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我最近采访了Cate Shanahan 博士，一位执业家庭医生、生物化学家和《纽约时报》畅销书作家。她的新书《暗藏的卡路里：植物油如何摧毁我们的健康以及我们如何恢复健康》（Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back）揭示了一个惊人的事实：植物油是导致美国公众健康危机的罪魁祸首，这场危机深刻影响了医学实践和食品供应。

Shanahan 博士指出，植物油的危害并非仅仅在于使食物本身变得有毒，更在于它会彻底改变我们身体脂肪的组成。工业化时代之前，人体脂肪中的多不饱和脂肪酸（PUFA）含量远低于现在。而植物油富含PUFA，导致我们储存的脂肪变得难以燃烧。换句话说，我们很容易囤积脂肪，却难以轻易减掉。 这正是许多医生所不知道的，也是他们无法有效帮助患者改善饮食和进行预防医学的原因。医生们普遍缺乏这方面的知识，我们必须比医生更了解自己的身体。

植物油 vs. 糖：孰轻孰重？

Shanahan 博士毫不犹豫地指出，植物油比糖更危险。因为植物油会改变我们的新陈代谢，导致严重的糖分渴望。它不仅让我们无法燃烧体内脂肪，还会在两餐之间引发严重的饥饿感，甚至导致易怒和情绪波动（“hangry”），最终促使我们选择含糖或精制碳水化合物食物。

优先戒除植物油的重要性

试图在身体仍然依赖糖分（因为植物油造成的损害）的情况下戒糖，只会导致失败和自我责备。因此，优先戒除植物油，然后再逐步减少其他有害食物，是更有效率的策略。 植物油是食物供应中最糟糕的成分，但它并非唯一需要避免的食物。

植物油对新陈代谢的生理影响

植物油会消耗我们体内的抗氧化剂，导致氧化应激。氧化应激是加速衰老、退化和炎症的罪魁祸首，它会使细胞无法正常产生能量，特别是无法有效利用自身脂肪作为能量来源。这正是我们渴望糖分，并最终导致过度饮食的原因。植物油破坏了我们身体利用自身脂肪的能力，这正是导致肥胖流行的主要原因之一。

氧化应激与线粒体

我们的身体主要通过线粒体产生能量。线粒体需要大量的抗氧化剂来控制氧气的能量，因为氧气是一种高能量化合物，过量的氧气会产生氧化应激和自由基，最终导致细胞损伤。植物油会消耗体内的抗氧化剂，破坏线粒体，从而损害我们的新陈代谢。

抗氧化剂补充剂的局限性

很多人认为补充抗氧化剂可以对抗氧化应激，但这并不完全正确。像蓝莓或枸杞中的抗氧化剂，人体并不能有效利用，最终会被肝脏代谢掉。我们真正需要的是一个健康的新陈代谢，拥有自身强大的抗氧化系统。健康的饮食，而非昂贵的补充剂，才是关键。

Denham Harman 博士的研究：死亡始于细胞

Shanahan 博士提到了Denham Harman 博士的研究，他发现自由基是导致细胞死亡的原因。自由基是高能量粒子，会破坏细胞膜和酶，最终导致细胞死亡。Harman 博士的研究启发了自由基生物学（Free Radical Biology）领域的发展，但该领域在延长寿命方面并未取得显著进展。Shanahan 博士认为，避免摄入植物油，保持健康饮食，是延长寿命最有效的方法。

“令人憎恶的八种油”（The Hateful Eight）

Shanahan 博士将需要避免的八种植物油定义为“令人憎恶的八种油”，包括：玉米油、菜籽油（在北美以外地区称为油菜籽油）、棉籽油、大豆油、葵花籽油、红花油、米糠油和葡萄籽油。其中，玉米油、菜籽油、棉籽油、大豆油、葵花籽油和红花油尤为需要避免。这些油的精炼过程会产生大量的毒素，并消耗体内的抗氧化剂。

植物油的精炼过程

植物油的精炼过程非常复杂，需要高温、高压和化学溶剂，这会破坏油中的营养物质，并产生大量的毒素。精炼过程中的漂白步骤还会产生反式脂肪，这是一种对健康有害的脂肪。最终产品几乎不含抗氧化剂，并且含有少量毒素，在暴露于光线或高温下还会产生更多毒素。

植物油对身体脂肪的影响

植物油不仅使食物有毒，还会使我们的身体脂肪变得有毒。植物油中的多不饱和脂肪酸会改变身体脂肪的组成，使其难以被细胞燃烧。这会导致餐间饥饿，并引发对糖分的渴望。

低碳水化合物饮食的潜在问题

如果体内已经积累了大量多不饱和脂肪酸，那么低碳水化合物或生酮饮食可能会适得其反，因为身体会分解肌肉蛋白质来产生能量。这可能会导致肌肉流失，并进一步损害新陈代谢。Shanahan 博士建议，在避免植物油的同时，适量摄入一些缓慢分解的碳水化合物，例如豆类、发芽谷物面包等，以避免肌肉流失。

胰岛素抵抗的能量模型

Shanahan 博士提出了“胰岛素抵抗的能量模型”，认为胰岛素抵抗的根本原因是身体无法从体内脂肪获取能量。大脑为了维持血糖水平，会通过迷走神经向肝脏发出信号，促使肝脏进行糖异生，产生更多的糖分。这会导致血糖和胰岛素水平升高，最终导致胰岛素抵抗。胰岛素抵抗始于肝脏，最终会影响其他器官。

压力激素与胰岛素抵抗

当血糖下降时，大脑会释放压力激素，如肾上腺素和皮质醇，以提高血糖水平。然而，在长期摄入植物油的情况下，这种机制会失调，导致压力激素水平长期升高，进一步加剧胰岛素抵抗。

PUFA 的细致解读：Omega-3 和 Omega-6

Shanahan 博士强调，多不饱和脂肪酸（PUFA）并非单指 Omega-6，Omega-3 也属于 PUFA。Omega-3 脂肪酸比 Omega-6 脂肪酸更容易氧化，因此在体内更容易被破坏。Omega-3 补充剂可能并不能带来预期的益处，甚至可能带来负面影响。 关键在于控制氧化应激，而非单纯关注 Omega-6 和 Omega-3 的比例。

如何保护自己

为了保护自身健康，我们需要：

• 避免摄入“令人憎恶的八种油”。
• 选择缓慢分解的碳水化合物，例如豆类、发芽谷物面包等。
• 注意区分正常的饥饿感和由胰岛素抵抗引起的病理性饥饿感。
• 缓慢而稳定地减重，避免过度燃烧PUFA脂肪。
• 如有必要，在医生的指导下谨慎使用鱼油补充剂。

结语

Shanahan 博士的观点引发了我们对植物油和公众健康的深刻思考。这场危机并非偶然，它与美国心脏协会和宝洁公司之间的关系密切相关。 我们需要更多地关注氧化应激，并重新审视我们对饮食和健康的认知。 只有了解这些知识，我们才能更好地保护自己的健康。

00:00 Coming up on today's show. Dark calories really tells the story of the biggest scandal ever perpetrated on the American public by a medical organization. And this scandal has affected every American because it's changed how medicine is practiced. In terms of our food supply, the first and foremost thing to pay attention to is the idea that vegetable oils are the worst thing that kills us. The first half is the fact that they make our food toxic, which is bad.

00:28 The second is that they make our body fat toxic because they reformulate our body fat with way more polyunsaturates than human body fat has ever had before the industrial era. When vegetable oils are in our diet, we're basically building body fat that our cells don't want to burn.

00:49 In other words, we can build body fat, but we can't get rid of it. Not easily. This is stuff your doctor doesn't know. And because your doctor doesn't know, your doctor cannot help you with diet. And your doctor cannot help you with preventative medicine. You have to know more than your doctor because doctors are miseducated.

01:08 Dr. Kate, in your opinion, which is worse, sugar or vegetable oil and why? Hands down, it's vegetable oil, Jesse. And the simple reason is that vegetable oils drive us to sugar, but sugar doesn't drive us to crave vegetable oils.

01:28 So yeah, so vegetable oils change our metabolism so that we end up with serious sugar cravings. They change our metabolism so that we can't burn our body fat. And between meals, we get hungry and we get hangry and we need to snack. And very often we end up choosing sugary things or very like refined curvy things, basically things that we know will raise our blood sugar, but we intuitively know this. And so,

01:54 That is the biggest take-home message for anybody out there struggling with all these different things that they need to avoid in their diet. Sugar is definitely bad, but if you start by cutting out sugar while your body still needs it because it's been damaged by vegetable oil…

02:16 You're going to be blaming yourself for failures. You're setting yourself up for failures. And I don't want to have you go through that. So it's easier if you cut out the vegetable oils first. And then I help you walk through other stuff that you need to avoid too, because it's not all about vegetable oils. But they are the number one worst thing in our food supply. Well, let's talk about the physiology. Somebody consuming these, what is it doing to their metabolic health specifically? Yeah.

02:44 So what vegetable oils do is they deplete our body of antioxidants, right? So antioxidants help us control free radicals in our body. They help us control oxygen reactions in the body and they help us prevent

03:02 oxidative stress. Now, oxidative stress sounds like chemical jargon. Yeah, it is chemical jargon, but it's chemical jargon. It's a very important little piece of chemical jargon. I want to spend a lot of time helping people understand why it's important to

03:20 So you see, oxidative stress is the thing that actually ages us and kills us and inevitably leads to, you know, our, the end of our lifespan, somewhere around hopefully a hundred good years.

03:32 But when we invite oxidative stress into our body, as we do with a bad diet and particularly the vegetable oils, we accelerate aging, we accelerate degeneration, and we accelerate inflammation. And all of that makes our cells unable to generate energy properly.

03:57 from our own body fat. So that's why we end up craving sugar. That's the physiology of how these oils lead us to eat more sugar and to overeat ultimately, you know, when we can't burn our body fat between meals and nature designed us to go between meals for hours and hours at a time, feeling just fine, uh, without needing snacks.

04:20 So nature designed for us to live off of our body fat, but vegetable oils ruin that. And that's why we're all getting fat. All right. Well, let's go even deeper into this. So somebody consuming vegetable oils, becoming part of their fat makeup in their body, why is that hindering them, which you've already touched on, from burning their body fat? So it has to do with antioxidants and oxidative stress.

04:49 and how our bodies generate energy, right? So our bodies generate energy mainly in these little chambers called mitochondria. And mitochondria are teeny tiny little structures that are like

05:03 with little wiggles inside them. They're really actually quite beautiful little structures inside our cells. That's where we, if you're an athlete, if you exercise, if you burn calories, you know, we all do burn calories. That's where we burn our calories. It's inside those mitochondria. And mitochondria generate our cellular energy by using oxygen. And they have to really control oxygen because

05:31 Because oxygen is a very, very energetic compound. Oxygen is what ultimately kills us. That's what causes oxidative stress in free radicals, right? So our energy generating mitochondria must have lots of antioxidants to be able to control oxygen's energy. And when we eat vegetable oils regularly,

05:56 They deplete our body's supply of antioxidants. Basically, vegetable oils, you can see them, if you want to visualize them as something bad, it's oxidative stress in a bottle. Vegetable oils are oxidative stress in a bottle, Jesse. When you invite oxidative stress into your body like that, you are destroying your mitochondria,

06:21 which are the foundational element of our metabolism. All right, you keep harping on this point of the oxidative stress. Oh yeah. What might be jumping into people's heads? Okay, I've heard of antioxidants. Why don't I just take more of those to make up for the oxidative stress being caused

06:40 by these vegetable oils? Right. That's a great question. But it doesn't work. That's the answer. So the long story short is taking antioxidants doesn't do a thing because for one reason,

06:54 Most of the antioxidants that people talk about, like those in blueberries or goji berries or whatever the antioxidant supplement du jour might be. I don't know. Do you know what the latest one is out there now? No, I'm out of the loop on those. Resveratrol was a big one for a long time. That was a big one. Yeah. So our body has no use for those. So when we eat them and they get absorbed into our bloodstream,

07:22 When they make it around to the liver, the liver has to eliminate them. So those kinds of antioxidants don't help our metabolism. That's not what our metabolism uses to control oxygen reactions and free radicals in our body. So antioxidant supplements don't help us prevent oxidative stress. What we need is a healthy metabolism and a healthy metabolism is going to have

07:50 its own arsenal, a huge complex arsenal of

07:54 free radical oxidative stress fighting enzymes and compounds that support those enzymes. So it's like a team effort to fight off a single free radical because free radicals are very dangerous. They're high energy compounds that are almost like having radiation flying around inside our body cells. They're high energy molecules and it takes a team

08:23 of antioxidants. It's like a hot potato. You have to pass it around from one antioxidant to the next to the next to the next to get that energy level down to where it is safe. Our bodies are designed to do that when we have a healthy diet. We don't need to have all these exotic supplements that people are spending so much money on and wasting their money. We just need to have a healthy diet. But

08:50 What vegetable oils do is they make it basically impossible for our body to control oxygen because the more we have in our diet, the more we need oxygen.

09:10 the more antioxidants we need. We get to a point where we're breaching what is possible in nature. We can make it up to a certain point, but at some point, it surpasses what nature has designed for humans to withstand in terms of free radicals and oxidative stress. That's what vegetable oils take us to. They take us to that point

09:39 I don't know if you got to the part in the book where I talk about Dr. Denim Harmon, the man who discovered why we die. I did. Did you have any questions about that? Because I mean, I'd kind of like to talk about that. This seems like a good point to talk about him. Yeah, go for it. And then I'll jump in and further question you. Great. So Denim Harmon was a chemist and

10:03 who in the 1950s became obsessed with the question of why do we die? And he went to medical school to help answer that question. You know, he could have had a great career in the pharmaceutical industry, but he was like, I need to know this. So he went to medical school to understand how the body worked better.

10:21 He came out and then he took a really cush job where I think once a day he had to press a lever or something. He basically could sit around and think. He was like a theoretical biologist. The Big Bang Theory was about theoretical physicists. Einstein, he was a theoretical physicist. Well, this guy, Harman, was a theoretical biologist. What he discovered in just a few months…

10:46 was like world changing in terms of science. So the first thing he came up with was, I think death begins in the cell.

10:53 Right. So we knew the body's constructed of cells. And if all your cells are alive, you can't die. You cannot die. So death has to begin in the cell. And so the next question was, okay, well then what kills the cells? And that's where his chemistry really was essential because he thought and he thought, he says, I thought, and I thought, and I thought, and I almost gave up. And then suddenly it hit me free radicals. That's a quote from him. Free radicals are those high energy election or it,

11:22 high energy particles that destroy cell membranes, destroy enzymes, destroy everything in the cell. That's what ultimately kills the cell. And that was his theory. And so he wrote a four-page paper

11:37 And immediately the world like pounced on it. They said, this can't be. But enough people tested the theory, right? It's like in physics, you have a theory and the theoreticals and then the experimental. So the experimental biologists put it to test and they found that yes, indeed, that is what kills us, free radicals, which are a component of oxidative stress. If you can't control oxidative stress, free radicals go out of control and vice versa. It's like,

12:08 Embers, you know, flying out of a flame can start another fire and a fire can create embers. It's kind of like a cycle, two sides of the same dangerous coin. Anyway, that doesn't matter too much. The thing is, he discovered why we die. Basically, if you want to know what sickens and kills us, just follow the free radical. That's it. Now, what Danim Harmon didn't know was that…

12:37 At that point in time, most people's lifespans were curtailed because basically of malnutrition or infections or for a good reason, right? So he thought that you could, and the average lifespan at the time was about 66. So he thought that if you could just control oxygen, you could extend your natural lifespan to like 80, maybe a hundred, you know, this was,

13:02 long time ago, so they didn't know that much about the natural lifespan of even a human. He inspired an entire branch of biology, this Denham Harmon, called Freebiotical Biology. Freebiotical Biology has spent the next 70 years

13:23 looking for ways to control oxygen in our body with all kinds of antioxidants i mean they've tried this is how we know it doesn't work they've tried everything even denim harman himself he took like mega doses of vitamin c and vitamin e because those are the ones he knew about he didn't know about the whole enzyme system scenario but we've discovered all that since and um

13:44 Free radical biology has had many, many failures because they've basically not been able to extend the natural lifespan, but they're still in existence. And they've actually, you know, led to, ultimately I see them as kind of the root of biohacking, right? Biohackers are still trying to extend that natural lifespan. But what they're missing is what vegetable oils do. They just basically the easiest way to extend a lifespan is

14:13 is to recognize that you're cutting your lifespan short by a bad diet. And vegetable oils are the worst thing in the diet today. They are promoting life, destroying oxidative stress. And so the best way to extend the lifespan from where it's unnaturally cut short is to avoid eating vegetable oils. And that way you are much more likely to have that natural enjoyment of whatever your genetic lifespan is going to be, somewhere usually between 75 and 100.

14:43 And, you know, oxidative stress is the root cause, right? It's not all about vegetable oils. There are other factors that can cause malnutrition and that can promote oxidative stress. But in terms of our food supply, the first and foremost thing to pay attention to and that everyone should be on board with is the idea that vegetable oils are the worst thing that kills us.

15:10 Up until this point, we've been talking about vegetable oils as an umbrella term. I know you have from our first conversation, the hateful eight.

15:18 So talk about what this is. Let's zoom in on what specifically these oils are. Yeah. So the Hateful Eight vegetable oils are the ones that I've defined based on their processing and their chemistry as the ones that we need to avoid. And the other ones are nowhere near as bad as these. So they are three C's, corn, canola, cottonseed.

15:40 three S's, soy, sunflower, safflower, and then rice bran and grapeseed, rounding out the other eight. Now the first six, the three C's and the three S's are the ones that I ask people to memorize. And those are the ones that you need to look for on an ingredients label. The other two, rice bran and grapeseed, those are mostly going to be in kind of fancier restaurants because they're promoted, they're more expensive and they're promoted as healthy, but they're not healthy.

16:10 So also it's worth noting that there's no such thing as canola outside of North America. Canola is called rapeseed there. It's the same thing. It's interesting. You mentioned grapeseed being something we'd find more in like fancy restaurants. I remember about five years ago in the health world, that oil was touted as a good oil to cook with. You don't really taste it. Apparently it was good for high heat.

16:39 I don't see it around as much anymore, but it's good that we're highlighting it here. Yeah. So, you know, all they make that same claim because they are all neutral flavor. They don't have a strong flavor due to the refining. It removes all the nutrients and all the flavor, almost all the flavor. But they also have a high smoke point, and that's really a…

17:01 a selling point, you know, for restaurants that need to use them in a deep fryer that need to be able to just kind of set it and forget that deep fryer. But if you're not using them in a deep fryer, it makes absolutely no difference that it has a high smoke point. And that's another conversation I think that's really important because a lot of people think that just like pan frying some chicken at home, they're going to need something high smoke point and they don't.

17:24 Okay, talk more about that. Yeah, so what is a smoke point? So the smoke point is this point at which you see a grayish blue wisp of smoke, the temperature at which you see this emerging from an oil. And the smoke point of olive oil is somewhere around 350. The smoke point of the vegetable oils, the hateful hate, is higher than that. It's usually at the high 300s or over 400s.

17:49 Deep frying temperature can go up to, you know, it usually starts at 400 and it can go up to 450.

17:57 But when you're cooking something in a pan, your food would incinerate. If it ever got to, you know, if the whole aspect of the food ever got to be 350, it would be inedible, right? So you don't, you're only the outer layers need to be heated and they only need to be heated around, uh, you know, depending what exactly you're cooking much like over 250 to 350, depending on how much time you have.

18:24 Um, so olive oil is going to get you there. And so are the other oils that, that I, uh, you know, recommend like the avocado oil that even the, I mean, the unrefined oils will get you there. They'll get you this nice crispy sear. Even butter gets you a lovely crispy sear on, um, the proteins that don't need super high heat. Like for example, um, those squishy things, I always call them oysters, but they're not, um,

18:51 Do you know what I'm talking about? People like to sear them. They're not shallots. Scallops, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So those big scallops that are just so delicious when you sear them, they get a little sear on them when you're frying them. But you can use butter and you get that sear color and flavor at a lower temperature, which is actually better for the nutrition. Yeah.

19:19 because high heat destroys nutrition. So if you can get something cooked at a lower temperature, tastes just as good or better, that is preferable to using high heat.

19:33 Right. So that is all just like glossed over and people lose all the nuance of cooking and, you know, the difference between the surface temperature and the pan temperature and the food temperature and the oil temperature and the internal temperature that none of that gets discussed when people are talking about, you know, oh, you need that high smoke point oil because you're

19:57 otherwise olive oil will start to catch fire. But that doesn't actually happen because if you're standing right there, you're gonna hear it making noise, you're gonna see it turning a little bit wrong color, and you're going to stir, and that lowers the temperature.

20:16 And besides, Italians have been even using olive oil for deep frying for quite a while. You know, pan, deep frying in a pan. They do know that you have to be careful because it might overboil if you're not watching it. And that's the whole reason why…

20:33 Restaurants use deep fryers because they set it and forget it. So you don't have to have a culinary person. You just have to have somebody who can look at the number on the dial. It's really not about cooking, not about making food taste better, certainly not about it making more nutritious. It's about being able to hire people who don't really have a lot of cooking skill.

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22:12 As a listener of the show, you get a free Element sample pack with any drink mix purchase. And to take advantage of this deal, go to ultimatehealthpodcast.com slash element. That's ultimatehealthpodcast.com slash element. Element is spelled L-M-N-T. Pick up some Element electrolytes today and stay salty. Let's talk about what goes into the processing of these hateful eight.

22:37 I think people would be surprised where we're taking a soy, a bean, or we're taking grape seeds and then making these oils that were a lot of people are using for cooking. Yeah. So the processing process,

22:52 is intensive. It's in factories. And it's very, very different than the way we extract oil from traditional oil sources. Very different from how we get fat from an animal, right? The traditional fats are produced by very gentle methods that don't require a lot of heat or pressure, certainly didn't require factories. And this difference…

23:20 We have this difference for a couple of reasons, and it has a lot of implications. So why does it matter? Well, first of all, olives have been cultivated for many thousands of years. They've been cultivated specifically to be used as a source of oil, as well as a food. So that means they've been cultivated so that very primitive techniques will yield a good amount of oil.

23:48 And that oil is edible and delicious immediately. Doesn't need refining. So that's true for peanut, olive, sesame, and a few others that are like minor things like flax and stuff. So that's the difference is that really the virgin form of that oil is edible.

24:15 Now you can take olive oil, like the mash, right? After you extract virgin olive oil, that's the first press. There's a mash left behind and that is the olives. Those olives still have a little bit of oil in them. And depending on the type and everything, it might be, you know, 50% depending exactly which, how it was extracted. So that's a lot left.

24:40 right? If it's as high as 50%. So the next press will not yield this extra virgin olive oil. It will yield a much lower grade and it will have require heat to extract it. So that's going to damage some of the fragile nutrients.

24:58 And that oil generally does need to be refined, you see, because the damaging, those are actually oxidation reactions that are occurring when these oils, fragile molecules are being damaged by heat or pressure, right?

25:14 Again, it comes to oxidation. So oxidation will damage the olive oil too, and it will need to be refined to make it edible. So that's why we have multiple grades and lower grades of olive oil are cheaper and nowhere near as good for you. Okay. Same thing for peanut oil.

25:31 There's, um, there is unrefined peanut oil, which is what I recommend. It's what I use and it can be consumed. You know, the crude oil is edible and delicious. Um, and refined peanut oil is a whole different animal because that oil is not initially edible. It has, it had to be

25:54 You know, it's analogous to what we did with the olives. We had that mashed up olives. Well, we have mashed up peanuts that still have a certain amount of oil in there, maybe 40%, maybe 30% of what there was is still in there. So to get it out of there, it requires higher heat, more pressure, and sometimes chemicals. And in that case, we're going to get what they call a crude oil after that that is inedible and needs to be cleaned up with extensive refining.

26:25 And so it's the very same kind of thing with the soy oil and the corn oil and the canola and the other members of the hateful eight that accept that we don't generally make any kind of virgin product of those things.

26:42 There are some exceptions, right? Some companies will make like a, there's a company Napa Valley, right? Where they make a lot of grape seeds called Salute Sante. They make a grape seed oil that is an extra virgin and it takes something like a ton of grape seeds to produce just a few liters. So there's a lot of waste and it's very expensive and the oil is very flavorful and it would be good for you.

27:05 But most grape seed and the other hateful eight, they don't get that gentle treatment. They want to get all that oil, every last drop out of there. And so these seeds get abused. They get abused thermally with temperatures as high as 600 degrees. They get abused with pressure, multiple pounds per square inch. Very often they get chemically abused with solvents like hexane.

27:30 And so that crude oil that initially comes out is inedible. No one would eat it. It's vile. If you ate it, you would probably throw up because of all the just horrific toxins in them that are just, you know, from all that heat and pressure. It's basically like you've burnt it.

27:48 And now you're going to sift through the ashes chemically with the rest of the factory refining and take out most of the toxins and leave behind just the triglyceride fats. And that's what happens during the refining steps, which include things like degumming, de-waxing, washing, centrifuging, ultrafiltration. You're just pulling off different aspects of different types of

28:14 toxins and things that, you know, make it disgusting flavored and also make it toxic. But the, the, the key thing to know is that one of the last refining steps called bleaching

28:28 creates trans fats, which are also toxic. And it creates a lot of them. The best factories really can't get this number of trans fats under 0.5%. And a lot of them are up as high as 5% trans fat in the bottle. And from there,

28:53 that oil is already set to create more toxins because it's been stripped of its antioxidants. Those abnormal trans fats are kind of all ready to go. They're like accelerants that will make more toxins form. So, you know, what all this adds up to is that

29:15 As they come out of the factory, the hateful eight oils contain some toxins. They have almost no antioxidants. And so when you open that bottle, if it's exposed to light, and certainly when you cook with it, more toxins will form and you will eat those and they will get into your bloodstream, start causing oxidative stress in your body and start to deplete your body of antioxidants.

29:41 And that's just half of the story. There's a whole nother story that I write about in another chapter. What is it you're getting at there? Yeah. So one thing is that, you know, the first half is the fact that they make our food toxic, which is bad. The second is that they make our body fat toxic because they reformulate our body fat.

30:10 with way more polyunsaturates than human body fat has ever had before the industrial era.

30:18 And polyunsaturates are, since we haven't mentioned this term before, polyunsaturates are a type of fatty acid that reacts with oxygen. And they're the reason that I identified the hateful eight as problematic because it's the polyunsaturates that are the precursors to the toxins as they go through that factory refining. It's the polyunsaturates that deteriorate into the small amount of toxins that they have already as they leave the factory.

30:47 And the polyunsaturates that remain will build up in our body fat. And in the context of depleted antioxidants, when those polyunsaturates get into our bloodstream or get into our mitochondria, and that's where oxygen is in our body, in our bloodstream, in our mitochondria, it's very high concentrations there.

31:13 then oxygen will attack those polyunsaturates and the same toxins will form in our bloodstream and in our mitochondria. And this is why these oils change our metabolism in the way that I was discussing earlier, because it makes our body fat basically unpalatable for our cells.

31:37 Right. So this is a lot of chemistry here. And I feel like, you know, I mean, the book makes it like makes the step. I hope that you felt like the book makes it clear. No, very clear. I want to touch on something you've brought up a couple of times now, and this is to do with the lack of energy to the body. And this builds off of what you just said, where these PUFAs get incorporated into our body and they actually stay there for years. Right.

32:07 And the mitochondria, they can't use them as energy. So you can't burn your body fat, which is a problem. And this causes us to need more sugar. So I'll have you take this story and continue it. And then we can get into some more of the nuances. Yeah. So what are you going to do when your body doesn't give you energy? Let's say you're a cell.

32:37 let's put it, let's put you in the thought process of a cell managing its energy supplies, because this is where you, this is where I had to go in order to understand this, this theory of like why it makes us hungry and you know, why it's making us gain weight. Um, if, if I'm a cell and it's between meals, I'm getting body fat and it's,

33:02 too much polyunsaturates, starting to cause some oxidative stress, not getting the energy. Oxidative stress can shut down mitochondria, so ATP production will shut down. So the manager of the cell will say, goodness gracious, I need a different fuel, you know,

33:17 They probably don't say exactly that way. They probably feel like, you know, there are energy sensors in our cell and those energy sensors, one of their functions is to start pulling in other fuel sources when that energy levels are low and they will pull in another fuel called glucose, which is always in our bloodstream and a great fuel for mitochondria to get energy from.

33:44 So that cells that are not getting energy from the body fat between meals will say, I need some sugar. Let's get some sugar in here. And they'll start importing sugar. The problem is we have very little sugar in our bloodstream at any one time. It was never meant to be our primary fuel between meals. That's what body fat is for. And sugar is a poor stand-in because there's simply not enough because sugar is regulated.

34:13 If there's much more than a teaspoon's worth of sugar in our total five gallons or so of blood, which is a very low concentration, it's like 100 milligrams per deciliter. That's the number on the blood test. A normal blood sugar number fasting is like 90 milligrams per deciliter. Very small amount. If a lot of cells start slurping down that sugar between meals,

34:40 What's going to happen to your blood sugar level? It's going to drop. It's going to drop. And when your blood sugar level drops, you don't feel so good and you get hungry. A lot of people get hungry. Some people get different symptoms from each other. There's actually quite a lot of symptoms you can get. We call the collection of symptoms hypoglycemia symptoms. It means low blood sugar.

35:08 And the symptoms include hungry, but not normal hungry because you're irritable and angry. So we call it hangry. Brain fog, shaking. The shaking comes from the adrenaline because your body is panicking from low energy. That is a serious stress. And your body's releasing stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. And it makes you shaky. It also brings up your blood sugar.

35:35 But it makes you shaky. It can make you sweat, can make you weak, can give you heart palpitations. When your blood sugar drops quickly, it can bring about a migraine. Some people with epilepsy will get seizures between meals. So you get hypoglycemic. And this is happening because your body fat is filled up with the wrong type of fuel.

36:04 And hypoglycemia, doctors don't really understand. They don't understand any of this. What am I saying? They don't understand any of this. They think that if somebody has hypoglycemia, it means that they have a fast metabolism. It's a good thing. They just need to snack more. I don't know if you ever heard that, like, you know, because you went through a bunch of training, right? That's, you know, kind of becoming more old school, but yes, definitely. Yeah.

36:34 Yes. I mean, thankfully, because it's becoming old school because we now have research that shows that, oops, advising people to snack just makes them overeat because duh, that's more calories. And so that's how, you know, folks who have vegetable oils in their diet end up slowly, slowly gaining weight because they end up eating more often. And studies show that

37:04 This is maybe what you're wanting to get into. In one of the chapters, I go into what hypoglycemia does to our behavior. So I don't know if you wanted to go there now or… I do, but let me recap to make sure we're all on the same page. So if we're eating these vegetable oils, it's causing them to build up in our fat. Normally in between meals, you can pull from your fat and fuel your mitochondria with that body fat. When you have too many PUFAs, you can't do that

37:35 So the mitochondria need to go to sugar and then that's going to cause the hypoglycemia. Do I have that? You have that. Perfect. You got that nailed. So now you know more than the best minds in diabetes research because that is the only explanation that explains all of the observable phenomena that we are experiencing now.

38:02 And I call it the energy model of insulin resistance. And it's not about calories. It's about controlling energy in our cells, controlling the oxygen and oxidative stress. So yeah, you got that perfectly. So what is the other thing that happens? I guess there's one more thing that is part of the sequence of events to metabolic disease.

38:34 So, so far we've just taken ourselves to hypoglycemia, being hungry and gaining weight. But where we get metabolic disease has to do with where we get insulin resistance. That's why it's the energy model of insulin resistance, not the energy model of obesity. So the insulin resistance happens because our body is suddenly struggling to keep enough sugar in the bloodstream

39:04 So that the brain gets energy, right? Our primary organ of blood sugar sensing is our brain because our brain uses more sugar than any other organ in the body. The brain doesn't regulate it the way the pancreas does. The pancreas produces insulin and that regulates it. But the brain senses blood sugar levels. The brain determines the set point.

39:30 because the body needs to have some sugar in the blood all the time, but too much sugar in the blood

39:38 is literally sticky and causes problems. It causes a chemical problem called glycation, and that can also promote oxidative stress and accelerate aging. It's also very bad. So insulin and other organs regulate our blood sugar, but the brain is where our needs, our set point is determined. And as our metabolism…

40:04 gets, you know, further damaged as our body fat contains more vegetable oils and our cells are gradually using more and more sugar, our brain gets in the habit of putting more blood sugar into the system. And it can do that. The brain has the power. It is the king of the body. The brain can actually override

40:27 the normal set point of the pancreas because the brain has a nerve called the vagus nerve and it winds down through the body and hits the liver. And the vagus nerve tells the liver to start doing more gluconeogenesis, which

40:51 Which basically produces sugar from scratch, right? The liver can do that, can produce sugar from scratch. It also tells the liver to start releasing other sugar stores, like in the form of glycogen. If you're an athlete, you've heard of muscle glycogen. The liver makes glycogen too. So there's a little glycogen there that it releases. But mostly when we're fasting, the brain tells the liver to hurry up and do more of that gluconeogenesis thing.

41:18 That can actually raise our fasting blood sugar up to higher than normal. A normal should be no higher than 90. The brain can easily tell the liver to crank it all the way up to 95, 100. If you're a pre-diabetic, it'll crank it up to 120.

41:41 That's where we diagnose prediabetes. If you're a diabetic, it'll crank it up to 150, 160. This is fasting we're talking about. Some diabetics have a fasting blood sugar over 300 or over 400. That's because the brain is overriding the pancreas and all the rest of the body's normal set points of where blood sugar should be.

42:10 And we actually have a word for that state where the brain is overriding all these other set points. That word is insulin resistance. So that's what insulin resistance really is. It's when the body has lost its ability to get energy from body fat. The brain is overriding and making our blood sugar set point unnaturally high. And it overrides the signal going to the liver.

42:40 from the pancreas, which is desperately shooting out insulin, the pancreas can shut down gluconeogenesis by the liver with lots of insulin, but the brain can override all that insulin. And it does. And that's why we get insulin resistance. That's why people are pre-diabetic. That's why people have type 2 diabetes.

43:04 Because their brain is making their liver insulin resistant. Insulin resistance begins in the liver. It ultimately affects other organs in other ways, but it starts in the liver. And this is why I say that this energy model of insulin resistance…

43:24 accounts for everything that we know and that we see, all the observable phenomena in people who are type 2 diabetic, pre-diabetic, and insulin resistant. All right. A couple of pieces I want to make sure I understand within this. Earlier, we talked about hormones as being part of this process. You just mentioned the fact the brain communicates with the vagus nerve

43:47 How do both of those two work? Is that two different pieces to this? Yeah, there's a couple of pieces. So I didn't even mention that the brain also communicates through the same vagus nerve to the adrenal glands, which raise adrenaline and cortisol.

44:03 And mobilize liver glycogen. They mobilize body fat, but that doesn't help the situation. But they also contribute to that elevated blood sugar level. So there's multiple pieces of our metabolic machinery involved.

44:23 that are mobilized in order to keep that blood sugar abnormally high and override all the set points that the hormone insulin and other sugar sensing organs are using to try to regulate sugar. And so, so what happens is as we become insulin resistant, both our blood sugar level and our insulin levels go up. And so,

44:55 This has been happening to the entire population, Jussie. I know now that I probably was insulin resistant before I changed my diet. This was well over 20 years ago because I had hypoglycemia symptoms. I would get shaky. I would get brain fog. I would come home from work and be in a bad mood. We'll get to that whole thing later.

45:20 about how this affects our moods. Cause that's also really like profound, I think. Um, but so I didn't know. And, and doctors don't diagnose insulin resistance like at all, right? Like a few metabolic doctors, a few keto doctors, they do, but insulin resistance is the precursor to type two diabetes. And, um, and it's, it's prevalence is, um,

45:44 Well, I'm going to make your hazard guess, or it's actually a quiz because you read the book. So let's see if you picked up on this piece. What is the prevalence of insulin resistance in adults in America? Your prediction? 99%. Yes. Based on the data. This is based on the NHANES data that was done on study surveys that were done in the 2010s.

46:08 And yeah, so they found that actually less than 1% of the population had HOMA-IR scores that…

46:18 um, that I would consider normal, right? So that's where there might be some other people saying, well, it's not 99% because Dr. Kate's definition of HOMA-IR score is different than mine, right? There is not a real consensus among the scientific community about what is a normal insulin level. What is a normal HOMA-IR score? That is the score that, uh, tells you whether you're insulin resistant or not called a HOMA-IR score. And it's based on your insulin level.

46:46 But we don't even know what a normal insulin level is. And here's the thing. As time has gone by, insulin levels in the population have gone up because we've all been eating more vegetable oils. We all are subjected to more oxidative stress. We've all been becoming more metabolically damaged. So the average insulin level is…

47:11 not normal, right? The average American is not healthy metabolically by anyone's definition, right? The average American is overweight. So, and the average, you know, I think there was a study done that looked at seven other, seven more typical biomarkers of metabolic health

47:34 And they found that 93% of the population had one or more of those biomarkers of bad metabolic health. That include blood pressure elevations, high triglyceride, being overweight, having a high body fat content. So by anyone's definition, the average person in this country is not healthy. And when we set…

48:02 the normal values for things like blood sugar and insulin, we just do it based on population averages. So as the population has become less and less healthy, these numbers have changed. When I first graduated college, the normal number for fasting glucose was between 65 and 85. Now it's between 70 and 100.

48:34 And that's not because human physiology has different needs. That's because the average human physiology is disrupted and unhealthy by our crappy diet. So this is all part of like the consequences of

48:58 What's happened when doctors are not focusing on oxidative stress as the root cause of disease, we're totally barking up the wrong tree. We cannot see health when it's sitting right in front of us. And we haven't been able to define like what even metabolic disease is because we're

49:24 They're not taking oxidative stress into account and they're not taking the fact that our population health is shifting into account. So we're not even capable of doing studies on a healthy population at this point in time. When we recruit people into studies and we think they're healthy because their weight is normal, well, we're not testing them for insulin resistance for the most part.

49:51 So we're doing studies where our supposedly healthy population is metabolically damaged. And that skews everything. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along. Which is why you should try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Zip.

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51:12 To make sure I have the different pieces here we've discussed, we have the hormone insulin. We have the vagus nerve being the nervous system.

51:39 I think there was another hormone or a couple of hormones you brought up earlier on though, which I was trying to hash out. Adrenaline and cortisol. That's it. So that's part of this too. Can you explain more how they fit in? Yeah. So when our blood sugar drops, our brain panics, right? Because the brain needs more sugar than any other organ in the body, pound for pound. Um, and brain cells will start to die within seconds if they don't get enough energy. Um, so our brain panics and it, it, uh,

52:08 sends impulses down through the vagus nerve that hit the liver, as I mentioned, but they also go to the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands are the source of adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline and cortisol, we call those the stress hormones. If you've heard of stress hormones and stress raising your blood sugar, it's because of adrenaline and cortisol and that effect. That raises blood sugar

52:34 to solve the problem of blood sugar being too low between meals. But this is happening all night long. So people are subjected to high adrenaline and high cortisol all night long because they're not eating all night long, right? Then they're not able to get energy from their body fat. And so we find that people wake up with sky-high cortisol levels

53:05 first thing in the morning. And that is also contributing to just not feeling that great. We find that people who are type 2 diabetic don't just have high blood sugar and high insulin. They also have high levels of these stress hormones because they've been in this, their brain has been in this somewhat panicked state

53:27 all night long, trying to keep that blood sugar level way up over the set point, battling the pancreas, releasing insulin to try and get blood sugar down. So if you have type 2 diabetes, your organs are fighting each other for control of your blood sugar. And gosh, no wonder you don't feel so great and energetic.

53:48 The piece that was a big light bulb moment for me reading your book was the piece we already talked about of not being able to access energy from our own body fat. Because insulin resistance is, in my world, a pretty common conversation, comes up on the show a lot. But basically, the piece that a lot of people aren't talking about

54:09 is the PUFUS being incorporated in the fat causing that fat to be useless when it comes to creating energy. Right. Exactly. So to me, that's the extra layer you've added into this conversation. Yeah. So I'm glad that that was meaningful for you because, um, for me, like when, when I finally did like my little, um, theoretical process of trying to figure out what was going on, that was really a light bulb moment for me when I, um,

54:36 When I realized, wait a second, could our body fat be failing, basically? Could our body, what is the role of this strange composition of our body fat? What is it doing to us? And I got the answer. Like I had that question for many years, actually, before I found any research that answered the question. And this is where in your book, you talk about where going low carb or ketogenic could be a problem for somebody, right?

55:06 If they still have a lot of PUFAs in their body fat. Yes. Talk about that. Well, um, you know, this relates to the whole Ozempic conversation now too. Um, so if you are trying to, if you want, if you want to go on a keto diet, um,

55:23 you're going to cut your carbs, right? Especially if you go to a real extreme keto where your carbohydrate intake is like 20 grams or less. You're basically doing leafy vegetables and meats and eggs and stuff like that and fats, but very few sources of carbohydrates. Well,

55:43 Kevin Hall at the National Institute of Health did some research showing that people who were on the keto diet versus people who were on a low-fat diet, they actually lost some more muscle being on the keto diet. And why would that happen? Well, it has to do with the adrenaline in the cortisol and the gluconeogenesis that

56:12 Because those things raise our blood sugar by converting protein into sugar. Gluconeogenesis is a process where certain amino acids, simple ones like alanine and glycine,

56:31 get chemically reorganized from three-carbon amino acids into a six-carbon glucose molecule. That's gluconeogenesis. That's what's going on there. You're constructing two three-carbon molecules, three plus three equals six, and they make glucose. So gluconeogenesis, though, requires the breakdown of proteins,

56:55 And we don't have a storage protein in our body other than our muscle and our bone and our other lean tissues. So I think…

57:06 That what Kevin Hall discovered when he did this very famous or infamous study, maybe you've talked about it, that Gary Taubes designed it. It was part of the New Sea Initiative. Did you talk about that before? No. Oh, okay. That's real interesting. You might want to have him on to talk about it. But Kevin Hall, I mean, because what he showed was that, yes, people on a keto diet are burning more fat, but it's…

57:33 the fat from their diet. It seems to be maybe not so much their own body fat because they need to dig into their muscle tissue to get energy here. And that's not good. And so the whole keto community was up in arms about that research. They were crying foul and all kinds of stuff. And I do discuss this in Dark Calories. But I think there was something there. And I think it was the fact that

57:57 they weren't accounting for the fact that people have excess body fat because when vegetable oils are in our diet, we're basically building body fat that our cells don't want to burn. In other words, we can build body fat, but we can't get rid of it. Not easily. So in its simplest form…

58:21 are we saying that we're not providing the body with this many carbs on a keto diet, plus the fat on our body is locked up. So basically that would leave fat that we're eating or amino acids that are pulled from protein in our muscles, say, to go through gluconeogenesis to form that energy for the body.

58:45 Absolutely. We are forcing our body to work with the one fuel that's still available, right? Body fat doesn't work. And we're talking between meals, right? So body fat's not working. There's, uh, there's problems getting sugar. Um, and so that leaves protein, right? That leaves protein. And we're, because we don't have body stores of protein, that means our lean mass, right?

59:14 Now, I don't know if you've heard this yet, but Peter Otia, do you know who he is? Yeah. Had him as a guest on your show? Not yet. Your guest. But he's great. Yeah. So Peter Otia has been using body composition. He's a metabolic doctor and he's been looking at people losing weight on Ozempic, the appetite suppressant drug. What's happening to their body composition?

59:45 And he's found that a shocking amount of the weight that they lose is not coming from their body fat. It's coming from the lean mass tissues. I haven't heard this. Shocking amount. Yeah. So normally around 20, 25% of the weight lost is

01:00:07 comes from lean mass. For example, let's say you are 100 pounds overweight and you lose 20 pounds. Well, you've also lost some of your lean mass there. 5% of the total that you lost is going to be coming from 5% of the 20 pounds. I'm sorry, 20% to 25% of

01:00:33 the 20 pounds is going to be coming from your lean mass. That's about four to five pounds. That's normal. Again, normal is not really truly healthy. I don't think this is the way it used to be back before vegetable oils were in our food supply. I think people could lose pure body fat in the past, but now we're dealing with a population that is already insulin resistant just on diagnosed.

01:00:58 And as time has gone by, more and more vegetable oils in the food supply. So people are more metabolically damaged. Now we're dealing with people, huge population that cannot lose weight without Ozempic. And Ozempic is this miracle drug.

01:01:11 Um, I've used it because it was originally patented for use in diabetes because it's oppressed people's appetite, which enabled them to control their blood sugars better. We didn't know that was the mechanism at the time, but that seems to be the main mechanism now. It's really just an appetite suppressant. Um, but so when you are now are a person who, whether you're diabetic or not, um, has lost say 50 pounds on Ozempic.

01:01:40 If you're an older person, if you're not doing exercise, if you're not eating just a boatload of protein, then you are likely to be losing, if you lost 50 pounds, it might be 25% of it that came from your lean mass. So we're making people skinny fat. We're making people metabolically more damaged physically.

01:02:01 If you meet all those criteria, right? Like some people can do okay on a Zempik if they're relatively more healthy, if they're eating extraordinary amounts of protein, if they're doing extraordinary amounts of exercise, that will preserve their muscle. But then the cost is that they're burning protein for energy instead, right?

01:02:23 And that has its own cost, its own set of costs, because protein is not neither meant to be a primary fuel for human beings. That has to do with nitrogen. And again, nitrogen promotes oxidative stress. So it's not good.

01:02:36 Nitrogen is very reactive. Nitrogen is the N in TNT, you know, that dynamite explosive TNT. N stands for nitrogen. Try nitrotoluene. Nitrogen reacts with oxygen really quickly. So nitrogen, having to process nitrogen for energy is also going to create oxidative stress and it's going to make strange things happen to people. And so I predict that in a few years, we're going to see some very strange and hear some very sad stories about oxygen.

01:03:05 having learned the hard way that forcing people to burn body fat by suppressing their appetite with Ozempic was a bad idea. I think we're already seeing some of that actually in what Peter Otia is talking about and in what some neurosurgeons have been talking about because they're seeing people who've been on Ozempic having a harder time recovering from surgery and they can't explain why, but I think it's because their lean tissues are being destroyed.

01:03:34 All right. Let me make sure I have the numbers right. So somebody say losing 50 pounds, typically without Ozempic or a GLP-1 agonist would lose, I think you said 20 to 25% lean mass using Ozempic. What does that number jump up to? Double or more. So, um, like Peter Otia even cited like some 60% and he's using DEXA scans to, um,

01:04:03 to follow this, to track people. And that is insane. I mean, you're, you're, you're making your bones weak. Maybe we do know that organs shrink. They, the liver will shrink. Although if it's from fatty liver, that might be a good thing. It might just be fatty liver regressing, but the heart will shrink. That's probably not a good thing. And the brain will shrink. And that's definitely not a good thing. Somebody coming to this conversation, not aware of PUFAs,

01:04:32 and been eating a standard type diet, they can assume their system at this point, their fat in their system is overloaded with those. Yes. We already know going keto is likely not going to be a good idea if their system is loaded with PUFAs. So they're a system that has this inflammatory fat from the PUFAs. They need to lose weight. Keto or really low carb is no longer a good option.

01:05:04 We know these fats stay in the system for years. Talk about what you'd say to somebody in that position looking to lose weight and get healthier. Yeah. So the solution is really pretty simple. It's just to have healthier carbohydrates, have the carbohydrates that break down slowly and will

01:05:23 There'll be like a time release little sugar pill because things like beans or somewhat semi-starchy vegetables like peas and corn, they break down slowly and they come out of the digestive system and into the bloodstream gradually. And they give you sort of a slow drip of sugar.

01:05:43 which many people's cells still need. So that's what I recommend. And in the last third, the last four chapters of Dark Calories,

01:05:53 I walk you through everything you need to know in order to be able to go shop and meal plan for at least a two-week period and take part in the two-week challenge that I propose, just to see how much better you feel during that time period. Up until this point, when we've talked about these PUFAs, there's been an underlying assumption we're talking about the omega-6s

01:06:21 The other branch of this is the omega-3s. Let's talk about how you think about those and what troubles they can cause. You know, Jesse, before we get to that, I want to get to that, but before we get to that, I should say that the studies on keto…

01:06:39 that were designed by Kevin Hall that really raised the hairs on the back of my neck were studies that were not avoiding seed oil keto diets. So you can do a keto diet that's high in fat where you don't avoid seed oils.

01:06:58 Right. And, and, um, that's actually what the dieticians, what most dieticians will design. You will be eating like mayonnaise. You will be, uh, you know, your salad dressings will be made from canola or soy, your sauces. You won't be getting butter. You'll be getting like a, a soft margarine spread that has the seed oils in it. Um, and it may be the case that a keto that completely avoids vegetable oils is safe because

01:07:26 Because I know that lots of people have felt fantastic by following keto when they're also avoiding vegetable oils and putting their carbs pretty low. But what we don't know is, are they also using some of the protein in their diet for energy? We don't really know. That hasn't been studied. So to be conservative…

01:07:48 I would recommend, well, let's, let's not, you know, wait for those studies. Let's just do the common sense thing, which is avoid the seed oils, cut carbs as low as you can, but don't cut them below 50. I don't recommend going below 50. And for, for some people, depending on how you feel, it all comes down to how you feel. Um, you know, cutting carbs low, I teach you how to, to, to

01:08:11 to gauge whether or not it's safe because if you're experiencing those hypoglycemia symptoms, it's not safe. If you have the low carb flu, don't cut, don't cut your carbs at low period. That's a problem. Don't just blow off the low carb flu and say, Oh, it'll get better. Oh, you need some minerals. Maybe it's a problem. Maybe this is this unknown that no one has studied. So to be safe, let's have some of these hot, um,

01:08:36 slow to break down carbohydrates, right? So when I, you know, I recommend doing sprouted grain bread. It's like the perfect slow to break down type of bread. I recommend beans. Beans are extremely slow to break down, but they have lots of carbohydrate in there. They don't spike your blood sugar. They're what's called low glycemic.

01:08:57 Glycemic meaning how high does it spike your blood sugar? Other great sources that I recommend are like nut butters and nuts and seeds because they break down really slowly. They will give you some sugar, enough maybe to protect your lean mass, hopefully, and enough to sustain your energy between meals, which is really the key. All right. This is really important before we move to the omega-3s. So what you're saying now is…

01:09:24 what we were talking about before about going really low carb and keto, that's if PUFAs are still in the diet. Yeah, we know it's bad. If they're just in the system, we might be okay to go keto if we're in that period where we're, say, clearing them out of our diet, but they're still in our fat. Right. But if we're still ingesting them, that's when going really low carb would be problematic.

01:09:47 Right. That's where we have enough evidence where I would say don't do it. Right. So simple enough. Just avoid the seed oils. But I still say why take the risk? Because this is truly a black box. It has not been studied whether you take somebody who's pretty severely insulin resistant or even mildly insulin resistant and you drop out their carbs. Maybe you are forcing them to burn too much body fat.

01:10:16 And maybe that is bad. Maybe those cells are now suffering from too much oxidative stress. Whichever cells they are diffusely throughout the body, it might be hard to detect, but

01:10:26 So why take the risk? That's basically what I'm saying. Why take the risk? So we know this about our metabolism. We know we have these problems. Let's like, I like to be like a doctor first, do no harm. We know the solution could be, could be a very important solution of just having a little bit of carb with every meal. And when I say every meal, I mean three meals a day. I, this is another conversation.

01:10:51 But I don't recommend diving right into extended fasting for the same reason, right? Does that, I mean, that's maybe intuitive because if you go for 16 hours without eating, you are forcing your body to burn, to try to burn body fat. Maybe it's not happening. Maybe you're going to be breaking down muscle. And again, we are seeing some glimmers of evidence in human trials that supports this.

01:11:16 One of them was that study that maybe you heard about on intermittent fasting causing heart problems. I heard something. I didn't dig into it though. Yeah. So it was, there wasn't really anything to dig into. It may not be anything. It was just a preliminary report. We don't have any key details, but still there's a theoretical problem that I've identified and now we're seeing evidence that

01:11:39 that is totally consistent with this theoretical problem that forcing your body to burn high PUFA body fat breaks down muscle and has some bad consequences to your metabolism. So why take the risk? And so it applies to the number of meals that I recommend a day also. I recommend three meals a day and trying not to snack. We really need to get through the day without snacks. So coming back to the fasting piece,

01:12:09 To me, what you're saying there is just that we're doing what we talked about before to a greater extreme. Because you're going longer in between meals overnight, say you're fasting, intermittent fasting, and you're going to have to go to body fat for energy. And again, what we talked about before, if you have PUFAs in there, that's not going to be a good energy source for the mitochondria. And then that leads back to everything we discussed before. Exactly. Exactly.

01:12:38 So yeah, so the three meals a day is a good place to start. Now, if you already are at two meals a day and you go through the book and you find that you do not experience any of the hypoglycemia symptoms, I ask you to track that. And you're already good on two meals a day because so many people are already doing things like that.

01:13:04 then great, keep doing that. You don't have to make a change. Maybe that's a sign that you've already gotten rid of a lot of the PUFAs. It could very well be, yes. So I think that's the best thing that we have to go on is how are we feeling? But we have to be very attuned to those 11 hypoglycemia symptoms because if we are experiencing them, then we are potentially experiencing

01:13:30 Go putting, forcing our body to go through everything we've been talking about. The, the, uh, the stress hormones, the breaking down of muscle, the potentially burning, you know, PUFAs that is damaging ourselves in undetectable ways. Right. So be very, very attuned to whether or not you're experiencing hypoglycemia, which is different than regular hunger. And I teach you how to tell the difference. Well, while we're in it, let's get into the nuance there.

01:13:57 Somebody's hungry versus this hypoglycemic pathologic hunger. What's the difference there? How does somebody know?

01:14:06 Right. So I call it pathologic because pathology means it's due to something. It's due to a disease state and the disease state is insulin resistant. So if you have these hypoglycemia symptoms and you don't have, you know, that means you are insulin resistant, right? So let's just make sure that we've got that clear. That's what you're checking for basically. So the differences between pathologic hunger is that it's related to energy deficits and

01:14:31 And it doesn't just go away the same as easily when you get distracted, right? So regular hunger is really just a reminder about your normal mealtime. Regular hunger is really a signal from your stomach that, hey, this is about the time of day that you normally send me some stuff. So I'm getting my digestive juices ready, right?

01:14:58 And the hormone that gives us regular hunger is called ghrelin. People remember it because ghrelin gets your stomach growling. And that is just a very polite little reminder. Yeah, we're ready down here if you got something for us. Otherwise, you know, we'll go away in a few minutes. And regular hunger does go away in just a few minutes. Usually people say, oh, well, I forgot about it. I got busy. I did something else. I drank some water. Sometimes that makes regular hunger go away.

01:15:26 And it doesn't cause any of the hypoglycemia symptoms either. So that's the big difference. Okay, let's come back to omega-3s. The other half of the PUFAs, and these are typically looked at as the good omega fats, anti-inflammatory versus pro-inflammatory, the omega-6s. I'll have you take that and explain the difference there when it comes to everything we've been talking about.

01:15:56 Okay. Yeah. So the omega-6 fatty acids are essential fatty acids. And they are kind of paired up with omega-3 fatty acids that are also essential fatty acids. And they're essential because we need to have them in the diet. So this is why dieticians and doctors too learn that they're good for us because we need them. But what do we need them for?

01:16:29 So we need them partly for triggering a response to trauma and responses to certain hormones. And that's where the inflammation and anti-inflammation terms come in. Because these molecules, omega-3 and omega-6, can be converted into eicosanoid chemicals

01:17:01 that are playing a role in responding to like getting a cut on your finger that will bleed. That will trigger a very small localized inflammatory response, which helps your blood clot. It helps a little bit of swelling happen that invites white blood cells into the area to fight off any bacteria that might be there. That's an inflammatory response.

01:17:25 And the omega-6s play a role in blood clotting and bringing more blood to the area and activating white blood cells. And the omega-3s play a role in also in that same response. And in somewhat the opposite way, like in some ways they play a role in preventing blood clotting from going too far, right? So that your whole body becomes one big blood clot.

01:17:54 Omega-3 is necessary to fight off, to keep the inflammation from spreading too far. It kind of hones it in. But it's so often misconstrued that linoleic acid is the pro-inflammatory and the omega-3s in things like walnut oil or flaxseed oil or fish oil are themselves anti-inflammatory. They are not. They're precursors.

01:18:26 to compounds that have these properties that exist for a very short period of time. And so linoleic acid is not the problem. The problem is oxidative stress. I want to make sure we're really clear on all this. So you have your omega-3s, your omega-6s, linoleic acid is under the omega-6s. A lot of times when this conversation comes up, linoleic acid is demonized

01:19:02 You're trying to bring more to this conversation. Get into the fine details of why that is. People typically demonize that specific piece and why there's more to it than that. Yeah, because so let's focus just on linoleic acid for a minute, the omega-6. So for linoleic acid to become an inflammatory compound, it undergoes a chemical transformation. Okay.

01:19:31 So it goes from being something called linoleic acid to an entirely different molecule called arachidonic acid. It's a different molecule. Linoleic acid does not trigger the inflammatory response. The body can convert linoleic acid into arachidonic acid. We don't need any of that in our diet. And arachidonic acid in and of itself also has no ability to cause inflammation.

01:20:03 No ability. Like I say, these are brief fleeting responses. The inflammatory response is brief and fleeting. We are not supposed to be in a constant inflammatory state. So the body turns on certain enzymes that will then get quickly turned off, right? And only those enzymes can create the inflammatory compounds that are called eicosanoids.

01:20:30 So we have one set of enzymes involved in taking linoleic acid from arachidonic acid, and then another set of enzymes in taking arachidonic acid from just being a benign thing in our cells to being a signaling agent that recruits and turns on a whole bunch of other

01:20:48 activities inside the cell that will do what I said, will do the clotting of the blood and try to address the injury or the trauma or the infection or the temporary problem. So does that help? So the cell is regulating every single one of those transformations with

01:21:10 enzymes. The enzymes take linoleic acid and convert it from linoleic acid into arachidonic acid. And then a whole other set of enzymes that are only active during an inflammatory event, during a brief event, will then take that arachidonic acid and convert it into something that triggers more of the inflammatory cascade to end the trauma.

01:21:38 which may take days, right? If it's an infection, you may have to have inflammation going on, like say in your lungs for days or weeks, um, until the infection is routed out. And until then you will feel bad. You will cough, you will wheeze, you'll have congestion in your lungs. That'll be from all the inflammatory stuff, but that's all, that's all regulated. And, and, and,

01:22:05 Linoleic acid per se cannot make that happen. It's only the oxidative stress that makes us experience inflammation for extended periods of time because once an inflammatory response gets triggered by an infection or a trauma, if we have too much oxidative stress, it takes a whole lot longer to heal.

01:22:37 shut the whole process down because that process itself involves oxygen molecules and it involves free radicals, the process itself. And that's another reason why antioxidants are so, so important. I didn't say that yet. So yeah. So like inflammation is basically triggered by

01:22:56 by oxidative stress, right? When we have an infection, those bacteria are causing oxidative stress. If we get a gunshot, the cells that are damaged are experiencing massive oxidative stress. It's going to trigger a massive inflammatory response.

01:23:17 And if we do not have normal antioxidants, it will, the trauma will be worse because the inflammation will spread farther and do more damage. Part of an inflammatory response involves chemicals that break down like our, our, our ligaments and stuff. When we sprain our ankle, that's another kind of trigger of the inflammatory system that's triggered by oxidative stress. And, and,

01:23:45 What happens that makes our legs swell so much is that part of what's happening there is enzymes get triggered that will chew up the frayed ends of the sprained ligament or the chewed broken ends of a broken bone. Enzymes that will come in that chew that all up to clean out the ragged edges of the damaged tissue and

01:24:13 And make way for rebuilding the tissue again. So the inflammatory response is important for healing, but it has to be brought under control. And that's the thing that's missing when our bodies are subjected to too much oxidative stress. It's

01:24:29 We're going to have more ankle swelling. If we get an infection in our lungs, we might get an asthma attack and need drugs to bring all that mucus and swelling under control. If we get an infection, instead of being able to heal it real quickly on our own like animals do, they don't always need antibiotics. They just lick, lick, lick and drain the abscess and then they heal.

01:24:51 That's what people used to have, abscesses that would drain and heal. But now we need antibiotics because the infection spreads because we have too much oxidative stress and it's not effective. Our immune system itself is not effective at fighting off even infections anymore. So we're seeing worse infections because of this, because of oxidative stress.

01:25:17 And the omega-6 to the omega-3 imbalance may play some role once we're experiencing a trauma, right? The omega-6 to omega-3 imbalance may be a problem in those certain scenarios, but it's not driving the trauma.

01:25:39 obesity epidemic that we have. It's not driving the epidemic of metabolic disease. It's not causing cancers. It's not contributing much of anything to things like dementia and mental disorders. So that's the difference. It may be making trauma and our response to trauma a little bit worse. Well, the part I really want to make sure we hash out with the omega-3s is

01:26:03 is the fact that they are so unstable, even more unstable than the omega-6s. So if we're having instability within them before or after they enter the body and become part of our tissues, the oxidative stress piece, tie that in because to me, they're so unstable. How do we make sure that we're not causing issues outside or inside the body because they are so fragile?

01:26:35 Omega-3 actually has more double bonds, which is why they're more unstable because every single double bond will attract oxygen and exposes the molecule to oxidation, free radicals, oxidative stress.

01:26:53 Because omega-3s have more double bonds. They have at least three. They are more prone to being damaged by oxidative stress. And so this is a big reason why we see that low omega-3 content in the body so often. Because we may be eating less.

01:27:19 a good amount of like flax oil or walnuts or fish with longer chain omega-3 fatty acids. But when our bodies are depleted of those antioxidants, those fragilist molecules will just disappear. They will react with oxygen. And so you see this, if you get your omega-3 levels tested, a lot of people have very low omega-3 levels.

01:27:49 And it's partly because, I mean, it's hugely because of oxidative stress and less because they're not eating enough because canola oil has lots of omega-3 and lots of things in our diet do contain omega-3. Normally, we just don't need that much because normally in a healthy body, it doesn't get destroyed. But in an unhealthy body, the omega-3 gets destroyed first.

01:28:18 So it is like that canary in the coal mine for oxidative stress, that omega-3 levels will drop before omega-6 levels will drop. I'm just picturing cells in the body taking up omega-3s, whether somebody's eating a ton of salmon or taking fish oil. And we've talked about with the omega-6s, how they become part of the fat. And because they are so unstable, I could see how this good omega-3

01:28:48 could be causing all kinds of problems in the body because of oxidative stress. Is that right? That is 100% correct, Jesse. And it's happening…

01:29:02 I think there's proof that that's happening. And that proof comes from the studies that we've done where we supplement people with fish oil and we supplement people with omega-3 from all sorts of sources, walnuts or flax or whatever. And it hasn't shown much benefit, right? And I think that's because it's just getting disappeared. It's getting oxidized and it's not having that beneficial effect.

01:29:29 And it could be contributing to problems. So some of the early studies on fish oil supplementation showed an increase in heart rhythm irregularities and palpitations and arrhythmias. And they couldn't explain that. Like, why? Why would that happen?

01:29:49 But, you know, I think the answer is that either the fish oil was already oxidized and contained toxins or it was oxidizing in our body tissues, right? And it was negatively affecting the heart because the heart is the ultimate, you know, the heart can't use sugar. The heart is one of the muscles. So most of the organs in our body can use sugar. The heart can't.

01:30:15 It has like only under the most extreme circumstances and it really like hates to do it because the heart, if you think about it, it's the ultimate cardio organ, right? And it's the cardio means heart and cardio exercise means aerobic exercise means oxygen requiring versus anaerobic, which is what we need the sugar for, right? Sugar. We can get energy from sugar without any oxygen, right?

01:30:40 But the heart doesn't use oxygen. It's not designed… I'm sorry. The heart is not designed to use glucose as its fuel, pretty much at all. And so if it's… Between meals, if it's getting some of that PUFA, it's going to be burning it. And that could be damaging the heart muscle. Throughout most of our conversation, when we use the word PUFA, I think you were in the same boat as me. We were…

01:31:10 There was an underlying assumption we were talking about omega-6s till this part when we're getting into omega-3s. I'm curious from an energy burning perspective, because we got into this before with the omega-6 PUFAs where the mitochondria can't use those for energy. And that leads to the whole metabolic problems that we talked about before needing more sugar. Is that the case with omega-3s as well? If somebody's got a lot of those, can the omega-3 PUFAs fuel the mitochondria or no? Yeah.

01:31:43 No, it's worse because there's more double bonds and the oxygen reacts quicker. And when you force mitochondria to burn omega-3, they shut down even more quickly than when you force them to burn omega-6. And I have an experiment that shows exactly the difference in the book. And you can see the energy level dropping within minutes, but

01:32:05 On omega-6, it drops to about 50%, a half of what it was. And when you feed the mitochondria omega-3 with more double bonds, it oxidizes faster, and the energy level drops much more quickly and levels off at somewhere around 30% of what it was. So it's worse.

01:32:24 And maybe we need to talk about the term PUFA, what it actually means. Because you're right. I didn't realize this, but I think a lot of people, when they hear PUFA, they equate that to omega-6. That is wrong. PUFA stands for polyunsaturated fatty acid. And that just means it has two or more double bonds, right? So it doesn't specify omega-3 or omega-6.

01:32:54 And in fact, some polyunsaturated fatty acids aren't omega-3 or omega-6. There's all kinds of polyunsaturated fatty acids out there, but all of them can promote oxidative stress because of the way that they react with oxygen. So yes, this whole linoleic acid conversation has kind of confused the issue, I think. And I'm really glad you're diving in with me on this to set it straight because I

01:33:21 It has so little, probably nothing to do with most metabolic disease. Well, when we're talking about vegetable oil, how we opened up and that's the thesis of this conversation, when it comes to PUFAs being in the omega-6 versus 3 realm with vegetable oils, how much of it is omega-6 versus 3?

01:33:46 Yeah. So most of it is omega-6, right? And so that is why I think the conversation got derailed because they're like, oh gosh, we've got a lot more omega-6 and omega-3. These two things kind of balance each other out in this eicosanoid inflammatory, anti-inflammatory concept. And that just kind of took off.

01:34:05 Whereas the concepts of oxidation, which require a little bit going deeper into the science, did not catch fire that way. And no one's been really talking about them, but that is the issue. And so in my work, when I talk about vegetable oil being bad, I don't talk about linoleic acid or focus on that at all. I focus on how it promotes oxidative stress. And it's not because of the linoleic acid. It's just because of

01:34:32 the total polyunsaturates that deteriorate into toxins. So it's, it's in fact, it's not the linoleic acid. It's the fact that linoleic acid turns into toxin, but so does the linoleic acid. So does the omega-3 turn into toxin too. And that applies mostly to the conversations around fish oil, understanding why fish oil may not be a good idea because it will

01:35:03 oxidized so quickly, it might only have a 30-day shelf life. Most are not purchased even by that point in time. So it's pertinent to the conversation around fish oil. And it's also pertinent to the conversation around vegetable oils because one of the hateful eight is canola oil. And canola oil has a good deal of omega-3. In fact, that's why a lot of cardiologists and dietitians will tell you that it's heart-healthy.

01:35:27 Because, oh, it makes up for this imbalance in omega-3, it's good for your heart, and on and on, yada, yada. But that's not true. It's no healthier than omega-6.

01:35:38 We need both of them. And we need to be able to, for either one of them to work, we need to have oxidative stress under control in our body. This is important. We're taking it to this level because like I said, because vegetable oils are predominantly the omega-6s, at least as a whole, you mentioned canola oil being an exception. The way I've been talking for most of the conversation is that we're talking about the omega-6 piece of the PUFA and you're clarifying it's both and

01:36:08 This is really important. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't even consider that might be what you were meaning because, um, so I'm so glad that you brought it up because that is, you know, going to this level of understanding it, unfortunately is what we have to do as ordinary citizen scientists, because the medical system is not doing this. I mean, I could have this very same conversation with doctors and they would be equally kind of like

01:36:36 Having to really concentrate and putting on their thinking heads and hopefully not confused, but perhaps somewhat confused and maybe needing to relisten to a few seconds, a few segments of the conversation. But, you know, this is medical school level stuff. This is stuff your doctor doesn't know. And because your doctor doesn't know, your doctor cannot help you with diet and your doctor cannot help you with preventative medicine.

01:37:03 And your doctor probably can't help you with simple things like, you know, reversing diabetes, you know, which is simple. It's really quite simple. Doctors are doing it all the time now that the keto diet is so popular. But, you know, even doctors do not learn this. And in chapter two of Dark Calories, I talk about how this is the thing that if doctors did learn this,

01:37:27 we would not have an obesity epidemic and we would not be spending $11 trillion a year on healthcare costs because doctors would be able to tell people, stop eating vegetable oils. This is what a healthy diet looks like. And 99% of people who right now have insulin resistance

01:37:48 if they were willing to do what the doctor recommended, wouldn't have it. Right? So it's a big deal. It has like planet changing consequences for people to get off these oils and make their diet healthy. And I'm not saying it's easy to do, but I am saying it's the most important thing that you can do, the most empowering thing that you can do.

01:38:13 All right, before we move forward, let's make sure we have the molecules. We're all on the same page when it comes to that. So you have PUFA at the top, omega-3, omega-6. What PUFAs are under each of those? We know linoleic acid is an omega-6. How many different ones fall under each of those categories? Well, I guess, well, you know, I have a chalkboard here. Do you want me to like, I can actually draw some of this out. Would that help? Sure, that'd be great. Let's do it. So we have PUFA.

01:38:44 We have omega-3. I'm just going to write 3 and 6, right? Now, linoleic acid has 18 carbons, okay? Okay.

01:39:02 And then linoleic acid, that's what's in the vegetable oils. That's what's in nuts and seeds. That's what's in chicken fat and bacon fat. And then linoleic acid also has 18 carbons, C standing for carbon there. So these are the yin and the yang, right? This is the increased inflammation. This is the decreased inflammation. And by the way, that is an oversimplification. They both have…

01:39:31 roles in what we call inflammatory reactions. So anyway, that's just a minor point. So then there's the other, the fish oils, right? So fish oil is full of, sorry, 20, 22, and 20, oh gosh,

01:39:58 Sorry, I think it's 22 and 24 carbons or fish oils. Is this still being on here? So this is fish oil. And then we don't really have an equivalent that we talk about very often. That's like very important in terms of our biology. It's really arachidonic acid.

01:40:22 And we don't really get this in the diet. We make this out of the 18 carbons and this is still, yeah, 20 carbons, right? So this has two double bonds and this has three double bonds, okay? So more double bonds means more oxidation, right?

01:40:54 Right. The oxygen really reacts with that.

01:41:00 Okay. And this is just two double bonds. O2 is oxygen and it really attacks these double bonds. So these things will evaporate more quickly. Even if we eat the same amount of linoleic acid and linoleic acid, when our bodies are subjected to oxidative stress, these will disappear from our body, from our body fat, from our body cells, from everywhere, from our bloodstream, they will disappear more quickly. And

01:41:29 We can, though, we can convert these into longer omega-3s with 20 carbons, 22, and 24 carbons. These are essential for nerve tissue. They are building blocks. This is, this plays a role. These fight each other. At the moment, I can't remember the name of this one, but this is,

01:41:59 causes inflammation, right? Positive inflammations. And this has a negative effect on inflammation. And then the body can elongate this to create this and this. We can just get it from our diet. Now, when we're subjected to oxidative stress, all of these levels are going to be lower because these will disappear faster than all of these. And so…

01:42:32 We won't have as much of this in our blood. We won't have as much of this in our brain tissues. We'll have some difficulties with vision. We can even get dry eye. So fish oil supplementation actually can help with dry eye. But because your body needs more, because when you're subjected to oxidative stress, you need more of this stuff in your diet to reach those tissues that need a lot.

01:43:00 Um, so some people need to supplement and help someone. They have dry eye. All right. So, um, I think there was one more point I wanted to make about this. Oh yeah. These enzymes here that need to go from that actually do this conversion step. Has, has that been a point of confusion in, in your, um, in your world? The enzymes? Yeah. I'd personally like some clarification. Sure. Yeah.

01:43:26 Okay. Or like, so does this help with anything so far? No, this is great. I have follow-up questions, but I'll let you finish here. All right. So do you want to talk more about the enzymes? Yeah. So the enzymes that, that convert this to this and this to this are the same enzyme. So there's one enzyme in here.

01:43:49 And some people are worried that if we have, say, 20 times as much of this as we do of this, that the enzyme is going to be busy making this into that. And it will never make this. I'm sorry. I got it reversed. If we have 20 times, we have more of this, right? This is more. We always have more of this.

01:44:12 In our diet because of the vegetable oils. The omega-6. So more of the omega-6 linoleic acid, yes. So go continue there with the enzyme. People are concerned if they're taking in too many omega-6s, the enzyme is going to be busy dealing with those. I'll have you explain what you're getting at there. So the enzyme…

01:44:36 has a small little binding site and it makes this into that at the binding site. And if there's 20 times more of this than there is of this, then people are worried that this is going to get all the attention from the enzyme and it's not going to be converting any of this into that, right? So the enzyme, these, they compete for each other, right? So if we have 20X more of this than we do of this, well, then we'll have 20X more of that than we will of that, maybe, right?

01:45:05 Right. And that, that may be true, but it's only under, it only matters for those, those few circumstances when we're responding to trauma or infection and granted, yes, that's very abhorrent. We need to be able to do that properly, but it's not the main reason that, um,

01:45:24 that oxidative stress is a problem. And there's actually more to it than that. There's another enzyme that's involved. It's not just this one enzyme that people talk about. There's other enzymes that get shut down by oxidative stress. And so that when those other enzymes get shut down by oxidative stress, none of this will happen. And we won't, right? So that's, to me, more of an issue.

01:45:52 than this one enzyme and the competition here. The enzymes are also involved in elongating these into the longer forms of the omega-3. And there's also 22 and 24 carbon omega-6s that our nervous system needs. And other enzymes involved in that can get shut down by oxidative stress.

01:46:21 and trans fats and all kinds of stuff that is the bad stuff in our food. And so that's another issue that's caused primarily by oxidative stress that doesn't get enough attention. All right, so you had follow-up questions, so I shouldn't get in the way of that. I'm just trying to get practical with all the science here. The fact that we have the PUFA there at the very top, which is vegetable oils are high in that.

01:46:50 But we're not concerned about the foods specifically that the vegetable oils are coming from. Like that's obviously controversial because soy, a lot of people don't eat it. But I'm saying in a really general sense that we're talking about the fact that it's been refined down into an oil where the PUFA has become a problem, not the whole foods, correct? Yes, exactly. It's that…

01:47:20 It's that it's not protected, right? So when we have, say, a sunflower seed, or that's the only one that's edible. If we have a sunflower seed, which is high in omega-6, it also comes along in the seed with a lot of vitamin E and other antioxidants and phytonutrients in there that protect the seed and keep that PUFA from becoming…

01:47:49 a broken down oxidation product, right? So what the problem with vegetable oil is that

01:47:57 It's not really the PUFA. It's the PUFA oxidation products or the lipid oxidation products. It's the PUFA no more, right? Because after you have linoleic acid, there's one more thing I can do is show that here, linoleic acid plus oxygen equals toxin. And so in vegetable oil,

01:48:24 You have some toxin as it comes out of the factory. You have lots of unprotected linoleic acid. And so when you cook with it, it's going to form more toxin. And that depletes our antioxidants because that's what toxins do. They cause oxidative stress and they deplete our body's antioxidants. So they bring us more to this unhealthy state of metabolism where we're subjected to oxidative stress.

01:48:52 And meanwhile, the ones that didn't react with oxygen, they will start concentrating in our body fat, but they didn't come along with any, um, with any of the normal antioxidants and vitamins that you get from eating a sunflower. And so the vitamin E won't end up in our body fat or in our body cells. It won't be there. Right. So it's,

01:49:17 Quite a mess. So to get practical, as we start to tie things together and wrap up here, we want to avoid these hateful eight. We know that they do stay in the system for years. Let's talk about in a practical sense, given everything we've shared, what we can do to protect ourselves against everything we've talked about today. So eliminate these hateful eight.

01:49:43 But say somebody has been consuming them on a regular basis to this point, their tissues, their fat tissues more specifically, are loaded with this inflammatory fat. What do we do? Other than not take in any more, is there a way to speed up that process? Talk more about the timeline of how long it takes in a general sense for these to leave the body. Yeah. So…

01:50:12 When our body fat contains, say, like 30% polyunsaturated fatty acid and normal is maybe 5% to 10%, it will take a number of years before it will go from high to normal. And during that time, if you start eating better, you're going to feel better way before it's all gone, okay? Yeah.

01:50:33 But until it's all gone, that means you're going to be prone more to maybe some hangry, maybe having carb cravings, maybe having sugar cravings. You might still be insulin resistant for a lot of that time, but you will feel better and better.

01:50:53 Somebody asked me this, you know, just earlier today, like, how can I accelerate getting the process? And my thinking is, I'm not sure you want to accelerate the process. You want to feel good while you're going through the process. But if you accelerate the process, you're

01:51:10 that means you're going to be forcing yourselves to burn more PUFA and that might be bad, right? So, and we do know that yo-yo dieters often end up, you know, when they're basically doing exactly that. They're basically trying to accelerate the process of weight loss, which means that they're trying to get rid of, they're effectively getting rid of more of that PUFA, but making their bodies burn it

01:51:32 but it damages their metabolism further possibly, which is why so many of my patients…

01:51:40 have gone on exercise programs, gone on shake programs, lost a lot of weight, and then they come to find out that they've developed insulin resistance. Now they're pre-diabetic. They weren't before they started their program. How's that possible? Oxidative stress. Oxidative stress causes insulin resistance. So what you're saying there is if you were to lose weight too quickly, if your body is loaded with PUFAs, you could cause damage…

01:52:07 of those being expelled too quickly. Yeah. Because when they're not getting expelled, they're getting burned. I guess maybe that's the key point. The only way to, yeah. The only way to get rid of them is to burn them off and it's your mitochondria are going to be burning them and you know,

01:52:24 So there is no detox pathway. I've spoken to scientists who study this stuff and they say, no, we can't get rid of them. It's not like other toxins that we can eliminate, like alcohol, right? We have a way to get rid of excess alcohol. Alcohol doesn't build up in our body tissues, right?

01:52:45 But these do, these polyunsaturates do build up in our body fat and it's like any other fat. The only way to get rid of it is to burn it off. And so that's why I don't think we want to be forcing the issue there because we gained it because our bodies didn't want to burn it off. So we talked about before how the mitochondria, it's troublesome for them to burn the PUFAs. Just to clarify, because we're talking about now the fact that they do have to burn them to get rid of them. They can burn them.

01:53:15 But they don't. I want you to get into the nuance there. Well, I have to. Because before we made it sound like they couldn't be burned. And now we're saying that's how we do get rid of them.

01:53:25 So is it just that they burn differently and it's not an efficient process? Get into the nuance there. It's about the concentration, right? So the more that there is in our body fat, the more likely it is that there's going to be PUFA ending up in the mitochondria. So let's dial it back to the world without any seed oils or vegetable oils. And we have just something like 5% PUFA in our body fat or even less. That PUFA is necessary for other things. Our bodies did not

01:53:54 like ever used to have to burn it. Right. So just by the law of concentration, it won't make it into the mitochondria at a very high rate by the randomness, right? Only one in 20 of, of, of our fatty acids are a PUFA. So that means 19 out of 20 are going to be good for the mitochondria. And there might even be other regulatory mechanisms that keep it out. We don't know about those, but

01:54:22 So, you know, at that low concentration, one out of 20 or 5% of all fatty acids delivered, that's not a big problem.

01:54:32 Still always burning, you know, burning fat, always using the mitochondria creates oxidative stress, right? So it's all a matter of nuance. There's always oxidative stress. Energy generation produces oxidative stress. We just, that's why we have so many free radicals. But when we use the wrong fuel, it produces more oxidative stress. And the more of the wrong fuel that we use, right?

01:54:58 the more of this excess oxidative stress is happening. So what we want to do is burn just a little bit of this high PUFA body fat every day. Not too much, not too little, right? So if we can keep it to a certain percentage where we're feeling okay, we don't feel these hypoglycemia symptoms, then to me, that's the best way to know that we're doing all right.

01:55:23 and slow weight loss, right? You're going to lose weight because you're going to not snack so much, right? Most people, a lot of their weight comes from being hungry between meals and snacking or being hangry at a meal and overordering your meal. And then you've got this giant plate of food and you want to finish it off because you're trying to do that by your mother. So, um,

01:55:46 Yeah, so once you don't have so much hangry in your life, you can better regulate your meals and you will start to lose weight without even…

01:55:56 seemingly feeling like you're cutting calories, right? The average calorie intake is just excessive by a couple hundred calories every day. You dial that back and you burn just a little bit more of your body fat every day. That's the safest way to lose weight gradually and slowly and by making sure that you don't have hypoglycemia symptoms because you are tracking your pathologic hunger. All right. So slow and steady when it comes to getting rid of these inflammatory fats.

01:56:24 For somebody that is, say, 30% of their fat, I think you used that number. Yeah. Being made up of this, and they're really toxic at this point, how long will that stay in their system if they're on a slow and steady method? We've kind of talked about long period of time, years, but what are we looking at? Well, no one really knows because, you know, it's…

01:56:48 We're all just sort of guessing based on some radiation studies that were done before PUFA was in the blood supply that showed that any given fatty acid in your body fat has a replacement time, a half-life of just about a year, a little over a year. That means that half of them will be replaced in a little over a year. That means all of them will be, most of them, 95% will be replaced in four half-lives, which is maybe four years.

01:57:15 But different fatty acids get mobilized at different rates. Some stick around. Some are offered up and can be utilized faster. So we don't know. It's all a guess. And it might be different based on genetics too. But I can tell you from what I've seen that it definitely takes at least two years. But most people do really start feeling so much better after just six months that they're okay with the slow weight loss.

01:57:45 Um, and you do, I do start to see dramatic improvements in the insulin, uh, sensitivity, um,

01:57:53 They don't become fully normal, but their other biomarkers all get good, right? Like they get lower triglycerides, they get elevated HDL, they get less, you know, less high blood pressure or normalized blood pressure. And they start to lose fat from the worst places that are the most embarrassing, like right around our belly and under the chin, um,

01:58:17 People have more energy. You just start feeling better. You can get off drugs. Actually, I just got a letter from somebody this morning or yesterday morning that said they were 900 pounds on 22 drugs. They had some surgery. Biorhagic surgery lost 400 pounds. But once they started getting off PUFA and following the kind of diet I recommend,

01:58:45 They got off the drugs and then they also lost the weight, the rest of the weight. So like, and now they're like 200 pounds, right? I mean, it's still a heavy person, but this is a person who was 900 pounds. So that they said that, you know, they, what kept that, what I hear from people is that what keeps them going is how good they feel. All right. Last question for you. And this ties back to the omega threes, given what you shared now,

01:59:16 I would assume you're not for supplementing with fish oil, flax oil, but I'll have you talk about that.

01:59:24 Yeah. So maybe fish oil, but not flax oil. If I'm going to supplement with fish oil, I'm going to do a test first called the omega test and see if somebody is really low in their long chain omega threes compared to their long chain omega sixes. And also this would apply to people who can't eat fish or won't eat fish or, you know, just can't diversify their diet in a way that will make much of a difference.

01:59:46 Also, if they have certain conditions like dry eye or rheumatoid arthritis where supplementing with a good quality fish oil has been shown to help a lot of people, then I would recommend. Okay. But, you know, before we wrap up, Jesse, there's one more thing that I think is so important to at least touch on because it's why I wrote the book, really. Please do.

02:00:08 And we didn't mention this at all. You know, dark calories really tells the story of what is the biggest scandal ever perpetrated on the American public by a medical organization. And this scandal has affected every American because it's changed how medicine is practiced. And the scandal that I'm talking about is the relationship between the American Heart Association and Procter &amp; Gamble.

02:00:34 And the fact that Procter &amp; Gamble sold vegetable oil

02:00:38 And they gave money to the American Heart Association. And very shortly after that, the American Heart Association started claiming that vegetable oils were heart healthy and cholesterol caused heart attacks. And they had no evidence to support that claim at that time. But they started popularizing that on the media all over the place. They wrote a very popular diet book, influenced millions and millions of Americans to start swapping out butter and using things like vegetable oil.

02:01:07 And then what's worse than that, and even more scandalous, is that the American Heart Association used that money to spend the next few decades fabricating a huge pile of evidence to support the idea that cholesterol causes heart attacks. And that pile of evidence is nonsense. It's nonsensical. And some very smart scientists who have sifted through it have come to the same conclusion. There's nothing here. There's no evidence.

02:01:36 And I bring this up because when you cut out vegetable oils and eat healthier foods, very likely your total cholesterol levels will go up and your doctor will tell you to stop following this diet that's improving your health and transforming your life. And it'll scare you maybe even into taking a statin drug, which

02:01:56 which is one of the most dangerous drugs out there. And so I have a whole chapter in Dark Calories about this so that you can kind of fortify your knowledge. You have to know more than your doctor because doctors are miseducated. So important you brought that up.

02:02:13 And I want to clarify there, when people do consume these vegetable oils, it does lower their cholesterol. Yeah. But what you're saying is when it comes to heart attacks and that whole story, that's where it's false. Correct. These will bring your cholesterol down. Statins are a drug that do bring your cholesterol down. But we need to look at the root. Is that really doing anything? And you're saying no.

02:02:39 I'm saying it's actually causing a problem. Both statins and the vegetable oils effect on our cholesterol are problematic. Vegetable oils probably cause heart attacks because they oxidize our lipoproteins. They oxidize our LDL particles. And regular LDL, no matter how high it is, doesn't build up in our arteries. But oxidized LDL, no matter how low it is, does build up in our arteries. It damages them.

02:03:08 Good place to end it. I'm glad we went there. I had a note on cholesterol, so I'm glad we got into that. And I'm going to link up the new book, your social media, your website, everything in the show notes. And I really appreciate the work you're doing and coming on the show again and sharing this. Thank you. Thank you, Jesse, for having me on again. It's been great talking with you. Now that you're finished with the episode, head on over to ultimatehealthpodcast.com for detailed show notes, including links to everything we discussed.

02:03:37 Thanks for listening and have a great day.

02:04:05 Whatever your stage, businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at shopify.com slash listen.

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节目开篇指出，《暗卡路里》一书揭示了医疗机构对美国公众实施的最大丑闻——植物油的危害。这一丑闻改变了医疗实践方式，影响了每个美国人。植物油是食品供应中最有害的物质，其危害体现在两个方面：一是使食物具有毒性；二是改变人体脂肪构成，使其含有远超工业时代前人类体脂的多不饱和脂肪酸，导致人体难以燃烧自身脂肪。医生对此并不了解，因此在饮食和预防医学方面无法提供有效帮助，人们需要比医生更了解相关知识。

当被问及糖和植物油哪种危害更大时，凯特博士明确表示是植物油。原因在于植物油会改变人体代谢，引发强烈的糖瘾，而糖不会让人渴望植物油。植物油使人体无法燃烧体脂，导致人们在两餐之间容易饥饿、易怒，进而选择含糖或精制碳水化合物食物。对于正在努力调整饮食的人来说，若先戒糖而身体因植物油受损仍需要糖，很容易失败并自责。因此，应先戒掉植物油，再逐步避免其他有害物质，植物油是食品供应中最糟糕的东西。

植物油会消耗人体的抗氧化剂。抗氧化剂能帮助控制体内自由基、氧气反应，预防氧化应激。氧化应激虽看似专业术语，却至关重要，它会加速衰老、退化和炎症，使细胞无法从自身脂肪中正常产生能量，这也是人们渴望糖、过量进食的生理原因。自然界本应让人类在数小时不进食的情况下依靠体脂生存，但植物油破坏了这一机制，导致肥胖问题蔓延。

人体主要通过细胞中的线粒体产生能量，线粒体利用氧气生成细胞能量，同时必须控制氧气，因为氧气是高活性化合物，会导致氧化应激和自由基产生，而线粒体需要大量抗氧化剂来控制氧气能量。定期食用植物油会耗尽体内抗氧化剂，植物油堪称“瓶装氧化应激”，会破坏作为代谢基础的线粒体。

有人会想通过补充抗氧化剂来弥补植物油带来的氧化应激，但这并无作用。蓝莓、枸杞等食物中的抗氧化剂及相关补剂，人体无法利用，会被肝脏清除，无法帮助预防氧化应激。健康的代谢系统自身会产生大量抗氧化酶和相关化合物来对抗自由基，这是一个团队协作的过程。而植物油会使人体对氧气的控制超出自然承受范围，引发一系列问题。

20世纪50年代，化学家德纳姆·哈蒙痴迷于“人为何会死亡”这一问题，为此进入医学院。他提出“死亡始于细胞”，而自由基是杀死细胞的原因，并撰写了一篇四页纸的论文。尽管起初遭到质疑，但实验生物学家证实了这一理论——自由基作为氧化应激的组成部分，若无法控制，会导致细胞死亡。

当时人们的寿命因营养不良、感染等因素较短，平均约66岁，哈蒙认为控制氧气可将寿命延长至80 - 100岁。他开创了“自由基生物学”领域，该领域70年来尝试用各种抗氧化剂控制体内氧气，但均未能延长自然寿命，哈蒙本人也曾大量服用维生素C和维生素E。如今，自由基生物学被视为生物黑客运动的根源，但他们都忽视了植物油的危害，而避免食用植物油是延长寿命的有效方式，尽管氧化应激并非仅由植物油引起，但植物油是食品供应中最主要的危害来源。

“可恨的八种”植物油是基于加工过程和化学性质定义的需避免的油类，其他油类的危害远不及它们。包括三个以“C”开头的油：玉米油、菜籽油、棉籽油；三个以“S”开头的油：大豆油、葵花籽油、红花籽油；以及米糠油和葡萄籽油。前六种建议人们牢记，需在配料表中留意；后两种多见于高档餐厅，常被宣传为健康油，但实则不然。

值得注意的是，在北美以外地区，菜籽油被称为菜籽油，两者是同一物质。葡萄籽油曾因无味、适合高温烹饪等特点在健康领域被推崇，如今虽不常见，但仍需警惕。这些油因精炼去除了营养和大部分味道，且烟点高，成为餐厅油炸的首选，但家庭烹饪无需高烟点油。

“可恨的八种”植物油的加工过程复杂，与传统油脂提取方式大相径庭。传统油脂如橄榄油、花生油等，采用温和方式提取，初榨油即可食用且美味，无需精炼。而“可恨的八种”植物油，除少数例外，不会进行初榨处理，为提取所有油脂，种子会经历高温（高达600度）、高压及化学溶剂（如己烷）处理，得到的粗油不可食用，含有大量毒素。

加工过程包括脱胶、脱蜡、洗涤、离心、超滤等步骤以去除毒素，但最后一步“漂白”会产生有毒的反式脂肪，含量通常在0.5% - 5%之间。出厂时的植物油含有部分毒素，几乎无抗氧化剂，开封后受光或烹饪时会产生更多毒素，进入人体后引发氧化应激，消耗抗氧化剂。

植物油的危害不仅在于使食物有毒，还会改变人体脂肪构成，使其多不饱和脂肪酸含量远超工业时代前。多不饱和脂肪酸是一种会与氧气反应的脂肪酸，是植物油在精炼过程中产生毒素的前体，残留的多不饱和脂肪酸会在体内积累。

当多不饱和脂肪酸进入血液或线粒体（氧气浓度高的地方），在抗氧化剂不足的情况下，氧气会攻击它们，产生毒素，导致人体脂肪难以被细胞利用，进而改变代谢，引发一系列问题。

当细胞在两餐之间从体脂获取能量时，若体脂中多不饱和脂肪酸过多，会引发氧化应激，关闭线粒体，导致ATP（三磷酸腺苷）生成停止。细胞的能量传感器会促使其摄取血液中的葡萄糖作为替代燃料。

但血液中的糖含量极低，若大量细胞同时摄取糖，血糖水平会下降，引发低血糖症状，如饥饿、易怒（“饿怒”）、脑雾、颤抖、出汗、虚弱、心悸，甚至偏头痛、癫痫发作等。医生对低血糖的认知存在误区，认为是代谢快的表现，建议多吃零食，而这会导致人们过量进食，逐渐增重。

代谢疾病与胰岛素抵抗相关，胰岛素抵抗的能量模型认为，其核心是人体无法从体脂获取能量，大脑会 override 身体的正常调节，使血糖设定点异常升高。大脑通过迷走神经向肝脏发出信号，促使肝脏进行糖异生（将非糖物质转化为糖）并释放糖原，还会向肾上腺发出信号，促使其分泌肾上腺素和皮质醇，升高血糖。

胰岛素抵抗表现为血糖和胰岛素水平均升高，在成年人中极为普遍。基于NHANES数据，不到1%的人口具有正常的HOMA - IR（胰岛素抵抗指数）评分，且科学界对正常胰岛素水平缺乏共识。随着植物油摄入增加，人群胰岛素水平上升，健康标准也因人群健康状况恶化而降低，导致研究难以在健康人群中开展，结果存在偏差。

大脑通过迷走神经与肝脏、肾上腺等器官沟通，调节血糖。当血糖下降时，大脑促使肾上腺分泌肾上腺素和皮质醇，这些应激激素会调动肝糖原，升高血糖，但也会带来负面影响，如糖尿病患者不仅血糖和胰岛素水平高，应激激素水平也高，身体器官在血糖控制上相互对抗，使人感觉不适。

许多人在改变饮食前就已存在胰岛素抵抗，表现为低血糖症状，而医生通常不诊断胰岛素抵抗，使其成为2型糖尿病的前兆却未被重视。

人体脂肪中含有的多不饱和脂肪酸（PUFAs）会影响低碳水或生酮饮食的效果。美国国立卫生研究院的凯文·霍尔研究发现，生酮饮食者比低脂饮食者流失更多肌肉，这与肾上腺素、皮质醇及糖异生有关，糖异生会将蛋白质转化为糖，消耗肌肉等 lean tissues 中的蛋白质。

对于体内PUFAs较多的人，生酮饮食可能导致肌肉流失。类似地，服用奥泽匹克（Ozempic）等减肥药的人，若不大量摄入蛋白质和运动，也会流失大量肌肉，形成“瘦胖子”，即使摄入大量蛋白质和运动，燃烧蛋白质供能也会因氮元素引发氧化应激，产生不良影响。

对于体内PUFAs较多的人，减肥需谨慎，建议避免植物油，将碳水化合物摄入量控制在50克以上，根据自身感受调整，若出现低血糖症状则需提高碳水摄入。不建议进行长时间断食，以免强迫身体燃烧高PUFA体脂，导致肌肉分解和代谢问题，建议每日三餐，避免零食。

病理性饥饿由胰岛素抵抗这一疾病状态引起，与能量不足相关，不会因分心而轻易消失；正常饥饿是胃发出的进食提醒，由饥饿素引发，通常在餐前出现，容易因分心而缓解，且不会伴随低血糖症状。区分二者有助于判断身体代谢状况，若出现低血糖症状，可能意味着存在胰岛素抵抗等问题。

欧米茄 - 6和欧米茄 - 3脂肪酸都是人体必需脂肪酸，在应对创伤和激素反应中发挥作用，可转化为类花生酸化学物质。欧米茄 - 6在血液凝固、增加局部血流量和激活白细胞方面起作用，欧米茄 - 6则防止血液过度凝固，限制炎症扩散，但二者本身并非直接具有抗炎或促炎作用，只是相关化合物的前体，且作用时间短暂。

亚油酸（欧米茄 - 6）本身并非问题根源，氧化应激才是。欧米茄 - 3因双键更多，比欧米茄 - 6更不稳定，易受氧化应激破坏，导致体内含量低。补充鱼油等欧米茄 - 3补剂效果有限，部分早期研究显示其可能引发心脏节律异常，这与补剂氧化或在体内氧化有关，心脏主要依赖脂肪供能，若燃烧PUFAs会受损。

欧米茄 - 3和欧米茄 - 6都属于多不饱和脂肪酸（PUFAs），线粒体燃烧欧米茄 - 3时能量下降更快，效率更低，对代谢的负面影响更大。植物油中以欧米茄 - 6为主，但菜籽油等含有一定量欧米茄 - 3，且其危害与欧米茄 - 6相当，只有在氧化应激得到控制时，二者才能正常发挥作用。

人体脂肪中多不饱和脂肪酸（PUFAs）含量若过高（如30%），降至正常水平（5% - 10%）需要数年时间。在此期间，改善饮食会让人逐渐感觉好转，但完全恢复前仍可能有糖瘾、胰岛素抵抗等问题。不建议加速这一过程，因为快速燃烧PUFAs可能加剧氧化应激，损害代谢，就像溜溜球式减肥者可能因快速减重发展出胰岛素抵抗。

安全的减肥方式是缓慢、稳定地进行，通过避免零食、合理控制正餐量，每天少量燃烧体脂，同时关注低血糖症状，确保身体处于良好状态。

关于欧米茄 - 3补充，可先进行“欧米茄测试”，检测长链欧米茄 - 3与长链欧米茄 - 6的比例，再决定是否补充鱼油，对于干眼症、类风湿性关节炎患者，优质鱼油可能有帮助，但不建议补充亚麻籽油。

美国心脏协会与宝洁公司存在利益关联，宝洁公司销售植物油并向其捐款后，美国心脏协会开始宣称植物油有益心脏健康、胆固醇会导致心脏病，这一说法缺乏证据，且后续数十年编造的支持证据也毫无意义。

植物油和他汀类药物虽能降低胆固醇，但这一作用存在问题。植物油会氧化低密度脂蛋白（LDL）颗粒，氧化后的LDL会在动脉中堆积，引发心脏病，而正常的LDL无论含量高低都不会如此。人们在减少植物油摄入、改善饮食后，胆固醇可能上升，医生可能因此建议停止健康饮食或服用他汀类药物，而人们需要了解真相，避免被误导。

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Edit:2025.07.09

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