The Dr. Hyman Show - The Industry Secret Keeping You Inflamed, Tired, & Bloated | Nina Teicholz & Max Lugavere

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

Highly processed vegetable oils, derived from seeds and beans, have become a dominant part of modern diets despite significant health concerns. Historical biases in nutrition science, influenced by the vegetable oil industry, have promoted these oils despite evidence from controlled studies showing negative health outcomes. These oils are unstable, prone to oxidation, and can create toxic byproducts, particularly when exposed to heat, contributing to inflammation and chronic diseases. Although they can lower LDL cholesterol, studies have shown that this reduction does not necessarily improve heart health and may increase risks for other conditions like cancer. In contrast, traditional fats like extra virgin olive oil and omega-3-rich foods offer more stability and health benefits, emphasizing the need for a balanced, minimally processed approach to dietary fats. In this episode, I talk with Nina Teicholz and Max Lugavere to explore the health impacts of different types of fats and oils, debunking misconceptions around cooking with extra virgin olive oil and emphasizing the dangers of industrial vegetable oils. Nina Teicholz is a science journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Big Fat Surprise, which upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat—especially saturated fat—and spurred a new conversation about whether these fats in fact cause heart disease. She is also the founder of the Nutrition Coalition, a non-profit working to ensure that government nutrition policy is transparent and evidence-based—work for which she’s been asked to testify before the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Canadian Senate. Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist and the author of the New York Times best-seller Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life, now published in 10 languages around the globe. His sophomore book, also a best-seller, is called The Genius Life: Heal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Become Extraordinary and latest book Genius Kitchen. Max is the host of a #1 iTunes health and wellness podcast, called The Genius Life. Max appears regularly on The Dr. Oz Show, The Rachael Ray Show, and The Doctors. He has contributed to Medscape, Vice, Fast Company, CNN, and The Daily Beast, has been featured on NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and in The New York Times and People Magazine. He is an internationally sought-after speaker and has given talks at South by Southwest, the New York Academy of Sciences, the Biohacker Summit in Stockholm, Sweden, and many others. Full length episodes can be found here: Is Vegetable Oil Good or Bad for You? Nina Teicholz The Best Diet for Your Brain This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%.

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman show. It's actually a myth that you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil. In the Mediterranean region of the world, they use extra virgin olive oil not just to cook with, but they use it as a sauce. For some reason, we've been told that the Mediterranean dietary pattern, as it's lauded in the Western medical literature, involves canola oil and all of these crap oils and that you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil. You know, I often remind people that sleep is not just a luxury, it's a necessity. It impacts your energy-focused metabolism and overall health. You might not know this, but poor sleep used to dominate my life, leaving me exhausted

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even offers a 365-day money back guarantee, so there's nothing to lose except another restless night. Now before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab

insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Dr. Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, DrHeiman.com for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Now, we were all taught when I was a kid that vegetable oil, and by the way, what the hell is vegetable oil?

You see vegetable oil in a bottle in a store? You go to that broccoli oil? I mean, it just does not even exist. So we're talking about seed and bean and nut oils like soybean oil, canola oil, safflower oil, corn oil, canola oil. These are all these oils that are out there and they're, by the way, there is something called vegetable oil which you can buy in the grocery stores. I have no idea what that is. Anyway, I wouldn't eat that. We're all trained that they're better for you and then we should be avoiding butter and saturated fat and animal

fats. And so there's been a big push to shift our diet from consuming more saturated fats to more unsaturated fats. And saturation, unsaturation, it's a chemical classification based on how many of the classification based on how many of the, you know, sort of carbons are saturated with hydrogen on a fat molecule. So the more saturated it is, the more hard it is at room temperature, the more hydrogens there are, it's basically just basically the classification system. But basically they have different functions in your body. And basically we're told that we should not be eating these saturated fats that cause high cholesterol, they clog our arteries, they lead to heart disease, and basically we're told that we should not be eating these saturated fats. They cause high cholesterol, they clog our arteries, they lead to heart disease and basically

we're told to swap out saturated for unsaturated fats or called PUFAs or the omega-6 fatty acids in these vegetable oils or quote vegetable oils. And they're everywhere. They're kind of clear cases. They're highly refined. They're processed with clear cases. They're highly refined. They're processed with hexane. They're deodorized. They're really extremely highly processed foods.

Now, some like olive oil or extra virgin olive oil, they're simple pressing. You can do it with like a machine. It's like a press and it squeezes the oil out. That's a very different thing than the kind of aggressive extraction methods they use for modern processed plant oils. Now, these oils are by definition unstable, right? If you take lard and you keep it at room temperature and you leave it there for two months, it's

fine. If you take a plant oil and you leave it out, it's going to become oxidized so it becomes very easily damaged. They're more unstable, more easily damaged, more oxidized, more oxidation leads to more inflammation and they can be problematic. And so, you know, these oils can be more inflammatory but there are certain caveats we'll talk about in that context. But the American Heart Association, the National Education Cholesterol Program, the National Institutes of Health, and even our government's own dietary guidelines are telling us to swap out saturated fat for these unsaturated fats, or these plant

oils. And a lot of respected doctors and scientists have been telling us this for a long, long time, and we've been listening. It turns out it's not so clear cut. We were talking about why we should maybe change our perspective and be a little more nuanced about this. Black and white thinking is not helpful in any subject, particularly nutrition. And so really, is it all or nothing? Should we like eliminate completely plant oils from our diet? Which oils should we 100% eliminate? Which oils can we include somewhat?

Should we be eating only saturated fat like coconut oil and butter and lard? I mean, what is the right answer here? And I wrote a whole book about this called Eat Fat Get Thin. You wanna go into more detail about it. But essentially, we're a little bit confused and it's not surprising because because there was an article, for example, in 2010 from Tufts University that concluded

there's a lot of benefit from cutting out saturated fat and increasing our intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids, or the PUFAs, or these plant oils. Now, the same group looked in 2014 at a meta-analysis of all the literature, kind of looking at 72 different studies, I think it was published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, they found no benefit to reducing saturated fat for cardiovascular disease or increase polyunsaturated fats, except there was a benefit for increasing omega-3 fats. So this is really key,

is the omega-3 fat piece is really important. Omega-3 fats are basically from wild food, wild fish, wild plants. We don't eat that much anymore, but omega-3s are really important for our brain function, our skin health, our immune health, inflammation regulation, so many different things. And it usually comes from wild fish at this point.

Sardines are one of the best sources. So we should be paying attention to that. But we're not easily clear about this because there's so much conflicting data. And experts can't seem to agree. You've got top nutrition scientists out there think one thing and from the NIH and another group that thinks the opposite. So like, how do we even begin to sort of come up with what actually makes sense here

in terms of what's the truth? And that's what I want to kind of unpack today a little bit. So, you know, the basic idea is that if you consume these PUFAs, these palliative saturated fatty acids, it lowers LDL cholesterol, which is true. If you basically cut out saturated fat and you add in these plant oils, these seed and bean oils, you will tend to have a lower LDL cholesterol. But is that enough to recommend that we should be doing this? And I think it's confusing because lowering LDL is not necessarily the key to reversing

heart disease. It has to do with a lot of factors and some resistance, oxidation, inflammation, and so forth. So, there was one really quite amazing study that and I'm going to sort of preface it by saying that most of the studies that we're looking at these polyunsaturated fats are observational studies, population studies, some are interventional studies where you can do a trial and get an answer about cause and effect. But they're a little hard to sort of decipher because in studies for example where people

are eating a lot of saturated fat, they're also eating a lot of sugar and starch. And you know, it's very different putting butter on your bagel than putting butter on your broccoli. Because when you put butter on your bagel, you're adding starch and saturated fat and that's deadly. Adding butter to your broccoli, not so much a problem. So if you really have a low intake of starch and sugar and you eat saturated fats, it won't necessarily be as big of an issue. And there's some genetics that has to do with who can tolerate saturated fat.

I don't know if we'll have time to get into that today, but it's a little more nuanced. But basically, it's not necessarily only the saturated fat, it's what you're eating it with. So if you cut out starch and sugar, saturated fats don't seem to be the boogeyman. And you can have a good look at my book. There's some increasing knowledge about this since my book was released. I think it was in 2016 maybe. You can get a sense of really where this was at though by having a look at the book. But the other problem is a lot of the studies looking at omega-6s, omega-3s, polyunsaturated fats were confusing because they combine different types of oil.

For example, certain oils like corn oil, safflower oil, peanut oil are plant oils, but they're almost entirely omega-6, whereas other oils like canola or soybean oil have a mixture of omega-6 and omega-3. So when you look at the data, people who just consume the omega-6s but no omega-3s had far worse outcomes, had far worse outcomes in terms of heart attacks and death. So we know that's not good just to have omega-6 oils by themselves, especially in a society

that's omega-3 deficient. So we basically used to eat a lot of wild stuff and have a ratio of omega-6 to 3, about 4 to 1, 2 to 1. Now it can be up to 20 to 1. I had a patient who was diabetic, heart failure, very overweight, really ate junk food all the time and her ratio was 20 to 1, which is just a disaster. Very low omega-3, very high omega-6. So you have to be kind of not just lump all the plant oils into one bucket. You have to kind of be a little more nuanced and you can actually look online as

a table I think on Wikipedia showing the ratios of omega-6 and 3 for every plant oil. So you can kind of stick away from the ones like corn oil. So there was a study that was done and then I want to talk about this for a minute, it's a really important study. It was done in the 60s, you couldn't do that study now, it's unethical, but it was done in a psychiatric hospital where they had complete control over the diets. They gave one group butter and one group as a source of fat and one group corn oil. Now the corn oil group, even though they had a lower LDL cholesterol, dramatically lower, there was a higher risk of heart attacks and stroke and death compared, and it was a randomized controlled trial, which is really hard to do on like 9,000

people, it's just impossible to do that, because you have to lock people up to do this, right? And people don't want to be locked up. So this was a locked up people, basically who were able to be experiment on before ethics rules, And they found this incredible result, which was the opposite of what we thought. And it was buried by the scientists who did the study because they couldn't believe it.

So they didn't actually publish it. And it was funded by the government and they should have published it. And it was some guy finding a bunch of files in a basement like 40 years later, they finally kind of assemble the data and publish the study. And it was really quite impressive study.

And it really showed that if you're just looking at pure omega-6 and comparing that to saturated fat, that the omega-6 did far worse, even though they lowered the LDL cholesterol more and that was dramatic. So I think that's just an important cautionary note. If you're consuming these oils, make sure you have enough omega-3s in your diet.

So you really, I think, looking at historically, we used to get these omega-6 oils from foods we ate, from beans, from seeds, from grains, from, basically we'd get these from the plants we ate, nuts, and they're fine, and they're fine to consume from the whole food sources. I don't have any where, you wanna have corn? It's got corn oil in it.

If you wanna have, you know, peanuts, eat the peanuts. You know, don't eat the peanut oil, don't eat the corn oil. If you wanna use some expeller or cold pressed, organic, non-GMO, soybean or canola oil, I think it's probably okay in small amounts as long as you're getting enough omega-3s. And omega-3s are more in the soy and canola oil. But most canola and soybean oil are GMO. Most of them are spray with glyphosate, most of them are highly refined, deodorized,

and processed in ways that may make them more harmful. So it's really nuanced, but it's not like, oh, soybean and canola are okay. They're okay if they're made in a certain way and they come from a certain place and they're not GMO and they're not overly processed in certain ways that we talked about. We just talked about. So I think that's an important distinction. Also if you want to get more omega-3s in your diet, you can eat wild fish like sardines,

herring, mackerel, anchovies. If you want to eat wild food like wild bison, wild elk, wild kind of deer, you can buy these now. They're raised and they're fed. They're natural diets. We generally raise cows. They can also be higher in omega-3s and lower in omega-6s. It's really possible to do that. I think it's really important. For example, wild meat and grass-fed beef contain about seven times as much omega-3s as industrially raised animals, which have almost none. And most of what our grandparents ate were pasture-raised, regenerative, organic, grass-fed, and they didn't get hormones, antibiotics. There was nothing else to eat.

So getting refined oils in our diet has, I think, been a problem as a society, particularly because we've kind of limited omega-3s and because we've had all these refined processes. So I would be very careful about consuming too much of just pure omega-6 fats. You can check your ratio. You can go to functionhealth.com. You can actually get a membership and one of the tests we check for is your omega index which looks at all of your essential fatty acids, omega-3s, omega-6s and saturated fatty and we can get a really picture of where you're at.

You want to know what's happening and not guess. The other problem is if you eat too much of the omega-6s, it actually inhibits the conversion of the plant-based omega-3s. So if you're let's say you're in walnuts or chia seeds or flax seeds and omega-3s which have ALA or alpha-linolenic acid, it actually prevents the conversion by inhibiting an enzyme called delta--saturates, which is necessary for the conversion of the omega 6s, I mean omega 3s that are in the plant form, ALA, to the omega 3s that we need for our brain to regulate inflammation and for everything else,

which is called EPA, DHA, and it reduces that conversion. So there's many reasons that it kind of interferes with things. So I would basically avoid consuming too much of this. There's been some population studies showing that high levels of omega-6s can contribute to more inflammatory diseases, can cause more mental illness, suicide, homicide. This is a work out of the NIH. So I think Dr. Joseph Hidlund has done a lot of this work. You can look at his research. It's quite interesting and it's a bit nuanced. So you have to kind of dig into it. It took me a

long time to figure it out because I was trying to, you know, cut through the noise of what I was hearing, you know, from this, so this paper, that paper or this expert, that expert and you know, we're in this country, I think everybody else. I'm like, I want to look at the literature myself and basically I concluded what I just shared with you. So you want to get rid of these things. I think we really are unfortunately overloaded in these oils. I think we should be limiting them. We should be only probably using my favorite oils which are extra virgin expeller pressed or cold pressed oils, extra virgin olive oil.

MCTL is okay actually, has a very limited effect on your cholesterol at all. It's anti-inflammatory, may help improve your metabolism and cholesterol. Avocados are great, grass-fed meats are great, grass-fed butter, nuts are great, walnuts, almonds, pecans, macadamia, seeds are great, chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, all five fatty fish, sardines, mackerel,

herring, wild salmon, full of omega-3 fats. So it's really important to sort of get your oils right in your diet, to get the right kind of oil change, to make sure you're not eating too much of these refined oils, to make sure you're having if you're having any of the plant oils that you make sure they're, you know, limited quantities are using basically the combination oils that are soy or canola that are not GMO that are organic and so forth. And also add in, you know, you can add in different oils like macadamia oil or walnut oil or, you know, almond oil. You can cook with these things.

You can use them for flavoring. There are different things, but they shouldn't be staples. As a doctor, I know how vital sleep is for your health. Sleep is the foundation of everything. If you're lying awake at night or waking up tired, I've been there too. That's why I recommend sleep breakthrough from Bioptimizers. These capsules are scientifically designed to help you fall asleep fast, stay asleep all night and wake up refreshed.

With no melatonin, they're a natural side effect free solution that's perfect for travel or regular use. Transform your sleep and your health. Visit Bioptimizers.com slash Hymen to get 10% off your order today with promo code HYMAN10. Try it risk free with Bioptimiz's 365-day money-back guarantee. You know, saturated fat is bad according to the experts, but vegetable oils are good according to the experts. And then we should be consuming a lot of these polyunsaturated, basically omega-6 refined oils like soybean oil, which is 10% of our calories, corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, canola oil.

And they're all saying these are great, we should consume more of them. What do you have to say to that? Well, okay, so going back to Ansel Keys, when they said avoid saturated fats, you were supposed to replace them with vegetable oils, right? That was the idea going back to the 1960s. Well, this is where the food industry does come in a little bit,

just to start off this story. So the vegetable oil industry was kind of born in the early 1900s, right? The first vegetable oil product was Crisco. Oh, yeah. So it used to be that those oils were used for the Industrial Revolution. They were used to lubricate machinery, and then they figured out how to harden them to make them, and they learned how to bleach them

and make them look white. And then they thought, and it was actually Procter & Gamble that figured out how to do that. They were gonna make it into a soap. Soap is made from oil. Instead they're like, that looks an awful lot like lard. Let's try to sell it as a food. So they started to sell it as a food.

And yeah, so it turns out that they contained, you know, that, it's what they, hardening vegetable oils is done through a process called hydrogenation and that produces trans fats. But so these trans fatty hardened oils were started to be sold to Americans in 1911. So coincidentally, heart disease starts to take off, right? Right around maybe like 10 years later, we start seeing increases in death from heart disease. So then Procter & Gamble figures out how to just sell oil as oil.

So one of the things to understand about these oils is they're pressed... Procter & Gamble produced like shampoo. Yeah, well they were a soap maker. So that's why they came up with this. But Crisco was like a best selling thing. They convinced, you know in America, so all these immigrants, and they want to become American, right? And so Procter & Gamble had this brilliant advertising campaign basically saying, you

know, give up LAR, those are the bygone days of your grandmothers, like the spinning wheel of the olden days, and have Crisco instead. And this is the newfangled thing made in shiny scientist kitchens. So Procter & Gamble figured out how to then make vegetable oils that were fluid in bottles. They kind of tinkered with the fatty acids to make them stable. And then, so here's where they start to influence nutrition science.

In 1948, the American Heart Association, which is really just an association of cardiologists, right, remember heart disease is new, tiny little association, they barely had an office, they were just like, they barely had any funds. Procter & Gamble comes in and says, we're gonna make you the designee of this radio show for a week. And it was this huge deal. Overnight, literally according to the official history

of the American Heart Association, they said millions of dollars flowed into our coffers. We became overnight the powerhouse, opening offices all across the country that we are today. They're still the number one largest non-for-profit in the country. Amazing. All thanks to Procter & Gamble. And pretty soon thereafter, they started to recommend that you start eating vegetable oils to prevent a heart attack.

Which was the worst idea because it turns out that trans fats, everybody agrees in this, have killed hundreds of thousands of millions of people over the decades. Yeah, the trans fats and the hardened vegetable oils in Crisco are bad for health, clearly bad for health, but in the liquid form. Another rule that's not safe to eat by the FDA after 50 years of pressure to change that. Right. And finally took a lawsuit from a 97-year-old scientist who first discovered this 50 years ago to get them to change Right, right. And that's also another story I tell in my book about how he tried to get to change another woman a scientist who was trying to you know

lobby for change and they and and how they were vilified and how they were raked over the coals by all the scientists who disagreed with them how people would literally think the vegetable industry literally had people assigned to Stand up in conferences and yell at these people when they were giving their presentations. I mean, this is the state of nutrition science. So, which again, continues today. Food hecklers.

But, so vegetable oils, so it turns out that they, when they're in the oil form, they're also dangerous. So they don't contain trans fats, right? But in the oil form, the oils are highly unstable. That means that they oxidize easily. Go rancid. They go rancid. Oxidation is, remember, that's why we take antioxidants,

because oxidation causes inflammation in your body. Wrinkles. Yeah, like, yes, that's actually true. On the inside and the outside. Cause heart disease on the inside, oxidized LDL is what's thought to provoke that unstable plaque that causes blockages in the heart. Like rancid cholesterol, that's the problem. Yeah, so this is what, and in those clinic, in that, on all those studies,

remember we talked about the Minnesota Coronary Survey where they had people, some people on vegetable oil diets, in all of those studies, remember we talked about the Minnesota Coronary Survey where they had some people on vegetable oil diets? In all of those studies, again and again and again, the people on the vegetable oil diets died at much higher rates from cancer. This was considered a side effect of this heart-healthy diet. And they actually had a series of very high-level meetings at the NIH in the early 1980s to figure out what was going on with this side effect of cancer, and nobody could figure it out, and they basically just said,

look, we believe that vegetable oils will help people prevent heart disease, so we're going to ignore the cancer effect. So how do we explain them, these top Harvard scientists who've studied this data for decades, saying that we should all be consuming more of these oils? You know, I have... What's the dirty backstory on that? saying that we should all be consuming more of these oils. What's the dirty backstory on that? I don't have the whole story. I have to assume that a lot of it is cognitive dissonance. We're in the third generation now

of scientists who believe saturated fats are bad and must be replaced by polyunsaturated vegetable oils. And that is just their boiled in the wool belief replaced by polyunsaturated vegetable oils. That is just their boiled in the wool belief that they cannot back out of. A hundred papers written on that subject, you're not gonna change your mind. It is also true that the Harvard scientists

have a close relationship with Unilever, one of the biggest vegetable oil manufacturers in the world, if not the biggest. And Bungie, another big vegetable oil manufacturer. In fact, recently Harvard published a paper in which three of the authors were employees of Unilever. I was like, what? Wow.

Wow. And they have Unilever fellows who come and work with them. And one of the biggest promoters of vegetable oils is on the scientific advisory board of Unilever. So I mean, I think that the, and what I found out from my research, because I actually started my book by writing about trans fat,

I thought I was writing a book on trans fats when I started. I didn't realize I would get sort of dragged into this whole larger world. So I spent like a year doing nothing but talking to vegetable oil executives when I started. I didn't realize I would get sort of dragged into this whole larger world. So I spent like a year doing nothing but talking to vegetable oil executives when I started. And I came to understand how much they have controlled nutrition science for like the last 50, 60 years. They were involved in every single one of those trials. They would give them their products for free. They were intimately involved in trials at NIH. I mean, they've just had, they've really been brilliant.

And executives from the vegetable oil industry have almost always served as the top general counsel role at the Food and Drug Administration. So they just like, they're very, they've been intricately- There's a whole vegetable oil lobby. Yeah, it's called the Institute for Shortening in Edible Oils. Wow, they still call it that? The Institute for Shortening in Edible Oils. Wow. They still call it that?

Yep. The Institute for Shortening. Shortening, right. That's kind of what I have. It shortens your life. That's good. Shortens your life. Yeah, that stuff is not good. And what's fascinating is that we've increased our consumption of this. This is a new food.

I always worry about when we add new to nature foods. So we had olive oil, we had lard, we had tall about when we add new to nature foods. So we had olive oil We had lard. We had tallow. We had other fats But we didn't have vegetable oils and these seed they're not really vegetable like seed and nut and bean oils. Yeah These were sort of invented a hundred and twenty plus years ago and we now have increased our consumption of soybean oil, for example, 1,000-fold. And it's 10% of our calories. And it's in everything. It's stuff that you wouldn't imagine is in.

So any processed food that you buy that's made in a factory probably has this oil in it or some variety of it. And I think when you look at the data, it is confusing. There is a lot of people who are looking at large observational processes that show that there's a risk for saturated fat and a benefit for omega-6 oils. And there's other data that show some actually randomized trials

that show the opposite. When you just have people eat only the vegetable oil, they do worse. Right, and let's just remember that latter data from trials is the rigorous cause and effect data, right? So, yeah, I mean... So what do you recommend? No vegetable oils? Well, I was just going to tell briefly about my visit to a vegetable oil factory to explain like... Oh, please do.

...what a bungie factory, what a brutal process it is to get oil out of a bean or a seed. They have to go through this process of extracting the oil. It's not even really oil when it comes out, it's this gray rancid disgusting fluid. It's chemically extracted with hexane and other nasty chemicals. They have to use hexane as a solvent to extract it. And then they have,

and then it's this bad smelling gray liquid. It has to be deodorized, winterized, leached and all this. So it goes through like 17 steps in this giant industrial plant. And then it's Crisco. So compared to, and this is what we're told to eat instead of turning butter. Right. She's like, you just milk the cow and then you churn the butter. So I think that it speaks to our, to me,

it speaks to the craziness about food that we live in, which is so divorced from our history. Can you really believe that something that goes through this 17 step process in a factory is what you should be eating to restore your health? How many steps did it take from the field to your fork? If there's more than one or two, it's probably not a good idea. I always joke, I say it's easy to figure out what to eat.

If man made it, leave it. If God made it, eat it. That's good. Or olive oil, man made it, but they step on the olive oils and smush them and then you get the olive oil. Well, the story of olive oil is a little bit funny because actually it was originally used in ancient times. It was not eaten. It was used as like a,

people put it on their bodies like, to make their muscles shine and they use it to make their skin look good, but they didn't eat it. They didn't start eating olive oil until like the late 1800s. Um, interesting. So it wasn't actually an ancient food stuff.

What humans- I remember being in Greece and everybody was rubbing all over their bodies. I was like, wow, this is fascinating. Everybody smelled like a salad. Did they really put it on their bodies? Yeah. Oh yeah. Mickey knows when I was 17 and there were these beaches and everybody was

rubbing olive oil all over their bodies. I'm like, okay. Yeah, the other thing you notice in the Mediterranean is, of course, the Mediterranean diet, high in meat, right? That's another thing that's not been accurately transferred through history. So olive oil is relatively stable. So the huge worry about vegetable oils, to my mind,

is that when they are heated, and even if they're left out in a bottle where they're exposed to light, they will degrade. Oxidize, right. They oxidize, they degrade. That means they break down into these oxidation products. When you put them under heat, like any chemical reaction, that speeds up

and it creates literally hundreds of degraded oxidation products, some of which are known toxins. Look up the word aldehyde and see what that is. A known toxin that is created. And so- Deep fryer is what they call it, acrylamide, which is super toxic that's formed.

Acrylamide is another one. So, and they occur, so without going into too much detail, but when all the big fast food chains like Burger King and all those McDonald's switched over to trans-free oils, oils without trans fats, they went right back to using just regular old vegetables. I mean, much as we don't like trans fats, they have, what they did is that they stabilized the oil,

that process of hardening the oil made it stable. Now we have these totally unstable oils in these fryers. They create hundreds of degraded toxic products. Those products are now known, there's experiments have been done to show that they enter into the food and that food enters into your body and that those products go past the blood brain barrier.

And if you eat a lot of those chicken McDungats or French fries or whatever, they are going to build up in your body and cause toxic inflammation in your body. I used to work when I was 17, I used to work in this mother's sandwich shop. And my job was to deliver the sandwiches in a little Volkswagen.

But at night, at the end of the shift, I would have to go in the kitchen and clean the oil. So literally it would run the oil through a filter so they could reuse it. And we used the same oil for a month, heated, heated, reheated, reheated, it was terrible. And I think people don't realize that McDonald's and all those companies used to use beef tallow

to fry in and now they switched to Crisco basically, trans fats and now they've gone to vegetable oils, which in some ways may be just as bad, if not worse. So it's pretty frightening. I think it's definitely worse. And you know, actually, ironically, it's probably like places like McDonald's and Burger King are probably safer than your mom and pop shop, right?

Because they have all these regulations in the big stores about not reusing their oils too much. And then they know about this oxidation product. So they've developed things like nitrogen blankets and silicon beads that they put in the oil to try to absorb all the toxic oxidation products. So they're actually, their oils are probably better than your local Chinese stir fry or whatever.

Where they're, I mean, that's probably where the real danger is. But I had to tell you- Go from McDonald's over Chinese takeout, is that it? Yeah, that's the take home message here. I don't know about that. We're going to work on that messaging. Stay at home and cook.

But I wanted to tell you the amazing story that I discovered, which is how they found out that these trans-free oils were causing all these problems, is that when they switched over to trans-freeze oils, all of a sudden they were having this like polymer like build up on their walls and in their fryers that they couldn't scrape off. It's like paint, stickiness. And those toxic oxidation products were so unstable and volatile that they would take the used uniforms from the workers to the dry cleaner and en route, they would spontaneously combust in the back of the car.

Cause they were so- Go on fire here. Cause those products are so unstable. They're so unstable. They're mutating and changing minute by minute. And then they'd wash the uniforms, put them in the dryer and the dryers would combust. So there was just like this,

it's just unbelievable that we're eating this stuff. Yeah, yeah. That's a good take home message is to stay away from the refined oils and deep fried stuff. Maybe a treat once in a while, but definitely not a staple. It's actually a myth that you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil. In the Mediterranean region of the world, they use extra virgin olive oil, not just to cook with, but they use it as a sauce.

And somehow we've been, for some reason we've been told that the Mediterranean dietary pattern, as it's lauded in the Western medical literature, involves canola oil and all of these crap oils and that you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil. But that's a total myth. So. Well, I'm gonna push back on that

because if you heat olive oil to a high temperature, you destroy a lot of the polyphenols and beneficial compounds and you can oxidize it. So I would agree with you if you're cooking at low temperature, but not if you're stir frying at high temperature. And I tell you what, I tell you an interesting thing I did was I went and had my entire metabolome checked.

And one of the things they find in metabolome is byproducts of food that have been metabolized in different ways. And so I had oxidized olive oil in my blood because I was always stir frying with olive oil, but I like to cook at high temperatures because I'm, you know, I was like brushing for time and I shouldn't be, but it's like, I need to sort of change the oil, use avocado oil or cook at low temperature.

Well, I'll say that it's much safer to cook at high temperatures with, with olive oil than it is to cook at high temperatures with a grain and seed oil, like a soybean oil or a corn oil. And you have to ask what olive oil is constructed with that might predispose it to oxidation. And when you actually look at extra virgin olive oil, it's about 85% monounsaturated fat, which is very chemically stable.

I mean, think about it. Avocado oil, which is praised for its high smoke. Mostly monounsaturated, yeah. Is mostly monosaturated, right? So if monosaturated fat was prone to oxidation, avocado oil would not be a high heat cooking oil, right? And then 15% of extra virgin olive oil is saturated, which we know is highly heat stable.

So you're right in that the polyphenols might degrade to a point when you cook with olive oil at high temperatures, but what's not gonna happen with extra virgin olive oil, you can rest assured that it's not gonna become the cancer causing mutagenic disfigured oil product that you get when you cook with soybean oil or corn oil to high temperatures.

Tell us how you really feel about those oils, Max. Yeah, I'm not a fan of grain and seed oils. Yeah, which is a, which is pushing against the orthodoxy because the traditional nutritional orthodoxy is that these seed oils and bean oils like soybean oil, canola oil, they just call it rape seed, but bad names. They gave a new name, which is better facelift for marketing canola oil. That those are essential. And that the more people consume of those that healthy names, they gave a new name, which is better face life for marketing canola oil. That those are essential. And that the more people consume of those that healthier are the

less heart disease, the better the cholesterol. Those are all often observational studies, even some interventional studies. What would you say about that? Yeah, the nutritional and medical orthodoxy can't see beyond the fact that these grain and seed oils do lower LDL cholesterol, which, which according to the orthodoxy is the end all be all indicator of cardiovascular risk, right? Yeah.

So they're unable to see past that. And it's true that grain and seed oils do reduce your LDL, um, and Apo B when compared to saturated fats and certain saturated fats, because as you mentioned, not all saturated fats, a fat is not a fat is not a fat. Not all saturated fats are Because as you mentioned, not all saturated fats, a fat is not a fat is not a fat. Not all saturated fats are created equal, right? We have stearic acid, which has a neutral effect on cardiovascular risk.

But there are other problems with grain and seed oils that we need to talk about. They're prone to oxidation, and these oxidized fats integrate themselves into all aspects of our physiology. They get tugged along by lipoproteins in our blood. So you've got these lipoproteins that carry triglycerides and cholesterol around our bodies dropping off nutrients, right? And when we ingest these oxidized fats, they get tugged around by these lipoproteins, by chylomicrons,

by the LDL lipoprotein. And that makes them, that gives them an inflammatory phenotype, makes them more prone to adhering to immune cells, which we know is early, an early occurrence in the development of atherosclerosis, right? We know that they integrate themselves into our fat tissue and they provide the precursor molecules to our inflammation pathway. We also know that these grain and seed oils

have a small but significant amount of trans fats, manmade trans fats, due to the production process. They undergo a step in the production process called deodorization, which creates trans fats. And we cook with them, they create, they become oxidized, they generate free radicals. And they also, what generates are also oxidative byproducts like aldehydes, certain of which we know are damaging

to our mitochondria and promote cancer. So yes, they reduce LDL, but there are all these other problems associated with them. So- And again, also the thing that people miss is that most of the data around these have become from large observational trials, which are the kinds of things we talked about earlier in the podcast that can't prove cause and effect. And there was one study that was done. This was a fascinating study we've talked about in the podcast years ago. There was a study done that was funded by the government back in the 60s. It was before we had medical ethics. Essentially, they took people in a mental institution and randomized

them to two groups. Basically, they didn't have to give them form because they go, you guys are going to eat this, you guys are going to eat that. They basically gave half of them a butter and saturated fat as a source of their fat, and the other half they gave corn oil. Now the corn oil group had a dramatically lower LDL, but for every LDL lowering they did, there was a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes. And this was a randomized, interventional controlled trial that is able to prove cause and effect. And the results were kind of staggering. And they were so staggering that the orthodox at the time was, was so entrenched in the belief that saturated fat was bad, that they refused to publish to study.

And it wasn't published till 50 years later, when an NIH scientist found out about the data that had been hidden. And it was a basement somewhere and went and found this guy. And there's a great Malcolm Gladwell podcast about this, went and found the son of and there's a great Malcolm Gladwell podcast about this, went and found the son of one of the original researchers after his father died in a basement full of his stuff. And he found all the old data and tapes

and computer programs, they found it all in the basement. And based on that data, they published a study, which was really one of the very few interventional trials looking at saturated fat versus vegetable oil. That was really pretty interesting. and subscribe to The Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Dr. Hyman Show.