The Dr. Hyman Show - Why You Should Avoid Sweet Fat

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

Many of us were taught that eating dietary fat makes us fat and leads to heart disease. This assumption has been catastrophic for our health. In fact, fats are essential for optimal health, and saturated fat, specifically, is not the boogeyman we once thought. We know now that there is no monolithic saturated fat. There are many saturated fats, each with its own effects. The saturated fat in coconut, for instance is different from the saturated fat in butter. In this mini-episode, Dr. Hyman talks with neurologist Dr. David Perlmutter about how saturated fat came to get such a bad rap. They dive into many of the ways the right saturated fats are beneficial to your health and discuss why, what Dr. Hyman calls “sweet fat,” is so harmful. *A Note on Fat: While a high fat diet does not work for everyone, we now know that fat is not the enemy it was previously made out to be. Some people do well with less fats and some do better with more fats. It is important to determine what work specifically for your body. **Please also note, we caught an error in the narration at the end of this episode. The final message is, "The kind of fat you eat is what matters most. Focus on eating a diet of whole foods and avoid processed junk. To hear Dr. Hyman’s full length interview with Dr. David Perlmutter please visit https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrDavidPerlmutter

The saturated fat thing is fascinating because I want people to hear that saturated fat is not necessarily bad, that it is something that can be helpful in many conditions, but that's with one big caution, is to avoid what I call sweet fat. Hi, I'm Kea Prowitt, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Consuming natural, whole food-based healthy fats is absolutely critical for good health. Even saturated fats can be part of a healthy diet, and yet we've been conditioned to believe that unsaturated fats from vegetable and seed oils are best, and that things like butter, coconut oil, lard, ghee, and other saturated fats are toxic. In their recent conversation, Dr. Hyman and neurologist Dr. David Perlmutter delve into

how saturated fat develops such a bad rap, and why what Dr. Hyman calls sweet fat is the real villain. And the reason that saturated fat I believe causes, and I want to hear your opinion on this, causes problems in the research which can correlate saturated fat with disease like heart disease and other problems, is that when those studies were done, they're done in the context of people eating saturated fat in a high-starch-sugar diet. I call that sweet fat. Think of donuts, french fries, ice cream, cookies. These are high-fat, high-sugar combos that are deadly. So, the caution is if you're going to eat saturated fat, you can't eat a diet high in

starch and sugar. Yes, high in carbohydrates, right? Plant foods. I always say 75% of your diet should be plant foods and sugar. Yes, high in carbohydrates, right? Plant foods. I always say 75% of your diet should be plant foods in terms of starch, not in terms of starch, in terms of vegetables. In fact, most of your diet should be plant foods by volume, but they have very little calories and most of your calories should be fat, but it's not much volume. Can you comment on that? Yeah, sure. And I would say say let's even take this unpack this

further and uh it doesn't even have to be in the in relationship to eating carbohydrates uh simple carbohydrates because the data comes from these studies that look at calculating the amount of saturated fat in somebody's diet based upon the foods that they eat. Then they calculate, well, this person eats, you know, a bunch of beef, they eat a bunch of bacon, et cetera, they get a lot of saturated fat. As we talked about earlier, those are the wrong kinds of foods for many, many reasons. So this is a calculated determination of saturated fat. It's not a biochemical demonstration that saturated fat does something in the body it's people who ate a diet higher in saturated fat which delivers lots of toxins because these are the mod of these are foods from animals that have been fed as we said earlier garbage

that's where those saturated fats how they're delivered to the human body so it's not a clean type of study right it doesn't relate to telling a person to take a tablespoon of organic coconut oil no relationship whatsoever look 50 percent of the fat in human breast milk is saturated fat yeah saturated wait a minute so basically breast milk is almost as much saturated as pure butter you bet and why is it there because it helps for brain development helps your immune system development it helps prime it was 25 50 50 it's of the fat of the fat it helps 25 of the calories in breast milk is from saturated fat yeah we're told to get less than five percent by the american heart association so according to the american heart association we should ban

breastfeeding i mean you know it wasn't long ago when we were told not to eat avocados or nuts. Yes. Because they had high levels of the dreaded fat. That was about the worst. And we know where that came from now. We know how medical literature in the late 1960s was tainted by industry, by sugar, who wanted, who influenced what was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, as recently revealed in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and ended up on the front page of the New York Times. And, you know, doctors bought into that. We bought

into what our journals were telling us, and it was patently wrong. Not only are these saturated fats more flavorful and nutritious and commonly used vegetable and seed oils like margarine, canola, safflower, corn, and soybean oil, the saturated fats also hold up better to heat, meaning they are less vulnerable to breaking down and turning into rancid, oxidized fats when overheated. When it comes to saturated fat, quality is paramount. There is no monolithic saturated fat. The saturated fat in a fast food bacon cheeseburger will have an entirely different effect than saturated fat in coconut oil.

Remember, you don't need to live in fear of fat. The kind of fat you eat is what matters most. Focus on eating a diet of whole foods and unprocessed junk. I hope you enjoyed this mini episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Thanks for tuning in.