Dhru Purohit Show - This Is Why You Should Avoid Seed Oils with Jeff Nobbs

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

This episode is brought to you by WHOOP and Rupa Health. Vegetable oils are a hot topic in the wellness world. Some believe they’re a heart-healthy alternative to saturated fats, while others claim their impact is far worse for our overall health than we initially thought. If you’re confused about seed oils, this episode is for you. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Jeff Nobbs to discuss the top seed oils consumed today and why they are so problematic for cardiometabolic health. Jeff Nobbs is the cofounder and CEO of Zero Acre Farms, a food company replacing destructive vegetable oils with a healthier, more sustainable option. With over 15 years of experience in health and nutrition, Jeff has cofounded several start-ups to offer better-quality ingredients and nutrition-forward foods to people and communities, including the fast-casual restaurant chain Kitava. In this episode, Dhru and Jeff dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): -Why seed oils aren’t as good for us as we initially thought (0:32 / 0:32) -The impact of seed oils on the body (2:34 / 2:34) -How to test your omega-6 blood levels (10:38 / 8:08) -The history of seed oils and how they’ve become so pervasive (12:16 / 9:59) -Why trans fats were “banned” from commercial production (20:06 / 18:40) -Observational research and the argument for seed oils (30:01 / 27:07) -Randomized controlled trials and the argument against seed oils (41:13 / 36:35) -Jeff’s story and how he became involved with seed oils (52:40 / 50:25) -The top seed oils consumed in restaurants and ultra-processed foods (59:20 / 57:04) -The downsides of fear-mongering seed oils in mainstream media (1:13:05 / 1:09:16) -The adulteration of olive oil and avocado oil and why it’s a problem (1:22:50 / 1:20:32) -Jeff’s thoughts on high-oleic oil (1:33:20 / 1:31:05) -About Zero Acre Farms’ mission and their cultured oil’s flavor, calorie density, and environmental impact (1:38:32 / 1:36:12) -The top dietary principles Jeff follows to keep himself healthy (1:58:42 / 1:56:21) -The top lifestyle principles Jeff follows to keep himself healthy (2:04:08 / 2:01:50) Also mentioned in this episode: -Dietary alteration of n-3 and n-6 fatty acids for headache reduction in adults with migraine: randomized controlled trial -McDonald’s Broke My Heart - Malcolm Gladwell -The Minnesota Coronary Heart Experiment -Zero Acre Cultured Oil -Zero Acre Farms Blog For more on Zero Acre, follow them on Instagram @zeroacrefarms and Twitter @zeroacrefarms.   WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker. To get yours, go to join.whoop.com and get your first month free. Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests with Rupa Health. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The reason seed oils are bad is because of the types of fats they contain, specifically that they contain unprecedented, very high amounts of omega-6 linoleic acid. That's what makes them so bad. Jeff, a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Let's jump right in. The top public health organizations, top doctors that are out there or at least recognize that are out there, they all say seed oils are not only safe to eat, but they're actually correlated with positive health outcomes and you feel differently. Give us a list of reasons why you

disagree with them. First of all, that's changing and an increasingly large number of more mainstream of viewpoints are now coming around to the fact that seed oils like soybean oil may not be good for us, may not even be neutral and in fact may be quite harmful. And the keyword from what you said is correlated. Often a lot of the science I'm putting in air quotes that says seed oils are good for you are based on observational studies, are based on correlation, not causation, and or are based on biomarkers like cholesterol levels as opposed to actual health outcomes like death, for example, which is a pretty good one to track closely. The other thing to keep in mind is seed oils have, or the linoleic acid, which is a type of

omega-6 fat, it's sort of what defines seed oils and that most seed oils are very high in this particular fat, no other foods are. It has a half-life of 680 days in our body. And most of the study showing that seed oils say aren't inflammatory or don't cause issues or good for you, they may last two weeks, four weeks, maybe a couple months max. But if that omega-6 fat that has been linked to all sorts of issues is staying in our bodies for years and years, a study of a couple weeks just isn't going to be a drop in the buck and isn't going to make a dent and actually getting that omega-6 fat out of our cells.

And the other thing I'll add is if you're just looking at seed oil consumption or omega-6 fat in the blood in a silo or in a vacuum, you're not capturing the full story. What perhaps makes seed oils so harmful is their high content of omega-6 fat and that that omega-6 fat oxidizes or changes into other compounds that are the real culprits behind disease. What happens in our life from your perspective? And again, this is a very contentious topic, which is partly why we want to have you here. We may have the other side in the future, but we want to get your side. What happens to the body, literally, when we are having a lot of seed oils and in a frequent basis? A lot of different things. In short, I'd say your body is in a state of oxidative stress.

So again, seed oils are high in omega-6 fats. They're a type of polyunsaturated fat. That means they have multiple double bonds. They break down very easily. They go rancid. They're unstable. And so when we consume large amounts of seed oils, we're getting a lot of omega-6 fat. That omega-6 fat gets incorporated into all of our cells, and it breaks down.

And so when I say break down, I mean it oxidizes. And oxidation is a term maybe people have heard, but don't really know what it means, but are probably familiar with many of the concepts. So you may think of iron turning to rust. that's a process of oxidation. In our body is when something oxidizes, it means it loses an electron. And so the resulting molecule that is now that has an unpaired electron is called a free radical. That's probably a term a lot of folks have heard.

And free radicals are combated by antioxidants. Oxidative stress defines the state in the body when there are more free radicals than antioxidants to neutralize them. And omega-6 fats are at the center of that. In fact, many studies that measure oxidative stress state in the body use oxidized omega-6 fats as the marker for measuring oxidative stress. Often these papers, though, don't tie that back to the fact that these omega-6 fats, while present in all foods, come almost entirely from our consumption of seed oils. So seed oils drive oxidative stress. Oxidative stress drives a number of different inflammatory conditions.

there is a difference between oxidative stress and inflammation. Oxidative stress is that process I just mentioned where there are more free radicals than antioxidants to neutralize them. Inflammation is our immune system's response to that damage. And let's start with heart disease. It's the number one cause of death in the world, so it seems like a good place to start. And when you look at populations that don't consume seed oils or vegetable oils, they essentially don't have heart disease.

and heart disease used it was once thought well heart disease was very rare in this country in the US and then it was once thought that cholesterol levels caused heart disease just cholesterol you know not not looking whether that's LDL or HDL it was then later discovered that there are different types of cholesterol there's LDL and there's HDL and it was then thought that it was high LDL levels of cholesterol that led to heart attacks or heart disease and now we know that it's actually oxidized LDL that is most strongly associated with heart disease. When you control for LDL, which is short for oxidized LDL, there's no association between LDL and heart disease. And oxidized LDL, those with higher race of oxidized LDL have a 17 times higher risk of heart

disease than those with lower oxidized LDL levels. That's on par with the association between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. So it's extremely strong. and oxidize LDL is literally defined as LDL particles that have oxidized polyunsaturated fats on them. That's the only known explanation currently. I've not heard of another explanation for what causes heart disease than that process. And almost all of those polyunsaturated fats are omega-6 fats that we get from only one place, which is in our diets from consuming seed oils. This episode is brought to you by Whoop.

Now, who doesn't want to feel great, live longer, and perform at their maximum potential? I know I do, which is why I started working out on the regular, but so much of getting fitter and stronger comes down to personalization. This is why I love, love, whoop. Whoop is a fitness wearable and companion app that specializes in breaking down your recovery, sleep, and workouts, and delivers real-time insights straight to your phone. Whoop helped me understand that there's way more that goes into maximizing my gains than just what I do at the gym. Their coaching program shows me how my sleep impacts my recovery,

how much strain my body can handle that day, and my ideal sleep wake times based on key health metrics. The coolest part about whoop, the longer you wear it, the smarter the algorithm gets. So my feedback is completely personalized to my body's unique physiology and my own unique needs from day to day. If you're looking to personalize your fitness routine to maximize your potential, you've got to try whoop. Head on over to join.com. whoop.com slash drew to get your first month free on whoop. That's join dot whoop.com slash dhru for your first month of whoop free. You know, as a CEO of a functional medicine clinic and someone who spends a lot of time with functional minded practitioners, one of the top complaints

that have heard from my friends in this field is how complicated it can be to order comprehensive lab testing for patients. Thankfully, my friends at Rupa Health have found an easier way. Many of my friends who own clinics and many of my friends who are doctors now use Rupa Health to order, track, and download test results, and they've never looked back. You want to know why? Because with Rupa Health, you can order from over 30 different lab companies using one convenient portal. Did you catch that? That's one invoice for all your labs, paid online, up front, all in one place. Plus, patients receive practitioner pricing, full patient support, personalized collection instructions, automated follow-ups, billing breakdowns, answers to testing.

questions and so much more. Ordering your lab work has gotten so much easier with Rupa Health. And best of all, it's free for practitioners to sign up. You can find out more by going to Rupa Rupa-R-P-A-health.com. That's Rupahealth.com to sign up today. Let's make this tangible for people who may not be familiar with all the different sources of seed oils. What are the primary foods that we're eating in our Western Americanized diet that is being exported around the world and many others are eating the same. What are the top sources of things that people are consuming on a daily basis of seed oils? And what are some of those seed oils? The most prevalent seed oils in the U.S. at least, like, yeah, like you said, the rest of the world is quickly

following suit. Soybean oil, first and foremost, canola oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, cotton seed oil, corn oil, peanut oil, grape seed oil, rice bran oil. There are probably another dozen. We're finding ways to chemically extract oil out of all sorts of crop products. But those are the most prevalent with soybean, canola, sunflower, peanut and cotton seed being kind of the top, the top of that list. And those oils are found in basically everything we eat. They're 20 to 21 percent of American calories now. So one in every five calories are from vegetable oils directly. Nearly every restaurant meal contains these vegetable oils or seed oils.

Nearly every packaged food contains seed oils. when you're cooking at home, you know, much of the country is not using olive oil or avocado oil or cooking with butter. They're cooking with Wesson vegetable oil or mazola corn oil or Crisco vegetable shortening. And so even if, you know, you're eating healthy, you're eating salads, that dressing is coming with vegetable oil. If you're drinking, I don't know, oat milk, that has a ton of oil in it. If you're eating out at a high-end Michelin-Star restaurant, they're probably using a ton of oil. Maybe it's not soybean oil. Maybe it's something like grape seed oil or rice bran oil.

But those oils are perhaps even worse and even higher in omega-6 fats. So unless you are actively avoiding seed oils, you are almost certainly getting too many seed oils in your diet. Are there any tests that are available today that you suggest that people can literally get a sense of the breakdown of oils in their body? I've talked to some in the past, but love to get your ideas. Like, how do you get a snapshot to see what your cells, and your body is made of when it comes to these oils?

The best test that's easiest right now is probably from a company called OmegaQuant. You can see blood levels of Omega-6 in your cells, both linoleic acid and arachidonic acid. You can see omega-3 levels as well in your blood. Certainly it's not perfect. Your dietary levels of omega-6 from seed oils is not always directly, associated with blood levels of those types of fatty acids, looking at levels of those fats and tissue may be more accurate, but is harder to do. But as a starting point, for someone who's just trying to get a sense of where they're at, Omega Quant is a really good way to get

blood levels of omega-6. Before we talk about your story and why this has become a big part of your mission, I want you to give me a little bit of the other side of things, right? Stress test where you come from and tell us a few things, right? This might take a few minutes, but why do restaurants use seed oils? Why do companies make seed oils? And why are there doctors, researchers? If you literally Google, are seed oils toxic, as we did here on our screen, you scroll down. One of the first articles that's there is the Harvard Chan School of Public Health.

And it's basically the title says, scientists debunks claim of seed oil. health risk, right? So let's break those down section by section. Let's start off with how we got into this situation where we're using seed oils in the first place. Give us a little bit of that history. Yeah. So history lesson here. Seed oils first started being consumed in large quantities in 1911 with the introduction of Crisco. So working backwards from there, they were first used in general for manufacturing. They were used to lubricate machinery. And that came about from not enough whale blubber.

We were originally using whale blubber for a lot of industrial applications. We overhunted whales, didn't have enough blubber. So we switched to using cottonseed oil and other vegetable oils. But they were acutely toxic. They had all sorts of downstream health effects. they would make men infertile permanently, for example, if too much cotton seed oil was consumed. Unfortunately, a lot of beef tallow at the time was cut with cotton seed oil because it was cheaper. And so there were all sorts of issues that stemmed from that.

But they discovered a way to acutely detoxify cotton seed oil and then partially hydrogenate it. And that created a sort of semi-solid white shortening substance that was branded as Crisco. crystallized cotton seed oil and was called vegetable shortening. It was from cotton. So people have more associated cotton with dresses and blouses and napkins than with vegetables. You know, this is an oil or shortening from like kale and asparagus and broccoli. But vegetable shortening had a good ring to it. And it was kind of before the days of all the FDA labeling requirements. So it's sort of just stuck. And now every oil that's chemically extracted or pressed from a crop is called vegetable oil. But that was 1911 introduction of Crisco. Pretty soon it was in

millions of American households. As we started to do more factory farming and raise more cattle and chickens that ate a lot of corn and soy, there was now a plethora of those seed crops in this country. And so we started chemically extracting oil from corn and soy as well. And that slowly started to replace cottonseed oil as the most prevalent oil that was used in the U.S. In 1955, I believe, President Eisenhower had a heart attack. And at that time, in the first half of the 20th century, heart disease was very rare, almost unheard of. And a lot of, you know, cardiology was not even a practice in the early 1900s.

Many doctors had never even heard of heart disease. I think it wasn't until 1930 that heart disease. that heart disease was an actual option as cause of death for folks. Again, this is the number one cause of death in the world we're talking about. And 100 years ago, many doctors had never even heard of it and didn't see patients who suffered from it. But that quickly changed. And more and more Americans were suffering from heart attacks.

And when the president, President Eisenhower did in 1955, it really put this topic of heart disease in the national spotlight. And everyone began to follow the president's story to see how he would recover and what would happen next. And at the time, even though there was no clinical evidence or no human interventional study whatsoever done on the idea that vegetable oils could help with heart disease, they found that folks who did have heart attacks and died when they would do autopsies, they'd find cholesterol and arterial walls. And that cholesterol was thought to then be the cause of heart disease. If there's a ton of cholesterol and heart attack patients. And, you know, it's this like foamy cholesterol, LDL,

they didn't know at the time it was LDL in particular, but LDL particles that are oxidized, that are hoovered up by these macrophages that get all big and foamy and then, you know, clog, clog arteries. Simple ideas stick. And the idea that you throw some butter or beef tallow down a cold drain pipe, and it will clog your drain pipe, that image stuck with our arteries, where if you eat saturated fat, it's going to clog your arteries, even though you know, you put any saturated fat at 98 degrees and it just, it melts into a liquid. But at the time, the thought was if we can eat something that lowers our cholesterol levels,

that's got to be good for heart disease. And it was found that eating more vegetable oils did, in fact, lower cholesterol levels. So back to President Eisenhower, he was put on a low saturated fat, high vegetable oil diet. He continued to get worse. So he and his doctors decided he need to take it to the next level. And he went on a high corn oil diet. Unfortunately, the president ended up dying of heart disease, I think five to ten years later. His doctor would later say something along the lines of, if there's one thing I learned from this whole experience,

I wish we could just go back to when no one had ever heard of corn oil. Is that documented? Like, is that, that's a known thing? Yeah, I think the doctor Dudley White, I think. So this was at his. end of life, kind of like in his final days or after Eisenhower had passed away, the doctor had mentioned this? Yeah, I think it was, I can't remember if it was after Eisenhower passed away or if it was at the end of his career when he sort of did a memo on his, you know, decades of

being a doctor. And he was largely influenced by a gentleman named Ansel Keys, who plays a large role in this whole story and was extremely influential. Sometimes history is defined, not by a bunch of really great data, but by just one person who's extremely convincing. And and that was Ansel Keys. Anyways, at this point, a lot of money had put in, had been put into organizations, interests were aligned. Procter and Gamble around this time donated a bunch of money to the American Heart Association, which was a very little known organization, you know, not, not nearly as, as

influential as it is today. But Procter and Gamble sort of turned that organization into something that they could, you know, maybe influence. And so all of this was in motion. Again, there were no human studies. The human studies that the proponents of vegetable oils did put together ended up not working out the way they expected. One was the Minnesota coronary experiment. This was Ansel Keys, and I forget the name of the other researcher designed this experiment.

And when it was published, only one of those folks ended up putting their name on the paper. And some of the data was actually just hidden. And it wasn't until the last 10 years when fellow named Christopher Ramsden, who's a researcher for the National Institutes of Health, NIH, very esteemed researcher, dug up these old dusty records from the basement of the lead researcher from decades ago and really republished all of this data and showed that what they were hiding, what they didn't want to publish was that, yes, vegetable oils did in fact lower cholesterol levels. And if you're just looking at biomarkers, that's a huge win. The issue, and this happened with both the Minnesota Corner Experiment and the Sydney Diet Heart Study, which is another study that Ramsden published, lower cholesterol levels, but increased risk of death, increased heart attacks. And in one of those studies in Sydney Diet Heart, the increased risk of death was 62%.

So a 1.62 hazard ratio. That's up there with physical inactivity, heavy drinking, heavy smoking, in terms of risk of death. Anyways, I'll, I'll fast forward now to the 1990s. You know, there's still a big push for, for vegetable oils because there's been so much momentum. And most vegetable oils, many vegetable oils are being partially hydrogenated into trans fats at this time. In the 1990s, there was a big push to move away from animal fats. And so, again, primarily because of one individual who put a bunch of his money into full-page New York Times ads and things like that, trying to get animal fats out of deep friars.

He was ultimately successful and pressured these companies to remove the beef tallow and the lard and to replace them with vegetable oils. Keys is who you're talking about? This wasn't Keys. This was, I'm blinking out on his name, but one individual who basically made it his life mission for this change to happen. Like a wealthy philanthropist?

Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And he was successful. And between 1990 and 1993, McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King all took the animal fats out of their friars

and replaced them with partial. hydrogenate oils or trans fats. That ended up being way worse for people's health. It's thought to have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. Transfats in particular. Transfats in particular. Artificial trans fats in particular. Yep. And then ultimately trans fats were banned. The reason they were banned, and this will be the wrap up of this story, a gentleman named Fred Kumero, who in his 90s had been researching trans fat for decades. He put out a citizen petition to the FDA for them to finally ban trans fats because the science had been showing how bad they were for many, many years. And the FDA just ignored him. So he sued the FDA. And in response, the FDA finally in 2015 banned trans fats. And by 2018,

they were required to be out of all foods beyond 0.5%. Even though they've had the data for a really long time. I know a tiny bit of that sort of history. It really took somebody suing the FDA for them to say, okay, we're actually going to do this and ban it. But even still, I think there's some controversy because I recently got my whole Boston heart full panel done by my cardiologist, Dr. Michael Twyman, who's been on this podcast before. And even somebody like me who, you know, doesn't cook with any sort of things that have trans fats at home. And yes, we'll occasionally eat out and other things like that,

generally at healthier restaurants. A lot of restaurants here in L.A. that actually, you know, promote themselves as not using vegetable oils and using higher quality oils. But you can't control that everywhere, right? You can just do your best.

Even I had a tiny amount of trans fats. And as most people do, they have trans fats that still are showing up when they do blood work. So there's some hidden rules there where you can still I think get a certain amount of trans fats through, even though they've pressured the companies to largely remove it. Is that your understanding? Yeah, on nutrition labels, you're allowed to list trans fats

as zero grams if it's under 0.5 grams per serving. So food companies can play with the serving sizes to ensure that there are fewer than 0.5 grams per serving. And often also when you when you heat the oil, it produces trans fats. So that, you know, the fresh soybean oil or canola oil may have have been lower in trans fats. But then once it's heated or deep fried, and there are numerous studies on this, it does produce trans fats. So I just want to pause there because regardless of what people feel about the topic of vegetable oils, maybe one side feels that people who are talking about the concerns around

vegetable oils, those individuals are fearmongering, that there's so many other things to focus on, like getting dietary fiber in people's diets, this, that, not that they have to be mutually exclusive. We're going to chat about that later on. But there's one side that feels people are fearmongering by telling people to avoid vegetable oils or their deeper concern, again, we'll chat about this later, is, well, what are they replacing it with and are those oils actually healthier? Again, we'll chat about this. Everybody stay tuned. So there's one side that feels that way to kind of simplify their feeling. And then the other side feels all the things that you've talked about in the beginning of the episode,

of all the other data around seed oils and why we should be so cautious. But put those two things aside. And I just want to pause for one second and say, trans fats, a fat that we know that is associated with increased death and increased cardiovascular disease, well established, like everybody agrees this now, even the industry agrees this,

there's still a way for that to get in our foods that's legal inside. of the U.S. So everybody can just pause for a second and just take that in, right? So just take that in for a second, that me, you, all of us, even anybody that's trying to be healthy, you're still consuming some amount of trans fats. Obviously, can't go crazy, still got to live your life. But the most dangerous oil that we know, the most dangerous fat that we know, if that's still allowed in our system, obviously that's going to, you know, trigger your spidey senses a little bit. And the only meaningful way that we're consuming trans fats now is.

through vegetable oils, and they don't have to be partially hydrogenated. Simply the process of cooking high omega-6 vegetable oils produces trans fats. And that individual, Fred Cumerow, he passed away a couple years ago, I think, at the age of 102. And he was doing research in his lab up until the last couple of years. I wish I had a medical. Yeah. Has anybody ever made a documentary about him?

Not that I know of. I feel like. I'm only in written form, but. I feel like that would be a person to really make a good documentary of that. Yeah, that would be really cool. You know, history doesn't exactly repeat itself, right, that old quote, but it will rhyme. And so we need to look at the way that it's rhymed over time, even some of the things that have happened during the pandemic, just to have a healthy sense of skepticism when people say the

science is settled on any side of things. But nonetheless, we'll put that to the side for a second. And I have one final point on Fred Kumero, which was in, in, uh, um, one of his final pieces of literature, you know, really urging people to not consume trans fats, he essentially said that there were two causes of CBD of cardiovascular disease or heart disease. One, the consumption of artificial trans fats, not to be confused with natural trans fats, which are found in things like ghee and dairy fats, but artificial trans fats from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. And two, oxidized polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils from frying and in,

in high polyunsaturated fat vegetable oils. So the person who finally got trans fats banned, he was trying to get two things banned. One was trans fats. Two was seed oils or high omega-6 vegetable oils. He was successful in one. He didn't live to see the day that the other would happen, but hopefully it does at some point.

Can we Google this guy? I just want to see what he looks like. For those that don't have access to the video, obviously we're streaming this on YouTube. Aw. He looks like my wife would say, Jugi. You know, he looks like a total.

little juji, which just mean like a sweet older guy or sweet cute person. Oh, man, you just want to give him a hug. He looks like he might be from Texas. He's got a little bit of that sort of southern Thai thing going on. Yeah, that's a good look. Or maybe from the south somewhere, which obviously if he was successful in this whole trans fats banning process, he had to have some cajonas. So he probably was from Texas. This is great. Any documentary filmmakers out there, this is your next subject. Somebody should make a story about him. So you gave us the history of vegetable oils, how they start off in industry, their toxic nature, how they were through a heavily sort of process, process.

A lot of the most toxic things were removed enough to make them short term, in your opinion, you know, quote unquote, safe to eat, meaning people were not immediately becoming, you know, the example that you gave of men and low sperm count and becoming sterile. I had not heard about that. I'd love to look that up to now they can be used and also industry likes it because it's cheap. We haven't said that as well, right? It's cheap to use. It's cheap to make.

And this is why also restaurants use these oils in addition of the fact that entire generation, multiple generations now of America and now increasing around the world when I go and visit India, there's signs everywhere about why big brands are telling people, do the healthy heart decision, switch to vegetable oil, right? So all around the world, everyone is in this narrative, right? And well-meaning in many cases of people thinking that they're doing a better, better job for their heart. And obviously, you're contesting that. So that's kind of the summary of that. What about the doctors that are out there that are saying very actively, like, you know, the head of Tufts medical school, right?

Different plant forward, vegan podcast host, and even, you know, people that are more like in the middle. Why are they looking at the data and coming up to a different interpretation? So what do they feel about the topic of vegetable oils and why are they defending them as being generally safe for people to consume and not inflammatory to them? the body. I'm also not a psychologist, and so I can't say exactly what's motivating them. Everyone has their biases. We're only human. We know that for sure. Two different people can look at the exact same study and walk away with two completely different conclusions. And less so their motivations, because I don't want to get you in their head, but what are they seeing that they're evidently,

and everybody's on a spectrum, right? We'll go through some of the opinions. Some people feel that, hey, I'm not defending vegetable oils. I just am worried about what people are going to replace them with. We're going to get to that in a second, right? That's one of the arguments that's out there. Other people say that actually, when you look at these big studies, people who have higher levels of vegetable oil in their diet actually have better outcomes, right? So what are they seeing there when they say things like that?

Yeah, so they're looking at observational studies. And observational studies sound the results. sound really powerful because you can say things like, we followed 437,000 people over 20 years and we found this result. I mean, that sounds really trustworthy. The issue is correlation is not causation and observational studies are not randomized controlled trials. So the ideal study would be you take one group of people, ideally it's thousands, but hundreds would be certainly better than nothing. And you have them do one intervention, say they eat more. vegetable oils. And then you have group B, and they do a different intervention. And let's say

they eat fewer vegetable oils. And everything else is equal. That's a randomized controlled trial. Then you can be very confident in the results at the end of that trial. What is the effect of that one variable that we changed? With observational studies, what is typically done is individuals in a study, probably at the beginning of the study, are given a food frequency questionnaire where your listeners can Google food frequency questionnaire issues, the list is long. You're essentially relying on someone to fill out a form of what they eat and then assume that's not what they eat for the next year, five year, 10 year, depending on the study. They're not very reliable, but okay, I get it. It's better than it's better than nothing. And then you follow these people

around for years or decades and you try to draw causation from what is by definition, not causation. So you may look at this group of hundreds of thousands of people and say the group of people eating more vegetable oils have fewer heart attacks. And for the average person hearing that, they may hear, if I eat fewer vegetable oils, I have a lower risk of heart attack. But there is no way you can say that. They may try to control for different factors. So for example, they could say, let's just compare the non-smokers to the non-smokers. the non-smokers who eat a lot of vegetable oils compared to the non-smokers who eat very few vegetable oils.

Or those who exercise a lot, let's compare those who exercise a lot and eat a lot of vegetable oils to those who exercise a lot and eat few vegetable oils. But to try to pick apart life into a few variables that you control for, I believe as a fool's errand, there is so much we do. And we have no idea. I mean, just the nature of this discussion, there's clearly a lot of controversy around this. there's controversy around almost everything.

And so to try to just define a handful of things that we know are, you know, risk factors for something and control those out, that does not give us causation. So that's the first issue, is relying on observational studies to try to infer anything causation. And healthy user bias plays a key role in this in that, you know, I just went over the kind of history of vegetable oils. it's been almost 100 years now that, I guess like 60 years now that the American Heart Association, you know, Time magazine, mainstream media has been saying vegetable oils are good. Vegetable oils are good.

So people that listen to health advice eat more vegetable oils. These are probably also the people that, you know, do more yoga and go on runs and eat more fruits and vegetables and do all the other health advice that they hear about. And there are studies showing, for example, the opposite side of that, which is, People who eat more saturated fat, also drink more alcohol, also exercise less, also, you know, participate in other less healthy activities. And so that's healthy user bias, unhealthy user bias. It's impossible to pull that out of observational studies completely. And then the second point is, I believe, an overreliance on biomarkers.

So biomarkers are not health outcomes like death or heart attack or cancer. biomarkers are things that we think are linked to those outcomes. And so biomarkers could be something like LDL cholesterol levels. And again, looking back at the history, much of this vegetable oil rhetoric was formed when we hadn't even differentiated between types of polyunsaturated fats like omega-6 and omega-3 or types of cholesterol like LDL and HDL. And we just looked at biomarkers like cholesterol levels. And even today, you know, many studies are guilty of this, of assuming that,

if a biomarker is associated with an outcome, then we can do another study that associates some lifestyle intervention like consuming seed oils with that biomarker and try to infer that eating the seed oils is therefore causative of that health outcome. So just to make sure I got that. So if a study, again, observational, right, got a few questions about that. But if a study's big observational study, we followed 400,000 people, you know, not sure what that data set was, whether it was Framingham or this or the nurse's study. We followed all these people over a period of time.

We saw from these food questionnaires what they ate. Here's our extrapolation of that data. One of those components being people who eat seed oils, right, that they had lower cholesterol, lower LDL, and then we're just assuming that lower LDL means less risk for cardiovascular disease. Is that what you mean that we're taking one biomarker and then immediately saying that that automatically means less cardiovascular disease? Yep, exactly. Versus straight up somebody dying from that thing. In a randomized controlled trial. Right. Now, let me ask you, this gentleman again, what was his name, the sweet old uncle? Fred Cumerow. Fred Cumerow,

who died at 102. What was the data set that he showed that got them to ban transfass? Was it observational data? Like what was the data that he got? Because I want to make sure, yes, observational data, as many of my guests have talked about before, there's challenges with it. And of course, there's been probably a lot of things that have come that we have today that is health advice that is given to the public that's made them healthier. That's probably largely based on observational data.

So in this example of trans fats, do you know what data was presented that came out in litigation that led to the banning of trans fats. It was relatively short his petition, actually. It had shown some data that he came up with in his lab, in his own experiments. It had also referenced data from others. There was, I mean, going back to the 70s, there was data on this. In the 90s, it became very prolific. But it also wasn't without its controversy. There's a book called The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Tyshawls, which he documents a lot of this. There were, there were, there were folks who were hired to follow around trans fat opponents at conferences and just grill them with questions to make them look silly and make them, you know, look not very

credible because they were hired by bit by industry to not get trans fat spanned. But Fred's petition was pretty short and sweet. It wasn't any, I don't think it was any particular, you know, type of observational study or trial. But it was built on other data sets that were there. And is my guess, just because I'm not in this world, I'm not a researcher, you know, you've looked into this space for a while. You've been passionate about it. Wouldn't you assume that some of that data that had led to the banning of trans fats was maybe probably observational data? Or was it all sort of clinical data? Was it randomized control trials? Do you know anything about that? All of the above. It was a plethora of different studies, which included all of those that you just mentioned. Okay, got it. So why can't the same thing happen with seed oil? Well, partially is the same. same data set there because one of the things that I saw, and maybe Tesla we could tweet this, who's the head of Tufts Medical School again? Darius. Darius, Mozafarian.

Yeah, Mazafarian. If you look them up on Twitter and you look up seed oils, one of the things that he's done is he says, you know, everybody's talking about seed oils being inflammatory. In fact, they've been showed to become the anti-inflammatory. So what data said is he talking about? He's tweeted about ongoingly, and you probably know what I'm talking about, right? but there do seem to be individuals that are saying there are actually, and I don't, didn't come prepared with any studies or links, have you seen people talk about non-observational data

showing that seed oils are safe or even maybe anti-inflammatory? Have you seen some of those comments? Yeah. And sometimes they are, they will be randomized controlled trials that measure biomarkers. So that leaves us right off with, you know, the problem we were talking about. Yeah, that's not an outcome. They may last two to four weeks. I watched your podcast with Simon Hill and the study that he mentioned. I've also seen him post on Instagram about this topic as a very, very plant forward individual who I think is fine with seed oils. Yeah, just to clarify for him, because I've asked him a few times, he's like, I'm not pro seed oil. I'm concerned with what people are going to replace it with, which we can have that whole discussion.

I think it's a great point. And also generally, he's four people cutting back on seed oils, if that means also, sort of restricting their calories from processed foods, if that's going to mean that they're going to eat healthier foods, he just doesn't think that they're as bad as everybody talks about it, right? Just to kind of clarify from what I understood his position being. Yeah, and I came away with the same position from that conversation. And in one of the primary studies there that, you know, I've seen a lot of folks cite in terms of

looking at the impact of seed oils on inflammation to try and show that they're not inflammatory are randomized controlled trials that last a couple of weeks. And in a couple of weeks, you're not giving, you're not giving your body a chance to incorporate all those new healthy fats into all of your cells. Again, linoleic acid, the primary fat in seed oils, has a 680-day half-life. That means it takes six years for 95% of the linoleic acid to leave your body. What the heck is going to happen in two weeks in terms of incorporating, you know, those new healthy fats into all of your cells. So if you're just looking at inflammatory markers a couple weeks later, you know, one, what markers are you looking at? And do we, do we have the audacity to think we can

capture every possible marker in the human body that may be associated with something like inflammation? And, and two, are you capturing all of the relevant data if you're only looking at it for two to four weeks as opposed to several years, which is, of course, harder to do? You know, one randomized controlled trial in humans that lasted something like four months was in migraine sufferers. Migraines are an inflammatory neuro condition. And in this randomized controlled trial, what was interesting was, so one group consumed significantly reduced levels of, so there was a control group, a group that had a high

omega-3 fat diet and a group that had a high-o-o-3, low-Omega-6 diet. And the group that just increased omega-3 consumption had a reduction in migraine pain. The group that increased omega-3 and decreased omega-6 had significantly reduced. I think it was twice as effective as the high-O-M-3 group in reducing migraine pain, days of migraine pain in a month. This was a more recent study. Yeah, this was like in the last year or two. Okay, amazing. If we find it, I would love to link to in the show notes.

also on this, you know, we talked about what does a perfect study look like, right? Like one group of people stays away from seed oils over a period of time and another group of people is fed healthier fats. Did you ever listen to that Malcolm Gladwell series? Yeah, how McDonald's broke my heart. How McDonald's broke my heart. Tessa, can you just bring that up? And one of the experiments that you talked about in there, and I don't remember who was behind it, but from what I understand, and you could probably fill in the blanks, there was a researcher who basically ran, what would today be considered maybe an unethical study, but at that time, it was allowed to kind of happen. And it was done with prison inmates, right? Are you familiar with this study? Yeah. Can you break it

down to the audience? Yeah, that was the Minnesota coronary experiment. Okay, just talk about that. What was that, you know, if you know anything about who ran it and what were some of the findings that were found from it? So the Minnesota coronary experiment was done many decades ago, 60s or 70s, and it was done very intentionally to prove that vegetable oils prevent heart attacks and prevent heart disease. And it was successful in lowering cholesterol. It was not successful in preventing heart attacks. In fact, especially for those older individuals in this study.

Prison mates who literally could not decide what to eat. They were being served food. They had to eat it. Right? One group was eating vegetable oils and another group was not eating vegetable oils. So it was perfectly controlled because their food was controlled because they were in prison. Yeah, ethically questionable today at the time made for a really great randomized controlled trial. They were sort of stuck eating whatever diet was given to them.

And yeah, exactly like you said, you know, one group may have been eating butter, another group may have been eating margarine made with vegetable oils. One group, maybe their eggs were cooked in butter. Another group their eggs were cooked in, you know, corn oil or whatever. And so there was definitely a dietary difference in omega-6 consumption. and vegetable oil consumption. And yeah, the group eating more vegetable oils, surprisingly, had had higher rates of heart attack. And this was not what the researchers expected. The whole point of the research was to show that vegetable oils were healthy.

So most of the data ended up in the lead researcher's basement until after he died. Yeah. And then Christopher Ramsden, this name keeps coming up, he was the lead researcher from the NIH. who wanted to get to the bottom of what really happened in this study. So he contacted that the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, lead researcher's son, and was able to get into his father's basement, dust off and find those old dusty tapes. So it wasn't like he had it on a thumb drive, right? This is from many decades ago.

So it was tapes of data and was able to pull together an updated analysis of the data based on these tapes. and what that data shows us is why they were so hesitant to publish this data because it shows that the more vegetable oils you eat, the higher your risk of heart disease. Yeah, it was, it's a great listen to. And if you, if you Google it, the basement days, Malcolm Gladwell, Revisionist History, probably a lot of people have heard it. It's a great series, history of McDonald's, them switching from, you know, beef tallow to fry their French fries in, and then switching to peanut oil, how the founder at the time of the CEO, I think the founder

got super on this whole track of trying to convince everybody to do it. He also took out full-page ads in the New York Times and things like that. And the unfortunate part was, and I've seen criticisms on both sides of this research, but at least in the way that Malcolm Gladwell tells it, that the researcher died feeling that he really had failed. They had done something seriously wrong in his research, that something was fundamentally off, and that his his family felt that he always kind of felt bad about the whole situation

because it didn't prove what they thought was going to be the obvious answer about vegetable oils and that the findings led them to believe that they legitimately effed up and how now the son feeling like through the reanalysis of it how much his dad would have felt like well the work was not in vain right and at least being part of the evidence base that could at least counter some of the claims that were being made about, you know, where our vegetable oil is always being shown as being healthy. So very fascinating. Better late than never.

Better late than never. You know, I want to share a little personal anecdote before we go into your story for a second here. For me, I grew up vegetarian and I grew up in a household that used a lot of both ghee and traditional cooking, but then also because our family was trying to do the right thing and that there is a lot of fried food in modern sort of Indian diet, especially Gujarati food, which is the type of cuisine where I'm from India, we would make a lot of, my mom would make these fried sort of flatbreads, right? We'd call them puri, is the name. And it was something we ate every Sunday morning. We would have, instead of like, people have like bread and like,

like a cup of tea, like in England, right? We, because we grew up in Kenya, we would have Puri, my family's from Kenya. I was born there, but we mostly grew up in the States. We had this British influence. So every Sunday morning, we'd have buri, bread and butter, and, you know, maybe some snacks that are there. And that was like a breakfast that I really looked forward to. But from a young age, again, my anecdotal experience, I was there, anytime my mom, and I would sleep in on Sundays or Saturdays when she would make it, anytime she'd get the vegetable oil going to fry the buri in, my room was upstairs. And I always remember I would have, and we wouldn't always have it because it was a special treat.

It might be every other weekend. My throat immediately would feel inflamed. I would have foggy thinking only when she fried. Only when she fried in vegetable oil. Now, separately, there were some dishes that we would make that she would pan fry in ghee. Now, we weren't doing deep frying in ghee. That was very difficult and not something that we would make happen. But I wouldn't get that same sort of effect.

I wouldn't get that same sort of effect. and then probably starting around like middle school, I noticed something for me that any time, and it really got clear when I was in high school college, anytime I would have anything fried, I would immediately like my throat would swell up. I kind of, it'd be hard to breathe. So I naturally started gravitating away towards a lot of fried food.

And by product, by association, I would start to also naturally gravitate away from, having a lot of just anything that was heavily cooked in oils in any in any form minus using just topical olive oil and things like that the last part of this is that then I became vegan in high school for animal rights reasons I'm no longer vegan now and in that process it worked great I went vegan because I had really bad acne and in a matter of months from just being off of commercial dairy my acne like immediately disappeared within like a month and a half So I thought I found the holy grail, right?

I'm on the vegan train. I'm telling everybody like, you got to go vegan. Here's why in addition to the animal rights components over there. So I was on that train for, you know, a year, two, three, four, five, six. And about my seventh year of being vegan and a good amount of that was also part of this whole raw food movement. Do you remember the raw food movement that was there, right? So at least that wasn't a super highly processed vegan except for my first couple years. and I was eating a lot of vegetables, fruit, you know,

I'm sorry, vegetable juices, things like that. So I was eating a good amount of, you know, healthy vegan food in the mix. I started to feel like, oh my gosh, like I feel like I am more depressed regularly. I was feeling more this regularly. Then I got connected to the whole world of functional medicine through a doctor that I met. And as I was digging into this, the name Omega Quant kept on coming up, right? The test that you meant at the beginning of the episode. So I have no affiliation with the company.

I don't think you have affiliation with the company. We're just mentioning it. It was $100 a test. And it still is like $100.99. I got my omega test done at home, little prick test. And it came back and my omega-6s were super high. And my omega-3s were super low. And this is an area that's not very controversial.

Most people accept that when your omega ratio is out of whack and you don't have enough omega-3s, that's correlated. right still some good data that we're getting from that and it's a lot of data and a mega quant has a bunch of it on their website it's correlated with increased risk of depression increased uh you know could be eczema skin issues whatever and i made the decision that i'm going to start eating fish and i started eating fish and again my own anecdotal story and i started to immediately feel like my brain was turned on i had not completely gotten off of you know vegetable oils in every aspect of my life, but I had already wound down on vegetable oils because I just naturally felt that I had

this immediate reaction as if I had been around somebody who'd been smoking all day, and I was much more sensitive. And I just thought it was, I'm sensitive. And I would literally go on dates, or I'd go out with my girlfriends over the years, and they would say, why aren't you eating fries? And I'm like, I don't know. Like, my throat gets clogged up. Maybe I'll do it, right? And I'd eat a bunch of fries. And we go back to my place later on. It's like, I literally could not sleep because my throat was so clogged up. So that was my own anecdotal thing. So I feel like good or bad, right? It just got me in a place where I would naturally sort of avoid vegetable oils and kind of push them away over the years. And then, of course, people started talking about

them and sharing the science. And that led me to naturally sort of have more of the precautionary approach. Like, hey, I'm not going to freak out. I still want to live my life. I want to eat at a restaurant. I want to go do stuff. I typically avoid fried food that's out there, especially deep. fried, but I'm not going to go berserk to avoid vegetable oils, but I'm not, I'm going to make sure that it's not a regular part of my diet by basing my diet around whole foods. So that's how my journey has been with vegetable oils over the years. And I feel like I've benefited, but it's largely been guided by most of my life, this precautionary approach just because I felt the effect that I felt, you know, pretty much immediately. Tell me about how you got down this

whole thing where you became this amateur researcher who knew more about this topic than most doctors and researchers that I'd come across. Well, most doctors only get, you know, a few hours, basically, of nutrition training in medical school and often as nutrition education that's a couple decades old. And so that's not a high bar, but I understand what you're saying. I have dedicate a lot of time to it. And, you know, it, so I grew up in Southern California here where we're recording down in San Diego. And both my parents were working professionals. My dad had always been an entrepreneur and my mom, a nurse. In fact, most of my family was in, was in the medical profession, MDs, nurses, et cetera. And then my dad was an entrepreneur.

And we ate a, I don't know, we tried to eat healthy. We had salads every night. We never had sugary sodas in the house. We were pretty active. My dad cycled. My mom ran. I think they thought we were doing all the right things. We always had fruit out that we were eating. And then when I was 20, my dad passed away from cancer. Six months later, my mom passed away from cancer. And that was a huge paradigm shift for me. And why the heck did this happen? And is this happening to other people? And if so, how can I help prevent that? Because it was such a pivotal, horrible moment in my life. I wanted to prevent it from having others.

I knew one of your parents' best way I didn't know it was both. So obviously I know it was a long time ago, but, you know, just want to say I'm sorry about that. That must have been very tough to go through at 20. It was tough. It was very tough. It was also tough for my little brother who was 17. And yeah, it was, you know, even though it was a long time ago now, I guess, almost 16 years. You know, it doesn't feel any different than the day after it happened. And, and I started

looking at the stats, and I was not the only one where that was happening. You know, I'm sure you and many of your listeners know that the stats on chronic disease, six and ten Americans suffer from a chronic disease. Four and ten adults in America have multiple chronic diseases. So you're at an airport in the middle of the country, look around. Forty percent of the adults you see walking around have cancer and heart disease or dementia and diabetes. You know, maybe there's a third or fourth in there too. The number of prescription medicines were taking, you know, has gone out the roof. Big problems to solve. And so I decided to make that my life purpose to try to figure out why this was happening to people and to try to do something about it. And so started consuming biochemistry textbooks,

molecular biology textbooks, physics textbooks, to really try and understand what happens. when we eat certain foods and what's going on inside our body as those break down into other compounds. And so most of my career now has been dedicated to starting businesses. I think I get that from my dad, the entrepreneurial spirit with the idea of medicine. And for me, that means seeing food as medicine. I've always been a huge foodie. And we literally are what we eat. Every cell in our body comes from only one source and that's what we consume. You know, we don't, we don't photosynthesize like plants. We, we are what we eat. And so it seemed obvious to me that we should really take a magnifying glass to what we eat. And as I was doing all that research,

I just kept coming back to the oxidation product products of omega-6, omega-6 fats, seed oils, where we're getting these omega-6 fats. Around that same time, I had started a restaurant like we were talking about a little bit before the show. And it was pretty easy to source foods that we felt good about. You know, all this research I've been doing led me to this conclusion of the foods we should be eating are not available to eat anywhere at restaurants. You know, this was like 2014. And so I said, I'm just going to start my own restaurant. This will be easy. It wasn't easy, but it was worth it. And, you know, so a lot of decisions like, let's get pasture raised eggs instead of regular eggs. Let's get, you know, local organic produce instead of produce from the other side of the country.

let's get regenerative grass-fed beef instead of factory farm beef. Those were fairly easy decisions. But then when it came to cooking oils, if we're going to deep fry, what are we going to deep fry with? What are we going to pan fry with? What are we going to make salad dressings with? There weren't a lot of easy decisions. We tried using coconut oil and everything just ended up tasting like coconuts. We tried using certain animal fats.

Those had low smoke points. And we had a lot of vegetarian vegan customers who were starting to come into the business where animal fats wouldn't make sense for them. extra virgin olive oil is just super strong in flavor. So a lot of our foods, you know, just didn't taste right and it ended up smoking up the kitchen. So that kind of convergence of a lot of my research pointing to seed oils as a lead domino on a lot of our health effects and running a restaurant where we are having a really hard time finding an alternative to seed oils.

What I've learned from now talking to hundreds, maybe at this point, thousands of other restaurants is we have become accustomed to liquid, neutral tasting, high smoke point oils. And so olive oil, beef tallow, lard, butter, ghee, none of those are that. All of those are either solid and or not neutral tasting and or have a low smoke point. So that kind of led to this idea of wanting to do something about it because it seemed like it was so it played such a central role in a lot of the pathologies and diseases that that we face today. And there was a clear problem among, you know, potential group of customers among restaurants where the alternative seed oils is, it's kind of like fourth in line. Like we used to

use animal fats. Then we use trans fats. Then there was kind of a move to palm oil. And then for a number reasons, health or environmental, all three of those are kind of, you know, not, look poorly on and are typically avoided. And so that leaves seed oils. No chef is excited about their canola oil. No restaurant, you know, needs their soybean oil to make a restaurant, to make a recipe work. It's kind of just what we're left with. By default. By default. Yeah. Process of elimination. So you went down this whole journey and you were like, can I create something better? I'm going to get to that in a second. You know, you launched a whole business around it. And you came up with a unique process of creating an oil.

But before that, let's, again, just give us the list of the top seed oils that are out there. And do you have any idea of what number one and number two are by consumption in the food circuit that we have right now? Number one, by far in the U.S. is soybean oil. About two-thirds of vegetable oil consumption in the U.S. is soybean oil alone. And the vast majority, would you feel that do you know, is that coming from packaged foods that people are eating? Because a lot of people don't remember adding soybean oil to their pan and then frying. So they're like, where is that coming from? Is that coming from packaged foods?

Is that coming from ultra-processed foods, like fast food restaurants? Do you have any idea? Yeah. Just about 40% is coming from restaurants, 37. percent, something like that. Including fast food. Yeah, all restaurants. All restaurants. You said 30, 40 percent. Yeah, like 37 to 40 percent. Okay, got it. 37 to 40 percent. So, you know, about 40 percent of people's exposure to seed oils is coming from them eating the standard American diet, but eating out, right? And I think 2013 or 14, we can look it up,

was the first year that Americans were spending more on groceries. Sorry, they were spending more on eating out than they were on groceries, right? That was the first year that the data came out on that. So obviously, we spend more as a country on eating out as a whole than we do even shopping for groceries. And then the rest of it, my guess is coming from packaged foods, things that you wouldn't even think of that would have soybean oil in it, right? What are some common package foods that people are buying every single day if they're not looking at the label that typically would have soybean or canola oil inside of it. Yeah, you're right.

Packaged foods are number two on that list, about a third of seed oil consumption is through packaged foods. And then, you know, someone buying Mazzola corn oil or Weston vegetable oil for cooking or buying shortening or something like that is under 30% of usage. And it's almost easier to come up or I should say harder to come up with a list of things that don't have vegetable oils in them because it's almost everything. Possa sauce, salad dressings, chips, crackers, baked goods, all the baby food. Baby food, baby formula, which is really sad.

I just had a baby and, so we, you know, we overspend on like clean little baby food pouches and make our own baby food. But most people can't do that. And most baby food and infant formula is packed with seed oil. and side tangent here, there's only one fat in infant formula that has a minimum and it's linoleic acid, specifically called out as a minimum for a baby formula. And it's because it's modeled off of breast milk and the content of linoleic acid in mother's breast milk on average.

The issue is... And that just to connect the dots that people are following along, that's the omega-6, right? Exactly. Which is typically higher in C. oils. Yep. Right. We all have some of it and we do actually need some omega-6, right? It is metabolically essential, but it is not essential from a dietary standpoint. Got it. So what that means is we need linoleic acid in our body, but we now know that our body can produce linoleic acid from arachidonic acid, which is found in meats and nuts and all sorts of other, all sorts

of other foods. So we actually now know it is not essential from a dietary standpoint. But yes, we do need in our body 100%. Yeah. And it is in most foods. So I was connecting those dots because you were saying baby formula is trying to being modeled off of mother's breast milk and mother's breast milk has linoleic acid in it. But you're saying that there's a difference. There's a difference between the average mother's breast milk, which has something like

15% linoleic acid because the mother's consuming so much vegetable oil and therefore so much omega-6 linoleic acid herself. when you compare the breast milk of, you know, modern American moms to the breast milk of, say, hunter gatherers or of pre-industrial moms, those mothers have significantly lower linoleic acid levels in their breast milk. So what's sad here is that our infant formula is modeled off of the modern mother's breast milk, which is not ideal. It's not optimal. It has too much linoleic acid in it. And now this is what we're giving our babies. And so it becomes this vicious cycle. Mom eats more vegetable oils, breast milk has more linoleic acid in it. Now, infant formula is modeled off of that average breast milk content, which includes a lot of linoleic acid, as opposed to being modeled off more traditional diet breast milk,

which has significantly less. But yes, breast milk is another packaged food product or formula is another packaged food product with vegetable oils. You know, you live and breed this world, and this is also a big part of your mission. Also on a human level, you're an entrepreneur, you travel, you fly. How aggressive are you, right? Be honest. How aggressive are you in one way or another? No judgment either way about avoiding vegetable oils in your diet. So with vegetable oil consumption, the dose makes the poison. This is the case for a lot of foods that we eat. You know, one woman who ate too much bok choy was hospitalized because there are toxins in bok choy. But for most people, it's not an issue. But if you're eating it every day. drank a ton of water. She's drank four,

Tesla, Google this. This was, I mean, my heart goes out to her family, but just, it's good that you mention this. She drank four bottles of water. Unfortunately, she passed away last week, right? She just, I think she drank them rapidly in a row. This is a phenomenon. You know, you have a lot of different situations that people can have

different things too much. Dose makes the poison, certain sequencing. That can lead to a negative, in this case, a fatal outcome. Yeah. And so I, I think, it's the same with linoleic acid, the main fat and seed oils, where it's not acutely toxic. It's not like I accidentally ate cyanide or something like that. It's, and it's going to build up over the course of many years to potentially cause harm.

That said, there are some short-term effects that some people feel. It sounds like, you know, you may be one of the canaries in the coal mine on some of those more acute toxic effects of seed oils to what you said earlier about your throat closing up and feeling, you know, when your mom was frying. with those oils. The number one cause of death for non-smoking women in China is cooking oil fumes. Wow. Because a lot of the toxins that make seed oils so bad when we cook with them and eat them are coming up in the smoke and the steam from that high heat walk cooking as well and are being

inhaled. So like for the safety of workers and fast food restaurants and things like that, more stable oils are also quite helpful. But back to your question. You know, if you're eating half a percent, one percent, two percent of your calories as linoleic acid, then that one airport meal in a pinch or that one meal when you want to go out and have food with friends and enjoy french fries is not going to be that big of a deal. But that's like 0.01% of people that are that strict to the point where they can go out and do that sort of thing and enjoy themselves and not have it kind of, get them over into the poison threshold of, you know, from a dosage standpoint, it seems,

and this is a little fuzzy based on the, the data, the research, but somewhere between like two and five percent of calories is probably that tipping point where, you know, you probably don't need to stress too much between whether you're getting 1.8 or 2 percent of your calories is linoleic acid. But if you're going from 2 percent to 8 percent, there seems to be, you know, clear harm that's happening. So all that said, I make it a regular part of my routine to avoid seed oils. But, you know, if I'm going to visit family and my mother-in-law cooked a meal or, you know, my wife's grandma cooked a meal for us and we hadn't already given them some healthy fats to cook with ahead of time, you know, I'm not going to push the plate away and say no thanks. I'm definitely going to

eat that meal. And if it's just not part of my routine, it just, you know, it doesn't come up. all that often. That said, we've identified the rest. I mean, I love eating out. I own a restaurant. I'm a foodie. So we've identified all the restaurants around us that don't use seed oils and we frequent them very often.

And where do you live right now? In Oakland, California. Okay. And you know, you got to double and triple check because you'll often ask what cooking oil do you use and they may say olive oil. And then you say, are you sure there it's olive oil? They say, yeah. You say, what else is in it?

Like, oh, well, it's cut with canola oil. and like, okay, well, what sort of blend? 80% canola oil, 20% olive oil. But it's called an olive oil blend because who would want to eat? You know, everyone wants olive oil instead of canola oil. And this is pretty common at restaurants. You may also see things like duck fat fries or beef tallow fries. That often doesn't mean that the fries were cooked in that fat.

It means they were cooked in seed oils and then drizzled with a little bit of duck fat for flavor. So I spent a lot of time talking to chefs sometimes maybe annoy them to really understand what oils are cooking with. so that, I mean, my dream is to just go eat at restaurants, absolutely love the food, love the delicious food, and not be worrying about, you know, what the oils is cooked in are going to do to me. And more importantly, allow everyone eventually in the world, but to start in the U.S.,

and especially those who need it most, who are those who are eating the most fast food, to be able to just go get their, you know, French fries and chicken nuggets or fried chicken. And these aren't the type of people that necessarily listen to, podcasts on health or are following what's going on and, you know, the environmental impact of different foods. These are the people who are just living their life and just have time and money

to go get that meal of fried food. If they can walk out of that experience with French fries, not being like so acutely bad for them and chronically bad for them and have it just be some, you know, some healthy fats, some potato and some salt, then I think we would literally see chronic disease rates start to decline in this country. But we're not there quite yet. That's my dream. You know, vegetable oils is one of those things I've shared before because of that story that I go out of my way generally. And also, too, I live in Los Angeles. I get invited to restaurants.

A lot of my friends have restaurants. I know I'm going to interact with them. And I get my blood work done. Like I mentioned on my Boston Heart Panel, you know, you can see your breakdown of a mega sixes, threes, your trans fats, even though you mentioned it's not perfect. It kind of gives me a rough sense. And generally, I let my lab work guide me in terms of, am I heading in the right direction? that have I been eating out too much more recently, which is probably the vast majority of where I

would get my exposure from because I wouldn't be using these things and I don't eat a lot of packaged foods at home. Occasionally, I do just like anybody else, but I'm more dialed in about it. I also feel that over the last few years where I was really very sort of focused on things like vegetable oils and other components, I still am going out of my way. but what I've also done is I've also made sure that where my strength training routine wasn't dialed in, that I regularly have strain training, you know, two to four times a week because of all the data that I've seen that's come out of there. And people like Peter Atia, Dr. Gabriel Lyon, Mark Hyman, other individuals talking about

how much strength training, muscle mass, metabolic health. And one of the criticisms that I've seen on this topic, I hinted towards it previously when it comes to telling people to be really start to worry about seed oils, not in the context of just, hey, eat less processed foods has been that people generally that are not super focused on health every day like me and you, they're going to get so burdened with the list of to dos of things that they have to do, right? Get your morning sunlight. Get this thing. Get that thing. Get that. That ultimately, they, might end up missing out on the one, two, and three things that we know significantly impact if we had to make a scale. Now, some people might argue that vegetable oils, I'd love to hear your take on this, are not yet on that one, two, or three, or four because either the data has been suppressed or we don't have enough data, but one day they might be. And, and like I mentioned, elsewhere, that is one of the criticisms that I've felt from even people who generally go out of their way is that if we fearmonger around vegetable oils, that are people going to deprioritize

other goals in their life, like just reducing ultra-process foods, working out and maybe generally trying to, you know, restrict their calories? What's your take on that? I think it is at the top of the list. And I think that fearmongering is a huge issue. And if one of the problems I've seen with folks who, who, you know, propose that we should be eating fewer seed oils, a message I agree with. But the mechanisms they propose make me just kind of like put my face in my palm and shake my head. You're basically talking about social media influencers. Yeah. Or maybe they're not the influential ones. They're the ones who comment. But yeah, also a good number of influencers.

People that are on the, let's seed oils is the main cause of disease. We need to get off of it. Yeah, it's almost become more ideological than scientific. And typically it's defended by saying, you know, they're processed. That doesn't mean anything. Or they're refined. Avocado oils refined too. Or just look how it's made.

That's gross. These aren't things that give the other side, those who may, be proponents of seed oils. I mean, one, it just tease up the criticisms from them. And two, it doesn't give us the opportunity to have a healthy debate about anything. And so I think none of those are the reasons that seed oils are bad. Maybe on the fringes, on the edges, they contribute, you know, a little bit. The reason seed oils are bad is because of the types of fats they contain,

specifically that they contain unprecedented, very high amounts of omega-6 linoleic acid. That's what makes them so bad. And I think another something that has held this movement back from picking up stream to become more mainstream. Though I will say it is probably the fastest growing dietary concern, at least according to Google Trends. It now has as much search volume as trans fats and non-GMO, seed oils, that is. So it's coming out of the dark niche corners of the internet to be a more mainstream thing. But something like plant-based is also, you know, it is very mainstream. And there are a lot of issues with how we raise animals in this country.

And a lot of people are trying to reduce their, say, red meat consumption or saturated fat consumption, have very bad associations with something like lard. And the message to consume fewer seed oils or cut seed oils out is almost always coupled with, therefore, you should eat a lot of lard and butter and animal fats. and I think that creates a lot of polarization that that isn't healthy toward the debate being focused on seed oils or the conversation being focused on seed oils. I think we need to talk about seed oils on its own without talking about, you know, say we should be eating more large instead because then I think you just immediately turn off a huge group of people who aren't even willing to have that conversation. Yeah, I think there's a whole individual health component too. While I mentioned I go out of my way to avoid seed oils, I also found out over the years through genetics,

testing, my own response, that large amounts of saturated fat at once for me seem to trigger some sort of endotoxemia reaction could be because of the antibiotics that I grew up on, other things, poor gut health, even though generally I feel like it's a lot better now. And then also, I fall into the 20% of hyper sort of cholesterol producers, which again, we're not saying that cholesterol on its own is an issue, but that has led to generally, I've historically had very high LDL and as everybody started talking about APOB, you know, I had very high levels of APOB. Now, I've counteracted that with, and that's why I sought out this fantastic cardiologist that I've had on the podcast, I've counteracted that with doing what's called a clearly scan.

I don't know if you've heard about one of these. It's basically like an advanced CT scan that looks at all your arteries in your heart and literally tells you down to the artery level how much plaque you have. and I'm proud to say that I had the best, you know, result that my cardiologist had seen in his practice, and he's ordered hundreds of these for any male, not a female. I think there's some female that are my age. I just turned 41. When I got it done, I was like mid, it was 40 and a half.

I had the lowest amount of plaque built up, and it's really a measure of endothelial function. And Dr. Twyman's really sort of. his feeling is that it's not the LDL particles or the APOB in itself. It's the endothelial. And we need to protect the endothelium. And we did a whole episode about that. But he's also on the side of, look, I don't know. And yes, a lot of high APOB, which I had, I think without medication, which I started. And I've shared that with the audience, not statins, but I'm on azetamide. You know, talk to your own doctor about this. I've had many conversations about why I end up in this position. And I'll be sharing my updated.

results, that still I want my APOB in general to be a little bit lower because I'm a hyperproducer just because you're rolling the dice and everybody's sort of taking a bet. I also don't think that nature just messes up, right? There's not a reason why me and a lot of other South Asians are hyperproducers, but when you combine high familial cholesterol, you know, hyper-cholesterol emia with also a lot of South Asians who are eating a lot of sugar, fried food, other things that damage the endothelium, a lot of alcohol, that's a recipe for a disaster. And that's why probably South Asians and Indians in particular have the highest risk of cardiovascular disease out of any ethnic minority in the United States. And I obviously don't want to be a statistic

in that category. So I don't do well with a lot of added saturated fats. So I have typically gone out of my way to include things like, you know, olive oils that I know that come from healthy sources, and I've written about this, avocado oils also that can be traced back and there's some sense of companies. There's a whole challenge with this, which we'll talk about in a second. And I try not to do a lot of added saturated fat. I was doing the whole bulletproof coffee thing for a while. And I felt like I had a lot of energy, but I was having a lot of other issues that came out of it. So I do want to go on record that while I go to my way of vegetable oils, I would also be in that camp that it doesn't make sense for me to have a lot of added saturated fat of my diet.

And that doesn't mean that I avoid it in foods that are out there, like certain animal foods and things. But I am cautious to overdo this animal fats because of my unique history and situation. And that's just sort of me. So just echoing my personal reason that I'm always on the hunt for what's the right oil for my unique situation that, that I might be in that maybe other people are not necessarily in. Yeah, totally makes sense. And yeah, modern urban India has one of the highest omega-6 to omega-3 ratios in the world. Crazy.

In the U.S. Historically, humans ate like a one-to-one omega-6 to omega-3 ratio. That's probably optimal. Maybe you go up to two to one or three-to-one. You're still all right. Most Americans are like five to one to 10-to-one, upwards of 15 to 20 to one. And, yeah, urban India, 50 to one. and, you know, genetics certainly play a role.

Genetics, I don't think that genetics cause any disease. Genetics certainly seem to predispose you to being more susceptible to certain diseases based on diet and lifestyle factors. And, you know, we see that in all sorts of countries all over the world and all sorts of individuals who may eat more or less the same thing and respond very differently to it. And we're all unique snowflakes. And we all did weird stuff as kids, like have antibiotics. and that may affect us for the rest of our life and how our microbiome responds to different foods.

So to just double tap on what you said, totally agree that you've got to do what works best for you, try different things. That said, I've yet to talk to anyone, including those who say, you know, are arguing for seed oils. They rarely eat seed oils themselves, right? So those that defend seed oils, they're probably not using Crisco in their kitchen at home. And they're often using something like an olive oil. And few people say, when I just put a couple tablespoons of canola and oil in my shake or soybean oil in my shake, that's what really fires me up and gives me energy and makes me feel great. Similar to trans fats, I hope that that can become one that, you know, whether you're vegan or

carnivore, that can be one we all agree should not be in the diet. I want to run through the list of healthy oil options out there and some of the problems with them and why you went on this quest of, hey, can I create an option, especially an option that could scale that the Chipotle's of the world or other people that are more health conscious, health forward might ultimately get behind so that the average person who's eating, we literally have a Chipotle, you know, downstairs from where this office is or a sweet green, right, which I think is a great company. And they use, you know, seed oils in their, in their salad dressings. And the other folks that are just, you know, wanting to make a healthy

decision and those companies that are, that are well intentioned and they're sort of following the narrative and they're hearing multiple different things that are pulling in different directions. And ultimately, they might be open to switching, but what they switch to has to be regarded it is being safe, healthy, and also the price point has to get there as well too. So you went on a quest to solve that and you came up with the whole venture and now you have an oil that's out. We're going to chat about that in a second. But let's talk briefly, really quickly, olive oil, something that a lot of people use. I've done episodes on this. I've interviewed experts on it. I've written about it. My audience knows that a huge percentage of olive oil that's out there in

the world is fake olive oil. Why are we have so much fake olive oil in the world? Because it's a premium oil and most people wouldn't know the difference. And so in many ways, this is run by the Italian mafia where a lot of oil comes from. And if you're simply optimizing for profits and you can make an, you can put 20% extra version olive oil and 80% soybean oil in there and maybe some other chemicals to give it a little bit of a bitter, grassy, peppery flavor like olive oil. And us dumb Americans will just go by and think it's great extra virgin olive oil from Italy. Why wouldn't you do that from a profit standpoint? And it's not being disclosed in the bottle.

Just to be clear, like it's actually manipulated oil. Yep, that's right. Have you been to Italy? Do you like going to Italy? I love Italy. Are you afraid now that you've called the mafia out and you want to go to Italy with your wife and you want to have fun and eat pizza? Aren't you afraid that they're going to come after you?

I'm more afraid of other things like seed oil. You're more afraid of choking on some seed oil. And running a business. That's hard. But yeah, olive oil is, you know, if you are actually consuming extra virgin olive oil and you're using it primarily to, you know, cook at home, drizzle on a salad, have with some sourdough bread, whatever, that is not why we're in this, you know, obesity and chronic disease epidemic. It's not because of an overconsumption of really great extra virgin olive oil. That said, Tom Butner was the investigative journalist who ended up writing a book on this, who estimates that about three quarters of extra virgin olive oil in the U.S. are adulterated. That's a big number. There was another study just a few years ago by Selena Wong at UC Davis. And her group found that it was a few dozen avocado oils that they purchased from store shelves

and online, that 82% were rancid or adulterated. And that some of the samples, I think at least three of the samples were just pure soybean oil. And you can imagine most people don't have a super sophisticated palette for this type of thing. If they throw some oil that seems to be avocado oil according to the package in their stir fry or whatever and it's actually soybean oil, they may not even know it. But whoever's making that product is making a very hefty profit because soybean oil is a lot cheaper than avocado oil. If people do want to have their best chance, and obviously this episode will live forever so people got to constantly kind of do their work, if they like olive oil and they wanted to have their best chance for finding authentic olive oil. that would meet all the requirements of maybe if you have olive oil in your house,

even though you've produced your own oil, what should they be doing? Who should they trust? So they need to buy some analytical equipment to keep in their kitchen to run fatty acid analyses on different olive oil. No, I mean, that's really the only way that you'll know. Are there groups out there that test? We've tested. And I can say Costco olive oil is in fact olive oil. It is. And it's very affordable. Nice. It comes in a big plastic jug, you know, some issues with that. But yeah, their olive oil is in fact olive oil. And what do you feel about like in the past I've recommended places like I think California olive oil grows association, you know, has a whole traceability component to it. I haven't investigated myself. Do you know anything about that?

I haven't investigated that either. I'm not sure. Okay. Great. I've listed some organizations that seem to do some bit of due diligence. I don't know if that's, you know, the full deep analytical aspect. So how did you end up testing Costco? Is there any other brands that you tested that are out there? Is anybody that failed the test? I don't know. No, Costco was just the only one we tested because we wanted to do some tests of our oil versus olive oil. So we went out and bought a jug at Costco.

And we're like, wait, before we do this test, let's make sure this is actually olive oil. And it was. Maybe I start a side business, which is like consumer health reports for that health people that are out there. All we just do is we just test the favorite brands. We send it in for analysis. People pay a yearly subscription and we'll tell you who passes and who fails. I think that would be a great nonprofit where, you know, you randomly take samples of different brands of oils and test them for authenticity and have it all public on your website. You can see what percentage of the time they pass, what the fatty acid analysis was.

I would donate to that nonprofit. What do you think and obviously speak freely, right? That's why we're here on the podcast. I got the opportunity to put a little money in through a venture fund that a buddy had started and they invested in like Primal Kitchen. by Marxist and they were really known for bringing a lot of avocado oils to the market. Naturally, the reason that you invest in companies, and this is the hope is, even though some people get upset at it, is that you want that company to sell and you make a return as an investor.

And in particular, Primal Kitchen, it's sold to Kraft. I didn't put a ton of money in, but I put a little money in. And I got a return. So that was a win. And it was sold to Kraft, right? They still sell those dressings. I use those dressings on a regular basis. I think fondly of the company.

I think fondly of Mark Sisson and his work. And I really appreciate it. I think largely he would agree with a lot of your stance that's out there. A company like that, not to call him out in particular or that brand, and I'm not calling them out. If I wanted to see if that avocado oil is pure is the only way of knowing, is that testing? Yep. Send it off to a third party lab. Or ask them if they've sent it off and they regularly test?

Yeah, you can ask them. and, you know, I would, I would look for, um, time stamped records of the analysis from a third party, ideally on, you know, the letterhead, the paperwork of that third party. Not to say I don't try, I mean, Mark's amazing. Obviously, but when you sell your company, you lose some level of control. A lot of founders are now writing into there that, you know, you can't change it or adulterated or this. And I know Mark and his team obviously are probably like super sophisticated. They probably have something like that. And he still consumes it. So I can't imagine. him, you know, being somebody that would consume it if it was adulterated.

But I do want to say, like, you know, I've generally, I've bought avocado, I've bought avocado oils. I bought in bulk an avocado oil that arrived to me that was sold on Amazon. And it came to me in a big jug. And it was a metal jug. And I would pour it out and I'd cook with it. I was like, something just feels different about this, right? Something feels different about this.

And I just intuitively, I said, you know what? I don't want to use this. Maybe it's from a different region, this, that. And then I started reading reports of avocado oil being even more adulterated because it's sold out even more of a premium. But I generally feel that when I use the primal kitchen avocado oil, which I'll use every so often, I feel fine. You know, I have no connections to the company anymore. They're not a sponsor, anything like that. But I'm just curious, you know, because I'm navigating the space like just like everybody else. Yeah, I totally trust, Mark. I totally trust them. The issue is, is not a lack of trust. It's a lack of supply chain transparency where, you know, primal kitchen doesn't own avocado fields

in Mexico where it's ensuring the entire supply chain is, you know, is overseen. They probably have some good stuff in place. I agree. That's a, you know, that's a brand I think very fondly of. But, you know, zooming out to other companies who may also buy avocado oil, I was chatting with a packaged food company who uses avocado oil. And they had four totes of oil that were going into to making their next next package food product, and they decided to actually test them. And of the four totes, only one of them was actually avocado oil and three of them were not. And unless they had done that test, they would never have known. And a lot of companies now, you know, kind of... And what's that test? Is that a mass spectrometer you have to send it into? The most straightforward test is measure

oleic acid levels and or linoleic acid levels. Avocado oil has, you know, a pretty clear range of where that falls. If it's adulterated with something like soybean oil, you're going to see way more linoleic acid, omega-6, and way less oleic acid, which is a mono-unsaturated fat. And there's labs that are out there that do this, people can Google it.

They might even be able to send in samples themselves. Yeah, Eurofins is one such example, E-U-R-O-F-N-S. You know, it's a bit complicated to kind of go through, but yeah, as a citizen scientist, you could go pay money to Eurofins to do a fatty acid analysis of whatever you want to send them.

So that's olive oil, avocado oil. We've talked about some of the challenges and the navigation around that. Any other common oils in the health food space that you see people eating that you want to chat about, you know, about maybe some pros and cons before we talk about what you've created in your formula?

So just so I don't come across as, you know, being negative on everything, I will say canola oil gets, gets a pretty bad rap out there as it's kind of seen as like the worst seed oil, I think. A lot of people will use canola oil kind of to be synonymous with horrible seed oils. Canola oil actually has, so this study that I had mentioned by UC Davis looking at a number of different avocado oil samples, the average omega-6 fat content among all those samples was 19.8%. That's almost exactly the omega-6 content of canola oil. So, I mean, I guess you could

take that one or two ways. One, avocado oil has a pretty high omega-6 content, or canola oil has an omega-6 content similar to avocado oil. So if we're celebrating avocado oil, we might want to consider celebrating canola oil. It's way lower an omega-6 than something like a soybean oil, and it has some omega-3s in there. So if you're using it for like a salad dressing or something like that, you know, there's an argument to be made that you'd be better off having the canola oil than the avocado of oil. And and then from there, you know, there just aren't many oils that, I mean, macadamia nut oil is an interesting one. It's super expensive and has a nutty flavor, but very low in omega-6. And then a lot of high-end restaurants will use grape seed oil or rice bran oil, but those are very

high in omega-6. Sunflower and safflower oil are the highest in omega-6. And then soybean oil is is right up there. And when I say high, I mean like 75% omega-6 fat. 75% of the oil is omega-6 fat. You're starting to see a lot of brands, even health food brands, talking about using high-olic. Oleic, high-o-leic sunflower oil.

What's your thoughts on that? Much better. So high-ol-leic sunflower oil means that the sunflower plants have been bred to produce lower amounts of lin-oleic acid and therefore higher amounts of oleic acid. And this is something that the food industry has been trying to do for a while because they recognize the issues with omega-6 fats. You know, they break down easily.

They don't last very long in fryers. They make your food not taste very good. They have a short shelf life. Same with avocado oil, you know, short shelf life. So so much of it is rancid because, I mean, you want to get through the product that you have. And so high oleic oils are lower in omega-6 fats. They're nowhere near like a butter or, or beef tallow or coconut oil or cocoa butter or something like that from an omega-6 standpoint.

But they're certainly lower than something like a regular safflower oil or regular soybean oil. And, you know, we didn't chat about it, but give us the breakdown on some of the animal fats. You know, I come from the Indian background, Hindu background, Vedic background, and ghee is a big part of the tradition. I interestingly enough, and still a little sensitive to ghee. So if I eat too much of it, I will break out. Again, could be how I grew up, my gut health, other things like that. The rest of my family seems to do okay with it.

Generally is using other higher quality sort of oils to cook with, but still will use it on certain dishes and things like that. How do you feel about ghee, other animal fats that people are using these days? I think way better than seed oils, way better than vegetable oils. just different application. Obviously, you can't make a salad dressing with, you know, with ghee. And it has a very, a very strong flavor similar to something like a beef tallow. I mean, I use those sorts of fats all the time at home for cooking when I want certain flavor profiles. I think they're great. I especially love using beef tallow when I've cooked a fatty piece of meat and I just have all this, you know, beef fat left over. And instead of throwing that away, I render it and then, you know, use it for cooking until it's out. And this is controversial. And this is where I think, like we were talking about before, you may lose a lot of people. They may be starting to understand, okay, seed oils are bad.

I get that. I should avoid them. What do I use instead? Wait, I'd need to use beef fat and lard and dairy fats. Like saturated fat is bad. I'm out. Let me go back to whatever I was doing before. But I think the whole saturated fat thing causes heart disease and is bad for you is

totally overblown. I don't think that means, you know, we should just be guzzling MCT oil and melted butter and coconut oil that every meal is like health foods. I think eating whole foods is super important. But when we do need to use a little oil or a little fat, I don't think those are problematic at all and, you know, lend a really great taste. I was consuming a bunch of MCT oil during like the bulletproof, bulletproof craze, you know, like the, because like I can't do a lot of butter.

And I always knew that because that would break me out. I was having a lot of MCT oil. This was like 2019, 18, you know, know, living in Santa Monica and, uh, and you had Bulletproof Cafe. Bulletproof Cafe was right there. And then I was having, I, I would get complimented all the time. Like my skin was really clear, other things before this time. I started eating a lot of more sort of butter in my food, ghee in my food. And then I would order the coffees, but just with MCT oil. And I felt great, but I was getting a lot of redness. And then one day this microbiologist

came on the podcast when my studio was back in. Santa Monica, his name is Kieran Krishnan from microbiome labs. And I was just talking about some things. And he was saying that he had come across some research that for some people, a large dose of saturated fat, I mentioned earlier, can cause sometimes an endotoxemia reaction. And that I, who was trying to figure out like, why am I breaking out again and why is my face so, you know, red a lot of times? He said, just do an experiment. Just take out any kind of concentrations of just added saturated fat, go for lower cuts of, you know,

leaner meats and things and see what happens. And I did that and I saw a difference. This was just me. This is anecdotal. I'm always clear about that. I'm not making statements for other people. And then I started digging into it a little bit more and running some tests with a physician

who's actually coming on the podcast tomorrow. El Roy Vigdani and I was talking to him about it who's here just in Brentwood. And he was saying, yeah, he's seen something like that too. And it's a sign that sometimes either you are more predisposed to that. Maybe your gut is remembering sort of an immune reaction, whatever it might be. But it just goes back to this idea of why I'm such a big proponent of personalized health.

You know, largely these things can be generally healthy for a lot of people. And then we all are making our own individual tweaks along the way. Yeah, absolutely. So let's get back to, you know, I guess quote unquote, the big reveal, right? talk about your company and how you got on this idea of wanting to create an oil that hit all those checkboxes of being a certain fatty acid profile being something that could be consumed by you know also vegans and vegetarians if that's the dietary you know pattern that people follow and also ultimately could be something that could be scaled to the degree that it met the

requirements of what restaurants or food production might need. So our mission is to give the world an oil change. And to do that, we were talking about some of the statistics earlier about how much oil is used in restaurants versus packaged foods versus consumers at home. The huge majority is used in restaurants and in packaged foods. So, you know, the product needs to fit the bill, check the boxes, as you said, when it comes to what those customers are really looking for. And we talked about You and I just a few minutes ago talked about olive oil and butter and ghee and avocado oil. Are those the answers? Well, in my mind, if those were the answers, then the problem would be answered because

those oils have been around for, you know, decades now. And they're just, they're a drop in the barrel when it comes to total oil consumption in the U.S. So, yeah, we looked into all sorts of potential solutions. I knew that I wanted to solve this problem. I didn't know how to solve this problem. I was kind of coming out of working on a nonprofit and working with a company called Perfect Keto

after kind of phasing out of the restaurant and bringing on a partner to run it. And was banging my head against the wall and how do we solve this problem? I don't think education is enough. I think we just need an alternative that can do the things that chefs want seed oils to do but won't cause so much harm.

To our health and to the planet, because seed oils are hugely destructive on a number of fronts from an environmental standpoint. And so we landed on a method of fermentation to produce oil. And the way that our company is called Zero Acre, and the way that Zero Acre oil is produced is by fermenting non-GMO sugar cane into oil. And that results in a very neutral tasting oil. It's liquid, stays liquid in the fridge. and it has an extremely high smoke point, 485 degrees Fahrenheit.

It makes French fries taste better. It makes salad dressing flavors pop because it's so neutral. The food ingredients really pop. So we've been really excited about this product because we think it does all those things that chefs want seed oils to do, but then is just really healthy. And it also has low saturated fat content. So for someone like you drew or for all the, vegans and vegetarians out there that are trying to avoid saturated fat, or frankly, for most of the

country that still has a perception that saturated fat is to be avoided, it checks that box as well. So this process of fermentation, you can think of it like brewing beer. Beer is made by fermenting sugars and barley into alcohol and carbon dioxide. That's what gives beer. It's alcohol content and it's carbonation. In this particular case, we ferment raw sugar from sugar cane. purely into oil. And then it's Expeller Press to give us Zero Acre Oil. And we just launched this last year. We started with consumers on our website, Zeroacre.com, just to start to get feedback from folks on how do you like this product, how is it working for you, anything we should know, things you don't like. And are you breaking out in acne? Are there things that we might not

even be thinking of that would be different with this oil? It shouldn't be because there's nothing new in it. It's just, it's the same healthy mono and saturated fats that are in olive oil, very, very high levels of mono and saturated fat and then just very low levels of omega-6 and low levels of saturated fat. There's nothing new, but still, you know, wanted to get feedback. We've gotten now, I think like 400 reviews. Those are just the people that have written them on our website, very positive feedback. And now we're starting to expand into what really is our North Star, where we really want to have an impact, which is interreferial. restaurants. And so we have a couple dozen restaurants using the product now. And we have some

exciting announcements coming up the next couple months for much larger chains that are going to be using the product. So it's top of the first inning, you know, very, very beginning of this the grand plan. But but so far, so good. And Chipotle is one of those partners that isn't using it Yeah, but they were an investor. Is that right? Yep, we have announced the financial investment from Chipotle. And what did they, when you approach them or if you had a contact, like why is somebody like Chipotle, what were they feeling excited about as wanting to be investors in something

like this? Their mission is to cultivate a better world. And so they're constantly looking at all of their ingredients they use and trying to figure out if they can level up those ingredients in a way that still makes their food accessible. You know, we've met a number of members of the team there. and they're really good people and they're authentic and they want to do the right thing. They also understand they have a business to run and if all their meals all of a sudden were, you know, double the price, then they wouldn't even have a stage to do a right thing

because they probably wouldn't attract many customers. But they're constantly looking out at this stuff. And what they see with seed oils is, you know, no matter how good their fajita peppers are or their bell peppers and onions, no matter how good their meat or chicken sourcing standards are, if it's all cooked in the equivalent of fast food frying oil, then are they really cultivating a better world? And are they really doing the right thing by having oil with all of these health and environmental issues?

And the answer is no. And that doesn't mean they're going to be using us tomorrow. But they make investments in companies where they see a path to potentially partnering with that company in a commercial way. And so we'll see. Yeah, I like Chipoli. I don't eat there a lot. but, you know, I just liked that they were a better option for a lot of people who typically

were maybe going to McDonald's or Taco Bell or something else where you might not find as many healthy options. So, yeah, I mean, congratulations on the launch of the company. You know, you and I have been in touch for like a couple years about it. And even this podcast, I said, you know, before I have you on, like, I want to try it for a little bit, right? By the way, just like, it's clear. There are a lot of podcasts that take paid guests.

that means like somebody like you could pay me to be on my show. I never do that. So anybody that I invite on, it's because I want to talk to them. I'm not knocking on that practice. I'm just saying it's a little bit sometimes confusing when people take paid guests and they don't announce it in some sort of way.

So I have no financial incentive. I'm also not investor. I actually passed on investing initially because I didn't understand what you guys were doing at that time. I always like to be transparent because my audience can see where I'm coming from and how I'm trying to figure things out on my own journey in that process, but I'm also open to like changing my mind and being open to it.

But still I said I want to try the product. And I brought mine in, actually. This is literally from my kitchen. This is the zero acre. If you're watching on YouTube, you can kind of see it. It's in this bottle. And if you're looking at it as why it's, why it's dented, which is why you asked me, I said it's dented because I genuinely use it.

I've probably gripped it up a few times and I've dropped it on my kitchen floor and counter in making food. So here's a few things that I've known. noticed from using it. Number one, I actually am so used to using things like olive oil and avocado oil and having a little bit of that flavor profile. And while this cooked perfectly, I almost for a second was, I didn't taste that in my food and I had to get a little used to that. Right. I had to get used to the fact of a neutral food that's there. It's kind of like when people cook for coconut oil, which I don't use. And I'm like, oh, everything tastes coconut. I'm never

going to use this. I had that initial thing of like, hey, I'm not tasting that initial sort of, I have all different types of olive oils that I'll use, high quality that I try to seek out. And so that was an interesting experience. And outside of that, it's like it did its job of what you said. I just didn't really notice it. You know, I don't eat fried food, so I haven't tried frying it. Are people literally using this as fried food? Yeah, they are. In making like fried food at home, like deep fried? They'll do shallow frying. I mean, it's not a lot of oil in that 60 ounce bottle. do shallow frying. I have access to a bit more oil, so we'll deep fry at home. And restaurants are doing, in fact, the majority of restaurants that are using it are using it for deep frying.

That's awesome. And a lot of folks have said something similar to what you said, where they assumed their neutral oil, you know, their avocado oil or whatever, was in fact neutral. And then they use zero acres. And they're like, oh, that's what neutral actually tastes like. And they'll say things like, I can taste my eggs for the first time in my omelet. I'm actually tasting the egg. I'm not tasting that sort of film or layer of oil that's over the entire egg that just masks it a little bit. There's a couple restaurants in Austin, right, that are using the product that I see that I've seen on social media. I think that they've, you've reposted them and they've kind of tagged you guys. The largest right now is a chain called Ziki in Austin, Texas. They're awesome

doing a bunch of the right things. They have. of 10 or 11 locations in Austin right now. You know, there's probably people that are listening that have a restaurant themselves or are friendly with somebody. If you wanted to, is the product at a level yet, right? Consumers can get it. Anybody that's looking for healthy cooking oil, you know, with a LinkedIn, the show notes, you know, it's not an affiliate link.

You can just go and buy it on the zero acre farm website. So it's ready for consumers. Is the product ready for restaurants, right? Do you sell it in larger amounts? And what are the unique things that have to happen in a restaurant? Do they have to change equipment? Do they have to do anything differently? Any education on staff?

You have restaurants. You're in the process of sort of switching the oil for those restaurants. So is it available for restaurants? How are the ones that are using it right now? And is there anything unique that restaurants have to do to localize the implementation of this oil? Yes, it is being used in restaurants right now. And it is ready to roll and be used at more restaurants.

we're very conscious of which restaurants we partner with first to make sure, you know, they're aligned with our values and brand and all of that. The majority of the world has never heard of Zero Acre. And so as they start to hear about it, we want to make sure it's associated with, you know, the right kinds of partnerships. If McDonald's came to us tomorrow and said, let's do it across all of our 16,000 locations, whatever, we'd say we need a few years to really scale up fermentation, scale up production. but, you know, for smaller restaurant chains, smaller being like they have dozens or maybe hundreds

of locations, not tens of thousands, or for, you know, high-end restaurants or mom-and-pop restaurants, certainly we have enough oil to service those folks and are just getting going and all the distributors all over the country that get food ingredients to restaurant operators. And are there any unique challenges of switching over to this? Like for a restaurant? today? I realize you asked that question too. I forgot to answer it. So yeah, it's a one-in drop-in replacement. It's not like a, I don't know, a gluten-free flour or using almond flour instead of wheat flour where you really need to work with it to see how it'll perform differently.

You just cook the food like you otherwise would have cooked it, except you're using now basically just an oil, a bottle full of healthy fats instead of fats that oxidize and cause harm. and in deep frying applications, there seem to be some unique benefits due to the oil's properties. So what we've seen in some trials is that French fries, for example, don't absorb as much oil. And so you end up having fewer fat calories in the French fries themselves. And it's noticeable in the greasiness of the fries. You just have less grease on your fingers afterwards. The fries are a little bit crispier, is what we've heard from restaurant operators.

and then there are also some benefits just in terms of the shelf life of the product, how long that oil will fry food for that the restaurants have really seemed to appreciate. How's the caloric profile? You know, we've done a whole summer weight loss series with a bunch of different food experts, fitness experts, JJ Virgin, Max Ligivir, Sal, DiStefano. And one of the big things that we've been talking about is that whole food first, avoid ultra-processed foods, obviously the best that you can, but severely, you know, minimize them or avoid them in your life. And also, too, if body composition is the goal, which is

improving muscle mass and lowering sort of total fat inside of the body, we have to, of course, pay attention to the strain training, protein consumption, but also we still do want to be mindful about the total level of calories because you can overeat on keto snacks. You can overeat on on pouring too much olive oil. And a lot of these things can add up. And I know firsthand because I was in that boat, even though I was eating quite healthy, before I started working with this strain training program here

in Los Angeles called Ultimate Performance. Yes, it was after a month in Italy. I came in at, and I'm a pretty skinny guy, I came in at 26% body fat percentage, probably largely because I was under muscleed at the time. But I ate like a very clean diet. And, you know, my blood largely look, you know, good, other things. But I wanted to improve my body composition.

And so I had to be a little bit more mindful about where kind of the calories you're coming from, tighten some things up. So yes, quality matters first and foremost, but also we want to pay attention to quantity to if we're interested in body composition. How does this look from a caloric standpoint compared to other oils that are out there? Identical from a, you know, that bottle of oil will have the exact number of calories as the same size bottle of olive oil, avocado oil, even canola oil, soybean oil. So the bottle itself has the same number of calories.

But what we're finding is that when you cook with it, 10 to 15 percent fewer calories are actually absorbed into the food. But it tastes just as good. And so it's kind of like a neat trick to cook with oil and have fat in your food without the, you know, with a little bit fewer calories. Yeah, that said, it'd be great if we got all of our fat. and protein and carbohydrates from purely whole foods. That's not the world we live in.

People like to cook with fat. People like to cook with oil. Restaurants deep fry. So if we're going to use all this added fat and added oil, certainly it should be an oil that doesn't do so much harm. There's some research showing that, you know, if you add some mono and saturated fat to your diet, it is beneficial.

Maybe that's because it helps with satiety signaling. It, you know, it helps you say no to the extra donut. So maybe it, you're not actually adding more calumatural. overall because it's helping you feel full longer. But on the topic of calories, I mean, we could go down a deep rabbit hole here, but there's really interesting research. We're actually not eating anymore in the U.S., not eating any more calories today than we were 20 years ago. We actually consumed more calories between, I think it was 2002 and 2004, as we did between 2016

to 2018. We actually consumed fewer between 2016 to 2018. But during that same time, obesity rates like doubled or grew by 50% or something. And similarly, there's a paper that just came out in nature like a few months ago from John Speakman. He's a UK, very esteemed researcher. And they found that while so total energy expenditure is going down. So how many calories were burning, essentially, it has been going down on a population level

across thousands or tens of thousands of subjects over the last couple of. decades, but activity levels are actually going up. So how many calories we're burning from activity from what we all think of when we think of burning calories, like going on a walk, going on a run, being on the treadmill, playing sports, that sort of thing. We've been doing a better job at that. So the reason that total caloric expenditure has been going down is because what's called BMR or basal metabolic rate has been decreasing. So this is super interesting because this is, refers to the calories we burn when we're, you know, sitting on the couch, watching Netflix, asleep on the toilet, like just doing normal human things.

And so that's not good because we don't know what's causing that and it's hard to control, but we're going to keep gaining weight if we're burning fewer calories while just sitting around. And interestingly, what the researchers pointed out was the change or the replacement of more traditional fats with unsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, omega-6 fats, as a potential culprit in this because of the research showing that excess consumption of omega-6 fats will actually decrease our basal metabolic rate. In other words, it will make it harder to burn calories when we're just sitting around. This could potentially translate to, you know, you have two people just both sitting there on the couch. One's maybe maybe feeling a little

lazier, a little, you know, less motivated to get up off the couch. And then, that could be because their basal metabolic rate is lower. Their body is just trying to conserve calories and not spend them as much. And this has been shown in animal models, in mammals. And so it's really fascinating. And there's a lot more to the calorie story than just, you know, my app said I burned 1,100 calories today on my run. And let me now type it into my fitness pal and, okay, match up the calories. And now I'm going to lose weight. It's way more complicated in that. 100%. We've had on people like Ben Bickman, who I think is involved in your company. Yep. He's an advisor of ours. And of course, we believe and I believe 100% that even if you're

maintaining healthy weight or you might even be not obese, you could still have terrible metabolic health. Your insulin could be high. This is all separate from even the vegetable oils conversation. So those things matter. And there are people that still are in that category where they have good metabolic health, that we're noticing that eating a generally healthy diet because we have so many tasty foods and there's so much abundance of foods that's out there that even the best of us can overeat sometimes.

And you notice that you on a personal level and N of 1 can gain weight in certain situations, right? Unwanted weight. But I totally agree that it's a lot more complicated than just the calorie story. In fact, I'm interviewing Ben on Monday again and he just posted something recently that might be related to this research that you were talking about.

So I'd love to have him, you know, chat about it a little bit. And if there's any other experts that are out there that you'd want me to have on to continue to tell the full story, you know, I'm always open to chatting with them. Jeff, this has been great. Let's leave the audience with, you know, you are the CEO founder of this company. Again, zero acres. People can find it. Google it online.

Click on the show notes. Check out the oil. But you also are somebody who just wants to be overall healthy, right? and wants to pass it on to others because of your own personal life being impacted and you don't want other families, individuals to be going through this, you know, same thing, right? Passing away of chronic diseases that are largely avoidable through extreme sort of, not extreme, through targeted lifestyle changes. So that's your mission.

So separate from the seed oil conversation, right, if you had to say, three, four things that are the things that you try to major in on a regular basis that keep you healthy that you want to leave our audience with. What would they be? So of course, we've chat about in detail seed oils and avoiding them and your philosophy and viewpoint on that. And that's an awesome one. Whole episode that we've been doing now for a little bit on that, almost two hours. give me the next three or four. Yeah, so number one, avoid seed oils. Number two, avoid refined sugars. Number three, avoid refined flowers. And then, and this is the important part, and then follow your taste buds and eat what tastes good. And I believe that if you cut those three things, your body wants

to be healthy. Your body will, you know, it may be subtle at first, but your body will send you signals of what it needs. And there's a bunch of research on this too, showing that people who are deficient in certain vitamins or minerals, or more likely to seek out foods that are high in those vitamins or minerals. And so eating what tastes good to you is probably a good, a good way to gauge what your body needs once you've cut out the things that, you know, may do a lot of the harm. And the reason I say, you know, cut out refined flowers in particular is even if it's something like an almond flower or a cassava flour or a coconut flour, it's so easy for that just to become basically an ultra-processed food, even if it's like, you know, made with avocado oil and coconut flour or something

like that, there's, there are no micronutrients in there. And the last thing I'll add is, if you can be biased toward more micronutrient dense foods, you know, more micronutrient-dense foods include things like seafood and liver and leafy greens and legumes and eggs and those sorts of things. Oh, oysters. Which I know you're a huge fan of. Don't get me started on oysters. You have a whole blog on your website. Tessa, do we have Jeff's blog? There's a whole article that you've written on oysters. Everyone should eat oysters. Why everyone should eat oysters?

Why should everybody eat oysters? Okay, well, there are several reasons. So one, first and foremost, oysters probably don't feel pain. They have no central nervous system, which is how we believe, you know, animals feel pain. And that's the reason that many vegans and vegetarians don't eat meat is because of, you know, animal cruelty reasons and because animals can feel, pain. Oysters can't feel pain. Therefore, I think all vegans and vegetarians should consider consuming oysters because they're so rich in a lot of the foods that are hard to get on a vegan diet. I'm just imagining me sitting down trying to convince my vegan friends to eat oysters.

Maybe this will win them over then. Oysters are also, they don't just have a low footprint. They're actually really good for the environment. Yeah. So water passes through them and they actually make that water cleaner on the other side, not in a gross way where now the oysters They're like filters full of crap. They're able to get rid of all that. But the water comes out cleaner on the other side. So they can't feel pain. So they're basically like plants in that regard.

They're really good for the environment. They're the single most micronutrient dense food on the planet after liver. They have some very unique antioxidants in them. They taste delicious. And if I don't know where to get these right now, but if you scroll down in this article toward the bottom, you'll see, I think it's toward the very bottom, you'll see chef Dan Barber out in New York holding that, that's the one, holding a couple of different oysters. That's what happens when you let oysters grow.

For those not watching this, a typical oyster is maybe, you know, an inch or too long, but they can grow to almost a foot long. It's like an oyster steak. And so it's actually quite economical when you're buying them in bulk and going, you know, doing oyster tastings, trying different toppings, it can be a fun activity with the loved one or something. I was just in Vancouver on a boy's trip, and I'm a huge fan of oysters, right? I thought they were disgusting and gross, obviously growing up, vegan, vegetarian, but I'm a huge fan of them now. And I feel like they're probably like a good introduction to organ meat for a lot of people that

know that organ meat can be healthy and is so nutrient dense, but are having a hard time getting there. It's usually how I've had my family. members that switched their dietary approach, I get them started with that. You mentioned three, four things on the dietary side. I want to give you an opportunity also, too, just from life as a whole, right? Is there anything else, right? You're a busy guy. You have a family. You have other stuff. I find often the people that are deeply in the world of health, we always need the reminder that like, and obviously you have this reminder, which is why you're on this mission to create something healthy that other people don't have to even think about, right?

They just, if they choose to eat fast food that day, they want to take their kids out for French fries. They don't have to think what kind of oil is this made in or is this going to be good for my kids or bad for these kids, right? And not everybody is thinking about food as much as we are. And depending on some of the data that you look at, you know, food may be only part of the reason that we're in the mess that we're in, whether it's, I'm not saying the blue zones data is perfect, but some of the extrapolations we can take out of there of community, activity,

et cetera, if there was three things that you would have that would not be food related, that our core of keeping you healthy while also having a family, a busy company, being on a mission, traveling a lot, what would those things be? Making time for physical fitness. I think that is extremely important. And so I have this kind of analogy. I can't remember where I first heard it, but you're a busy person, I'm a busy person. We're juggling a lot of balls.

Some of those balls are made of rubber and some of those balls are made of glass. The balls that are made of rubber, it's not a big deal if you drop them. The balls that are made of glass, they're shattered forever when you drop them. The work is usually a rubber ball. Your relationships and especially your relationships with family, those are glass balls. And I try not to drop the glass balls. Sometimes I might, you know, slip a little and then barely save it. But the rubber balls can be dropped.

And for me, physical fitness is a glass ball. last ball. Once I stop working out, I just have no motivation to get back into it. So I got to just keep doing it. Even if that just means, you know, like taking my one year old on a walk in the morning around the block, just make sure I get out and do something, get my heart rate going, get moving, get outside. And I also, this is just like the efficient person in me. I try to double or triple up on things. Again, being a busy person. For example, if I'm an exercise, I don't want to just be stuck in the garage on a Peloton. I want to be outside getting sunlight, seeing neighbors, catching up with them, you know, going on either a walk or a run, ideally having my son with

me on that walk. So I'm getting, you know, a little bit of the community, the sunlight, and the family time in. And then I've come to realize the importance of boundaries, both in, you know, in like time management, but also in relationships. And, you know, In time management, you know, that's kind of the most straightforward piece. I'm now at a point where when it's 5 o'clock, my day ends. And it used to be, oh, I'll try to end by then. And then all of a sudden it's 9 o'clock and my wife's mad at me and, you know, why did I work so much? But now it's 5 o'clock.

My day ends. I go spend a few hours with the family, you know, with my son. We put them to bed together. We clean a bunch of poop, whatever we have to do. And then maybe I'll log back on for an hour to, you know, clear out any urgent emails or whatever. but having that boundary of this is when my day ends. And if I'm not going to log back in for an hour, actually say out loud, I'm done working for the day.

And that creates this a really strong boundary. And then boundaries with other people. I think I've heard Mark Hyman do a whole podcast on this, actually, as he's kind of realizing the importance and the power of boundaries. I've also found very helpful. It's not in my nature to seek out conflict. and, you know, I want to agree with people as opposed to disagree. That's kind of just, you know, my bias.

But being very clear when I don't agree and why, you know, and letting people you'll know what my truth is has been very helpful in my life from a boundary setting standpoint. Beautiful. Love those three. Jeff, this has been fantastic. If people want to keep in touch with you, are you active on social media? Can they follow you anywhere? I'm semi-active depending on the, you know, what's going on with the best.

business and how much it pulls me in. But when I'm active, it's on Twitter at Jeff Knobbs, my name. I co-write a bunch of the content also on the Zero Acre blog. And we're getting ready to do some exciting announcements of new restaurants that are going to be using Zero Acres. So check back soon. And for those listening, please support those restaurants. Well, this has been a blast. You can follow Jeff and Zero Acres. They have some good social media content as well, the blogs of the stuff that they post. Zero Acres more active on Instagram. Yeah, more active. We have the link to that in the show notes. Jeff, thanks so much for making it in person.

This is a fantastic conversation and super appreciate the mission that you're on. Thank you. I appreciate everything you're doing, Drew, and thanks for having me. Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app.

And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love

can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset, to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes

that's called Try This, or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.