[00:00:00] JJ: I’m J. J. Virgin, Ph. D. dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times bestselling author. I’m a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I’m driven most of all. By my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can.

[00:00:33] JJ: And that’s where you come in. That’s why I created the Well Beyond 40 Podcast. to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we’ll talk about what’s working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to powerful aging and prescriptive fitness.

[00:00:57] JJ: Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out. 100. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe [email protected] to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. So you probably heard that less than 7% of the US population is metabolically healthy, and that’s really kind of code word for, um, insulin resistance.

[00:01:28] JJ: And that was. Pre 2020 so I have no idea what it is now. What if there was one thing that you could shift? That you could do a swap for in your diet that could reduce inflammation, reduce that feeling of hangry, improve insulin sensitivity And do it quickly. That is what we’re going to be talking about today.

[00:01:50] JJ: And honestly today I’m very excited I brought this guest on because I heard her on my buddy Dr. David Perlmutter’s um, podcast and I realized I’d really had my thinking wrong on something. And I like to pride myself in being critically open minded. Which means that I try to look at everything out there and question my beliefs because ultimately we don’t, who the heck knows what really is something nowadays when you look online and you hear all these, look at all these differing opinions.

[00:02:22] JJ: And boy, that is certainly the case with seed oils. In fact, right before taping this podcast, I was on X. I’ve gotten sucked a little bit into that black hole and someone was saying, seed oils are the most heart healthy there are. And someone else was like, no, they destroy your health. And I’m like, all right, well, I’m about to go to the expert and really figure this out.

[00:02:42] JJ: And that’s what I’m doing today with Dr. Kate Shanahan. She’s the author of Deep Nutrition, which is Honestly, one of those books, it reminds me of nourishing traditions where you want to have this book. It says why your genes need traditional food and featuring the four pillars of the human diet. So this is one you definitely want to have.

[00:03:00] JJ: We’re talking today about dark calories. And this is about seed oils, um, what they’re doing to our health and then what you can do to get your health back and easy swaps that you can do. And honestly, once you know this one, you’ll realize how easily these are sneaking into your diet, even if you’re trying to eat healthy, but how, how you can swap it out.

[00:03:24] JJ: So again, I’ve got Dr. Kate Shanahan. She is a family physician, she’s an author, and she’s really the. She’s, she calls herself a medical revolutionist. I call her a seed oil warrior who is up against All of these corrupt health authorities who are out there pushing seed oils, just like years ago, by the way, I don’t know if you remember like years ago when they had these cigarette ads and smoking cigarettes was recommended, you know, and then there was a while there where it wasn’t fat that was making this, um, Or it wasn’t sugar that was making us fat, it was fat.

[00:04:03] JJ: And we could eat everything that we wanted as long as it was low fat. So, there’s been a lot of crazy stuff. And I think we’re going to look back 10, 20, 30 years from now and realize that seed oils were one of those crazy things. So we’re going to be digging into which oils should you eat, which oils should you avoid, and, you know, how to make that shift to traditional foods and nature’s wisdom.

[00:04:29] JJ: And she has a load of research linking seed oils and processed foods to obesity, inflammatory illnesses. All the childhood issues, you know, linked fertility, et cetera. So that’s what we’re going to be digging into today. And again, I came from this wanting to really look at my own position because I thought it was much more of a omega 6 to omega 3 imbalance.

[00:04:54] JJ: It wasn’t. I was wrong. So spoiler alert on that. So I’m going to put all of her information for you to check out afterwards at JJVirgin. com forward slash Kate, C A T E, because she is going to give you a bunch of materials to help you on your journey. Of course, I also recommend grabbing those books, but you’ll also be able to get these Uh, meal plans and challenges and calculators, all sorts of stuff to help you right away so you can easily get these hateful eight seed oils outta your diet, and you’re gonna want to do that after listening to Kate.

[00:05:30] JJ: I’ll be right back. Stay tuned.

[00:05:44] JJ: Dr. Kate Shanahan. I’m super excited to dive into what I think is a very polarizing. Emotional topic with you. We are going to talk about seed oils today. So welcome to the show.

[00:05:58] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Thank you so much. JJ. This is the first time I’m meeting you and this is just so exciting to be here with you today.

[00:06:04] JJ: Well, I followed you for a while.

[00:06:06] JJ: Your book Deep Nutrition. is one that I think everybody needs in their success library. It reminds me of when I first read Nourishing Traditions, what, like, 20 years ago, and my mind was blown. So these are, like, great foundational things that you don’t think of coming from an MD, a family practice MD, traditionally.

[00:06:26] JJ: And I think your story of how you started to get into all of this is really interesting. So how did you go from, like, being the traditional doctor over to getting deep into nutrition?

[00:06:39] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Yeah, my whole life I wanted to be a doctor, and I wanted to be a doctor because I wanted to be able to resolve people’s worries about things that come, come up with their health.

[00:06:53] Dr. Cate Shanahan: That means you have to understand the underlying root cause, right? And really to be able to really resolve the worry, because it doesn’t make people feel so good to say, uh, like what we do say now, like, uh, why am I hypertensive? Or why do I have recurring migraines? And doctors say, oh, it’s just, you know, bad luck, or bad genes, or we don’t really know, medical science hasn’t figured it out.

[00:07:14] Dr. Cate Shanahan: That doesn’t really alleviate it, right? It’s, it’s nice to know what it’s called. But people still worry, well, maybe it’s something else. Maybe there’s something else wrong, maybe something else will go wrong. So it was not satisfying, um, to me to be a newly minted family practice doctor, as I was, um, early in my career when all I did was, I mean, not all I did, but I felt like a lot of what I did was just see people for refills.

[00:07:47] JJ: Yeah, that would not feel very satisfying.

[00:07:49] Dr. Cate Shanahan: No, and they didn’t, they didn’t love that either. They would come in and they would apologize. Oh, sorry, I have high blood pressure. Um, I’m like, well, you know, it’s not your fault. And I say, maybe, have you not been taking your medicine? And they were like, yeah, exactly, doc.

[00:08:04] Dr. Cate Shanahan: It didn’t make me feel any better. Um, you know, so. And then, of course, doctors are pre programmed to have a response to that to scare them back onto their drugs because we’re pre programmed with this phrase, Hypertension is a silent killer, or whatever. I was

[00:08:20] JJ: just going to say that, but hypertension is a silent killer.

[00:08:23] JJ: Like, oh my gosh, these talk lines. Exactly.

[00:08:27] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And we don’t realize how we’re just programmed, you know? And, uh, you know, and it’s all in the intention of Doing the right thing, but when I got sick myself, then I had to, uh, dive into a new way of thinking about nutrition because nothing else was working. I tried surgery.

[00:08:48] Dr. Cate Shanahan: I tried even seeing a, a true Hawaiian kahuna who, uh, what’s a Hawaiian kahuna that is a wise person who is a healer. And, uh, so he took me into his room, which was really just a garage, a carport. So many things happen in carports in Hawaii. Um, and he got like all, you know, the, um, medical benches there and everything and I jumped up on the bench, or I didn’t jump up, I climbed up slowly because my knee was hurting and he did like a whole bunch of cool stuff over me with energy work and blowing on my knee and very sincerely praying for me and but it didn’t help.

[00:09:26] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Um, and so, but it was cool. It was a great experience. Um, yeah. And I will just will never forget that man’s face because he was so earnest. Um, and I’m sure he helps a lot of people, but it couldn’t help me. So I had to, uh, listen to my husband who told me it’s like the hardest thing ever is. For me, listening to people who’ve been giving me advice that I just disagree with, right?

[00:09:53] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And I had to realize maybe he was right. Um, as he’d been saying for a long time that my sugar habit, which was very, uh, enormous, uh, was probably not good. Like he compared my diet I’ve got to

[00:10:05] JJ: ask, Kate, how enormous was your sugar habit?

[00:10:09] Dr. Cate Shanahan: I, he compared my diet to that of an army of ants. Right, I guess, like insects, I guess, eat a lot of sugar, but I would have a quarter cup of sugar in my coffee every day, a quarter cup, um, and what I had to do to get it to dissolve was make my own caramel sauce, so on the island, I was living on the island of Kauai, Hawaii at that time, zero Starbucks.

[00:10:37] Dr. Cate Shanahan: zero, like any kind of coffee places. And that was my preferred, that was my addiction of choice, was the, the two addictive substances, caffeine plus sugar. So, um, so, like, I had nothing better to do with my time because my injury, my problem, was preventing me from walking. It was very severe, and I had been spending most of my free time Doing fun things on the island, like going swimming, or hiking, or mountain biking.

[00:11:09] Dr. Cate Shanahan: So I had nothing to do for hours on my days off. And, and he had given me this book, and it was called Spontaneous Healing. And in there, um, Andrew Weil, the author, mentioned, uh, vegetable oils. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay. They are, uh, uniquely, unique for their chemistry, he said. And That triggered my inner chemist because before I went to medical school, I was, um, actually a chemist.

[00:11:41] Dr. Cate Shanahan: I was going to be a biochemist. I was getting my Ph. D. studying for it. Um, and what I wanted to do with it was design bacteria that would digest plastic. Now, how this relates to vegetable oil at all is that plastic is a polymer. Meaning it’s one big molecule made out of small molecules and the process of polymerization, um, requires chemistry that is similar to what I saw in the fatty acids of the vegetable oils.

[00:12:19] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Once I started diving into what are these vegetable oils that Andrew Weil was recommending, um, and I saw, what I saw in the chemistry was like, Oh my God, these things. These, these vegetable oils have bonds that could make them all polymerized together through something called a free radical chain reaction, which is an out of control reaction.

[00:12:45] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Not a problem when you’re trying to paint a liquid, uh, polyurethane onto your table to prevent it from getting, you know, water damage, right? You want a plastic polymer. Big problem if it might be happening in your cell membranes, and so just looking at that, I knew from what I had learned there could be something major going on here with our health, maybe my health, maybe that was affecting me too, um, and so I was fascinated from that moment on, and I just dove into Uh, reading an entire biochemistry textbook, um, that I had not read, uh, during my previous careers and just everything I could get my hands on about fat because, you know, we learn that these oils are healthy, right?

[00:13:38] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Like these vegetable oils, doctors do learn that something about nutrition, we learn vegetable oils lower your cholesterol. and supposedly prevent heart attacks, right? So what we learn about nutrition is wrong. And that was the thing that I was, you know, back in, this was 2002 when I first encountered this.

[00:14:07] Dr. Cate Shanahan: That was what I was wrestling with, and it took a year or two for me to wrestle with, was I really just outright miseducated? Why? How did that happen? What really causes heart disease? So all of that was. It’s driving me and it took a total of six to eight years, depending how you count it, to get that book, Deep Nutrition, done because there was so much I discovered that I thought everybody needs to know.

[00:14:42] JJ: So along the way, because you, you were sick when you started to write it, you were injured or sick or suffering. Did you heal yourself by making these shifts?

[00:14:51] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Yes, I did. It took a long time. Like, you know, I stopped eating the, the two things that I identify in deep nutrition as problematic were the sugar, of course, um, and, um, the, uh, vegetable oils.

[00:15:05] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And I started eating healthier fats and healthier carbohydrate, you know, like whole food, whole food based carbs instead of sugar based carbs. Not only did that help me heal my immune system, which is what fought off the thing that was trying to kill me, which is a virus, um, that, uh, it also radically changed my, it killed my sweet tooth.

[00:15:31] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Like, I never thought, I don’t know if you ever struggled with. It’s food addictions or sugar addictions or carb or any kind of, uh, flavor addiction. But I did obviously, and I never thought I’d get over it ever. I just thought it was me. But after a couple of years, I realized now I, I knew I shouldn’t be eating sugar.

[00:15:58] Dr. Cate Shanahan: But I, I realized I didn’t even cra I, like, didn’t even care. Like, my husband could bring home chocolates my that were my favorite Christmas chocolates. Those little balls that you can get from Costco that have hazelnuts in them and that kind of crunchy thing. And a soft chocolate center. The most, like, heavenly things I could imagine.

[00:16:17] Dr. Cate Shanahan: He actually brought them home and I had forgotten that he brought them home. Like, normally I would have been obsessing about them. And that was when I realized something important had happened. And Um, that was after I’d written Deep Nutrition. And so I started writing other books to, like, to explain how getting off seed oils can change our cravings so powerfully that we can get rid of a lifetime of food addiction.

[00:16:50] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And just a year or two.

[00:16:53] JJ: So one of the reasons I, there was a variety of reasons I wanted to unpack this with you specifically. Uh, I loved your interview that you did with my buddy Dr. David Perlmutter. Because you’re very science based and on the internet it is like, It is ridiculous. It is like, it is like you have two religious factions yelling at each other and I go, I was just going to go, well, let’s just show me, let’s look at the research and let’s really look at the research because, you know, we all know you can cherry pick studies.

[00:17:22] JJ: I’ve done it myself back before I knew better. So mea culpa. But when I was studying nutrition, biochemistry is basically nutrition, right? That’s the, when I was studying it, right? Okay, so we need omega 3s and omega 6s. And when I started to hear the seed oil issues I did not understand the real issue with them.

[00:17:43] JJ: I thought the issue with them because we have omega 6 fatty acids and omega 3 fatty acids. We, they’re both considered essential, that our body needs them. And historically, thousand plus years ago, maybe 200 years ago, Our ratio between sixes and threes was apparently like four to one and now it’s 20 to one and it’s putting us in a pro inflammatory state and blah, blah, blah.

[00:18:09] JJ: That’s what I thought the issue was. And so I was like, well, you know, as long as you are, you know, prioritizing so that you’ve got that ratio right, you know, that’s where I thought the issue was and that maybe some of them were oxidizing. Then I heard your, your interview and I’m like, oh. Nope, I do not have this right and that’s what I really want to talk about is what the real issue is in these and when we’re talking about these, because I’ve heard you talk about the hateful eight, which I love and we’ll get a link to too, but you know, which are these and what is the real problem behind them since it’s, it’s not what I thought it was.

[00:18:48] Dr. Cate Shanahan: I am so glad that you picked up on that because that is The point, that is like why I’ve been so excited about Sharing this information since the year 2002 because I was never concerned about that ratio business like that was an interesting side effect I mean an interesting rabbit hole that I had seen some research go down But I had also seen it been kind of debunked you know and I I think that um that the conversation around seed oils has been Impaired negatively by that, continuing to focus on that ratio concept, um, and not focusing on what I think is the real issue, which is this oxidation.

[00:19:38] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And that’s what I talk about in Dark Calories. That’s what I wanted to make clear in Dark Calories, which is my latest book. Um, which focuses, Dark Calories are the hateful eight. Um, and it focuses on why they’re bad, how they’re made, why they’re bad, what they do to our bodies. And it’s really an attempt to correct the 70 years of misinformation that medical associations have been pumping out.

[00:20:05] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Because of the wrongheaded idea that somebody had, the American Heart Association, Ancel Keys and the American Heart Association, promoted back in the 1950s, 40s and 50s, where they started talking about saturated fat being harmful for us. Um, and that’s when they started promoting these oils as heart healthy.

[00:20:25] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And doctors have learned that for the past three generations. And what that has done is not just, um, Make, uh, make us eat a lot of them, right? It’s not just mis educating doctors. It’s keeping us from seeing that all of these metabolic diseases that are con that we are experiencing now in epidemic proportions stem from a simple root cause called oxidative stress.

[00:21:04] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And that vegetable oils in our food supply are the number one driver of that. Vegetable oils are the reason processed food is unhealthy. And they put the junk in junk food. And why that’s controversial is because it was a lie! To begin with, that these oils are healthy. We’ve all been fed this lie and believed that there was evidence to support this lie in the first place, which there was not.

[00:21:39] JJ: Was it that there was like, there was, oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off on that. Was it that it was a lie or did they just not know? Did they not know better or did they know better and they didn’t? Duped us.

[00:21:50] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Yeah. Yeah. So I, I, I thought about that really hard and I just kept digging and finding more evidence that yeah, it was a lie.

[00:21:59] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Um, I think they absolutely knew better. And when I say they, I mean, chiefly Ansel Keys and a few of the very high up people in the American heart association who are promoting vegetable oils as heart healthy, who were benefiting from personally just from the publicity. Yeah. Like, they wanted to be famous, is what I think drove them, um, Ansel Keys and a couple other people.

[00:22:23] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And the reason I say that is, um, I, I, I give some of the historical details about this in the middle section of Dark Calories. And one of the things that kind of convinced me that Ansel Keys was, um, was, his heart was not in the right place from the beginning. Was, That he lied about how much experience he’d had working with heart attack victims and asking them about their diets.

[00:23:02] Dr. Cate Shanahan: He lied about that on, um, you know, every media opportunity. And, uh, every opportunity he had to interact with colleagues who gave him pushback. He would say this, he would say, I have 5, 000 heart attack cases. How many do you have? As if to say, the other people who were questioning his, um, evidence base had no basis to question his evidence base.

[00:23:33] Dr. Cate Shanahan: But he, did he really have 5, 000 cases? The answer, I found, was not even close. When he started saying that, he maybe had 12.

[00:23:44] JJ: Wow, I know that, I went through this in my, when I wrote Sugar Impact Diet because, I was looking at all the work of John Yudkin who got decredited by Ansel Keys. Because Ancel Keys was all about it’s saturated fat that’s creating the problem and Sugar that’s creating the problem and went after him.

[00:24:04] JJ: And so yep, same thing all right, so These seed oils in question because this is what I want to really dig into is which ones are they? Where are they and what are they doing to us? So what are the hateful eight? So

[00:24:23] Dr. Cate Shanahan: the Hafele 8 seed oils are the following corn, canola, cotton seed, soy, sunflower, safflower.

[00:24:34] Dr. Cate Shanahan: So there’s three C’s to memorize, three S’s. And then there’s like the sometimes Y, um, you know, with A, E, I, O, U. Remember that from Schoolhouse Rock? Um, the sometimes Y are two more, rice bran and grapeseed. And those are mostly in restaurants. They’re not I’ve not really seen them on labels and food, um, labels when I’m going grocery shopping.

[00:24:58] Dr. Cate Shanahan: So, of the hateful eight, the first six are the most important to memorize.

[00:25:06] JJ: And why are these so problematic?

[00:25:10] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Yeah, so these are uniquely problematic because of the, um, a couple of factors. And, you know, frankly, Answering that simple question requires a whole ton of scientific knowledge because right now in the debate around seed oils.

[00:25:26] Dr. Cate Shanahan: You’ve got people all over the place with what is a seed oil, like, they’re just saying anything that has the word seed in front of it, or could be a seed, right? Like, so, some people are saying sesame seed oil is bad, or peanuts, well those are seeds, they should be bad, right?

[00:25:39] JJ: Well, peanuts are legumes, they’re really, actually, and so is the soy, so I actually think it’s kind of, I was confused with seed oils too.

[00:25:46] JJ: That’s where I got the omega 6 thing, Kate. I was like, Oh, it must be the omega 6 and pro inflammatory and the ratio is out of balance because soy is not a seed. Corn, it’s like, corn’s not really a seed. Like, I don’t know what a canola is. So I’m like, wasn’t it rape seed? So, you know, but when I heard you talk about the processing, that’s when it really made.

[00:26:08] JJ: So I don’t even know if we have to even worry so much about the seed oil. Although I just saw another fight right before, I was like, I’m glad we’re doing this interview because it was another person citing all this research on heart disease and how seed oils are the preferential oils. I’m like, so I think it’s, I think using the hateful eight.

[00:26:24] JJ: It’s actually more helpful because then you’ll understand which ones you could, you could touch, so.

[00:26:30] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Yeah, I never even thought about that, like, uh, various confusion over, like, so it’s, botanically they are seeds, right? Legumes, the, you know, anything that could be planted in the ground and grow. Is, uh, botanically a seed, so like wheat germ, you know, wheat berries, wheat germ oil, that could be seed oil too, right?

[00:26:46] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Flax oil. It just gets way

[00:26:48] JJ: too confusing. I mean, it’s like, it’s just like,

[00:26:50] Dr. Cate Shanahan: it’s a stupid term. Yeah, it is a stupid term because the seed is not the problem. The problem is more complicated than that. The problem is a combination of variables that overlap to create a devastatingly unhealthy final product.

[00:27:06] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And the, the key variables here are The, um, fact that these specific seeds have a lot of unstable fatty acids, those are called the polyunsaturated fatty acids, which, um, react with oxygen, right? They’re unstable. Unstable in what scenario? Unstable around oxygen. So they will easily react with oxygen.

[00:27:29] Dr. Cate Shanahan: That’s why they polymerize, that’s why we, when we make, um, in the olden days, linse oil, seed oil, linse oil, uh, was used to, uh, form like a shellac or a lacquer over paint and over furniture, linse oil, because it is got the right chemistry. Um, what they had to do to make it do that is heat it. So they boiled it.

[00:27:53] Dr. Cate Shanahan: So boiled linseed oil. is basically a, um, free plastic polymer. Right? Now, we heat the seed oils in factories, too. And the other things that we do in factories, um, makes it so that when we take, when we buy a bottle of soy oil or corn oil, That should be considered a potentially pre plastic polymer too, because when you fry with it, it forms plastic like polymers that you actually do get polymerization.

[00:28:26] Dr. Cate Shanahan: That’s why, um, it’s a different kind of crispiness that you get on your fries. When they are fried in seed oils than when they are fried in tallow because when they fry in seed oils, they have polymerized. But that polymerization will also occur in our own bodily tissues. It really, truly does. And that polymerization is devastating.

[00:28:53] Dr. Cate Shanahan: To our health and the seed oils, they, they can, they can do this because of those two factors. Like I said, one is they have the unstable fatty acids and two is what the processing does. Now, a lot of people, JJ think that the processing adds chemicals like, you know, hexane people have heard of hexane and they assume that there’s other chemicals added in a factory, right?

[00:29:20] Dr. Cate Shanahan: But the toxins. in the Hafele oils are not added, they are developed out of the reactions that occur during the processing steps, right? So it’s, it’s those polyunsaturated fatty acids that react with oxygen that become toxins. And a way of thinking about this is like a glass is fragile, right? Like I’ve got one right here, it’s a glass of water.

[00:29:47] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Fragile, but useful. Now, if I were to take. a hammer and smash it, it would break into a thousand shards, no longer useful, and actually dangerous, right? I would have to be careful where I’m walking around here. So think of the polyunsaturated fatty acids like that, fragile glass, and then oxygen like a hammer, because oxygen breaks those molecules into, uh, different little chemical shards that are very dangerous to our biological tissues.

[00:30:20] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And when we eat these bottles of the hateful eight oils, we are eating these dangerous shards. And there’s more to it than that. It’s just unbelievably complicated. Um, the, those, a little bit of toxin in a bottle can multiply before you open it. So that what’s a part per billion of toxin and something that some academic might go, oh part per billion, poo poo, who cares?

[00:30:47] Dr. Cate Shanahan: It will multiply when you open it and when you cook with it So that by the time you’re eating a french fry cooked in corn oil in a deep fryer You’re getting as much toxicity from a single french fry as you would from smoking an entire tobacco cigarette

[00:31:05] JJ: Yeah, I heard you saying that. It’s like the pack of french fries is like a pack of cigarettes.

[00:31:09] JJ: I’m like, okay, now you’re sitting and you’re eating french fries. You’ve just like mimicked a lot of smoking. What’s the, um, Going back to the oils in the processing though. Is there a way, is there any way to take these hateful eight and process them so that they aren’t hateful? Or is the only way these things can be processed into an oil creates these toxic byproducts?

[00:31:36] Dr. Cate Shanahan: So, um, the only way that they enter our food supply and mass in processed foods is through these factory Uh, intense refining processes that I was talking about because that’s cost effective and that’s what drives our economy. Right? So 99. 99 percent of the canola oil, for example, that’s out there. is terrible for us.

[00:32:03] Dr. Cate Shanahan: There is a way that you can make, um, you know, canola oil be less toxic. Now, is it gonna be healthy? I don’t think so. Um, and I have to say that I don’t think so because there’s very few people actually testing this, the, the oil in the way that it needs to be tested. Which is, you have to test it for stability over time, and you have to test it what happens when you open it, what, you have to test what happens when you cook it with food, you have to test what happens as it’s consumed by an organism, an animal, a person, or a, a lab rat.

[00:32:38] JJ: So, then In a perfect world, they could take some of these oils and do a better version of them, but this is not happening because it would be super duper expensive to do it.

[00:32:49] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And it kind

[00:32:49] JJ: of reminds me of maybe olive oil, because you can get beautiful versions of extra virgin olive oil because it’s this gourmet amazing thing.

[00:33:00] JJ: However, the most of it out there that you’re seeing, as someone was just flashing on social media recently, literally the label said extra virgin olive oil, and you flipped it over, and it was like, you know, 80 percent canola oil. You’re like, wow, how can you even say this? You know,

[00:33:15] Dr. Cate Shanahan: I know it’s really shocking that what they can get away with now.

[00:33:19] Dr. Cate Shanahan: But, um, but yeah, so the other part of it is that, um, the fatty acid, you know, we don’t need that many polyunsaturated fatty acids probably in our diet and certainly being imbalanced like that is probably not good either. , but that consideration is, uh, far down the road, right? And from the, the most primary, first and foremost reality that the oxidation makes them toxic.

[00:33:49] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And that has. Many, many more effects, uh, than this ratio business, um, because the, uh, body’s not stupid. The body doesn’t count on us to eat a certain amount of omega 6 or omega 3 in order to be able to regulate the inflammatory processes in our body. It doesn’t. immediately go from our diet to inflammation or anti inflammation.

[00:34:18] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Um, and that idea is just very flawed. It’s been debunked, and that’s part of the problem here, you see, because, because JJ, what I’m talking about is actually new research, right? The Omega imbalance idea came from a researcher at the National Institute of Health named Artemis Simopoulos. That’s why that was promulgated and proposed, um, many years ago, and that’s why it’s so popular because it’s tied to a What academics would call real researcher, right?

[00:34:54] Dr. Cate Shanahan: I’m a family practice doctor and I don’t work at a think tank or the National Institutes of Health or even a university, right? So, um, what I’m doing here is I’m trying to get the world to understand really pretty high level science that should be taught in medical schools. Um, but isn’t from my living room, and this isn’t really a fair fight, frankly, you know, it’s it’s me versus academia versus all the debunkers, and I am just so grateful that in spite of all that.

[00:35:34] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Now the White House has their eye on seed oils, right? Like RFK joining up with Trump has created this powerful alliance. And for the first time, I am hearing people who have power to do something about this, say they want to do something about this. And like, I, you know, I’m the mother of the no seed oil movement.

[00:35:58] Dr. Cate Shanahan: This is my baby. I have been nurturing this for 20 years and I never. My wildest dreams expected it to make it to the White House. So I’m thrilled that it has, and I want to make sure it survives. Because what I see is a lot of great intentions, but a lot of, like, pent up energy of, Wow, we gotta, we gotta talk about so many things now that we haven’t talked about.

[00:36:26] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And I’m a little worried that seed oils are gonna get lost in the mix when they are the most important. driver of disease. There’s a lot of drivers of disease now, right? We’ve got the dyes and coloring agents and artificial flavors and, um, pesticides and herbicides. Um, just that’s just the drivers of disease in our food.

[00:36:50] Dr. Cate Shanahan: There’s many others. But of all of them, um, the seed oil issue bigger than all of them. It’s bigger than cigarette smoking.

[00:37:02] JJ: Let’s unpack that because that’s what I want to know is You know, first of all, don’t sell yourself short. I love the fact, like, I’m just a family practice doc in my living room. You have been making your dent and it just takes continuing to, to chip away at these things.

[00:37:20] JJ: Where people, what is it, that first they think you’re crazy and then they think you’re the savior, right? You know, I mean, it’s just that process where you have to go through this, where people are like, that woman is crazy and they’re like, wait a minute, you know. So. Thank you. When you talk about the seed oils and the fact, and again, I feel like, here I’ve been studying nutrition for 30 plus years and I went, wait, I thought it was a 6 to 3 ratio and I totally had it wrong.

[00:37:48] JJ: Totally had it wrong. Didn’t realize the toxicity piece of it, then I’m like, oh my gosh. What does You know, consuming these toxic oils, and maybe that’s the way to really frame them for people to understand, is they’re toxic. They’ve got toxic byproducts in them. What does consuming these toxic oils, what are the different things that it can lead to?

[00:38:10] JJ: I know one of them is that it can perturb insulin resistance. What are some of the things?

[00:38:15] Dr. Cate Shanahan: Yeah, so let’s talk about what sickness actually is. It’s cellular dysfunction. Cellular dysfunction. If we have healthy cells, We aren’t sick. We can’t be, because our cells are functioning. On the other hand, if our cells are dysfunctional, well, then we are likely to get sick.

[00:38:36] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And what is the number one driver of cellular dysfunction turns out to be free radicals and oxidative stress. The number one driver. That’s what all of the free radical and anti aging research has shown for many, many years. Um, and, The thing is that all of that free radical and anti aging research has never just simply linked it to our food supply.

[00:39:04] Dr. Cate Shanahan: And what the vegetable oils do is they set us up for oxidative stress. Vegetable oils, you can think of as oxidative stress in a bottle. And oxidative stress is the root cause of disease and death. So vegetable oils are really death in a bottle, accelerated aging in a bottle. They, they promote literally everything we don’t want.

[00:39:25] Dr. Cate Shanahan: They promote inflammatory disease. They promote, um, joint pain. They promote mental illness. They promote, um, uh, autoimmune diseases. They promote all the metabolic diseases. And they do this because of the many ways that they can damage our cellular function. Because they promote oxidative stress, which is the root cause of every known disease.

[00:39:50] Dr. Cate Shanahan: That is not even controversial. It is so widely accepted by, um, the people, the doctor’s doctors. So the, who are the doctor’s doctors? They’re called pathologists. Those are the subspecialty of medicine where they, when you get a biopsy, it gets, you kn
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