328: Yes, (Bad) Fats DO Make You Fat

Today's guest is the author of the classic book Deep Nutrition and her new book the Fatburn Fix.

Dr. Cate joins us today to discuss how the number one most important health factor is whether you can burn your body fat or not—more important than smoking, exercise, family history or even sleep – and how toxic body fat actually protects itself by causing sugar cravings. We also go deep over our shared skepticism of fish oils and how refined seed oils can be contributing to weight loss resistance. Learn simple things you can do now.

More about Dr. Cate Shanahan:

Dr. Catherine Shanahan is a board-certified family physician. She trained in biochemistry and genetics at Cornell University before attending Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She practiced in Hawaii for ten years, where she studied ethnobotany and her healthiest patients’ culinary habits. She served as the director of the LA Lakers PRO Nutrition program for six years and now operates Healthy Choice Corporate Wellness and Metabolic Health from her office in Orlando, Florida.

Show notes:

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Transcript:

Dr. Pompa:
Boy, on this Cell TV, this is a great interview. We resonate on some topics that are life changing for you all. This is absolutely important information. Hormones and beyond, but I talk about my lack of belief in fish oil. I finally found someone else that resonates with me on this. We dig in to seed oils. The dangers and how this can disrupt your ability to burn fat. As a matter of fact, we talk about how these fats can be stored as fats and it can lead to weight loss resistance, other hormone problems. Wait until you see this video. The good part is, is we give you simple things you can do now. Check it out.

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith and today we welcome Dr. Cate Shanahan. Author of the classic book, Deep Nutrition and her new book, The Fatburn Fix. Dr. Cate joins us today to discuss how the number one most important health factor is whether you can burn your body fat or not. More important than smoking, exercise, family history, or even sleep. How toxic body fat actually protects itself by causing sugar cravings. This is a fascinating topic and I can’t wait to hear more. Let’s get started and welcome Dr. Cate Shanahan and of course, Dr. Pompa. Welcome both of you.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s up?

Dr. Shanahan:
Hi, Dr. Pompa. Thanks for having me on.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Gosh, I love all of these topics, man. These are some of my big pet peeves. I can’t wait to dig in. How many people are eating bad fats that are causing everything that was just mentioned. I just could not agree more. People have no clue. Even those of you watching this, it could be you because even healthy people are being saturated with what they think are healthy fats. We’re going to explore that a little bit deeper. Dr. Cate, I couldn’t agree more. I love that. It’s more important than smoking. It’s more important than all of these things that we think are important. The ability to burn fat. What a great title of a book because I say this. You can judge how healthy you are by your ability to burn your own body fat.

Dr. Shanahan:
Absolutely, 100%. I mean, there’s nothing more important than that because that’s what gives you energy and you can’t yourself don’t live very long if they don’t get energy. If we are jeopardizing our energy supply to our cells, we are jeopardizing our cell’s ability to function to even survive. I love that right behind you, fix the cell, get well. That’s what I’m talking about. Oh, I’m talking about fuel the cell, but it’s the same idea. The same root cause I think as we touched on before we started the conversation is that these companies have been feeding us seed oils and if we’re not paying attention, if we don’t know what they are, we’re probably eating them. I can almost guarantee.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. We’re going to talk about that, so hang in there everybody. We’re going to get there. When we look at this being more dangerous and everything, everything that you mentioned there, people have to understand that when we look at cancer, we know it’s a metabolic problem meaning really the inability to use your fat, your own body fat for energy. When we look at obviously the explosion of diabetes and all these conditions, this is what we’re talking about. This is a cellular issue, to your point. This is your cell’s inability to take your own body fat, when you’re not eating, burn it up and obviously keeps you lean.

Again, if you’re someone out there that gets hangry, that says, I just need to eat – oh, and by the way, I see, I hang with healthy people. I see them eating all the time, but see, if you ask them how many meals, Dr. Cate, they eat. They would say, oh, I always eat two meals a day. I eat three meals a day, but I see them shoveling food the whole time. Oh, and it’s the drinks too. They say organic and they’re healthy, kombuchas, but they’re constantly feeding the beast because truthfully, their mitochondria, their cells are not able to use their own fat successfully. Therefore, it’s nuts, it’s this, it’s that. All organic of course. Do you see the same thing? Even though it’s healthy is that a problem still?

Dr. Shanahan:
I do see it all the time and yes, absolutely, it’s a problem. Part of the reason that people will tell you, they’ll look at you straight in the face even and say, oh, I hardly eat anything, but as they’re carrying around a big Starbucks Frappuccino which has 400 calories because here’s why. I mean, I always – I’m like, what’s going on? How could they not literally see that? Once I came to understand that habit and the way our metabolism is driving our hunger and misleading us into thinking that, well, if we were hungry or even worse, if we’re tired or even more powerful, if we had brain fog or we’re irritable and we ate something, doesn’t that mean that our last meal wasn’t – I’m sorry.

We ate something and when that makes us feel better, it alleviates. Doesn’t that mean that my last meal wasn’t big enough? I kind of deserve. I kind of need this. I’m behind. I’m not getting enough energy because I’m not eating enough calories. The math doesn’t happen because unless you’re – let’s face it, once you’re a biohacker or you really know amounts, you’re not going to know. It’s hard to figure out how many calories you’re actually eating. You have to go by how you feel.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Dr. Shanahan:
That’s what I try to help people do in the book, The Fatburn Fix is to help them understand what they’re feeling. Recognize what they’re feeling for what it is which is a signal of a metabolic disaster where you can’t burn your own body fat. That happens if you get these hangry symptoms. If it’s not just ordinary stomach grumbling hunger that if you get busy, drink a glass of water, it just goes away because it’s not an emergency. The difference is that, if you get hangry, you have brain fog. Most of the time it just doesn’t go away at all unless something really buzzes your adrenaline out because adrenaline helps you dig down and release a little bit more body fat even though you might have insulin resistance, adrenaline helps fight against that. It also helps you convert – get your blood sugar up as well.

For the most part, that doesn’t happen in a normal morning at work. You have your breakfast maybe early, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00 and then, by mid-morning 10:00, you’re having a little low on your energy and that’s when a lot of people with the worst weight problems by which I mean they’ve just tried so many times. They’ve gained and they’ve lost or the worst metabolic problems by which I mean they’re on their way to getting cancer but they don’t even know it.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.

Dr. Shanahan:
They don’t even know it. I say this because everybody I know who’s had cancer at a young age, in their 30s or 40s, they were snackers or grazers. In retrospect, it didn’t even register as a thing, but in retrospect, on deep analysis of what they did, oh yeah, I carry something around in my purse. I had a bunch of stuff stashed in my car, in my drawers even if their weight was normal. This is such an important sign that is trying to tell us. It’s our bodies trying to tell us, hey, I’m in trouble.

We have to pay attention to it and that’s what I – I have a bunch of chapters devoted to that and even worksheets devoted to assessing your hunger, assessing what kind of symptoms are you getting when you’re hungry because there’s 11 of them that are super common flags that your metabolism is not in good shape and you are not able to burn your body fat. I just have to excuse my hair because people always comment on my hair when I can’t get to my hairdresser and I’m way overdue.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. I have to ask this question though. We’re still off topic. What are their comments about your hair? Your hair looks thick and healthy. What’s going on?

Dr. Shanahan:
Oh, why thank you, Dr. Pompa. Oh, they’ll say like – well, one was it looked like a cow licked her head. Yeah, and another one is, it’s asymmetrical.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, my gosh. Let me tell you something. I hear people say – no matter what, people are critical. I get it all the time, so who cares. That’s funny. I love you already just because you’re [00:09:56]. Just the fact that you pointed that, I just absolutely love and adore you now. I always say my wife is brain-mouth. She thinks it, it comes out. That’s just what happened there. You thought, you fluffed your hair and immediately it just came right out. I love it. Now we’re having fun, see. This is a huge topic. You and I resonate so well on this on every aspect. It’s amazing. I feel like we’re in the healthy world and that’s most of my viewers. Those looking to get healthy and do healthy things, but oh my gosh, yeah, there’s so many people that don’t understand these concepts that we’re talking about here.

I want people to understand one thing and you said it, so I’m just proofing what you just said. This isn’t a fat-skinny thing. This happens to skinny people or fat people. The bigger danger here is, yes, this can keep you from burning your own fat and you can gain weight. Weight loss resistance, all the cravings, failure on every diet. Yes, this is the reason why, but you could be the skinny person who tends to, when they’re not able to burn their fat, they burn their muscle. You get what I call skinny fat with fatty organs that are arguably more dangerous and these people end up with cancer just the same. I think you’re right. The long-term gain here is obviously all these hormone issues people have along the way. Not feeling well, not sleeping, anxiety, blah, blah, blah, but cancer is absolutely the scariest part of this. You said that, you said that people end in cancer.

All right, so let’s talk about – my book and your book really jive well together and most people who watch this have my book, Beyond Fasting, because this is all my diet variation fasting strategies. Just I utilized and fixed this problem. Your book, just perfect. I love those symptoms. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the symptoms and everyone should get your book. We’ll make sure we have the link there. Talk about some of these other symptoms besides hangry, besides hungry. What are these symptoms?

Dr. Shanahan:
Anxiety is a big one.

Dr. Pompa:
I just threw that off because I knew that, yeah.

Dr. Shanahan:
Anxiety is brought on partly by two aspects of this. One is, when your brain is not getting enough energy, thought is slowed down or it’s distorted and disturbed and that is very anxiety-provoking especially if you’re in a new circumstance like you just started a job or you’re trying to find – you’re driving and you’re trying to find a place you’ve never been to before. It’s super anxiety-provoking when your brain is not working right. Then the other part of how all of this drives anxiety is that, in order to get energy to your brain, your body releases adrenaline. Adrenaline makes you jittery and anxiety-prone and you can get lost and perseverate on your failures or your bad thoughts or your bad feelings when you’ve got too much adrenaline in your system. That’s a huge one and I –

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, cortisol. It will just drive up cortisol which can drive anxiety because glucose [00:13:32] cortisol and I want people listening to be clear. The reason that she’s talking about this is because your brain can only use glucose for energy unless it burns fat, your own fat for energy that it makes ketones and the brain can use ketones. If you don’t or not able to burn your fat for energy, guess what it needs, glucose. If you’re not eating, guess what it does, anxiety. It’s either cortisol or adrenaline to get the glucose to the brain. Am I right?

Dr. Shanahan:
Absolutely. Both of those do the job and the way I look at the difference is that, cortisol is like the slow-motion version of adrenaline. Adrenaline you can have a thought and boom it will – yeah, exactly. You can feel your heart pounding and stuff like that. Cortisol is more like on a continual daily basis. It goes up and then if you are chronically stressed, all your cortisol rhythms get off as I’m sure you’ve talked about. That’s anxiety. Then the next one is brain fog and these are super duper related obviously. You’re not getting energy to your brain, so you might be staring at work and this is in a different circumstance.

You’re not necessarily in some intense, I got to figure it out situation, but more in a slow, boring-er situation where, oh, I can’t wait for lunch. Then you’re just staring at your job, your task that you have to do or whatever it is. You can’t get your head wrapped around it the way that you feel that you would like to, to get the stupid thing in front of you done. That’s brain fog and that’s how it happens. That’s again for low brain energy. Then another one is dizziness. In fact, such sever dizziness can happen that people actually have nausea and vertigo. They have to sit down. Vertigo is a severe dizziness where it seems like the room is spinning or you have to hang on to something. You lose your balance.

I’ve had a couple of folks who have – when their blood sugar drops and it doesn’t have to be – because they can’t burn their fat, their blood sugar can drop from 110 which is just a little bit high to something like 80 which is actually within normal and I’ll see that happen because I do continuous glucose monitors with some of my patients. That will be the moment where they’re like, oh my God, I’m getting one of my dizzy spells. I have to sit down. The fix for that is being able to burn your body fat. That’s another super common one. Then heart palpitations are also very, very common. Again, because of the adrenaline. Shaking because of the adrenaline.

You can also get cold extremities or somebody told me that they feel cold all over, but cold hands because also the adrenaline – well, the adrenaline makes you shaky, but it also shuts down blood flow to the extremities. Also, just having inadequate energy supply or metabolism, your blood flow is disordered. You can have all kinds of problems related to that and this is more in the long-term you can actually get erectile dysfunction, sexual dysfunction because that’s hugely blood flow dependent too.

Dr. Pompa:
Of course, yeah.

Dr. Shanahan:
Nausea is another super common side effect. Those are some of the most common.

Dr. Pompa:
How about wake you up in the middle of the night because people wake up in the middle of the night because your brain’s going, I’m not getting glucose. Why, because when you and I are sleeping, and Ashley, we’re burning up fat for energy. It takes tremendous amounts of energy to sleep for your brain. When the brain’s not getting glucose, because you can’t burn fat and make ketones, so then, what does it do? Uh-oh, I’m going to die. Guess what? It lights up cortisol or adrenaline and guess what you do, you wake up.

Dr. Shanahan:
Exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
Saved its life, it saves its brain, but you wake up and go, I can’t sleep.

Dr. Shanahan:
Now you can’t sleep which makes it worse with the cortisol. It’s a vicious cycle. It’s a downward spiral. Now that I’ve been doing the continuous glucose monitors, I actually see that the lowest time of – what happens when a lot of the folks have these issues where they can’t burn their body fat, your blood sugar will drop somewhere between midnight and 6 and it will be low for you which is too low for your brain and there’ll be a little dip and then, I’ll see it come back up again as that cortisol spikes and I’ll know that that’s the time when somebody probably got woken up and couldn’t get back to sleep.

Dr. Pompa:
Of course. I talk a lot about how toxins cause this cellular problem where we can’t burn our own fat for energy, et cetera, et cetera. I teach deeply on how bad fats can cause the cell membrane to have problems. That’s where the hormone receptors are and that causes problems in the mitochondrial membrane. Yet I think that people still don’t get it. Let’s make them get it. You mentioned seed oils. These are polyunsaturated fats. Why would these be a causative factor for this problem?

Dr. Shanahan:
Because they’re unstable. Very simply, it means that they have a tendency to react with oxygen and turn – when they do that, they turn into toxins. It’s like it’s a latent toxic compound. These are the toxins with long names like 4-hydroxynonenal and 4-hydroxyhexanal. They are known cytotoxins. You put them in a micromolar concentrations meaning like 1 millionth of a drop and that they can kill cells with that little concentration. They’re not necessarily containing those toxins when you buy them although the tests almost universally show that they have degraded. They’re that unstable. They don’t even stay stable in the shelf and then they become even less stable when they get into your body because now they’re interacting with all kinds of other chemicals that – and the more that there are, it’s like flint and oxygen and it just starts a fire basically and that’s literally what it is because it is burning.

It’s an oxygen reaction. It causes all kinds of problems. Not just the fact that we have these toxins form, but even if on the way to calming down these toxic reactions you have something called free radical cascades and these are things that are like a domino effect of damage in a cell membrane. It’s one little molecule reacts with oxygen and within a matter of a single second, you can have 9 billion other of the fatty acids in that same cell’s membrane. One single second, all become damaged and dysfunctional. They take out a huge chunk of that cell’s membrane and it's not going to be able to function normally for a while until that gets fixed.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s amazing. I have a PowerPoint. I was telling you this. It says, 132 days of dysfunction because when you eat these rancid seed oils, they make their way – or vegetable oil, canola oil. It’s a seed. Anyway, they make their way into the cell membrane and literally create 132 days on average of dysfunction. That’s based on what you’re describing. These things get into your body. Okay, so I know my viewers right now are going, wait, wait, what are these oils. I know you list them in your book, but give us the oils to stay away from. Can I eat organic oil? Can I do this? Can I do that? What do we eat and how do we get the safe oils? Which ones are? Talk about that.

Dr. Shanahan:
Yeah. Those are all such important questions. They’re really literally the thing that could save your life. There’s three C’s and three S’s and I want everybody to try and remember them. These are the most common seed oils. We’ve got canola, corn, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower. Those are the most common that you're going to find. They are also –

Dr. Pompa:
I love that. Three S’s, three C’s. That’s beautiful because I tell people those. I’m not smart enough to do that. That’s great. I can actually remember from that.

Dr. Shanahan:
My boss came up with that. I got hired this current job.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re not smart enough either.

Dr. Shanahan:
No, he came up with it. He gets props for that. Yeah, I was doing it all out of order. I was like, well, canola’s probably the most important.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, yeah, me too, yeah.

Dr. Shanahan:
They’re also knowns as the industrial term vegetable oil. Vegetable oils refers to any one of those six oils. Not to broccoli and peas. It’s great branding on the part of Unilever and Monsanto. All those folks who grow this stuff. It sounds healthy because vegetables who could beat that. My gosh, if you squeeze oil out of vegetables, that sounds like you're taking the goodness out. Don't believe it.

Dr. Pompa:
It sounds really heathy actually, yeah.

Dr. Shanahan:
Right. It does, but it’s referring to those three C’s and three S’s. Then, when you go to restaurants, there's a couple more. It’s like A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y. The sometimes Y of the vegetable oils are rice bran oil and grape seed oil, and those are – it’s the same idea. They are super highly polyunsaturated and they generally are also highly processed because these seeds don't want to give up these oils and they have to be extracted under high heat pressure often with a solvent like hexane which is an ingredient in gasoline. Then it has to be removed so that's the refining, bleaching and deodorizing steps and so, that is where you strip out any shred of nutrition.

That’s why I can still say go ahead and have sunflower seeds. I’m not one of those people that’s against soy. I’m sure you stand on that one, but soy in moderation is fine like any other vegetable in moderation. I feel like –

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I mean, a non-GMO soy. People say, oh, what about the phytoestrogen? It’s fine in those amounts.

Dr. Shanahan:
Exactly. If you're basing your lifeline at some of the stories, you shouldn’t do that with really anything, but – so if you want to consume it in soy, it’s fine because it's still going to have the vitamins that the seed uses to stabilize, to control the oxidation reactions to keep it stable. There’s all kinds of vitamins, antioxidants and minerals that are in the seed, but they get stripped out. They’re not in the [00:25:16].

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, I’m not against vegetable oil when it’s in vegetables. I’m not against seed oils when it’s in seeds because to your point, all these protective measures are there. I just want to – polyunsaturated fatty acids are very, very, very unstable. To your point, they’re denatured right out of the gate and that’s what we’re talking about here. When you look at your olive oil, you could say, well, where does that fit in? It’s a mono. It’s mostly monounsaturated. It could take heat better. Saturated fats can take heat even more. Polyunsaturated, just to be clear are what you're referencing.

Dr. Shanahan:
Absolutely. Since this is such an important part of my message, I have a – my website, one of the main accessed pages on it is my list of good fats and bad. If you just Google, Dr. Cate list of good fats and bad, it should come right up. It helps. It’s something you can take a picture of, keep it on your phone and refer to it. Then the document itself explains a lot of it because I'm sure you've been through this Dr. Pompa, but you probably get attacked dietitians and people who believe that canola oil is somehow special because it's got omega-3 fatty acids. They don't understand what they’re talking about honestly. When they even say polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Dr. Pompa:
I get attacked even worse than that because – and I don't even know where you stand on this and it's okay if we disagree. Fish oils or polyunsaturated fatty acids, my saying here, I love fish oil when it’s in fish, but I hate fish oil. Again, I get hate mail, but – listen, I dug at the studies. I don't believe it. I don't believe it, but anyway where do you stand on that?

Dr. Shanahan:
No, I totally agree, so I’m happy to hear you say that because it is like an outlier position because everybody feels like, oh, it’s the antidote because there's so much talk about the ratio of omega-6 and omega-3 and omega-3 being okay, well now, we need to supplement with that and I would love it if it were that simple, but really, what it looks like is that you just have to stop eating so many of the seed oils including canola with omega-3.

Dr. Pompa:
Grain-fed meat throws that ratio off. Grain-fed meat is loaded with 6, so to your point, they say Americans are 21, 6 to 1-3 meaning way too much 6. Look, my study of the membrane is, the omega-6 is the king of the membrane. It’s the most important actually, so it's not that omega-6 is bad. We’re eating all of these vegetable oil, seed oils, grain-fed meats. Now we are 6 dominant. We want a better ratio than that, but that doesn't mean you eat more 3.

Dr. Shanahan:
No. Exactly because what happens is – if we want to talk just for a second about how it builds up in our bodies, you talk about how it builds up in your cell membranes. It builds up in our body fat too and to a massive amount. The cells do their best to regulate the polyunsaturated fat content that they have because they've got a recipe that they're trying to follow and they do their best. When they say no to those polyunsaturates, where does it go? You can’t get rid of it. It goes to your body fat. There’s only two ways to get rid of it. You have to burn it or it can come out – if you’re a woman, you can feed it to your babies through breast milk. You have to burn it and so, until you can burn it, it has to be stored and of course, it's stored in your body fat.

Now if we look at how much it was in there 100 years ago before there were all these industrial seed oils, before plant fats were 80% of our fat calories, when they were really just like 10% to 20% and the rest of it came from animals, our body fat had about 2%, 3% maybe 5% polyunsaturated fatty acid. Now when they do biopsies, it has up to 25% and some maybe even as high as 30% because the last study was done when the average consumption of this stuff was a lot lower. Our body fat percentage of PUFAs almost exactly mirrors our dietary percentage of PUFAs. Right now, for some people, that’s 30%. Your body fat is going to be 30% this stuff.

One of the things that is the most important study in the book, The Fatburn Fix is the study I found. It shows what happens when – these things are the fuel for your mitochondria. When it gets released from your body fat, your mitochondria are going to burn it. They can't say no either. These things will get into your cells and get into your mitochondria and then, your mitochondria will try to burn them. What happens is, it shuts down the mitochondria’s ability to produce energy. We're talking about the energy powerhouses of every single cell in your body. If your body fat has too much PUFA in it, then every time you're trying to burn your body fat, you're going to the gym and working out, you are damaging your mitochondria. You’re shutting down your cell’s energy production from fat. What do they have as a back-up plan? Sugar.

Dr. Pompa:
That will lead to the cancer, diabetes, heart disease, all the number one killers.

Dr. Shanahan:
Exactly. What you feel is that hypoglycemia. You feel that. It’s not because you need to regulate your blood sugar by eating, it’s because your body is so dependent on sugar that you can't get enough in your blood stream to feed all the cells that need some at any given moment in time. Blood sugar is regulated. That's what diabetes is. When we can't regulate our blood sugar anymore, type 2 diabetes. If you are a non-diabetic, you can only have about 3 quarters of a teaspoon of sugar in your blood stream at any given time which is about 3 grams which is about 12 calories.

I mean, how much exercise can you do as a sugar burner. You have to have tons of glycogen in your muscle and that's how your muscles store sugar. If you’re an athlete or into fitness, all of these studies that talk about, oh my God, you need to have glycogen. You need carbo loading. It’s so important to fill up the glycogen. Those are done in people who have this problem that I'm describing where they can’t burn their body fat because they live in America. We all eat too much of this stuff unless we are looking out for them. Our athletes even. This goes back to the skinny people.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. I mean, look, I can go – typically, I don’t even eat my first meal until 3:00 or 4:00. Half the time, I’m not hungry. [00:33:00] the busier I am, I don’t even know because my body's eating from its body fat. That’s it. It’s doing its job, but to your point, I love that explanation of how these fats end up being burned in the mitochondria. That was well said. I mean, that really files up the whole system of why you can't burn your own fat.

Dr. Shanahan:
Yeah. It damages the mitochondria. It helps you understand where we get all these mitochondrial diseases from. Cancer we know is a mitochondrial disease, but neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s, these [00:33:36].

Dr. Pompa:
I mean, everybody watching this, everybody that knows a little bit about health, we all agree and understand that sugar is part of the metabolic issue. Do you feel this is a bigger issue? That these fats are causing then sugar to the mitochondria because everyone’s oh, sugar’s why the mitochondria is failing and leads to cancer, but is this the bigger problem?

Dr. Shanahan:
I do understand that is the bigger problem, as a bigger problem now. When I first started – actually, when I wrote Deep Nutrition, I was like, well, they’re both really bad. Just avoid both of them, but I really feel that this is worse because –

Dr. Pompa:
Me too, by the way. Me too. We’re on a very small island.

Dr. Shanahan:
Yeah, very small.

Dr. Pompa:
With just a couple of people. I don’t know.

Dr. Shanahan:
Yeah, a bunch of crazy like Gilligan's Island. One day, they’ll rescue us and they'll be like, thank you. That's my fantasy anyway. Yeah, because if you eat too much sugar, you store it as fat. Yeah, that’s not great, but your body can control what kind of fat it’s stored as. It can store it as saturated and monounsaturated fat. In fact, that’s how it stores it. It has to store it that way. We can’t store sugar in the form of sugar. Our body fat gets converted to fat. We can’t make polyunsaturated fatty acid. That’s why we do need some in our diet which is why this whole topic is so confusing to people who have a little bit of information.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s right. We have to get it from where it’s protected because it’s so fragile. That’s why seeds are great, but you get some of the polyunsaturated fats that you need and you get it in a protected form.

Dr. Shanahan:
Yes, exactly. When we talk about the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, I was looking at some of the traditional cultures that would be getting a lot of – potentially a lot of fat. How much omega-3 are they getting? Because somebody posted a really good question on one of my websites about what about the Eskimos because if you're saying omega-3 is so bad and Eskimos get a lot of their fat from salmon or – they said salmon, but actually, they really also got a ton of it from seal. What’s the composition there?

Dr. Pompa:
[00:36:01] more often seal truthfully, to your point.

Dr. Shanahan:
Yeah. That actually, according to what I could find, seals have a huge amount of a highly unsaturated polyunsaturated fatty acids like the omega-3s, the long chain ones and they've got – some are at least 15% which is a huge amount of that extremely unstable. Some parts of them may even have as much as 20%, but it's totally different because they ate it without cooking it. It was cold all the time, so the reactions were slower and the fish themselves can have all this polyunsaturated fatty acid in their body fat and the seals can because they're in freezing cold arctic water. It’s the temperature that really has a huge impact on the nature and the constitution of your body fat. What I’m saying is basically the recipe for your body fat. What is the right amount of saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated?

Human beings who are in – we’ve got a warm environment most the time because we wear clothes. We need a lot more mono – more of the stable stuff. That’s why when we eat too much sugar, that’s what we make is the stable stuff. Even though sugar is not – I’m not a fan of too much of anything especially not sugar, but at least, we can basically detoxify it as long as we are not diabetic. We can still detoxify by essentially getting it out of our bloodstream, getting it out of our tissues, and storing it in safe haven in our body fat in the form of saturated and monounsaturated fat.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, yeah. Good point, right. The sugars we have avenues to burn it or store it as saturated or monosaturated. These fats we don’t. Okay. You tipped into this fish oil conversation. Fish oil is like antifreeze, the cold water. How much do we really need? I've interviewed Brian Peskin on the show. He found me because he heard me talking about the dangers of fish oil on the cell membranes. He talks a lot about the parent fats which are your alpha-linolenic, linoleic acids. Your omega-3 and omega-6, the parent fat. What people don’t understand is we have the ability to make DHA from those fats. They’re called the derivatives meaning that we don’t need fish oil.

Otherwise, what about people in land. They would die, wouldn’t they? Because they didn’t have access to fish. They didn’t have trucks that would bring it. When we look it at these parent fats, the alpha-linolenic acid and then the linoleic acid, you can take those and make these other fats that people say are so important. The brain needs very little actually. The brain needs some of those omega-3s more, but it’s not as what people think. Talk a little bit about that.

Dr. Shanahan:
We can make it. I want to talk for a second just why you hear it said so often that we can’t elongate it. That's because when you do studies in a situation where you don't recognize that the animals you're studying are getting too much PUFA and/or they’re getting trans-fat.

Dr. Pompa:
You said PUFA, that’s polyunsaturated fatty acid.

Dr. Shanahan:
Thank you.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. PUFAs are polyunsaturated fatty acids. Now you can say PUFA all you want.

Dr. Shanahan:
PUFAs go poof, they’re unstable. That’s how I like to help people remember it. The animals are fed animal chow that’s made of corn oil so they are being studied and this is how they've come to a lot of conclusions that, oh well, animals can't extend, humans even, can't extend or lengthen. They’re taking the parent molecule being at 18 carbons and the ones that your brain is made out of, being made out of, 20, 22 ,24. That can't happen in animals including humans who have too much trans-fat in our diet or too much omega-6 because we have damaged enzymes.

There’s a very important enzyme for this elongation process that’s called – I think it’s either delta-9 or delta-6 desaturase. I can’t remember. It’s been a while since I wrote the book, Deep Nutrition where I talked about it. That enzyme is knocked out by trans-fat and by high levels of PUFA and oxidation. That’s why we have this I guess mythology out there that, oh no, you do have to supplement with the long-chain stuff if you can’t eat.

Dr. Pompa:
That was well said actually, because you're right. When we looked at some of these original studies, they were like, oh my gosh, so little is converted. That’s why we need it. We have to take fish oil, DHA, and da, da, da. To your point, they didn’t look what was broken, what was stopping a conversion. That enzyme is affected, to your point by these bad unstable fats. Interesting. That’s an interesting way. I never thought of it that way.

Dr. Shanahan:
Yeah. That’s one of the missing pieces in so much medical and nutrition research is that, when they talk about animal studies especially the animal chow is – the fat is generally corn oil.

Dr. Pompa:
They feed them corn, grains, GMO too and all the bad stuff.

Dr. Shanahan:
Yes, exactly. Of course, it’s stale and everything about it is not what the animal would eat given the choice. The animals are every bit as damaged as we are, as the people that they’re trying to do all these experiments to help people who are metabolically damaged because of their diet. They’re giving the animals the same diet so, so much of the research is skewed and confusatory because of that. It’s almost like its fake science. It’s really, really, really crazy. What do you do about that? How do you even prove anything?

That gets to the topic of our first book. My husband and I wrote the first book together, Deep Nutrition. We talk about what is it that – we talk about nutrition science as if we're coming up with it today. As if we need randomized, epidemiologically controlled studies to know anything at all about nutrition. There’s no science. No valid science beyond what we put in our medical journals. Wait a second. People were healthier 100 years ago. Why don't we just do what they did and how can we figure that out? Do we have to –

Dr. Pompa:
Do a double-blind placebo study?

Dr. Shanahan:
Right. We can look at cookbooks. That’s what my husband and I did. I looked at dozens and dozens and dozens of cookbooks written in English from all the countries that I could get in English from 1700 and 1800. I also watched a lot of travel shows about indigenous cultures.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a cool way to do it. First of all, they were cooking with lard but they were eating grass-fed animals.

Dr. Shanahan:
Totally different.

Dr. Pompa:
That was different, right?

Dr. Shanahan:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
They didn’t have vegetable oils.

Dr. Shanahan:
Right, right, right.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s amazing. To your point as well, what studies actually have done is really screwed this whole thing up because we're studying broken people. You know what I’m saying? We’re studying broken animals. We’re studying saturated fats are bad. It's like studies have gotten us in trouble. I said, what did they do when heart disease barely existed. They were eating a lot of saturated fats. What they weren’t doing is eating these oils that we’re talking about. This isn’t rocket science. A question just popped into my mind before you said that other thing and I have to ask it. This is for our people who have struggled losing weight. Because we store – we either burn these PUFAs. We’re going to call them PUFAs now, or we store them as fat.

When they are stored as fat, we know that our good fat, stored fat, saturated or mono, those we can access and burn. Does our body have trouble taking the stored PUFAs and burning it? Does this end up to be the fat we can’t burn, the cellulite, the bad fat?

Dr. Shanahan:
There’s a researcher I spoke to at UC Davis, Frances [00:45:04]. She felt that they do have a bioaccumulation effect in our bodies that they seem to maybe perhaps be less preferentially released compared to the other fat.

Dr. Pompa:
The reason I asked the question because I didn’t know the answer. Sometimes you ask questions you know and you want them to know, but it’s like, I didn’t know the answer, but the reason I came to the question is because of my major premise. The body, all it wants to ever do is survive. It knows that these oils are not good to their mitochondria. It has to burn them in the mitochondria and it damaged mitochondria. [00:45:48] intelligence reach for the mono and the saturated stored fats first, that was my thought.

Dr. Shanahan:
Yes, exactly. I love that you do that. That kind of, well, if I were the body, what would make sense to me. That’s guided a lot of my thought process is because it seems as though nature's pretty darn smart and it's smarter, way smarter than us. Yes. It’s been at this game for a very long time and very successful. That is exactly how I think about it and so, I was actually – I didn't know how to go about pursuing the answer to that question, but I was just having a conversation around this woman's research with her. She just spontaneously mentioned that. I was like, oh, well, that is just totally fascinating. It does make sense in that paradigm.

There’s a way to look it up. It has to do with the different kind of enzyme. Some that were only just recently discovered that have a preference for a certain fatty acid at certain location in the triglyceride, but I haven’t done it. What I have done is decided. This is a hypothesis. That what happens is, when there is a certain concentration of these PUFAs, when you’ve been eating seed oils – when you’re a baby, your body fat is as nature would have it. You have more that ideal concentration, but as time goes on and we keep eating more seed oils every day, day after day, year after year, the concentration does go up in our body fat and there are studies that reflect this.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, [00:47:34] 25% versus 2 to 3% which is normal.

Dr. Shanahan:
Yes. After a certain number of decades, then it does very much reflect your dietary consumption. What happens is the fat cells then are inflamed. We have this conversation around inflammatory fat and omental fat as if it's only the omental fat, but I think a lot of folks who have enough seed oils in their body fat have – every fat cell is inflammatory because we know this. These fat cells are not healthy. They don’t produce the right hormones and they don’t respond normally to hormones and they’re incontinent. They can’t hang on to fat and so, that they will release it all the time between meals even. Even in spite of the fact that there's too much insulin in the bloodstream and a healthy fat cell would normally be keeping that in there.

That’s when people really get into trouble with their arteries. When your fat cells can no longer keep a hold of the fat that they're supposed to be storing and they're incontinent and basically just goes in for a little bit and then it comes back out into the arteries. You aren’t burning it for energy because the cells don't want it. They’re getting sugar. That’s when a person is in such a bad metabolic state. They stated having hard attacks and strokes, and they have a real trouble regulating their blood sugar at that point. They get to where there are just very, very metabolically damaged and fragile. They are, at that point, a ticking time bomb.

That can happen in your 40s if you’ve had enough of these PUFAs in your life. When I was in medical school, type 2 diabetes was a little more common than type 1. Okay, yes. I mean, my age. It was for elderly people or it was genetic. Now we’re seeing it so common in people in their 30s and even in children. There’s just no way it can just be the carbohydrates that were eating because if you look at the amount, we’re not eating any more carbohydrates than we were at the turn of the century. They’re different. There are more fructose arguably. Definitely more processed, but in terms of the volume, it’s the same.

If you look at the amount of PUFA, we were eating somewhere around what was in our body fat, 2% to 3%. Now it’s 10 times that much. How is that not the first thing that people talk about when it comes to diet. It’s just like, this is the outlier. I know sugar. Sugar is not good for you. Having a sweet tooth is not healthy. You don't have a hope of curing your sweet tooth or seriously developing a healthy relationship with sugar while your body fat is forcing yourselves to be addicted to sugar.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn't have said it best. Gosh, we’re going to have to have you back on. We are at the top of the show and I’m like, gosh, I want to talk about this. These fats disrupt the cell membrane. They affect your detox. The reason people are failing on diets is because of this reason. You just said, it’s like – Cate, we have to write a book together but I’m going to bring you back on the show. I just want to continue this conversation. This is worthy of a part one and part 2, honestly. Because we are on to the bigger issue and there’s so few of us speaking this message. The world needs to hear it. Folks get rid of these fats in your diet. Buy Cate's book. I mean, this is – very few people know this information. Dr. Cate, thank you so much for being on here. I can’t wait to have you back. It’s funny because at the top of the show, we thought you were on Cell TV already.

Dr. Shanahan:
Circular time.

Dr. Pompa:
That's right. You’re going to be on a second time. I’m going to make sure Ashley – Ashley will put the links in for Dr. Cate. Dr. Cate, again, thank you for being on Cellular Healing TV. Fix the cell, get well.

Dr. Shanahan:
Thank you so much.

Dr. Pompa:
Bye-bye.

Dr. Shanahan:
This was fun. Thank you, Dr Pompa.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10:00 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.