and like we said the AHA and it's been a journey.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Yeah, it's really sad. But all of that is just to say that you have to be your own kind of expert. Really, it's a sad state of affairs.

But the average consumer, if they want to be healthy, they need to know more than their own doctor about nutrition. You need to be kind of a rebel, which segue, Melanie, here we go. All right. My next project is called Rebel Well, because it's a course. It's a course where I teach people the practical part of all this. What are you going to eat? What lab tests do you need to check? All that kind of stuff. And I call it Rebel Well because you do have to be a rebel if you want to be well in this day and age.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, I love that. Okay, so it's upcoming project or can people sign up now or what's the deal?

Cate Shanahan, MD
It's upcoming, but sign up to my newsletter. So go to my website, drkate.com, and you'll have a link somewhere for that. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon
Yes. Yeah. So we'll put that in the show notes for sure.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Thank you, and then sign up for my newsletter because when it's released, which will be soon, I'm doing like some pilots right now so that it can be like in the best tip-top shape when it's released. It'll be probably like around spring-ish that it's released. So, but sign up in the newsletter so you find out.

Melanie Avalon
Perfect, we'll put all of that in the show notes. I have one last random question.

You talk about how you evaluated 80 pre-industrial cuisines and came up with your four ancestral pillars that you've been talking about. I'm curious, was there like a fifth pillar? Like was there anything really surprising in any of them that you wanted to include or was it pretty obvious like the four things?

Cate Shanahan, MD
It was so starkly obvious that my husband, once we pointed them out, we would laugh because literally every episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations when he would go to the mama sita who was standing in the kitchen all day cooking, you would find those four pillars on that plate on the table at the end of the day.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. So those are eat fresh food from healthy soil, raw or gently cooked, preserve and enhance foods through fermentation and sprouting, exact nutrients that support healthy connective tissue, so like boiling bones and skin and joints, and then using every part of the animal, including organs and fat.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Shanahan. This has been amazing. I've been following your work for so long. You're doing so much incredible work. Was there anything else you wanted to listeners know about everything that you're doing?

Cate Shanahan, MD
Well, I would just say that if you do find this compelling and you want to educate your doctor, I would not be upset at all if you were to buy my book Dark Calories for your doctor and give it to him or her. Many people actually had done that.

People started telling me that they're spontaneously that they did that and that their doctor actually read it. Then I started getting emails from doctors saying, why haven't I heard of you before?

Melanie Avalon
Oh, that's amazing. Well, speaking up, very grateful for that.

And the last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just because I realize more and more each day how important mindset is. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Cate Shanahan, MD
Well, I guess I'm really grateful that I found my house where I found it because it is just stunningly beautiful here in terms of, Eva, I don't have to leave my house to feel like I am communing with nature.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, that's amazing. Okay. I love looking at like houses in nature and everything. Well, thank you so much. This has been so incredible.

I am so, so grateful for everything that you're doing. You're literally changing lives. Like you're saying, you're like the mother of this movement and it's having a profound effect on our health. So I can't wait for all your future endeavors. We'd love to have you back in the future and just thank you. You're the best.

Cate Shanahan, MD
Well, thank you so much Melanie. It's been so much fun talking to you. You're so knowledgeable. Those questions were great. Those were great

Melanie Avalon
questions. Thank you so much. You are the best. We'll talk soon.

Okay. Bye. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What, When, Why, as well as my supplement line, Avalon X. Please visit melanieavalon.com to learn more about today's guest and always feel free to contact me at contact at melanieavalon.com and always remember, you got this.