The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 129. Paul Saladino, MD: Why 'Heart-Healthy' Seed Oils Are Actually Poison

Starting point is 00:00:00 You go to McDonald's, that is a metabolic toxin. You are actively poisoning yourself. If you have been eating McDonald's and lots of seed oils your whole life, if you stop today, it takes you potentially four plus years to fully recycle the membranes of all the cells in your body. I think that people don't realize all the places that they're hidden. I mean, they're everywhere. Potato chips, nearly every dressing that you pull off of the shelf and breads.

Starting point is 00:00:22 There are so many markers of inflammation that increase when you fill the body with these oxidation-prone oils. And yet, the mainstream perspective, Harvard, many apparently intelligent physicians in the community, longevity influencers, are still holding fast to the claim that seed oils are benign for humans. I would argue that the best trials with seed oils clearly show they're harmful. It's just that these trials have been suppressed.

Starting point is 00:00:42 And you know what I find is that a lot of randomized clinical trials essentially end up proving what we know ancestrally from nature. It always takes us back to the basics. You can't go wrong eating simple whole foods. It's just unprocessed animal foods, unprocessed plant foods. You'll be great. We take the narrative that these seed oils are bad for you. So I think we just need to put it into context. Why are we attacking this plant? Why are we attacking the oil extraction method? The only thing that seed oils might have going for them. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. You know the drill. I'm your host, Gary Brekka, human biologist, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between.

Starting point is 00:01:30 One of my favorite house guests has paid me a visit again before Thanksgiving. And even though he didn't know it, I was like, every time we meet in the kitchen, we start running a podcast together. And I was like, dude, let's just go in the studio and rip this because this is really, really good content. Welcome back to the show, Paul Saladino. It's always good to see you, man. Happy to do it. Yeah. So Dr. Paul Saladino and I have formed an unbelievable friendship over the last few years, not just being in the same industry, but spending a lot of time in close proximity and really seeing that he practices what he preaches, that I practice what I preach.

Starting point is 00:02:05 And, you know, every time we meet in the morning, you know, I caught him this morning getting his sunlight and doing his stretches outside on the balcony in the sun. I was like, hey, I'm getting ready to go out there and do my breath work myself. And he comes back in, he goes, let me show you my morning elixir. He starts breaking open these capsules of testicle and B vitamins and honey. And we've had raw colostrum over the last few days. I feel amazing. And we just started going back and forth about a recent documentary that he published, which is phenomenal. I'm going to put the link in the show notes below. You've got to watch this documentary, which I think finally closes the chapter on seed oils and the inflammatory nature of these oils and their implications in many of the chronic disease conditions that we are blaming keep an eye on cholesterol, but my point is that we have been blaming the firemen for the fire for too many years.

Starting point is 00:03:11 And the notion that if we had less firemen, we'd have fewer fires is simply a fallacy, and the large data is starting to prove that. So, Paul, I would love it if you would just give us a little background on the documentary, like what led to it, and give us an overview of what we're going to see in the documentary. I specifically want to go down in detail the road of seed oils because just yesterday, one of the biggest gurus, longevity gurus in our space, we just talked about it. I won't name any names, posted that seed oils were safe. It's crazy. So this is a mini documentary. It's only about 37 minutes long, and I did it in collaboration with Heart and Soil Supplements.

Starting point is 00:03:49 So those testicle pills that I was emptying into your raw milk this morning. They're actually pretty good. I mean, we put it in raw milk, and then we added honey. Honey, yeah, yeah. You can't even taste them. Those are testicle pills from Heart and Soil Supplements. And Heart and Soil is just a company that I built to help people get organs in the capsules. But Heart and Soil has an amazing research team. And I collaborated with them to make this

Starting point is 00:04:07 mini documentary on seed oils. It's called Fed a Lie. And it's kind of an entry-level seed oil documentary. It's just to get people asking the questions. So I'm in the documentary. Chris Kenobi's in the documentary. He's an MD. He's an ophthalmologist. And Nina Teicholtz is in the documentary who wrote The Big Fat Surprise. The Big Fat Surprise. Yeah. Detailing a lot of the sort of corruption and confusion in the space around the history around saturated fat versus seed oils. You're not saying that there's corruption in our nutritional research. In the food industry, imagine that. Perhaps a little bit of corruption.

Starting point is 00:04:37 We can talk about it. you think about this from the perspective of seed oils and the history is that we really have been, I believe, fed a lie regarding their benign nature or their health benefits. And as you suggested, it kind of all centers around this idea of cholesterol. So the only thing that seed oils might have going for them is that they lower ApoB. They lower your cholesterol, quote unquote. And the mainstream medical paradigm, which I was trained in, perhaps propagandized in. He's a medical doctor, by the way. He's an MD. Yeah, it's all about lowering cholesterol,

Starting point is 00:05:15 often in a myopic view, right? So if you are an MD, you are basically trained to lower ApoB and or LDL cholesterol, no matter what, without much attention to other metrics that may have more weight on your cardiovascular risk or that are simply more relevant, like oxidized LDL, LP little a, LPPLA2, which is lipoprotein associated phospholipase A2. And this is where it starts to get interesting because I'll say this about

Starting point is 00:05:41 seed oils. I think you could come to the conclusion that seed oils are benign for humans if you ignore all historical data, all evolutionary precedent. Humans have never had this in our diets. You ignore all animal studies, which clearly show that seed oils increase rates of cancer, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, which is liver injury. That's very bad in animals.

Starting point is 00:06:02 They increase adiposity. They increase cardiovascular disease in animal models. You have to ignore all mechanistic studies, which clearly show that linoleic acid, this 18-carbon omega-6 fatty acid, is very susceptible to oxidation in biological systems. And you also have to kind of cherry-pick the randomized controlled trials in humans

Starting point is 00:06:19 and ignore the randomized controlled trials in humans that show that when you feed people seed oils versus olive oil or saturated fat, they have increased oxidized LDL, increased LP little a and increased LP little a. Increased LP little a. Uh-huh. Increased LP little a, seven to 10%. Yeah. And that's usually a genetic, more of a genetic predisposition. I actually have high LP little a and my cholesterol levels are great. And I'm very cautious about what I eat. So I take Bergamot O, I take slow-release niacin. That's helped. I've done TPE, total plasma exchange.

Starting point is 00:06:50 That really helped. We can talk about LP little a because I want to share with you some data from my friend Dave Feldman about LP little a also. Really? Yeah, we'll get to that. I'm very interested in that because a lot of folks that are watching this,

Starting point is 00:07:00 you know, that have- They worry about LP little a. What's interesting, but you know, before we get on this road is, and we talked about this before, is, you know, in the mortality space, when we were doing mortality research tables, when we were building these probabilistic models, it was very apparent to us that the people that were living the longest all had, and I'm just picking one isolated portion of cholesterol, but they all had elevated levels of LDL cholesterol at the time of their death. We would process a lot of death claims on folks that were, at the time that they passed, they were in nursing homes, and they actually, we did have, you know, blood work on them.

Starting point is 00:07:36 And I don't recall a time, there may have been, but I don't recall a time where we processed a death claim on a centenarian, someone over the age of 100, that did not have clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol at the time of their death. And so we actually didn't use randomized clinical trials. We used big data. Right. But I want to get back to the seed oils, and I want to sort of walk people through this because I think inherently people think sunflower, good.

Starting point is 00:08:03 Rapeseed, it's a plant, good. We're never eaten by humans. We can talk about rapeseed, it's a plant, good. We're never eaten by humans. We can talk about rapeseed, but yeah. And I know the whole evolution of industrial, but I'm just saying for the general public, I see soybean oil. Soybeans are healthy. I mean, sunflower oil.

Starting point is 00:08:18 Sunflowers are great. I eat sunflower seeds. And so then we take the narrative that these seed oils are bad for you. So I think we just need to put it into context. Why are we attacking this plant? Why are we attacking the oil extraction method? Right.

Starting point is 00:08:32 So seed oils are often called vegetable oils. And I think that's kind of a marketing claim, right? That's a euphemism. They're seed oils. They're called vegetable oils probably because we all associate vegetables with health, which is a separate conversation. But in order to get oil out of a plant seed, whether it's a rapeseed, which is the precursor of canola oil, or a soybean, or a peanut, or, I mean, corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, rice bran, all of these are seed oils. You have to do refining, bleaching, and deodorization. And if anyone has ever seen a seed oil factory, it looks like an oil refinery because that's what it is. There's huge smokestacks with either water condensation vapor coming out or other pollutants coming out of the smokestacks.

Starting point is 00:09:15 It's a huge process with grinding, with extraction, with degumming, with deodorization. We've talked about this extraction with hexane, contaminated with hydroxide. Very often bleach. Yeah, they're refined, bleached, and deodorized oils. And the heating process in seed oils, it starts with a grinding step, then they're heated to 200 degrees, then they're heated to like 300 degrees,

Starting point is 00:09:34 and then they're heated to over 400, 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Remember, this is an omega-6 polyunsaturated fat rich oil. Sometimes up to 55% of the oil is linoleic acid. And when you heat linoleic acid to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, you get massive amounts of lipid peroxides, which is essentially rusted oil or rancid oxidized oil. And it's just, this is the nature of the oil. This is organic chemistry. You cannot avoid this. So people have looked at levels of lipid peroxides. These are oxidized oils and these are reactive products. When you put these into your body, they initiate a chain reaction. And that chain reaction can partially

Starting point is 00:10:09 be quelled or stopped by things like vitamin E or vitamin C, depending on whether you're in the lipid soluble or the water soluble fraction of your body. But it cannot entirely be abolished. This uses up resources in your body. And the idea with seed oils is that when you eat polyunsaturated fats, whether it's from fish oil or from seed oils, we store these. And we talked about this last night in our pre-prep. Yeah, for four and a half years. Essentially, yes. There is some interesting data about the kinetics of how we hold onto these oils. And it's not easy for us to get rid of them. So when you are eating French fries cooked in seed oils, which are even more oxidized because it's been a fryer oil that hasn't been changed for a week. You know, I've been to McDonald's, I've been to KFC, and I ask them, how often do you change the fryer oil?

Starting point is 00:10:55 Both of them, about every once a week, you know, you go to In-N-Out, how often do you change the fryer oil? Once a week, once a week, you're frying 16, 20 hours a day in this oil that's very susceptible to oxidation. And if you're getting French fries cooked in seed oils that have been fried in that for a week, you are getting massively increased levels of these lipid peroxides. Not to even mention the fact that increasing polyunsaturated fats in the human diet

Starting point is 00:11:17 evolutionarily is inconsistent. And we store all of these. It creates this oxidative stress burden in our bodies. It's just like having a bunch of dry wood stored at your cabin in the mountains in the middle of a lightning storm. This isn't a good idea. If you have a lot of dry wood in your body, the dry wood being the oxidation susceptible

Starting point is 00:11:32 linoleic acid, and you have lots of sparks, you're going to get lots of fires. And then you're going to overwhelm your body's resources and you can run into real problems. Now, people always say seed oils are inflammatory. And the counter argument is there's no evidence that seed oils are inflammatory because there are some studies which show that seed oils maybe don't increase canonical inflammatory markers like CRP. But I would argue that oxidized LDL, LP little a and LPPLA2 are clearly inflammatory markers. So this is just this is just semantics. I think that cherry picking. Yes.

Starting point is 00:12:04 Because it doesn't create a non-specific marker of inflammation like c-reactive protein you're like it's not driving inflammation well that's not the only marker there are so many markers of inflammation and one of the things crp does is bind to oxidized ldl right so the crp and oxidized ldl are intimately linked and so to say that there's no inflammatory markers with seed oils is ludicrous it's just closing your eyes and putting your hands in your ears and saying, la, la, la, you know, there's, I don't see any CRP, you know, just because ESR doesn't go up, erythrocyte sedimentation rate with seed oils. There are so many markers of inflammation that increase when you, when you fill the body with these oxidation prone oils. And yet the mainstream perspective, Harvard, Mayo, many apparently

Starting point is 00:12:46 intelligent physicians in the community, longevity influencers are still holding fast to the claim that seed oils are benign for humans. And so we just wanted it with hardened soil. I just wanted to make a documentary that got people talking about this and at a higher level, asking questions about why we still think these are healthy, how anyone can even say that. Because when you look at the highest level of evidence, the randomized controlled trials with seed oils, and I have a whole thread on X that I did months ago about this. And I just resurfaced the tweet this morning.

Starting point is 00:13:17 I broke down all 11 of the randomized controlled trials in humans with seed oils. Because that's the highest level of evidence, right? I went through it earlier in this podcast. We talked about evolutionarily inconsistent. We've never had seed oils in our diet. Mechanistic studies, very bad. How do we introduce seed oils? Because we've had polyunsaturated fatty acids,

Starting point is 00:13:37 but I mean- In small amounts, right? You know, historically- Nuts or- Nuts, basically small amounts of nuts, but how many almonds can you eat? You know, almonds are a recent addition to the human diet. Sure, there are some hunter-gatherers that have mongongo nuts, the koi san,

Starting point is 00:13:51 but most of us historically, throughout our evolution as humans, had very small amounts of polyunsaturated fats in our diets. And if you look at hunter-gatherers or indigenous cultures, very small amounts, 1%, 2% of their calories from polyunsaturated fats. Versus 40%. Or 10% to 15% of our calories, and then it increases even from there for us. So average Americans today eat five

Starting point is 00:14:13 tablespoons of some combination of seed oils, five tablespoons. That's hundreds of calories. And I think that people don't realize all the places that they're hidden. They're everywhere. Potato chips, in snack foods, in nearly every dressing that you pull off the shelf that they're hidden. They're everywhere. In potato chips, in snack foods, in nearly every dressing that you pull off the shelf, in breads. Breads have it. Like you said, dressings. Yeah. And even some of the good dressings. And it'll say, you know, what about expeller pressed? So when you have an expeller pressed oil, now let's be honest, there's this very, very small fraction, probably less than a tenth of a percent of all seed oils are expeller-pressed.

Starting point is 00:14:48 You don't have the refining, the bleaching, and the deodorization. So that's a less oxidized oil, but you still have a very fragile oil that has been stripped from the seed matrix and is going to be susceptible to oxidation. It's less oxidized, but I still think it's an evolutionarily inappropriate thing to consume as a human because you're still stuffing your cells with these oxidation prone seed oils. And so if we get back to the randomized controlled trials of these 11 trials, right? The majority of them are flawed, fundamentally flawed because they were done from the 1950s to the 1980s. And we didn't really have a good sense of trans fat in that time trans fat was really only banned from food in what the late 18 uh 1980s or 1990s so almost every single one of these trials has trans fats in the control group and the control group in these randomized control trials is comparing saturated fat rich diets in the control group to polyunsaturated

Starting point is 00:15:40 fat rich diets so what do you think happens in a randomized controlled trial if the control group eating saturated fat has significantly more trans fats than the experimental group eating polyunsaturated fat rich diets. So what do you think happens in a randomized controlled trial if the control group eating saturated fat has significantly more trans fats than the experimental group eating polyunsaturated fats? That's a problem, right? And many of these trials are also multifactorial interventions. Things like, oh, in the control group, we're gonna say eat your normal diet,

Starting point is 00:16:00 which is perhaps animal fat rich, but you're probably also eating margarine with trans fats because we didn't tell you to stop doing that. And the experimental group, we're going to say, eat more seed oils, but also exercise more, eat more vegetables and stop smoking. And these are the type of randomized controlled trials that form the, quote, bedrock of the fact checkers. When I get fact check on Instagram or Meta, any Meta platform for saying that seed oils

Starting point is 00:16:22 are harmful for humans, they'll say, no, there's a randomized controlled trial here, or there's a meta analysis here, or here's an AFP fact check article where people have said seed oils are fine based on these foundationally, fundamentally flawed randomized controlled trials. And the randomized controlled trials that show seed oils to be harmful are suppressed. Sydney Diet Heart, Minnesota Coronary Experiment at the Rose Corn Oil Trial was one of the first trials done on seed oils in the late 1950s. And it was underpowered, but it clearly showed that seed oils were very harmful for humans. A significantly higher amount of people in the seed oil group versus the saturated fat group had heart attacks. And the p-value was between 0.05 and 0.1. So there was less than a one in a thousand chance that this result showing seed oils are harmful happens by chance.

Starting point is 00:17:08 Less than one in a thousand. But because the p-value wasn't less than 0.05, people say it wasn't a significant finding. That should have been case closed for seed oils in the 1950s. Wow. But there were still 10 more randomized controlled trials that many of which almost funded by the food industry funded by the food industry or which confuse the data which are very complex trials and there isn't a perfect trial done with seed oils but i would argue that the best trials with seed oils clearly show they're harmful it's just that these trials have been suppressed and as you know with a meta-analysis a researcher like

Starting point is 00:17:39 darius mazafari and at tufts who gifted us with the food compass system which tells us that fruit loops and cheerios are healthier than ground beef and eggs, can write a meta-analysis on seed oils. And he's done this and he can leave out things like Sydney Diet Heart. He can just choose which trials he wants to put in his meta-analysis and write in the abstract that seed oils are benign or trend toward cardiovascular benefit for humans. This is ludicrous. This is ludicrous. This is the state of the affairs right now. If you want protein to build lean muscle, but without the caloric impact or need to cut, you need Perfect Amino. It's pure essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in a precise form and ratio that allows for near 100% utilization in building lean muscle and no

Starting point is 00:18:21 caloric impact. So we build protein six times as much as whey, but without the excess body fat we normally get during bulking. This is the new era of protein supplementation, and it's real. If you want to build lean muscle without having to cut, you need Perfect Amino. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

Starting point is 00:18:40 Well, we know that 74% of our nutritional research is actually funded by Big Pharma. I hope it changes soon. Yeah, yeah, I think it's gonna, and if you and I have anything to do about it, you know that 74% of our nutritional research is actually funded by Big Pharma. I hope it changes soon. Yeah, yeah. I think it's going to. And if you and I have anything to do about it, you know, it will. I mean, you know, I'm so excited to see the Make America Healthy movement taking off and having a shot at really affecting public policy. Because, you know, our public policy research really should be independent.

Starting point is 00:19:01 I mean, that should be taxpayer-funded, independent, third-party research done through the public university system and completely independent. When you start to bring in private sector funding and you privatize the profits from these and then you socialize the expense, then you're just creating a problem. And I don't think anybody would argue that our healthcare system is broken. You know, $4.5 trillion a year in healthcare, leading the world in morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, infant mortality, maternal mortality. We're actually ranked 60th.

Starting point is 00:19:38 When I started my podcast, we were ranked 58th. We're now ranked 60th in the world. We actually were talking right before the camera started rolling about how there are, and it's hard to get your arms around this, but there are third world nations, third world countries that actually have longer life expectancies than us. It's wild. And by third world, you know, these are people that don't have consistent access to sanitation, to sanitary, clean drinking water.

Starting point is 00:20:02 They might not have consistent access to sanitary sewage systems, removing the waste and sewage from close proximity to where they live. But they also don't have a lot of access to highly processed foods, seed oils. They're by default eating whole foods. Right. And it's astounding when you think someone living in a first world nation like the United

Starting point is 00:20:29 States that spends $4.5 trillion a year on health care is actually not outliving somebody that is essentially living outside under a tin roof, you know, bathing in a stream where the cows bathe and defecate. It's pretty, it says a lot about the state of affairs of where we are. So what are, what is the, so you have this oxidized oil. And I think you could probably make the same argument for burned meat, you know, nitrates, a lot of other things that can happen when, you know, if you overcook things or overchar things. But you have this highly oxidized oil. It gets into the body. And then what happens? I mean,

Starting point is 00:21:16 I know we all know inflammation is bad, but what is it about the inflammation that is bad? What is it that is it doing to the endothelial lining of the artery? Or how is it creating this contact surface that is attracting cholesterol? which I think a lot of people don't realize that cholesterol is called to the site of inflammation. It's usually called to repair a tissue. It doesn't just magically just jump out of the bloodstream and stick to the wall. I don't think it doesn't do that. Native LDL, you would have a hard time arguing, looking at the medical literature, that native LDL, that is unoxidized, unmodified LDL, is atherogenic. So something has to happen to our LDL to make it participate. Either to the LDL or to the endothelial wall or both.

Starting point is 00:21:55 I would argue the endothelial wall is the proximate event of atherosclerosis because we know that really uninjured endothelium, uninjured arteries don't really accumulate LDL. So you can think about this. And we may have talked about this on a previous podcast, but if we're talking about LDL or ApoB-containing lipoproteins, which is a slightly broader family than just LDL, I have the same amount of LDL circulating in my veins.

Starting point is 00:22:22 You have veins on your arm too. You can see these are returning blood to my heart from my hands. Deeper in my arm, I have arteries that are pumping blood to my hands. And in between there are capillaries. So I have a continuous system of blood flow. The last time I checked my cholesterol, which was about a month ago, my LDL, I think, was 125 milligrams per deciliter. My ApoB is probably just over 100 or just below 100.

Starting point is 00:22:44 So a lot of physicians would consider that high, above 99? Yeah, somebody would consider it high. I have the same amount of LDL circulating to my hands, moving through the capillaries, and coming back in my veins. But in me and all humans, we do not see atherosclerosis occurring in native veins. So atherosclerosis doesn't occur in a vein at all in humans. It's because it's lower pressure. And when you have lower occur in a vein at all in humans.

Starting point is 00:23:06 It's because it's lower pressure. And when you have lower pressure in a vein, you don't denude the endothelium. You don't create proximate endothelial injury that is necessary to start atherosclerosis. If ApoB containing lipoproteins, that is LDL plus its cousins, are atherogenic, why don't we get atherosclerosis in veins? They have the exact same endothelial lining on the inside.

Starting point is 00:23:26 If you were in a little spaceship, like Rick Moranis in Honey, I Shrunk, or like, what is that? Like in inner space or whatever. You know, if you're running through my body in the artery and the vein, if I put you inside a vein or I put you inside an artery

Starting point is 00:23:38 and you're looking from the inside of the vessel to the wall, it looks the same. It looks the same. The inside of an artery and the inside of a vein are the same. The endothelium is the same. Yeah inside of an artery and the inside of a vein are the same. The endothelium is the same. Yeah, it's just on the outside of the endothelium, you'll have smooth muscle. Versus, yeah, versus more musculature in an artery to help it contract.

Starting point is 00:23:54 And you can actually take a vein and you can transplant it into the arterial circulation. So we do this in coronary artery bypass grafting. You can take a vein usually from the leg or other places in the body and you can transplant it into the arterial circulation. So you can take a vein and put it in the arterial circulation and it actually gets atherosclerosis very quickly because it is subjected to higher pressure and that denudes the endothelium. So when a vein is in the arterial circulation and it has that sort of proximate event, that arterial inner endothelial damage, it will accumulate atherosclerosis, but it doesn't happen in native circulation. And I would argue

Starting point is 00:24:30 that is a very strong argument that ApoB is not causal because I have the same amount of ApoB in my veins. If it's so bad for my arteries and my veins, if it's so bad for my endothelium, why isn't it damaging the endothelium in my veins? Because it needs a proximate event to have that happen. Now, circle back to humans today in 2024. There are many studies which suggest that 86 to 93% of us have at least one marker of metabolic dysfunction, right? And these are the metabolic syndrome criteria. But I think if you look around our population today, which you were hinting at, it's pretty sad. Many of us are obese and many of us are on a continuum of insulin resistance. And when you start to develop insulin resistance, and I'll talk about how this is probably related to seed oils in a moment. When you develop insulin

Starting point is 00:25:13 resistance, I think this is what's impairing your immune system. We know that diabetics, full-blown insulin resistance, have a lot of trouble regulating their immune system. They can get a cut on their toe and they can lose their foot, right? Because they have such poor immune function. So as you move along this continuum of insulin resistance, the immune system suffers. And this is shown over and over and over that insulin resistance impairs immune function. So I believe what's going on here

Starting point is 00:25:36 is that in a diabetic, in any human that is on this pathway of insulin resistance, which we know is related to our processed foods and our lifestyle, you have impairment of the immune system in the arterial wall. So when you cut your knee, say you're like surfing or, and you hit a reef or you're skateboarding or you're dancing or whatever, you're playing baseball and you skin your knee, your immune system goes there to repair the knee. Well, all of us are getting quote skin knees on the inside of our arteries because all

Starting point is 00:26:01 of us have higher pressure in our arteries, But diabetics, anyone on this insulin resistant spectrum or continuum is going to have trouble repairing the endothelial damage that happens from daily life. And that I think is what's going on for diabetics that is causing atherosclerosis. All of us get damaged to the arteries. Most of us can repair it. Just like we, you know, I was playing a pickleball in Phoenix recently. I was there to surf a wave pool and I ran into a wall, right? I was going off the court because I stink at pickleball. And I ran into a cement wall that was there. And I had like, I had a little strawberry on my knee.

Starting point is 00:26:34 I had a little skin on my knee. My immune system repairs it. But when you have insulin resistance, it doesn't get repaired in time. And I think that is where the atherosclerosis starts. Diabetics have continuous damage without functional, actual true repair on the inside of their arteries. And that I think is what's going on

Starting point is 00:26:52 that no one's talking about. So the problem is not LDL. We should pay attention to it. If you're diabetic, okay, pay attention to it. But the problem is not the LDL. The problem is the insulin resistance and the immune dysfunction that comes with it and the persistent damage to the endothelium, the persistent damage to arteries that comes with it, which leaves you

Starting point is 00:27:07 susceptible, right? Going back to the wood analogy, we have LDL and I'm mixing my metaphors here, but I think about LDL as wood and wood doesn't cause a fire unless there's a spark, right? And you can build things out of wood. You can build a cabin out of wood, but when you have more sparks. Hormones, cell walls, cell membranes, vitamin D d3 it does all of these things lots of things are made from yes sex hormones cell membranes we need ldl we need ldl is the carrier ldl is the carrier for all of these vital things in the human body it doesn't initiate atherosclerosis but if you have lots of sparks that dry wood can light on fire right Right. And again, I'm mixing my metaphors here. I talked about PUFA earlier as dry wood, but let's talk about LDL as dry wood here. So, um, yeah, hopefully

Starting point is 00:27:50 that's not confusing for people, but you, I get the idea that like wood doesn't spontaneously combust into a fire, right? Right. Wood is valuable. LDL is valuable in the human body. It also has immune roles. So to say that ApoB is what we should be lowering without any attention to insulin sensitivity, oxidized LDL, LP little a, it's just ludicrous to me. There's so much more to the picture here. Yeah, we want to make it so simple that LDL high, cardiovascular risk high. LDL low, cardiovascular risk low. So all you have to do is hammer this down.

Starting point is 00:28:17 And, you know, it is astounding to me that most of the time we're actually not talking about, you know, the toxic soup that we're bathing our cellular biology. And we want to, we want to continue to bathe our cellular biology in this toxic soup and then, and then come down on top of it with a chemical or a synthetic pharmaceutical and, and allow that to be the answer without actually changing the habitual pattern that it brought you there. I mean, a lot of times when people talk to me about really wanting to lose weight, um, I walk them through, you know, for not to sound harsh, but why are you so fat, right? Let's figure out why you're so heavy. And then let's not do that. And in the process of doing that, we're also going to put some components in place to make sure that you, you really, you know, you lose weight quickly and

Starting point is 00:29:02 safely and everything else. But to reframe the way that we talk about the state of the condition that we're in, if you've got metabolic syndrome, the answer isn't, okay, well, let's add insulin and metformin and beta to manage it with synthetics and chemicals and pharmaceuticals, but it's to say, how do we get into this condition? In the first place. And I think as I became more and more aware of seed oils, I mean, I have to say for the consumer, it's hard. I mean, it is difficult to walk down a grocery store aisle um and you know the deception in my opinion in food labeling to you know heart healthy is right on the seed oil bottle by the way brother i was in costco the other day filming and the corn oil has a big heart healthy yeah label it's got the little heart how is is this possible? It's like an emoji.

Starting point is 00:30:06 Because this is ludicrous. So let's talk about how we get insulin resistant. Because this is interesting to me. So when you go to your doctor, and I want the people that are listening to think about this, and your doctor checks your cholesterol, how often does your doctor do any metric

Starting point is 00:30:22 that approximates your insulin sensitivity? They're not really telling you about fasting insulin. I have to constantly talk to people and say, ask your doctor for a fasting insulin. It's a $30 test that your insurance should pay for, but maybe your insurance won't pay, but it's $30 for the amount of information it gives you. And most- Glucose, hemoglobin, A1C. All of those also, or ratios of triglycerides right but i think fasting insulin is such a good metric of insulin sensitivity and no one is getting it and you're interpreting lipids without any context of your insulin sensitivity i think every lipid panel

Starting point is 00:30:56 should be paired with insulin fasting insulin because your lipids matter in the context of your insulin sensitivity and this goes back to dave feldman's research which we get to. But I think that what's happening here for people, and this is where it gets really interesting, and we don't have randomized controlled trials here, so we're approximating mechanistic data, but it's really interesting to say that, as we talked about earlier, when you eat polyunsaturated fats, they get stored in your body. We just are full of them. And you mentioned a number earlier that it's important to bring up again, which is the fact that looking at kinetic studies of how we accumulate fatty acids, most people estimate that if you have been eating McDonald's and lots of seed oils your whole life, it takes you potentially four plus years if you stop today to fully recycle the membranes of all the cells in your body,

Starting point is 00:31:40 the fatty acid depots, like the fat tissue probably being the least quick to recycle, but it probably takes about four years to really fully change the composition of all the cell membranes and all the mitochondrial membranes. Wow. That's a big deal, right? There are potentially ways to speed that up that we can talk about, but they're pretty intense. Yeah. I'd like to talk about those. Yeah. So, but what's going on is we are stuffing our cell membranes and we are stuffing our mitochondrial membranes with polyunsaturated fatty acids. Our bodies change based on what we're eating. This is the thing that like, not all calories are created equally. The last time we talked, we talked about my, my, my frustration with the notion that you can just eat less calories and even eat bad food,

Starting point is 00:32:19 that you can somehow out diet or out exercise a bad diet. And it's not true because if you are eating French fries, yes, you could lose weight eating French fries, but you are immediately stuffing all of your cell membranes, all of your mitochondrial membranes, all of the cells in your fatty acid depots with more polyunsaturated fatty acids. We are in flux. And so evolutionarily inappropriate diets

Starting point is 00:32:39 of polyunsaturated fatty acids that are already oxidized and susceptible to further oxidation in the human body are causing major issues for people. And I think that there's mechanistic data that points to the actual problem here. There is evidence that as the membrane of your mitochondria becomes more highly polyunsaturated, you actually get proton leak.

Starting point is 00:32:58 So the mitochondria is quite a complex little organelle, right? Right. Probably evidence of endosymbiosis, this primordial connection that we had with some sort of a bacteria hundreds of millions of years ago, where a, you know, a nucleated organism actually engulfed a bacteria and that bacteria started working for us. And now we have trillions of these mitochondria in our bodies. And this is the way that, yeah, this is the way that our, this is the way that our bodies convert food energy into kinetic energy. It's through the

Starting point is 00:33:29 mitochondria. This is where beta oxidation and glycolysis, um, happen or the downstream effects of the downstream, uh, biochemistry after glycolysis happened in the mitochondria. So this is where the Krebs cycle happens. And so in order to convert food energy, which is potential energy to kinetic energy, actual usable ATP, which we use food energy, which is potential energy, to kinetic energy, actual usable ATP, which we use to repair DNA, to make hormones, to make cellular processes, to rebuild our bodies, to run our brains, everything in our body happens with kinetic energy, ATP, that comes from food. But in between are our mitochondria. So potential energy and food, kinetic energy used to make a vital, fertile, happy, healthy human being.

Starting point is 00:34:05 In between is our mitochondria. Right. If you break the mitochondria, and you've spoken about this at length. Yes. If you break the mitochondria, you get stuck with potential energy. And what does that look like? That looks like fat humans. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:15 And so it's not just about calories. Fat insulin-resistant humans. Fat insulin-resistant humans. It's not just about calories. It's about what are those calories doing to your cellular energy factories. If they are breaking your mitochondria, you are going to store more of those calories. So when you look at a label on Doritos and it says 200 calories per serving, that is baloney because you can't actually make that Dorito into 200 calories of kinetic energy because there are ingredients in that Dorito, all sorts of ingredients that are breaking your mitochondria.

Starting point is 00:34:42 And so when you stuff your mitochondrial membranes, right, there's two mitochondrial membranes. The inner mitochondrial membrane is kind of the ground zero breaking your mitochondria. And so when you stuff your mitochondrial membranes, there's two mitochondrial membranes. The inner mitochondrial membrane is kind of the ground zero inside the mitochondria is where the Krebs cycle happens in deep in there. And as you are doing this electron transport chain, you are moving protons across those membranes to create a gradient. And then the protons moving down the gradient

Starting point is 00:34:59 through the little ATP motor, complex five of the mitochondrial electron transport chain, that's what makes ATP. But if those protons are leaking back across, you're not making ATP. And that happens when you stuff your mitochondria with polyunsaturated fatty acids at an evolutionarily inappropriate level.

Starting point is 00:35:13 So there's lots of mechanisms by which stuffing your cells full of polyunsaturated fats creates a lot of problems for humans at this formation of energy level. And I think that's what's hard for people to wrap their head around, because it's like, this is mechanistic research and we don't have a study in humans to prove that

Starting point is 00:35:29 because who would fund it? Right, right, right. It's so tricky, but I think that it's pretty clear that we are doing something very wrong as humans today. It's not just that we are eating too many calories. We're eating slightly more calories, but, and I talk about this in the Fed Alive documentary, in the last 20 to 30 years

Starting point is 00:35:45 in the United States, we have not increased calorie consumption at all. And obesity has gone from 30% to 42%. We're not eating more calories. We're just getting fatter. What's going on? We're not converting the food energy to kinetic energy because we're breaking our mitochondria. And there are other things that I believe break mitochondria, but I think seed oils are a major factor. We've never had these in our diets at this level. And I think that the way out, which you wanted to talk about, is stopping eating so many polyunsaturated fats, particularly this omega-6 linoleic acid. It makes no sense with the big data because, you know, you would think with the parabolic rise in statins, you would have a parabolic reduction in cardiovascular disease. Still the number one killer worldwide.

Starting point is 00:36:27 We don't see much of a reduction at all in cardiovascular disease despite the revolution of statins. So we are well capable of controlling cholesterol, but we're not capable of controlling the cardiovascular disease. So is it possible? This is just why I want to open people's minds, because your primary care physician might staunchly disagree with this. Is it possible that we've been actually firing the magic bullet at the wrong target?

Starting point is 00:36:54 Absolutely. You know, I think that we have, you want to talk about a pandemic. I think we have a pandemic in this country of holding organs responsible for crimes they didn't commit. We do this with the thyroid. We do this with the heart. We do this with the, you know, most people that have, you know, cardiovascular diagnoses of, let's say, hypertension, you know, essential hypertension or, you know, type 2 hypertension, whatever you want to call it. These people that have essential hypertension, 85% of the time, their origin is idiopathic, meaning it's of unknown origin. And so when we don't know the origin, how do we know the organ to hold responsible?

Starting point is 00:37:34 It always fascinates me when we say things like, well, you've got high blood pressure. We don't know why, but we're going to medicate the heart. Well, what did you find wrong with the heart? Nothing. So why are we medicating the heart? Well, because we don't have why, but we're going to medicate the heart. Well, what did you find wrong with the heart? Nothing. So why are we medicating the heart? Well, because we don't have anything else to do. But if you don't know the origin, how do we go after the organ? Right.

Starting point is 00:37:54 And so I think that I've been deep down the rabbit hole of this lately. And I think most of the answers to human physiology are a little more complex and a lot less linear than I think modern medicine likes to make them. We're an ecosystem. Human beings thrive in communities. Our cells thrive in communities. Very often what we do is we take cells out of the body. We study them in a Petri dish. We look how they behave in a lab or in certain media, manipulated media.

Starting point is 00:38:23 And then we assume that when we put that cell back into the human body, it's going to behave the same way. And it doesn't because you have this giant community, right? And I think what you're talking about is the, the cause and effect, you know, like the downstream effect of highly processed foods, highly refined sugars. And then all of the direct insults. Forget the hormone disruptors and everything that we're putting on our skin,

Starting point is 00:38:48 but the fake food dyes, the pesticides, the herbicides, the insecticides, the preservatives. All of these things are entering this community in our cellular biology, and they are wreaking havoc on its capacity to communicate and exchange with its outside environment. It's clogging up our proton pumps. It's actually interrupting our cell walls and our cell membranes. And when you do this at such a microscopic level, because we're just a thriving community of these organisms, you get these macroscopic results.

Starting point is 00:39:23 And then we oversimplify it by saying it's just one thing, right? And so anyway, I digress a little bit, but so let's go back. We put these in, they're pro-inflammatory and in your case, what you mean by pro-inflammatory is they can actually embed themselves into the cell membrane, which is a lipid bilayer, by the way, for the folks that are, you know, what's around your cells is something called a phospholipid bilayer, which is sort of a little ring of fat, if you will. And not all fat is created equal. And when these highly oxidized fats get into those cell membranes, they have a hard time getting out. And that cell membrane is super important because it's the gateway from the interior to the exterior.

Starting point is 00:40:11 You know, all of the good stuff is out in the serum of your blood. We got to bring it in. Sometimes there's waste, and by waste I mean cellular waste that's got to get out. And if you interrupt these channels, now you have a metabolically unhealthy cell. And we know, for example, that all cancer is a metabolic shift in the cell, right? It's all connected. It's also connected. It's all connected.

Starting point is 00:40:32 It's also connected. Guys, let me let you in on one of my favorite snack foods. This is masa chips. If you actually look at the back of the ingredients here, you'll see things that you read and pronounce and understand. Non-GMO corn, organic beef, grass-fed tallow, and sea salt. That's it. Sea salt, beef tallow, and organic non-GMO corn. Those are the kinds of ingredients

Starting point is 00:40:52 we should be using to fuel our body. Those are whole foods in their natural state. I love these. They come in four or five flavors. These are great for your kids. You can replace your Doritos and your other seed oil-laden chips with these. They're not super high in sodium, but they do use a little Redmond sea salt. Great for your kids. You can replace your Doritos and your other seed oil laden chips with these.

Starting point is 00:41:06 They're not super high in sodium, but they do use a little Redmond sea salt. It's mineral rich. And you know how much I talk about minerals and the need for the body to actually have the 91 essential minerals. We can get these from natural salts. So imagine combining natural salts with organic grass-fed beef tallow and non-GMO corn.

Starting point is 00:41:23 This is a perfect snack. This is guilt-free eating. You can replace Doritos. You can actually make nachos with these. All guilt-free. Feed these to your kids. I keep them on my shelf. Keep them around.

Starting point is 00:41:33 It'll become your favorite snack. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. So linoleic acid, this 18-carbon polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acid, is also the most abundant fatty acid in your LDL. So your LDL is a balloon that carries cholesterol and triglycerides. The most abundant fatty acid in there is linoleic acid. So even if that linoleic acid is not oxidized before it gets in the LDL, the population of the membrane of the LDL changes when you eat more seed oils. So you make a membrane that is more susceptible to oxidation and you make a membrane that is more difficult for your body to manage in terms of

Starting point is 00:42:08 oxidative stress at the level of the LDL. So your actual LDL particle is full of linoleic acid when you're eating French fries and cookies and cakes and crackers and dressings. And if you don't eat those things, your LDL remodels very quickly. So let's talk about how to detox. Yeah, let's talk about that. This is really interesting to me because it starts to connect a lot of the dots. So canonical thinking is four years. So, okay, that's a long time.

Starting point is 00:42:36 But if someone is listening to this and you are eating seed oils and you just stop today, right? Today is the day before Thanksgiving, 2024. If you stop eating seed oils today- We'll give you until the day after Thanksgiving. Yeah, okay. We'll give them one more day, Paul. Okay, okay, fair, fair, fair, fair. Don't kill them right before Thanksgiving. All right, day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday. Black Friday. Seed oil, black Friday. You're not eating seed oils and anything else for the rest

Starting point is 00:42:57 of your next four years. You will almost essentially remodel all of your cells, all the fatty tissues, all of your mitochondria in four years. But there are ways to speed it up and there are things to do to protect your body against the oxidation of these seed oils. Let's talk about speeding it up. This is interesting. And probably I will say from the outset, maybe not super practical for most people. So there are studies in monkeys, cebus monkeys, and I saw this today, where they were able to speed up the remodeling from four years to 30 days. Wow. But they fed the monkeys a very, very low fat diet. And when you feed a very low fat diet as a human, you don't feel good. Right. And I'm not really advocating for this. I'm just telling you, research shows this in monkeys. And then it reminded me of

Starting point is 00:43:40 something called the rice diet. You ever heard of Walter Kempner? This guy's fascinating. He died in the 90s. But in the 1950s and 1960s, he took diabetics and he gave them a diet of processed white sugar and rice, a 2,000 calorie, very low fat diet of almost white rice and white sugar. And their diabetes got better. It reversed. Wow. But in order to do this, he had to lock them in a hospital, right? And there's controversy because apparently he had to whip them to get them.

Starting point is 00:44:07 You cannot keep a human on this diet. I'm not advocating for humans being whipped in metabolic wards, but it's an interesting study that would never be repeated today, right? Right. So it's an example of a very low-fat diet in humans. And the pictures in his studies are remarkable. It's like a very rotund man, And he's rail thin after six months. And the diabetes completely reverses.

Starting point is 00:44:30 And even when Walter reversed or liberalized their diet, the diabetes did not come back. So there are now multiple data points of very low-fat diets leading to resolution of metabolic dysfunction. And I think what's going on here is accelerated membrane remodeling, right? So I'm just saying there are ways to do this. It's not easy. If a human wanted to accelerate the remodeling of your membranes, you could potentially eat a lower fat diet for 30, 60, 90 days. Understanding that a low fat diet is not super sustainable for humans. But the other thing you could do is eat a very low polyunsaturated fat diet. You can look at the amount of linoleic acid in your diet

Starting point is 00:45:09 and lower it. Even after avoiding seed oils, should you avoid olive oil? Olive oil can be 12 to 28% linoleic acid, right? Avocado oil can be 20% linoleic acid. So I think you could accelerate the turnover of your membranes toward a lower linoleic acid membrane state by eating no olive oil, no avocado oil. Again, do it after Thanksgiving, right? And just lower in the amount of linoleic acid in your diet.

Starting point is 00:45:33 Beef tallow, 1% to 2% linoleic acid. Butter, 1% to 2% linoleic acid. Avocado oil, olive oil, 12% to 25%. Canola, 25% linoleic acid. Soybean oil, 50%. Corn oil, 12 to 25, right? Canola, 25% linoleic acid, soybean oil, 50%, right? Corn oil, 45%, grapeseed oil, 55 to 60% linoleic acid. So if you focus on the low linoleic acid animal fats, the ones we've been told that are bad for us, you can accelerate the turnover of linoleic acid in your cell membranes. And butter especially, I believe, could be protective. And I'll tell you why. This

Starting point is 00:46:06 is the second piece of this equation. So lower fat oils or fats, animal fats that are much lower in linoleic acid, I believe this will accelerate the turnover of your membranes. There's a fatty acid, we were talking about this last night, called C15, pentadecanoic acid. Pentadecanoic acid. Pentadecanoic acid. Most of the fatty acids in your cells are odd chain. Saturated fats, C12, C14, C16, C18, lauric, myristic, palmitic, and stearic acid. They're all odd chain. They're all even chain fatty acids, right?

Starting point is 00:46:33 Odd chain fatty acids, C15 and C17 are starting to be understood, or we're looking at research. And there's research that suggests that C15 levels in your cell membranes can be protective against oxidative stress in your membranes. So polyunsaturated fatty acid peroxidation, lipid peroxidation, induced cell death is called ferroptosis. So apoptosis is programmed cell death, but ferroptosis is oxidative

Starting point is 00:46:58 stress induced cell death. And C15 levels in your cell membranes protect against ferroptosis. Wow. cell death. And C15 levels in your cell membranes protect against ferroptosis. So the ideal level of C15 in the study that I think was published in 2024, I think it's by Ven Watson is the main author, was 0.4 to 0.64% of your cell membrane is C15. Where do you get C15 in your diet? Butter and dairy. Dairy fats and butter are good sources of C15. In fact, they track so much that you can look at someone's C15 levels and tell how much dairy fat they're eating. Again, dairy fat being something that's been vilified, but you and I had raw milk. And in fact, I have to tell the story. So we got raw milk from Southwest Ranches. I love these guys here in Miami. And they gave us glass containers of raw milk. And this is raw milk from a cow.

Starting point is 00:47:46 And this raw milk is so good that you can see the cream on top of the raw milk in the fridge. Paul left to go out to dinner last night. And as soon as he left, I slowly poured the cream off the top. You stole the cream off my milk. I literally did. He admitted to it. I did. And when he came back, he was like, damn, you dog.

Starting point is 00:48:01 You took it. He took all the good cream. But this is such good raw milk. That's a price to stay at my house. I will willingly pay the tax. Thank you for having me at your house. But you can see, and I'll post it on my stories or something. We can post a video together showing this.

Starting point is 00:48:16 Because I want to show this. Because there's a lot of raw milk that I get that you can't see. This cream versus milk. But that cream on top of the raw milk, what you did there, Gary, is you got a C15 infusion by stealing, by stealing the cream off of the raw milk, which I willingly give to you. Happy, happy Thanksgiving. You had C15 and that C15 changes the composition of your cell membranes. And that looks to be protective against ferrooptosis, lipid peroxide induced cell death. So what are we worried about? What are we worried about with polyunsaturated fats?

Starting point is 00:48:45 We're worried about lipid peroxidation. We're worried about cellular damage. Eat dairy fat. This means butter is healthy, seed oils are garbage. So doing more butter and less or no seed oils could also be protective. So in summary, I think there are human and monkey or primate studies showing that low-fat diets

Starting point is 00:49:02 can accelerate this. And I think if you really want to accelerate turnover of your cell membranes to detox from seed oils, you have to get low linoleic acid in your diet. Low linoleic acid. Which probably means even avoiding, if you really wanna optimize avoiding avocado oil, avoiding olive oil and focusing on butter,

Starting point is 00:49:19 especially with C15 or tallow. That would be, I think that there's a case to be made for that in the research. And look, maybe in this administration, we'll actually get some funding to do that study, right? So this is the thing. I will freely say there is no randomized double-blind controlled trial to prove that, but I'm connecting the dots with the research that's out there. There are mechanistic studies. There are studies to suggest that this happens in both humans and in primates. And so I think it's very reasonable to do that.

Starting point is 00:49:45 And you know what I find is that a lot of randomized clinical trials essentially end up proving what we know ancestrally from nature. You know, it always takes us back to the basics. It does. It's interesting how it comes full circle. You know, we go deep down into isolating the oils and their origin and whether or not they're processed or not. And it just basically gravitates us back towards the basic whole foods.

Starting point is 00:50:09 Simple things. Yeah, yeah. How can you go wrong eating simple? Because nature designs it perfect. How can we go? You can't go wrong eating simple whole foods. It's just unprocessed animal foods, unprocessed plant foods. You'll be great.

Starting point is 00:50:20 Yeah. So I want to go down the road of supplementation, right? I mean, we have essential fatty acids. We have essential amino acids. Essential meaning they're necessary for life. I don't think many people are not getting these, but there's so first thing in the morning, which I'm actually a fan of. I need enough of it that I don't have to do it, but I'm a fan of people that don't get enough doing that. So what are, you know, first of all, can you give a little explanation of the difference between an omega-3 fatty acid and an omega-6 fatty acid and why the ratio is important and where we get omega-3s and 6s. And if somebody's listening to this and they want to start taking a EPA or DHEA or needs to take a fatty acid supplement, what do you recommend or do you recommend getting it from diet? So omega-3 is also polyunsaturated. And omega-3 versus omega-6 is just a nomenclature

Starting point is 00:51:26 designation based upon where the first double bond is based from the end of the molecule so if you look at a fatty acid it's a long chain of carbons with a carboxylic acid group on the end and the first desaturation point which is a double bond if it's close to the end of the molecule if it's three carbons from the end we call it an omega the molecule, if it's three carbons from the end, we call it an omega-3. If it's six carbons from the end, we call it an omega-6. Okay. Omega-3s are in much smaller amounts in our diets than omega-6s. And need to be in higher amounts, yeah. Well, they probably should be in higher amounts for most of us, right? Many of us, you and I, get plenty of omega-3s and maybe don't need to increase, right?

Starting point is 00:52:02 Right. Omega-3s occur naturally. And omega-3s, we're talking about ALA, which is alpha-linolenic acid, not linoleic, alpha-linolenic acid, DHA, docosahexaenoic acid, EPA, eicosapentaenoic acid, and DPA, docosapentaenoic acid. And there's a sort of a biosynthesis pathway. And the pathway's parallel, right? So there's the same exact series of enzymes. These are desaturases and elongases that turn ALA into DPA, and they also turn linoleic acid into arachidonic acid and other omega-6 downstream metabolites. And so D5D, D6D,

Starting point is 00:52:39 these are shared enzymes between omega-3 and omega-6. And one of the things we know is that if you're eating a lot of omega-6, and I would argue that humans are eating evolutionarily inappropriately high amounts of omega-6 and probably for many evolutionarily inappropriately low amounts of omega-3 because processed foods don't have much omega-3, but they're full of omega-6. This is a problem because these pathways are parallel. And when you eat too much omega-6, all the enzymatic activity of those shared enzymes goes to the omega-6 pathway, and you can't really biotransform the omega-3s. You can get preformed omega-3s in your diet, but you are not really going to be able to

Starting point is 00:53:15 biotransform anything if you're getting ALA, alpha-linolenic acid, or any of the upstream omega-3 metabolites, and you want to turn them into DPA or downstream metabolites. You can't do that well if you're eating a lot of omega-6. So if you look at the amount of omega-3 that I eat, it's pretty small in my diet. Relatively speaking, I have egg yolks sometimes and I get my omega-3s from animal fats. There's omega-3s in that cream on the milk, right? There's omega-3s in meat. I don't feel like I need to supplement with a fish oil because I'm eating unprocessed animal foods that are primarily fed grass. And my body can biotransform alpha-linolenic acid into EPA, DHA, DPA.

Starting point is 00:53:51 I've done these checks and I have lots of EPA, DHA, and DPA in my body and I don't take a fish oil supplement because I'm eating less omega-6. I have very low levels of omega-6, so my body can use those parallel enzymes. Where does the omega-6 come from? The omega-6 comes from seed oils, right? Primarily. Yeah, you can get a little bit of omega-6. So my body can use those parallel enzymes. Where does the omega-6 come from? The omega-6 comes from seed oils, right? Primarily. Yeah, you can get a little bit of omega-6 if you're eating almonds. I don't think that's a problem for most people. If you

Starting point is 00:54:12 can digest almonds, that's a separate conversation that we've had about, I don't think almonds are very digestible, but you're not getting a lot of omega-6 if you're eating unprocessed plant foods. You're just not, but you're getting a lot of omega-6 from the seed oils. Now, asterisk, we are also getting evolutionarily inappropriate amounts of omega-6 from things like chicken and pork, because going back to our previous point, humans, chickens, and pigs are all monogastric animals. We all store polyunsaturated fats. When you are eating a chicken and the chicken thigh is going to be fattier, if you're eating a chicken thigh and that chicken is fed corn and soy, just like humans that are fed corn and soy oils,

Starting point is 00:54:54 that chicken is accumulating linoleic acid in their fatty acid, in their tissues. So chickens historically, if you look at wild chickens, 4% linoleic acid in their fat. Chickens today, 20%. Wow. Same with pigs, 4% to 5% wild hogs, right? 4% to 5% linoleic acid in their tissues. Today, 20% linoleic acid in the tissue. So do I think that eating traditionally raised pork and chicken is the major contributor to linoleic? No, this is not the biggest.

Starting point is 00:55:21 It's mostly seed oils. Right. linoleic acid. No, this is not the biggest. It's mostly seed oils. But if somebody is really trying to be aware of evolutionarily appropriate, biologically appropriate consumption of linoleic acid, you have to start thinking about your bacon. I'm sorry. And look, you can do it. Raise your own pigs. Let them root in the ground. Let them eat bugs and worms and mice because they do eat other animals. And let them eat roots. Don't feed them corn and soy, and your pigs will have much lower amounts of linoleic acid. There are more and more of these producers out there doing low LA pork. Wow.

Starting point is 00:55:51 Historically, we are eating pork that is full of linoleic acid because of what they're fed. So most of it is coming from seed oils and it's coming from, and this also happens with our eggs, Gary, too, which is why it's important to eat chickens or eggs from chickens that are eating the right things, right? Right. So if chickens are eating better, there's less linoleic acid in their eggs. But if chickens are eating corn and soy, they put more linoleic acid into their eggs. And so there was recently an article that came out about this, you know, like the amount of linoleic acid in egg yolks is higher than it probably should be historically. Wow.

Starting point is 00:56:22 So the quality of what your chickens is eating. And I don't want this. At this point, I'll pause and say I don't want this to be should be historically. Wow. So the quality of what your chickens is eating, and I don't want this, at this point I'll pause and say, I don't want this to be overwhelming for people. Right. Knowledge is power. Know better, do better. Right. I'm just offering information that anyone listening to this

Starting point is 00:56:35 can use wherever they are on their health journey. Right. If your first step is getting rid of seed oils, get rid of seed oils. Yes. Keep eating pork, keep eating chicken, keep eating your eggs. Don't worry about that yet.

Starting point is 00:56:44 That's step three. That's step three, but I'm giving you all the steps, right? So that's where all of the linoleic acid is coming from in our diets. And it's kind of tough because when you think about it, we're getting it from all angles. If the chickens that you're eating are fed corn and soy and the pork you're eating is fed corn and soy and the eggs are coming from chickens that are fed corn and soy and you're eating sweet oils. And then you're making sauces out of corn and soy. Yeah, yeah. Then is it any wonder? Think about all of these inputs in our diets.

Starting point is 00:57:13 And I'll go back to this phrase, evolutionarily inappropriate consumption of excess amounts of linoleic acid in our diet. And I think it's a real problem for humans. And again, it happens at every level. The good news here is that beef is a ruminant, right? Beef, so cows, bison, lamb, elk, deer, these animals do not bioaccumulate linoleic acid. They have the biochemical machinery to saturate polyunsaturated fatty acids. We do not. So if a cow is fed grains, it has essentially the same amount of linoleic acid in its fat as a cow that's fed grass. I think a cow is better when it's fed grass, but a grain-fed cow does not have the same magnification of linoleic acid in its tissues.

Starting point is 00:57:55 As a chicken. As a chicken or a pig because they're monogastric. Or a human, right? Not that we're eating humans, but humans store this. So we have the same issue there's evidence from i guess archaeology or anthropology that in our fatty tissues humans historically had two three percent linoleic acid and now we're looking at 20 plus percent wow linoleic acid or fat so we are the same as a chicken or a pig and what's the consequences of all of this linoleic acid is it because it it's composition

Starting point is 00:58:20 of the the cell membrane back to the mitochondrial thing we talked about with the proton leak and, you know, potentially impairing at a cellular energy level the hypothesis, which I think is supported by the literature, is that it's impairing the biotransformation of potential energy to kinetic energy. Hey, guys. I'm beyond excited to introduce something that's going to transform your nutrition game,

Starting point is 00:58:42 a new protein bar formulated by me, created in partnership with Body Health. Now, this is the kind of protein bar I would want in my own backpack. In fact, as I head out on the Great World Race, it's going to be in both my sons and my backpack. It is packed with perfect amino, the same essential amino acids I use every day

Starting point is 00:58:59 for up to 99% protein absorption. Clean, plant-based protein, energizing MCT oil, and a powerhouse organic fruit and veggie blend that will fuel your body at a cellular level. And guess what? It's naturally sweetened with monk fruit for that minimal caloric and glycemic impact. Whether you're hitting the gym, grinding through a busy day, or you just need that nutrient-dense boost, this bar is my go-to and your new secret weapon. This is not just any kind of protein bar, guys. If I formulate a protein bar, it's going to be made out of nutrient-dense whole foods. And that's what we accomplished here. And if you're part of my Rule Breaka community,

Starting point is 00:59:34 you'll also get an exclusive discount. So snag yours now before they're gone. Your body and your future self will thank you. Links to my protein bar and my Rule Breaka VIP community will be down below in the description now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast you know what's interesting too is that um i don't advocate really really hardcore dog dogmatic carnivore diets but for periods of time um i've used things like keto reset carnivore reset people's energy level goes through the roof i know that is a lot of it is eliminating the bad right right i mean that's probably 70 of it the other is the presence of the good um and i don't think that i've had a client that um i've put on one of these reset

Starting point is 01:00:20 programs including dan and white uh that went through it for 10 weeks, that didn't report like significant increases in energy, significant increases in mental clarity, significant reduction of gut-related issues, even if their gut-related issues were mild, and some were very severe. I mean, borderline pathological diverticulitis, Crohn's, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, like really complicated concepts in the bowel. And you see reductions in almost as though it's healing that single cell layer in the luminal wall of the intestine too because you actually do see inflammatory markers like c-reactive protein go down um and i see improvements in alkaline phosphatase i see increases in egfrs these glomerular filtration rates which is another

Starting point is 01:01:17 sort of ancillary sign that inflammation is dropping as you reduce inflammation you can increase the filtration rate lower the poison levels um so you know what what's what's interesting is when um you you move people onto these transition uh diets and i the one that you just told me about it's pretty aggressive sugar and white rice i'm not advocating for that that one really caught me off guard but it's low fat it illustrates the point right yeah yeah it's low fat illustrates It illustrates the point, right? Yeah, yeah. It's low fat. It illustrates the point. You actually see, it's like the tide raises and lowers all the ship. You see increased thyroid production of T4 starts to rise. C-reactive protein goes down. Homocysteine levels drop.

Starting point is 01:01:57 Filtration rates increase in the kidneys. You see, obviously, hemoglobin A1C, three-month averages of blood sugar going down, fasting insulin reducing, overall insulin levels reducing, even alkaline phosphatase and liver enzyme levels, AST, GGT, you know, ALT, these sort of secondary markers of inflammation in the liver, you know. And not that all these levels collapse, if you if you compare labs 10 weeks apart and all you did was really put them on um something like a carnivore diet or in some cases

Starting point is 01:02:32 a keto reset um you see this systemic improvement in all of these levels and you know that's that's probably a podcast for another time you know the gut being the gateway to the rest of the body but um i i have seen those you know those those results super powerful and a lot of it is you know probably eliminating these seed oils but the the positive effects are rather immediate i mean you know i mean you and i both i mean i we talked about this on the first podcast that we did i wrote a book about the carnivore diet. Yeah. I think that something with more foods works better for me and a lot of people long-term, but think about what happens if you just eat steak. You are just eating animal fat, which is very low in linoleic acid. You're essentially doing a gut reset because you're just eating meat, which is

Starting point is 01:03:20 very highly digestible for most people, contrary to popular belief. And you're eating only animal fat. You're not eating olive oil or avocado belief. And you're eating only animal fat. You're not eating olive oil or avocado oil. You're not eating any seed oils. You're not eating any oils that are high in linoleic acid. A lot of things get better. I think that for a lot of people, it doesn't work long-term. It gets a little too limiting.

Starting point is 01:03:35 Right. That's why I said 10 weeks. Yeah, yeah. But it can be really powerful. And I think that this is where I'm interested in this idea of an animal-based diet, kind of this in-between. And on some recent podcasts, I thought maybe animal-based is kind of like carn between and on some recent podcasts i thought maybe animal-based is kind of like carnivore 2.0 right you do maybe you do carnivore as a reset or you can just go right to animal-based and animal-based for people that don't know it's just a term that i that i've

Starting point is 01:03:53 used to help people understand the framework is like meat plus fruit right so like you know i've got some squash in there on the table squash is a fruit you're making orange juice yeah making orange juice like but the meat plus the fruit and obviously you're getting the organs in there too that works really well as well and it's a little more sustainable and you're not afraid of the uh you know the fructose fructose in the blueberries and it's it's really the combination of having the glucose and the fructose together together i think the body's metabolizing those not just the presence of fructose on its own we i think we talked about on the Because a lot of people attack blueberries.

Starting point is 01:04:26 It's crazy. And I've even seen people attacking honey. Yeah. And you and I, we geek out on honey. Because I brought you this honey from my house in Costa Rica. What was it called? Mariola honey. Yeah, dude.

Starting point is 01:04:36 Oh, I'm so bummed that you didn't bring it to me this time. Stingless bees. I'm bringing it next time I have it. Stingless bees. Those are my kind of bees. They're amazing. So I have a hive in my house of Mariola honey. But there's been people attacking honey recently. But if you look at the medical literature, you can't attack honey. Yeah. I mean, honey improves insulin sensitivity,

Starting point is 01:04:53 sucrose, not so much, which is, you know, this pure molecule that's been extracted from the honey. Honey has over 300 bioactive compounds, but honey improves metabolic function in humans and honey improves testosterone. And there's review papers written about honey improves metabolic function in humans and honey improves testosterone. And there's review papers written about honey for metabolic illness. It's wild. And we get so myopic in medicine, kind of like with the LDL, we just focus on blood glucose. Blood glucose is a symptom of underlying metabolic dysfunction. It's not the metabolic dysfunction.

Starting point is 01:05:21 Eating honey does not cause insulin resistance. Honey doesn't cause diabetes. If you have diabetes, honey is going to spike your blood sugar, but it didn't cause it. So if you have diabetes, yeah, don't eat as much honey as you or I, but small amounts of honey, probably beneficial. And honey didn't cause the problem. We have to point the weapons at the actual cause. If you point the weapon at the wrong cause you're just putting your resources where they shouldn't be and as we talked about apo b wrong place to put your weapon right insulin resistance glucose fructose wrong place to point your weapon point your weapon at insulin resistance right the same thing with fruit if you look at someone who's

Starting point is 01:06:00 trying to make a case that fructose is harmful, invariably, they will cite studies in animals who don't have the same biochemistry. They do much higher rates of de novo lipogenesis when they are presented with fructose. Meaning if you give fructose to a rat, it's making much more of that into body fat than when we do as a human. We do 1%.

Starting point is 01:06:17 You give a human 1% of fructose goes to fat via de novo lipogenesis. Most of it goes to glucose, It goes to glycogen. It goes to lactate. I mean, fructose doesn't turn into fat in humans anywhere near like it does in animals. So you can't look at animal studies for fructose metabolism

Starting point is 01:06:34 because it's completely different, right? It's completely different. And if you look at human studies with fructose, they are, as you suggest, invariably giving pure fructose. There's not a single fruit or honey or anything on the planet where you're getting pure fructose. There's not a single fruit or honey or anything on the planet where you're getting pure fructose without glucose. Right.

Starting point is 01:06:49 And in the gut, it's all symporters. It's all transporters that need glucose and fructose to move across the gut lining. Yeah. And so if you get free fructose in the gut, it gets stuck in the gut. Well, what happens if fructose gets stuck in the gut? It causes overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria.

Starting point is 01:07:04 And then you get lipopolysaccharide, you get endotoxin. So they've done these studies in animals where they'll give free fructose and they'll give something that blocks TLR4 or 5, toll-like receptor 4 or 5, which is what endotoxin triggers eventually. And the negative effects of fructose are essentially abolished. Wow. So the negative effects of fructose at the level of the gut and humans is driven by endotoxin. And we don't get more endotoxin when we eat fruit.

Starting point is 01:07:29 In fact, I think you could easily make a case that when you eat a blueberry or you're eating a persimmon or you're eating orange juice, endotoxin, which is lipopolysaccharide, goes down. But the harmful effects of fructose in humans are isolated fructose feeding leading to LPS. So it's just, it's again, it really mirrors a lot of the discussion around seed oil research or ApoB.

Starting point is 01:07:49 I think that the people, I think that people in the health space are well-intentioned and super intelligent, but I really hope we can all come together and consider all of the research in its entirety with candor, you know? Because I think that if you just, if we're, it's hard. We need a lot of people to look at this because it's easy for one person and I will raise my hand,

Starting point is 01:08:10 you know, like I wanna collaborate with people who think differently than me. It's easy for one person just to see the research in less than its entirety. And if you're only looking at the fructose research in humans, that's isolated fructose feeding, or you're only looking at the research with LDL in people that are insulin resistant,

Starting point is 01:08:24 or you're only looking at the seed oil researchL in people that are insulin resistant, or you're only looking at the seed oil research in the trials that are flawed because of their design, you're gonna come to the wrong conclusion. And that's the problem here. Yeah, I totally agree. Well, what else is exciting you, man? What's new with Paul Saladino? Man, I think that all of this is super exciting for me.

Starting point is 01:08:42 I mean, the ability to affect public policy research, we talk about this all the time is you know maybe to be maha you know like yeah make america healthy again gets me pretty excited yeah um i was pretty bummed to see rfk jr with the photo of the mcdonald's but i believe i believe his heart is good and i'm really excited to see where it goes over the next four years i mean um who uh jay badacharya did you see this head of the nih yeah this researcher from stanford was recently nominated for the head of the head of the nih so jay badacharya was one of the guys kind of raising the alarm during covid oh yeah yeah no no i did just see that he was appointed yeah he was

Starting point is 01:09:21 he was nominated for the head of the nih you know r, RFK Jr., head of health and human services. I think Marty McQuarrie is head of the FDA potentially. Right. So it's going to be interesting to see where this goes. Yeah. Because I think that at the level of the Senate, you have a Republican controlled Senate, but you have a lot of people in the Senate who have ties to Big Food. So I think that there's going to be—hopefully there's enough pressure. Five lobbyists, according to Cali Means.

Starting point is 01:09:50 I mean, five lobbyists for every member of Congress. This is crazy. I mean, that's mind-blowing. It's mind-blowing. Can you imagine just five people whose 40-hour workweek is designed to do nothing but influence your decisions? Decision making. I mean, the amount of inbound that you must have to deal with, just five people assigned just to you for a single sector of what you're working on as a congressional service person. I mean, it's pretty intense.

Starting point is 01:10:18 And I think there's a lot of light being shed on this now, the corruption, the food supply, the corruption, the nutritional research, the conflicts of interest, if not worse. We've talked about this at the USDA. So maybe somebody was, I mean, I wonder who's gonna head the USDA, but Nina Teicholz, who's in this seed oil documentary, has pointed out 19 out of 20 members

Starting point is 01:10:40 of the USDA Dietary Guidelines Committee 2020 to 2025 had ties to pharma and processed food industry. Things like ILC, the International Life Sciences Institute, which is just a euphemistic title for a lobbying group for Pepsi and Kraft and General Mills. 95% of them had ties. This is the USDA Dietary Guidelines Committee that makes policy for food and food stamps

Starting point is 01:11:01 and school lunches. It's crazy. It is. It is really crazy. It's absolutely. It is. It is really crazy. It's absolutely ludicrous. The amount of corruption at those levels is sickening. Yeah. And look, the amount of damage that the corruption causes is really what's sickening.

Starting point is 01:11:13 I mean, you know, I think politicians have been taking, you know, money for favors for decades. But, you know, this is especially troublesome, you know, especially in the era where we have the highest rates of childhood cancer that we've ever had um highest rates of childhood obesity that we've ever had the the most skyrocketing rates of autism ashbergers add adhd ocd manic depression bipolar like these conditions you just never heard of 30 or 40 years ago 50 years ago that are now so prevalent you know i I remember RFK made a statement. It really hit me, hit home with me. He said, when I graduated high school and I graduated high school in 1988, so I'm really dating myself there. You know, I just, I didn't know an autistic child. I didn't have any autistic friends. I didn't know what that was. And I didn't

Starting point is 01:12:01 know someone who knew someone who was. My 16-year-old knows 10 kids in her school. She could name 10 people that openly have autism or they're in programs that are related to autistic children or kids with other kinds of neuroinflammatory conditions. And you think, wow, that's super anecdotal. But in my mind, it went from zero to one to ten. And this is not increased screening. This is increased incidence. This is not that we're more aware of it.

Starting point is 01:12:36 When you were in high school, when I was in high school, there were not undiagnosed kids. There were just no kids. When someone has autism. It wasn't socially unpopular. Like some of the sexual choices today. It wasn't that people were hiding it. It was that they just didn't

Starting point is 01:12:52 have the rates of autism. You don't exhibit it. These are not something you can hide. Yeah. This is increased incidents. This is humans getting less healthy in front of our eyes. In real time. To continue the corruption at that level with that kind of expense is astounding to me. And we talked about this earlier.

Starting point is 01:13:10 The USDA recently came out and tweeted, we don't have enough data that ultra-processed foods are causing— Yeah, I saw that ultra-processed foods. I was like, what do you mean we don't have enough data? The USDA Dietary Guidelines Committee 2020 to 2025—thankfully they're out of here in like a year. Not even. A couple months yeah yeah okay so they they tweeted we don't have enough data we need more data who's gonna fund it that ultra processed foods are behind the obesity crisis are you crazy i mean there's kevin hall did a study about this and there's another study that was published that's essentially the exact same thing you put people in a metabolic, you control everything they're eating for two weeks.

Starting point is 01:13:46 When you give them the same amount of calories, but they can eat as much as they want in ultra processed food or processed food, ultra processed food or unprocessed food, they consistently eat more ultra processed food. They gain two pounds a week, I think was the study. Maybe, yeah, something like that. Two pounds a week on ultra processed food.

Starting point is 01:14:01 Dr. Hyman talked about this. They're given the exact same calories. They try to match everything for sugar, salt, fat, macros. The ultra-processed food is just more addictive. It doesn't trigger satiety. It's more addictive and it's less nutrient-deprived. And so it's less satiating, right? And if you look at the mechanisms for GLP-1,

Starting point is 01:14:23 they have a lot to do with the nutrient density of food releasing the GLP-1, giving us that satiation response. So if you don't release the GLP-1, if you don't create a satiation response, you're now just, you've eaten the same volume and caloric intake and you're still hungry because your brain is like, I still need beta carotene and iron

Starting point is 01:14:43 and I need a complex of B vitamins. Like I'm nutrient deficient. So let's keep putting stuff in so I can just get the basics of, of what I need. I mean, inherently we know that. There's natural, natural Ozempic. It's meat and, you know, plant foods. Like, yeah. Try to overeat. Yeah. It's hard. Meat, try to overeat a steak, you know, like that's natural Ozempic, man. Like meat in a salad, meat and fruit. It's hard to overeat that, which is why natural ozempic, man. Meat in a salad, meat and fruit. It's hard to overeat that, which is why it kind of kills me. I think it's so crazy that we push down on the top of this pandemic of obesity

Starting point is 01:15:12 rather than pushing up from the bottom. Again, it's the toxic soup. We're bathing our cellular biology and not just this magic obesity sort of. I think classifying it as a disease makes people think it happened to them. And not have it within them. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like I caught this, like I caught the flu. Right. Right. That happened to you. You took a long flight and then, you know, the next morning you woke up and you got a sore throat or, you know,

Starting point is 01:15:38 you're sick. I mean, that, that, that, the influenza happened to you. Diabetes didn't happen to you. Right. It happened within you. And I think that if we can sort of shift the narrative a little bit, get physical education back in the public school system. Put them in the sun. Yeah, put them in the sun. Put kids outside. They do let them go on recess. I saw Tim Gray from the UK did a post the other day where he actually showed a study that prisoners, incarcerated prisoners,

Starting point is 01:16:06 get more sunlight on a daily basis than grade school children because they're actually required by law to be outside for an hour. They're given an hour outside every day. Whereas, you know, kids get in a covered – go from a covered house to a covered garage to a covered car to a covered school, stay in there all day, and then go to a covered car to a covered garage back to a covered school, staying there all day, and then go to a covered car, to a covered garage, back to a covered house. And we just, you know, wonder why we're facing a lot of these crises. And eventually, the research is just going to, again, it's going to bring us back to the basics, something like grounding, you know, movement, exercise, whole foods, and, you know that the the possibility of even cleaning up the um public school food you know like when when they made the announcement that you know the federal government was going to subsidize lunchables for the public school system i was like this isn't even food

Starting point is 01:16:56 what you know so we're getting way off the way down the rabbit hole but no but it's all relevant it's all connected we're not that far down the rabbit hole. And you've seen this clip of Fatima Stanford, who I think is a Harvard physician, on 60 Minutes with Barbara Walters, telling her that obesity is a genetic disease. I know. And I will paraphrase her, but I'm basically,

Starting point is 01:17:16 this is pretty close to what she said. She said, even if you do diet and exercise right, 60 to 75% of people will become obese. That is absolutely not. Why didn't we have this in the 50s then? It's malarkey. We had will become obese. That is absolutely not. Why didn't we have this in the fifties then? It's malarkey. We had genetics back then. Oh my gosh. And she's paid by Ozempic. She's on. And going back to what we were saying earlier, Darius Mazzafarian, who writes this meta-analysis on seed oils, paid by Bungie, seed oil manufacturer,

Starting point is 01:17:43 right? So again, I'm not saying it's all like that i think they're researchers get it right get it wrong even if they're not funded by industry but let's be honest about who's funded by industry and and really talk about this when you know when your tufts you know nutrition food compass guy is funded by seed oils yeah he's funded by ultra processed food and you know and then this this woman at Harvard is on 60 Minutes saying it's a genetic disease. You're receiving funding from Ozempic. Come on. What are we doing?

Starting point is 01:18:12 Tell me what gene in the genome carries the fat gene. Where's the fat gene? Yeah. I don't know. I've spent the balance of my adult lifetime studying epigenetics, and I don't know about that gene. But it's genetic. It's genetic, Gary. You can't avoid it.

Starting point is 01:18:24 You know, we say it's genetic very often when it runs in families and a lot of times that's that's another fallacy is that because things are in families they're genetic and that's that's absolutely patently false um i mean there are certainly conditions that are genetically inherited but significantly less than we've been led to believe and one of them is definitely not obesity i think you can be predisposed. Yes. But the predisposition is not a predetermination. You can put somebody without the fat gene in the wrong environment.

Starting point is 01:18:52 Right. And they're going to be obese. Right. I mean, obesity is... When I would go to Disney World or Universal Studios, I always tell the story of... I spoke at Access Hollywood one time and I I always tell the story of why, you know, I spoke at access Hollywood one, one time and I, and I was walking from the, uh, the back of the park, uh, where they picked me up to the, to the studio. And as we're cruising through the park, you know, I, I mean, you, you want to see what bad shape we're in as middle America, just, just go to Disney world and just take, take a look around.

Starting point is 01:19:20 And I made a comment about the fanny packs or people were wearing. And I was like, what's with the fanny pack pandemic? And I was just making a joke because everybody I saw had a fanny pack on. And the security guard just very flippantly said, oh, that's because they can't put their hands in their pockets. And I was like, whoa, dude, you're right. They actually can't get their hands in their pockets. But my other point is that you could see the lineage. There was like a beast grandma in the motorized wheelchair very often with a two liter of soda

Starting point is 01:19:49 in the basket oh yeah and then um you know mom is you know kind of waddling not far behind and then a rather obese 12 13 year old kid um and i don't think the grandmother passed the gene to the mother passed it to the son i i think you look at the, you know, the epigenetic influence. They're all eating the same foods. They're all in the same environment. And then he's sitting on a, you know, a bench with a, you know, a funnel cake and a 64-ounce Big Gulp. And I'm running the math in my head.

Starting point is 01:20:18 I'm like, 64 ounces of soda. Okay, so that's 29 teaspoons of soda. Okay, so that's because it's five sodas. Sugar, yeah. Like running the math. And a funnel cake is just white flour, deep fried in seed oils with 10X sugar. Yeah. And he's just, that's what's going in.

Starting point is 01:20:36 I'm just like, you know, and of course he's sniffling and wiping his face. And I just felt, I felt bad and I felt like how uninformed these people must be. because, you know, if you went to that mother, she loves her kid. You know, I consider it child abuse. But that also implies that they really are aware and know what they're doing. Right. The pendulum's just swung that far. We're that far off of any semblance of even basic, you know, fundamental nutrition. And I think that RFK Jr. put this in the right context.

Starting point is 01:21:08 This is poison. I think that you have foods that promote health in humans, and then you have poison. And you have non-foods, and then you have poisons. I agree. You have poison. You got like, you know, serves you neutral damage. And these are metabolic poisons.

Starting point is 01:21:26 Metabolic poisons that are legal. So cigarettes regulated, alcohol regulated, right? Raw milk is illegal in many places, but metabolic poisons are legal. And that's what's not, I don't think we've really framed it in that perspective. I would see this as you go to McDonald's, that is a metabolic toxin you are actively

Starting point is 01:21:46 poisoning yourself and look we all do it i've had alcohol in my life alcohol is also a toxin right i i've smoked one and a half cigarettes in my whole life there's a whole story about that yeah but like we all engage in some toxic no question it's part of being human eat birthday cake with your kids but look if you don't understand that is a metabolic poison and your body will cross a threshold at which point your metabolism, your mitochondria will become broken, we're missing the plot. Yeah, I agree. These are poisons.

Starting point is 01:22:16 Yeah, I agree. Paul, thank you so much, man. Yeah, Brian. I always love it. I always love it. And I'm sorry for stealing your cream. Oh, we got more. It's been amazing having you on.

Starting point is 01:22:26 You know the last question that I always ask my guests. I asked you this last time. But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? And I probably will answer it in the same way. I don't remember exactly how I answered it. For me, it means being able to get up, put my bare feet on the ground, put the sun in my eyes, hopefully go in the ocean and get some grounding, be in nature and spend time with people I care about in nature and have

Starting point is 01:22:49 the health and the vitality that is necessary to do that. Like being able for me, the best part of my life is spending time with people I care about in nature. And I need health and I need vitality to do that. Whether we're surfing, whether we're climbing mountains, whether we are snowboarding in the mountains or whether we are in the ocean, you know, just in a river like that is being the ultimate human. And like my vitality, my energy, my motivation, my strength comes from having a metabolism that works. And so I need I need to be healthy to be able to do those things and make the memories that I will treasure for my life. Yeah. Amen. Well, that's great, guys. And as always, that's just science.

The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 129. Paul Saladino, MD: Why 'Heart-Healthy' Seed Oils Are Actually Poison

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.