Fats and Oils Explained: What Matters for Your Health - Transcript

Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode

Max Lugavere
It's actually a myth that you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil. In the Mediterranean region of the world, they use extra virgin olive oil, not just to cook with, but they use it as a sauce. For some reason, we've been told that the Mediterranean dietary pattern as it's lauded in the in the Western medical literature involves canola oil and all of these crap oils and that you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Now before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, doctor Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated, trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, doctorhyman.com, for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

Now we were all taught when I was a kid that vegetable oil and by the way, what the hell is vegetable oil? You see vegetable on a bottle in a store? I go to that broccoli oil? I mean, that does not even exist. So we're talking about seed and bean and not oils like soybean oil, canola oil, sap oil, corn oil, canola oil.

These are all these oils that are out there. And there is by the way, there is something called vegetable oil which you can buy in the grocery stores. I have no idea what that is. Anyway, I wouldn't eat that. We're all trained that they're better for you, and then we should be avoiding butter and saturated fat and animal fats.

And so there's been a big push to shift our diet from consuming more saturated fats to more unsaturated fats and saturation, unsaturation. It just it's a chemical classification based on how many of the, sort of carbons are saturated with hydrogen on a fat molecule. So the more saturated is, the more hard it is at room temperature, the more hydrogens are. It's basically just basically the classification system. But basically, they have different functions in your body.

And basically, we're told that we should not be eating these saturated fats that cause high cholesterol. They they clog our arteries and lead to heart disease. And basically, we're told to swap out saturated for unsaturated fats or called PUFAs or the omega 6 fatty acids in these vegetable oils or, quote, vegetable oils. And they're they're everywhere. They're kinda clear cases.

They're highly refined. They're processed with hexane. They're deodorized. They're, I mean, they're really, extremely highly processed foods. Now some like olive oil or extra virgin olive oil, they're simple pressing.

You can do it with, like, a machine. It's like a press, and it squeezes the oil out. That's a very different thing than the kind of aggressive extraction methods they use for modern, processed, plant oils. Now the the, these oils are, by definition, unstable. Right?

If you take lard and you keep it at room temperature and you leave it there for two months, it's fine. If you take a a plant oil and you leave it out, it's gonna become oxidized. So it becomes very easily damaged or more unstable, more easily damaged, more oxidized, more oxidation, leads to more inflammation, and they can be problematic. And so, you know, the oils can be more inflammatory, but there's certain caveats we'll talk about in that context. But the American Heart Association, the National Education Cholesterol Program, the National Institutes of Health, and even our government's own dietary guidelines are telling us to swap out saturated fat for these unsaturated fats or these these plant oils.

And a lot of well respected doctors and scientists have been telling us this for a long, long time, and we've been listening. It turns out it's not so clear cut. We're we were talking about why we should maybe change our perspective and be a little more nuanced about this. Black and white thinking is not helpful in any subject, particularly nutrition. And and and so, really, is it all or nothing?

Should we, like, eliminate completely plant oils from our diet? Which oil should we % eliminate? Which oils can we include somewhat? Should we be eating only saturated fat like coconut oil and butter and lard? I mean, what is the right answer here?

And I wrote a whole book about this called eat fat get thin. You wanna go into more more detail about it. But, essentially, we're a little bit confused, and it's not not surprising because there was an article, for example, in 2010 from Tufts University that concluded there's a lot of benefit from cutting out saturated fat and increasing our intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids, are the PUFAs or these plant oils. Now, the same group looked in 2014 at a meta analysis of all the literature, kind of looking at 72 different studies. I think it was published in the annual internal medicine.

They found no benefit to reducing saturated fat for cardiovascular disease or increased polyunsaturated fats, except there was a benefit for increasing omega 3 fats. So this is really key is the omega three fat piece is really important. Omega 3 fats are basically from wild food, wild fish, wild plants. We don't eat that much anymore, but omega threes are really important for our brain function, our skin health, our immune health, inflammation regulation, so many different things. And it usually comes from wild fish at this point.

Sardines are 1 of the best sources. So so we should be paying attention to that. But we're not, easily clear about this because there's so much conflicting data and experts can't seem to agree, you know, like you've got, you know, top nutrition scientists out there, I think, 1 thing and from the NIH and another group that thinks the opposite. So, like, how do we even begin to sort of come up with what would actually make sense here in terms of what's the the truth? And that's what I wanna kinda unpack today a little bit.

So, you know, the basic idea is that if you if you consume these PUFAs, these polyunsaturated fatty acids, it lowers LDL cholesterol, which is true. If you basically cut out saturated fat and you add in these plant oils, you see bean oils, you will tend to have a lower LDL cholesterol. But is that enough to recommend that we should be doing this? And I think it's confusing because, you know, lowering LDL is not necessarily the the key to reversing heart disease. It has to do with a lot of factors and some resistance, oxidation, inflammation, and so forth.

So there was 1 really quite amazing study that and and and the most sort of prefaces by saying that most of the studies that we're looking at these polyunsaturated fats are observational studies, population studies, some are interventional studies where you can do a trial and get an answer about cause and effect. But and they're they're they're a little hard to sort of decipher because, you know, in studies, for example, where people are eating a lot of saturated fat, they're also eating a lot of sugar and starch. And, you know, it's very different putting butter on your bagel and putting butter on your broccoli. Because when you put butter on your bagel, you're adding starch and saturated fat, and that's deadly. Adding butter to your broccoli, not so much a problem.

So if you really have a low intake of starch and sugar and set you eat tartar fats, it won't necessarily be big of an issue. And there's some genetics that has to do with who can tolerate such a fat. And I I don't know if we'll get it have time to get into that today, but, it's a little more nuanced. But basically, it's it's not necessarily only the saturated fat. It's what you're eating it with.

So if you cut out starch and sugar, saturated fats don't seem to be to be the boogeyman. And you can you can have a good look at my book. There's some increasing, knowledge about this since my book was released. I think it was in 2016 maybe. And you can get a sense of of really, you know, where this is at, though, by having a look at the book.

But the other the other problem is a lot of the studies looking at omega sixes, omega threes, polyunsaturated fats were confusing because they combine different types of oil. For example, certain oils like corn oil, safflower oil, peanut oil are plant oils, but they're almost entirely omega six. Whereas other oils like canola or soybean oil have a mixture of omega six and omega three. So when you look at the data, people who just consume the omega sixes but no omega threes. Had far worse outcomes, had far worse outcomes in terms of heart attacks and death.

So we know that's not good just to have omega six oils by themselves, especially in a society that's omega three deficient. So we basically used to eat a lot of wild stuff and have a ratio of omega six to 3, about 4 to one, two to 1. Now it can be up to 20 to 1. I had a patient who was diabetic, heart failure, very overweight, really ate junk food all the time, and her ratio was 20 to 1, which is just a disaster. Very low omega three is very high omega sixes.

So you have to be kinda not just lump all the plant oils into 1 bucket. You have to kinda be a little more nuanced, and you can actually look online. There's a table, I think, on Wikipedia showing the ratios of omega six and three for every plant oil. So you can kinda stick away from the ones like corn oil. So there was a study that was done.

And then then now we're gonna talk about this for me because it's really important study. It was done in the You couldn't do that study now. It's unethical, but it was done in a in a psychiatric hospital where they had complete control over their diets. They gave 1 group butter and 1 group as their source of fat and 1 group corn oil. Now the Cornell group, even though they had a lower LDL cholesterol, dramatically lower, There was a higher risk of heart attacks and stroke and death compared and it was a randomized controlled trial, which is really hard to do on, like, 9000 people.

It's just impossible to do that because you have to lock people up to do this. Right? And people don't wanna be locked up. So this was a locked up people, basically who were able to be experiment on before ethics rules. And they found this incredible result, which was the opposite of what we thought.

And it was buried by the scientists who did the study because they couldn't believe it. So they didn't actually publish it. And it was funded by the government, and they should have published it. And it was some guy finding a bunch of files in a basement, like forty years later. They finally kind of assembled the data and published a study.

And it was it was really quite impressive study. And it really showed that if you're just looking at pure omega six and comparing that to saturated fat, that the omega six did far worse even though they lowered the LDL cholesterol more than this than than. And that was dramatic. So I think I think that's just an important cautionary note if you're consuming as well as make sure you have enough omega threes in your diet. So you really, I think, you know, looking at historically, we used to get these omega six oils from foods we ate, from beans, from seeds, from grains, from you know, basically, we we get these from the plants we ate, nuts, and and they're fine, and they're fine to consume from the whole food sources.

I don't have anywhere. Wanna have corn? It's got corn oil in it. If you wanna have, you know, peanuts, eat the peanuts. You know?

Don't eat the peanut oil. Don't eat the corn oil. If you wanna use some expeller or cold pressed organic non GMO soybean or canola oil, I think I think it's probably okay in small amounts as long as you're getting enough omega threes. And omega threes are more in the soy and canola oil. But most canola and soybean oil are GMO.

Most of them are sprayed with glyphosate. Most of them are highly refined, deodorized, and, processed in ways that may make them more harmful. So it's really nuanced, but it's not like, oh, soybean and kennel are okay. No. They're okay if they're made in a certain way, and they come from a certain place, and they're not GMO and they're they're, not overly processed in certain ways that we talk about we just talked about.

So I think that's that's an important distinction. Also, if you wanna get more omega threes in your diet, you can eat wild fish like sardines, herring, mackerel, anchovies. If you wanna eat wild food like wild, bison, wild elk, wild, kind of, deer, you can buy these now. They're raised, and they were fed their natural diets. We're generally raised cows and also be higher in omega threes and lower in omega sixes.

It's really possible to do that. I think it's really important. For example, wild meat and grass fed beef contain about 7 times as much omega threes as industrially raised animals, which have almost none. And, you know, most of what our grandparents ate were pasture raised, regenerative, organic, grass fed, and then get hormones, antibiotics. There was nothing else to eat.

So getting getting refined oils in our diet, I think, been a problem as a society particularly because we've kind of limited omega threes and because we've had all these refined processes. So I would be very careful about consuming too much of just pure omega 6 fats. You can check your ratio. You can go on, go to functionhealth.com. You can actually get the membership.

And 1 of the tests we check for is your omega, index, which looks at all of your essential fatty acids, omega threes, omega sixes, and saturated fat. We can get a really picture of where you're at. You wanna know what's happening and not guess. The other problem would be too much of the omega sixes. It actually inhibits the conversion of the plant based omega threes.

So if you're let's say you're in walnuts or chia seeds or flax seeds and have omega threes, or, which have ALA or alpha linolenic acid, it it actually prevents the conversion by inhibiting an enzyme called delta 60 saturase, which is necessary for the conversion of the omega sixes I mean, omega threes that are in the platform ALA to the omega threes that we need for our brain to regulate inflammation and for everything else, which is called EPA DHA, and it can reduces that conversion. So it's there's many reasons that it kinda interferes with things. So I I would basically avoid consuming too much of this. There's been some population studies showing that high levels of omega sixes can contribute to more inflammatory diseases, can cause more mental illness, suicide, homicide. This is, work out of the NIH.

So I think doctor Joseph Hibblin has done a lot of this work. You can look at his research. It's quite interesting, and it's a bit nuanced, so you have to kind of dig into it. It took me a long time to figure it out because I was trying to, you know, cut through the noise of what what I was hearing, you know, in the from this so this paper or that paper or this expert or that expert or any of this country, looking at everybody else. So I'm like, I wanna look at the literature myself.

And and, basically, I concluded what I just shared with you. And so you wanna get rid of these things. And and, I think I think we really are unfortunately overloaded in these oils. I think we should be limiting them. We should be only probably using my my favorite oils, which are extra virgin, expeller pressed, or cold pressed oils, extra virgin olive oil, MCTL is okay, actually, has a very limited limited, effect on your on your cholesterol if at all.

It's anti inflammatory. It may help improve your metabolism and cholesterol. Avocados are great. Grass fed meats are great. Grass fed butter.

Nuts are great. Walnuts, almonds, pecans, macadamia. You You know, seeds are great. Chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds. All 5 fatty fish, sardines, mackerel, herring, wild salmon, full of omega three fats.

So it's really important to to get your oils right in your diet, to get the right kind of oil change, to make sure you're not eating too much of these refined oils, to make sure you're having if you're having any of the plant oils that you make sure they're, you know, limited quantities that you're using. Basically, the the combination oils that are soy or canola that are not GMO and organic and so forth. And also add in you know, you can add in different oils for, like, macadamia oil or walnut oil or, you know, almond oil. You can cook with these things. You can use them for flavoring.

They're different things, but they shouldn't be staples. You know, saturated fat is bad according to the experts, but vegetable oils are good according to the experts. And then we should be consuming a lot of these polyunsaturated, basically omega 6 refined oils like soybean oil, which is 10% of our calories, corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, canola oil. And they're all saying these are great. We should consume more of them.

What do you have to say to that?

Nina Teicholz
Well, okay. So going back to Ancel Keys, when they said avoid saturated fats, you were supposed to replace them with vegetable oils. Right? That was the idea going back to the Well, this is where the food industry does come in a little bit, just to start off this story. So the, the the vegetable oil industry was kind of born in the Right?

The first vegetable oil product was Crisco.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, yeah.

Nina Teicholz
Right? So it used to be that those oils were used for the industrial revolution. They were used to to lubricate machinery, and then they figured out how to harden them to make them and they learned how to bleach them and make them look white. And then they thought and it was actually Procter and Gamble that that figured out how to do that. They were gonna make it into a soap.

You know, soap is made from oil. Instead, they're like, that looks an awful lot like lard. Let's try to sell it as a food. Yeah. So they started to sell it as a food.

It

Dr. Mark Hyman
burns fat.

Nina Teicholz
Yeah. So it turns out that they contained, you know, that it's what they hardening vegetable oils is done through a process called hydrogenation, and that produces trans fats. But so these these trans fatty hardened oils were started to be sold to Americans in 1911. So, coincidentally, heart disease starts to take off right, right around maybe, like, ten years later. We start seeing increases in death from heart disease.

So, so then Procter and Gamble figured out how to just sell oil as oil. So 1 of the things to understand about, these oils is they're pressed Procter

Dr. Mark Hyman
and Gamble produced, like, shampoo.

Nina Teicholz
Yeah. Well, they they were a soap maker. So that's why they came up with this. So but they were like but Crisco was, like, a best selling thing. They convinced you know, in America, so all these immigrants, so, and they want to become American.

Right? And so Procter and Gamble had this brilliant advertising campaign basically saying, you know, give up those are the 4 the bygone days of your grandmothers, like the spinning wheel of the olden days, and, you know, have Crisco instead. And this is the newfangled thing made, in, you know, shiny scientist kitchens. So, so, Procter and Gamble figured out how to then make vegetable oils that were fluid in bottles. They kinda tinkered with the fatty acids to make them stable.

And then, so here's the where they they start to influence nutrition science. In 1948, the American Heart Association, which is really just an association of cardiologists. Right? Remember, heart disease is new. Tiny little association.

They barely had an office. They were just, like, they barely had any funds. Procter and Gamble comes in and says, we're gonna make you the designee of this radio show, for the a week. And over it was this huge deal overnight, literally, according to the official history of the American Heart Association. They said millions of dollars flowed into our coffers.

We became, overnight, the powerhouse, opening offices all across the country that we are today. They're still the number 1 largest non for profit in the in the country.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing.

Nina Teicholz
All thanks to Procter and Gamble. And pretty soon thereafter, they started to recommend that you start eating vegetable oils to prevent a heart attack.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm. Which was the worst idea because it turns out that trans fats, everybody agrees in this, have killed hundreds of thousand millions of people over the decades.

Nina Teicholz
Trans oh, that's that's yeah. The trans fats and the hardened vegetable oils in Crisco are bad for health, clearly bad for health. But in the liquid form

Dr. Mark Hyman
And now they're ruled as not safe to eat by the FDA after fifty years of pressure to change that.

Nina Teicholz
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And finally took a lawsuit from a 97 year old scientist who first discovered this fifty years ago to get them to change.

Nina Teicholz
Right. Right. And that's also another story I tell in my book about how he tried to get it to change, another a woman, a scientist who was trying to, you know, lobby for change, and they and and how they were vilified and how they were raked over the coals by all the scientists who disagreed with them, and how people would literally they the vegetable industry literally had people assigned to stand up in conferences and yell at these people

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh my god.

Nina Teicholz
When they were giving their presentations. I mean, this is the state of nutrition science. So, which again, continues today.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Food

Nina Teicholz
hecklers. But, so, vegetable oils, so it turns out that if they when they're in the oil form, they're also dangerous. So they don't contain trans fats. Right? But in the oil form, the oils are highly unstable.

That means that they oxidize easily. They go rancid. Oxidation is remember, that's why we take antioxidants because oxidation causes inflammation in your body. Yeah. Like, yes.

That's actually true.

Dr. Mark Hyman
On the inside and the outside.

Nina Teicholz
Heart cause heart disease on the inside. Oxidized LDL is what's thought to to provoke that unstable plaque that causes heart blockages.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And cholesterol. That's the problem.

Nina Teicholz
Yeah. So this is what and in those clinic on in that on all those studies, remember we talked about the Minnesota Coronary Survey where they had people, some people on on vegetable oil diets? In all of those studies, again and again and again, the people on the vegetable oil diets died at much higher rates from cancer. This was considered a side effect of this, heart healthy diet. And they actually had a series of very high level meetings at the NIH in the to figure out what was going on with this side effect of cancer, and nobody could figure it out.

And they basically just said, look. We believe that vegetable oils will help people prevent heart disease, so we're gonna ignore the cancer effect.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So how do we explain to these top Harvard scientists who studied this data for decades saying that we should all be consuming more of these oils?

Nina Teicholz
You know, I have What's

Dr. Mark Hyman
the dirty backstory on that?

Nina Teicholz
You know, I don't have the whole story. I have to I I I have to assume that a lot of it is cognitive dissonance. Right? This is we're in the third generation now of scientists who believe saturated fats are bad and must be replaced by polyunsaturated vegetable oils, and that is their that is just their their, you know, boiled in the wool belief that they cannot back out of. Right?

Pay a hundred papers written on that subject, you're not gonna change your mind. It is also true that that the Harvard scientists and, have a close relationship with Unilever, one of the biggest vegetable oil manufacturers in the They're

Dr. Mark Hyman
a big food company.

Nina Teicholz
Fungi, another big vegetable oil manufacturer. In fact, recently, Harvard published a paper in which 3 of the authors were employees of Unilever. Wow. What? Wow.

And it's and they have Unilever fellows who come and work with them. And, the 1 of the biggest promoters of of vegetable oils is, you know, on the scientific advisory board of Unilever. So, I mean, I just I think that the the veg and what I found out from my research because I actually started my book by writing about trans fat. I thought I was writing a book on trans fats when I started. I didn't realize I would get sort of dragged into this whole larger world.

So I spent, like, a year doing nothing but talking to vegetable oil executives when I started.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And

Nina Teicholz
I came to understand how much they have controlled nutrition science for, like, the last fifty, sixty years. They were involved in every single 1 of those trials. They would give them their products for free. They were intimately involved in trials at NIH. I mean, they they've just had they've really been brilliant.

And and executives from the vegetable industry have have almost always served as the top general counsel role at the Food and Drug Administration. So they just, like, they're very they've been in jocolli oil lobby. Yeah. It's called the Institute for Shortening and Edible Oils.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow. They still call it that? Yep. The Institute for Shortening.

Nina Teicholz
Shortening. Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's kind of a Shortening. Right. Shortening. Yeah. I Shortening your life.

Nina Teicholz
That's good.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Shortens your life. Yeah. That stuff is not good. And and what's fascinating is that when we increased our consumption of this, this is a new food. You know, I always worry about when we add new to nature foods.

So we had olive oil. We had lard. We had tallow. We had other fats, but we didn't have vegetable oils. And these seed they're not really vegetable.

They're like seed and nut and bean oils. Yeah. These were sort of invented a hundred and twenty plus years ago, and we now have increased our consumption of soybean oil, for example, a thousand fold. And it's 10% of our calories, and it's in everything. It's stuff that you wouldn't imagine is in.

So any processed food that you buy that's made in a factory probably has this oil in it or some variety of it. And I think, you know, when you look at the data, it it is confusing. There's a lot of people who who are looking at large observational processes that that show that there's a a risk for, you know, saturated fat and a benefit for omega three oil omega six oils. And there's other data that show this some actually randomized trials that show the opposite. When you just have people eat only the vegetable oil, they do worse.

Right.

Nina Teicholz
And let's just remember, that latter data from trials is is the the rigorous cause and effect data. Right? So, yeah. I mean

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what do you recommend? No vegetable oils?

Nina Teicholz
Well, I I I was just gonna tell briefly about my visit to a vegetable oil factory to explain, like, what a bungee factory, what a brutal process it is to get oil out of a bean or a seed. Right? They they have to go through this, you know, process of extracting the oil when the oil It's not even really oil when it comes out. It's this gray, rancid, disgusting fluid.

Dr. Mark Hyman
When it's chemically extracted with

Nina Teicholz
hexane and

Dr. Mark Hyman
other nasty chemicals. They have to

Nina Teicholz
use hexane as a solvent to extract it. And then they and then they have and then it's this bad smelling gray liquid. It has to be deodorized, winterized, you know, bleached and all this. So it goes through, like, 17 steps in this giant industrial plant. And, you know, and then it's Crisco.

So, you know, compared to and this is what we're told to eat instead of of churning butter.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Nina Teicholz
She's like, you just milk the cow, and then you churn the butter. So I think that, you know, it's it's sort of it speaks to our to me, like, speaks to kind of the craziness about food that we live in, which is so, you know, so divorced from our history. Like, can you really believe that something that goes through this, you know, 17 step process in a in a factory is what you should be eating to Right. Restore your health?

Dr. Mark Hyman
How many steps did it take from the field to your fork? You know? If there's more than 1 or 2, it's probably not a good idea. Yeah. I was joking.

I said it's easy to to figure out what to eat. If man made it, leave it. If god made it, eat it. Right? So

Nina Teicholz
That's good.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Or, you know, olive oil. You know, man made it, but they step on the olives and smoosh them, and then you get the olive oil. It's not

Nina Teicholz
Well, you know, the story of olive oil is a little bit funny because, actually, it was originally used in ancient times. It was not eaten. It was used as, like, a, people put it on their bodies, like, an oint to to make their muscles shine, and they use it to make their skin look good, but they didn't eat it. They didn't start eating olive oil until, like, the

Dr. Mark Hyman
Interesting.

Nina Teicholz
So it wasn't actually an ancient foodstuff. What humans

Dr. Mark Hyman
I remember being in Greece, and everybody was rubbing all over their bodies. And I was like, wow. This is fascinating. Everybody smelled like a salad.

Nina Teicholz
Did they really put it on their bodies? Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, yeah. I went to Mykonos when I was 17, and there were these beaches, and everybody was rubbing olive oil over their bodies. And I'm like, okay.

Nina Teicholz
Yeah. The other thing you notice in the Mediterranean is, like, of course, the Mediterranean diet, high in meat. Right? That's another thing that it was kind of not it's not been accurately transferred through history. But, so, olive oil is relatively stable.

So the huge worry about vegetable oils, to my mind, is that when they are heated, and even if they're left out in an in a bottle where they're exposed to light, they will degrade.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oxidize.

Nina Teicholz
Right? They oxidize. They degrade. That means they break down into these oxidation products. When you put them under heat, that like any chemical reaction, that speeds up and it creates literally hundreds of degraded oxidation products, some of which are known toxins.

You can look up the word aldehyde

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Nina Teicholz
And see what that is, a known toxin that has created. And so

Dr. Mark Hyman
Deep fryers, they call acrylamide, which is super toxic that's formed.

Nina Teicholz
Acrylamide is another 1. So and they occur so without going into too much detail, but when all the big fast food chains like Burger King and all those, you know, McDonald's switched over to trans free oils, oils without trans fats, they went right back to using just regular old vegetable oils. I mean, much as we don't like trans fats,

Dr. Mark Hyman
the

Nina Teicholz
what they did is that they stabilized the oil. That that process of hardening the oil made it stable. Now we have these totally unstable oils in these fryers. Yeah. They create hundreds of degraded toxic products.

Those products are now known. There's experiments have been done to show that they enter into the food, and that food enters into your body and that those products, go past the blood brain barrier. And if you eat a lot of those, you know, chicken McDungits or french fries or whatever, they are going to build up in your body and cause toxic inflammation in your body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I I used to work when I was 17, I used to work in this mother's sandwich shop. And I my job was to, you know, deliver the sandwiches in a little Volkswagen. But at night, at the end of the shift, I would have to go in the kitchen and clean the oil. So literally, it would run the oil through a filter so they could reuse it, and we used the same oil for a month. Heated, heated, reheated, reheated.

It was terrible. And, I think people don't realize that McDonald's and all those companies used to use beef tallow Yeah. To fry in, and now they switch to Crisco, basically, trans fats, and now they've gone to vegetable oils, which in some ways may be just as bad, if not worse.

Nina Teicholz
It's pretty frightening.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I

Nina Teicholz
think it's definitely worse. And, you know, actually, ironically, it's probably like places like McDonald's and Burger King are probably safer than your mom and pop shop. Right? Because they have all these regulations in the big stores about not reusing their oils too much, and then they've they know about this oxidation product. So they've developed, things like nitrogen blankets and silicone beads that they put in the oil to try to absorb all the toxic oxidation products.

So they're actually their oils are probably better than your local Chinese stir fry or whatever where they're I mean, that's probably where the real danger is. But I have to

Dr. Mark Hyman
tell over Chinese takeout. Is that it?

Nina Teicholz
Yeah. That's the take home messenger. I don't

Dr. Mark Hyman
know about that. We can work on that messaging.

Nina Teicholz
No. Stay at home and cook. No. But I but I wanna just tell you the the amazing story that, I discovered, which is how they found out that these trans free oils were causing all these problems is that when they switched over to trans free oils, they all of a sudden, they were having this, like, polymer like buildup on their walls and in their fryers that they couldn't scrape off. It's like paint, stickiness.

And those toxic oxidation products, were so unstable and volatile that they they would take the used uniforms from the workers to the to the dry cleaner, and on route, they would spontaneously combust in the back of the car because they were so

Dr. Mark Hyman
on fire here.

Nina Teicholz
Because the those products are so unstable. They're so unstable. They're mutating and changing minute by minute, and then they would put the they'd wash the uniforms, put them in the dryer, and the dryers would combust. So there's just, like, this it's just unbelievable that we're eating this stuff.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good take home message is to stay away from the refined oils and deep fried stuff. Maybe a treat once in a while, but definitely not a staple.

Max Lugavere
It's actually a myth that you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil. In the Mediterranean region of the world, they use extra virgin olive oil, not just to cook with, but they use it as a sauce. And somehow, we've been for some reason, we've been told that the Mediterranean dietary pattern, as it's lauded in the in the Western medical literature, involves canola oil and all of these crap oils and that you can't cook with extra virgin olive oil. But that's a total myth. So Well

Dr. Mark Hyman
well well, I'm gonna push back on that because if it's your if you heat olive oil to a high temperature, you destroy a lot of the polyphenols and benefit beneficial compounds, and you can oxidize it. So I agree with you if you're cooking at low temperature, but not if you're stir frying at high temperature. And I Well, yeah. And I'll tell you what I'll tell you an interesting thing I did was I I went and had my entire metabolome checked. And and 1 of the things they find in your metabolome is byproducts of food that have been metabolized in different ways.

And so I had oxidized olive oil in my blood because I was always stir frying with olive oil, but I like to cook at high temperatures because I'm, you know, I was, like, rushing for time and I I shouldn't be, but It's like, I I need to sort of change the oil, use avocado oil, or cook at low temperature.

Max Lugavere
Well, I'll say that it's much safer to cook at high temperatures with with olive oil than it is to cook at high temperatures with a grain and seed oil, like a soybean oil or a corn oil. And you have to you have to ask what olive oil is constructed with that, that might predispose it to oxidation. And when you actually look at extra virgin olive oil, it's about 85% monounsaturated fat, which is very chemically stable. I mean, think about it. Avocado oil, which is praised for its

Dr. Mark Hyman
high season Mostly monounsaturated. Yeah.

Max Lugavere
Is most mostly monounsaturated. Right? So if monounsaturated fat was prone to oxidation, avocado oil would not be a high heat cooking oil. Right? And then 15% of extra virgin olive oil is saturated fat, which we know is is is highly heat stable.

So, you're right in that the polyphenols, might degrade to a point when you cook with olive oil at at high temperatures. But what's not gonna happen with extra virgin olive oil, you can rest assured that it's not gonna become the cancer causing mutagenic, disfigured oil product that you get when you cook with soybean oil or corn oil to high temperatures.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Tell us how you really feel about those oils, Max. Yeah.

Max Lugavere
I'm not a fan of of grain and seed oils. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which is but just pushing against the orthodoxy because the traditional and the traditional orthodoxy is that these seed oils and bean oils, like soybean oil, canola oil, they used to call it rapeseed, but it's a bad name so they gave a new name which is better facelift for marketing canola oil, that those are essential and that the more people consume of those, the healthier they are, the less heart disease, the better the cholesterol. Those are all often observational studies, even some interventional studies. What would you say about that?

Max Lugavere
Yeah. The nutritional and medical orthodoxy can't see beyond the fact that these grain and seed oils do lower LDL cholesterol, which which according to the orthodoxy is the end all be all indicator of cardiovascular risk. Right? Yeah. So they're unable to see past that.

And it's true that grain and seed oils do reduce your LDL, and ApoB when compared to saturated fats Yeah. And and certain saturated fats. Because as you mentioned, not all saturated fats a fat is not a fat is not a fat. Not all saturated fats are created equal. Right?

We have stearic acid, which has a neutral effect on cardiovascular, risk. Yeah. But there are other problems with grain and seed oils that we that that we need to talk about. They're prone to oxidation, and these oxidized fats integrate themselves into all aspects of our physiology. They get tugged along by lipoproteins in our blood.

So you've got these, these lipoproteins that that that carry triglycerides and cholesterol around our bodies dropping off nutrients. Right? Yep. And when we we ingest these oxidized fats, they get tugged around by these LDL, by these lipoproteins, by chylomicrons, by, the LDL lipoprotein. And that makes them that that gives them an inflammatory phenotype, Makes them more prone to adhering to immune cells, which we know is early, an early occurrence in the development of atherosclerosis.

Right? We know that they integrate themselves into our fat tissue, and they provide the precursor molecules to our inflammation pathway. We also know that these grain and seed oils have a small but significant amount of trans fats, manmade trans fats

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Max Lugavere
Due to the production process. They undergo a step in the production process called deodorization, which creates trans fats. And we cook with them. They create, they they become oxidized. They generate free radicals.

And they also, what generates are also, oxidative byproducts like aldehyde, certain of which we know are are damaging to our mitochondria and promote cancer. So, yes, they reduce LDL, but there are all these other problems associated with them. So

Dr. Mark Hyman
And again again, also, the the the thing that people miss is that most of the data around these have become from large observational trials, which are the kinds of things we talked about earlier in the podcast that can't prove cause and effect. And there was 1 study that was done. This was a fascinating study we talked about in the podcast years ago. There was there was a study done, that was funded by the government back in the It was before we had medical ethics. And, essentially, they took people in a mental institution and randomized them to 2 groups.

Basically, they didn't have to give them form consent. They go, hey. You guys are gonna eat this. You guys are gonna eat that. They basically gave half of them butter and saturated fat as a source of their fat, and the other half, they gave corn oil.

Now the Cornell group had a dramatically lower LDL, but for every LDL lowering they did, there was a high risk of heart attacks and strokes. And this was a randomized, interventional, controlled trial that is able to prove cause and effect. And the results were kinda staggering, and they were so staggering that the Orthodox at the time was, was so entrenched in the belief that saturated fat was bad, that they refused to publish the study. And it wasn't published till fifty years later when an NIH scientist found out about the data that had been hidden and went and found this guy. And there's a great Malcolm Gladwell podcast about this.

Went and found the son of 1 of the original researchers after his father died and a basement full of his stuff. And he found all the old data and tapes and computer program shit. They found it all in the basement. And based on that data, they published this study, which was really 1 of the very few interventional trials looking at saturated fat versus vegetable oil. That was pretty pretty interesting.

Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at doctor Mark Hyman. And we'll see you next time.