You Were Lied To About Fat — Your Cells Are Paying the Price

Fat is not the enemy — fat deficiency is. For decades, the low-fat message stripped the one macronutrient your cells use to build membranes, regulate hormones, and produce energy at the mitochondrial level. In this episode, Dr. Axe breaks down the specific fats your body was designed to run on, which ones are silently damaging your cells, and the food-first protocol to repair the damage — starting today. Resources mentioned: https://guide.thehealthinstitute.com/l-407

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Josh Axe?

  There's one structure in your body that decides whether you get heart disease, cancer, or dementia, and almost no doctor will ever mention it to you. It's not an organ, it's the wall around every one of your 37 trillion cells. It's made of fat, and most people have spent 60 years building it out of the wrong kinds of fat. In a study on 42,000 people, the people that had the right type of fat built into their cell wall had a 15% to 18% lower risk of dying and way better health. And here's the thing about an unhealthy cell membrane, is you feel it way before a diagnosis.

• 0:40Josh Axe?

  You'll start noticing things like brain fog, cold hands, dry skin, the 3pm energy crash, and joint stiffness. And you've been told, hey, it's just stress, or it's your age, but look around you. There are 72-year-olds with sharp minds and warm hands, and 40-year-olds who can't hold a thought past lunch. If it were just age, that couldn't happen. And here's the part that nobody tells you. Every year you leave it, it compounds and it gets worse. Your arterial walls stiffen, your joints stiffen, your hormone receptors don't work as well, and your mitochondria starve and your energy gets lower and lower and lower. And most of the time, your labs will stay normal.

• 1:24Josh Axe?

  I'm Dr. Josh Axe, and I'm going to walk you through the seven ways I use with my patients to rebuild the cell wall, and every study behind it. And stay to the end, because I'm going to rank all seven by the biggest impact. Welcome to the Dr. Josh Axe Show.

• 1:53Josh Axe?

  Listen, if you've started over more times than you can count, maybe it was another diet, another protocol that works for three weeks, and then it stops working, you're not missing discipline, you're missing the foundation. That's what our cellular healing protocols build at the Health Institute. We've got hundreds of five-star reviews on TrustPilot from folks who finally stopped guessing and actually discovered lasting healing. The first step is a cellular blood work analysis, which is our at-home blood work kit, followed by a full-hour review with a senior health advisor who will map out your patterns and show you exactly how we can work together. If you're ready to finally stop the cycle, go to mybloodwork.com, that's mybloodwork.com, so we can help you regain your health.

• 2:40Josh Axe?

  By the way, before we get started, do me a big favor. If this show has ever helped you, hit subscribe right now. It takes one second, and it's the number one way we get this message out to more people. And also think about the one person that could benefit from this. Maybe they've got brain fog, or cold hands, or hypothyroidism, and they need to hear this one, bless them by sharing it with them. And as we go, here's what I want you to do. Count how many of these seven you're already doing, and I bet it's far fewer than you think. Now, I got turned on to cellular health because my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and what I'm about to share with you literally saved her life. I started digging into research on how can my mom heal naturally?

• 3:22Josh Axe?

  And I came across the work of a woman named Joanna Budriga and many others, and they started to say this, if you want to heal and fight cancer naturally, you have to get more oxygen inside the cell. And the science said in order to do that, you have to have a healthy cell membrane. And it said, literally, there are people out there, many people, whose cells are starving for oxygen, and your cells also can't make ATP and cellular energy without oxygen. And they said, one of the key factors at getting more oxygen inside the cell and toxins outside the cell was having a healthy cell membrane. So your cell membrane, so every cell in your body, has this membrane on the outside. It's the outer part of your cell that acts as the wall.

• 4:05Josh Axe?

  And so your cell membrane should be moldable and pliable and soft and spongy. Think about kind of like a trampoline-like material, or even Play-Doh. It should be, it should be that, but, and that's healthy. But what can happen to some people over time is their cell membrane can get very hard. And we actually see this in arterial plaque. If your arteries become stiffening, and we actually call it, we call it arterial calcification. It calcifies, it hardens like a rock and gets stiff. That greatly increases your risk of a heart attack and stroke. So in order to be healthy and get more oxygen inside your cell, and more nutrients inside your cell, and more toxins out, your cell membrane needs to be healthy. And your cell membrane is made predominantly of fat and secondarily of proteins.

• 4:50Josh Axe?

  And the way that it works is oxygen slides straight through the fat. Okay, so it allows oxygen to come in and out if you have the right fats making up your cell membrane. And so again, your cell membrane is made up of phospholipids, cholesterol, protein, and fatty acids. And think about how crazy the low-fat diet craze was, or even doctors today saying, you know, taking, people taking statin drugs to lower cholesterol. Your cells themselves are made up of cholesterol and fat. And there were years where doctors put people on low-fat, low-cholesterol diets. So their cell membranes and their brain and nervous system was literally deteriorating. And so what I'm going to walk you through today on today's episode is exactly how to heal your cell membrane, and it is probably one of the single greatest things will allow

• 5:35Josh Axe?

  you to feel younger and look younger. Now, I mentioned cancer a minute ago with my mom, and so one of the things we really focused on doing was healing her cell membranes and her mitochondria in order to fight cancer. And there's some research around this, and I want to talk about how you start to fix a cell membrane, or in what happens in the body. So cancer cells actually can rebuild their own walls, and they do this to hide from your immune system. And there's pretty recent research, this was published in 2021, and researchers found that when tumor cells took in DHEA, this type of omega-3 fatty acid from fish oil, their walls actually broke down of the cancer cells, and the cancer cells died.

• 6:18Josh Axe?

  This was a study done on animals, and they found that omega-3 fatty acids slowed tumor growth. And the reason why this worked is what they said in the study was, DHEA started to become part of that cell membrane of the cancer cell, which then allowed oxygen to get into the cell. And a lot of cancer cells, they don't like oxygen. And so what it actually did was, getting oxygen into the cell actually started to kill the cancer cell. Isn't that amazing? And so one of the biggest things, and Otto Werberg said this many years ago, he said, we now know the cause of cancer, it's lack of oxygen in the cell. And changing out the fatty acids you're eating and protecting your cell membranes is one

• 7:03Josh Axe?

  of the best ways to fight cancer naturally. By the way, I created a guide for you that goes through this in depth, and it's in the show notes, so if you want to get it for free, it's called My Cellular Healing Guide. You can go in the show notes, by the way, it goes through the top oils to swap, and the type of omegas to get, the supplement list and everything. So again, it's free, it's in the show notes, you can grab it right here after the show, or really anytime. And so the number one way to start to heal your cell membrane, which again, your cell membrane is so critically important, especially for fighting cancer, heart disease, and insulin resistance, and fighting inflammation. Okay? But the number one way is to boost your intake of EPA, DHEA, because those literally become your cell wall.

• 7:47Josh Axe?

  And DHA is the number one fat in your brain. You know, there's a test that I run in my clinical practice, and it is one of my top 10 tests I do on everybody. It's called an omega-3 index. And so what I can literally see with this blood test, and let me say this as well, did you know that 98% of doctors do not run this test? But it is far more important than your LDL cholesterol, than your total cholesterol, than most markers that your doctors are doing today, like ALT, and SAT, and all these other tests they're running. This is way more important. It's looking at inflammation of your cells. And it's literally looking at what your cell membranes are made up of.

• 8:30Josh Axe?

  And what this test actually looks at is how much of your cells are made up of omega-3 fatty acids. And the average person should be over 8%, probably closer to 10% of your cell membrane should be made up of omega-3 fatty acids. However, you know, the average person is around 4%, and that's less than half of what it should be. And what that does is, is that keeps your cells completely inflamed. And by the way, this is exactly what causes your joint pain, your skin to age more quickly, your arteries to harden up and the plaque to build up in there. This keeps you chronically inflamed, and so most people are at 50% of the levels that

• 9:15Josh Axe?

  they should be. You know, if I would go and ask most people if they think omega-3 fats are healthy, and of course, all of you watching this, you're very educated, you would say, of course, yes. Or if I would ask you, is magnesium important? Or zinc? You'd say, yes. But let me ask you this, how many of you have ever had a blood test that has actually looked at what your levels are at right now? Most people haven't, because most doctors today are not doing root cause blood work. And so every patient that I work with, we're looking at omega-3 fats, magnesium, we're looking at all of these nutrients, because they are critically important for your overall health. And here are some studies that solidify this in the very prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, Medical Journal.

• 9:57Josh Axe?

  They did a study on 22,000 male physicians, and they followed them for 17 years. And the men in the top quarter for omega-3 fatty acids had 81% lower risk of cardiac death than the bottom quarter. And the biggest difference was the omega-3 fatty acids in their cell membrane and their cell heart walls. Here's another one. Japanese men in Japan eat far more fish than Americans. And on average, they consumed double the amount of omega-3 fats as American men. And they found they had less plaque in their arteries despite, listen to this, the other men in Japan smoking more and having similar levels of cholesterol.

• 10:42Josh Axe?

  You know, you've heard this principle, right? You are what you eat? That's most true about the fats you eat. Because when you eat fat, it literally becomes your cell membrane and part of every cell in your body, and it's most important when it comes to omega-3 fatty acids. And so here's my number one prescription for you to start off when it comes to healing your cell membrane. Consume three servings a week at least of omega-3 rich fish. Could be wild salmon, sardines, herring, mackerel. And I would do about a palm-sized portion, you know, four to, four to six ounces or so. By the way, here's another one that's a little expensive, but it is maybe the most powerful out there today, and it's caviar or salmon roe.

• 11:27Josh Axe?

  One tablespoon of salmon roe carries about one gram, 1,000 milligrams of EPA and DHA, and it's already bound as well to phospholipids, which we'll get into more of that in a minute. But actually, caviar in terms of medicine is maybe the most powerful food-based medicine for your cell membranes in the entire world. And the next is a backup are walnuts and flax seeds. Now, these are a backup, and many people do not convert the type of omega-3s found in walnuts, which is called ALA. They don't not convert that well into EPA or DHA, okay? But they're still helpful, okay? But overall, it's this wild fatty fish that is the most beneficial.

• 12:11Josh Axe?

  I have a very exciting announcement. We just found out that Heal Yourself is officially a New York Times bestseller, and that's entirely because of you. I just want to say thank you for showing up. Thank you for sharing this work, and thank you for believing in the power of cellular health. If you haven't grabbed your copy yet, you can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite book retailer. Also, if you've already ordered but haven't claimed your bonuses yet, make sure to go to healyourselves.com and enter your email and your order number, and we'll send you hundreds of dollars in free content. Again, that's healyourselves.com. By the way, that free content includes a peptide guide, natural healing recipes, a masterclass, and loads of other free content.

• 12:55Josh Axe?

  I'm so excited for you to read this content. I hope it's going to change your life.

• 13:01Josh Axe?

  Now, number two thing you have to have in order to build a healthy cell membrane is choline. Now, choline used to be known as a B vitamin or part of the B vitamin family. And of course, we all know that B vitamins are important, like niacin and folate and vitamin B12. Well, choline is just as important and more important for your cell membrane. In fact, there's a compound called phosphatidylcholine, and it is the raw material your body needs for brain health and for memory chemicals. And if you're ever getting brain fog or short-term memory lapses, it could be a deficiency in choline. Now, here's a shocking reality. The number one nutrient most people don't get enough of in America today is vitamin

• 13:46Josh Axe?

  D. Do you know what number two is? It's choline. Around 92% of Americans are not getting enough choline in their diet. And your top sources include, by far, number one is beef liver, okay? Or any type of liver. And of course, we don't eat organ meats in our culture very much anymore. Now, you can take them as capsules and tablets, and that's still a great way to get choline in, but beef liver is incredibly high. Number two are eggs. And what's happened over the years, people have said, oh, don't eat eggs. They've got cholesterol. They do, but if they're pasture-raised, it's lower in certain types of cholesterol, higher in certain types of cholesterol, higher in omega-3 fatty acids, higher in choline. So if you're doing organic pasture-raised eggs, an amazing source of choline.

• 14:31Josh Axe?

  Also, 100% grass-fed beef, chicken thighs, cod, broccoli, these are the foods that are the highest in choline, along with what I mentioned earlier, caviar. And listen to this study. A 20-year study out of Finland done on over 2,000 people found the ones eating the most phosphatidylcholine in their diet, typically from eggs, had a 28% lower risk of dementia and scored better on memory tests. So overall, it is critical. If you were ever noticing, I forgot where my keys were, or you have some brain fog, choline is likely one of the nutrients you're missing. And by the way, it is crazy. When you go back and look at the history, let's go back to 1968.

• 15:11Josh Axe?

  The American Heart Association capped cholesterol at 300 milligrams a day, okay? That's about one egg to one and a half eggs. And Americans spent the next 50 years oftentimes only eating egg whites. And listen, it's not the more the better. I think for most people, again, it's about two eggs or two egg yolks is ideal. Now, if you are fairly healthy, you can definitely eat more than that. By the way, my choline prescription is this, two pastured eggs a day. By the way, you're better off having the yolk a little bit runny or not fully hardened cooked. You don't want it like a fried hard egg or a hard-boiled egg because the phospholipids

• 15:54Josh Axe?

  are in the yolk, and so they're better off just lightly cooked or slightly cooked and not overcooked. So two eggs a day is ideal, or two eggs, two to three days a week, and then three ounces of beef liver once a week because it is so high in choline, you would need to get liver just once a week. Now, there's something that my wife and I buy. There is a type of beef called Forces of Nature, and it has grass-fed beef and also has beef liver and heart in there, so you don't even taste it because it's part of a blend. And that is a great way to get more choline in your diet. And listen, for you, if eggs or liver just aren't happening, you can do a tablespoon of sunflower lecithin in a smoothie, or a phosphatidylcholine or a phospholipid supplement, and that can be great as well.

• 16:37Josh Axe?

  The number three way to support your cell membranes is olive oils. Get olive oil in and seed oils out. You know, most of these industrialized seed oils like soybean oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil are very high in omega-6 fatty acids and very low to no omega-3s whatsoever. Now, olive oil doesn't really have much of either. Olive oil is very high in omega-9 fatty acids, known as monounsaturated fats, but also very high in polyphenols, which actually protect your body and the fat of your cell membrane against oxidation. And there was a study that looked at exactly how protective olive oil was.

• 17:20Josh Axe?

  This was done on 7,000 individuals. And so the 7,000 individuals followed a Mediterranean diet and also did a lot of extra virgin olive oil. And over the five years, the olive oil group had roughly 30% fewer heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular events. So here's my prescription to heal your cell membranes. Two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil a day. Make extra virgin olive oil your go-to oil for nearly everything. And if you have to use something else, use a little bit of avocado oil or a little bit of coconut oil. Those are the best alternatives when you decide not to use extra virgin olive oil

• 18:01Josh Axe?

  and get all of the seed oils out of your diet, even a lot of the animal fats, you know? Those can slow down your liver. Those aren't the best for most people either. Generally speaking, olive oil is the absolute best, along with small amounts of grass-fed animal fats and things like wild-caught salmon. The number four way to heal your cell membrane, which of course then is going to reduce your risk of heart attack and cancer and insulin resistance and make you look and feel younger, but it is guard the cell walls with vitamin E, polyphenols, astaxanthin, glutathione, like N-acetylcysteine. These will protect your cells from oxidative stress. So here's the key. And so step number four is protect the cell membrane.

• 18:45Josh Axe?

  So listen, you want to be eating these omega-3 fatty acids and other healthy fats, and those will become your cell membrane, okay? And you do want to get some healthy saturated fat, a little bit of things from coconut oil, a little bit of 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef. Getting some of that fat in, not too much, but some of that along with the omega-3s, that will become your cell membrane, the choline. You have to have those things. But you also need to protect that fat of your cells from being damaged and oxidizing. And that's where vitamin E, astaxanthin, polyphenols, glutathione, they will protect those cell membranes. Now, your greatest source of vitamin E are typically nuts and avocado.

• 19:27Josh Axe?

  So a little bit of almond, macadamia nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, avocado, these are going to be great sources of vitamin E. In addition, wild blueberries and pomegranates, green tea, and extra virgin olive oil that are high in these polyphenols, and then things like wild-caught salmon like sockeye and king over farm-raised salmon, and then garlic and onions and broccoli. These are going to boost glutathione. These are going to help protect that cell wall from oxidation. Now, you may wonder, how long does it take to radically transform these cell membranes? Here's your answer, four months. It's about the same amount of time it takes for your body to create new red blood cells. Do you know every four months, all of your red blood cells are new?

• 20:12Josh Axe?

  A lot of your tissues are new every four months. And so if you can follow this diet that I've laid out for you, in four months, you will look younger, you will feel younger, you will reduce your risk of cancer, heart disease, insulin resistance, your body will get physiologically younger. And one thing I do with my patients, and I encourage you to do this, is do that omega-3 test, get that right blood work done, look at where you're at today on your omega-3 index score. There, it's actually, there's a, the one that I run is a cellular omega-3 index, so I can see the omega-3s in your cells. And you want to hit the target market of at least 8%, whereas 10% is closer to ideal.

• 20:55Josh Axe?

  I said, I see a lot of people around that 4%. When I see people with major heart disease and insulin issues and major hormonal issues and they feel like they're aging too quickly, all notice is that score tends to be very, very low, but there are things that we can do nutritionally that can make such a big difference in fixing those cell membranes fast. And again, this was a key principle we followed in my mom healing from cancer. My mom now is around 74 years old. She is water skiing. She, she won a 5K about a month ago. And she's incredibly healthy in her mid 70s. So is my dad. And this is one of those markers that I do on their annual blood work to keep them healthy and young. So they're playing with their grandkids.

• 21:37Josh Axe?

  You know, I get to go out right now. I get to go and be active with my dad and I'm so grateful he's still around because we've been able to do this type of testing and keep him younger, longer. And when it comes to supplements, these are the ones that'll make the biggest difference. You want to take a fish oil supplement, but you want to take one that, listen to this, this is very important, that's in triglyceride form from a very, very good company that you know creates great omega three supplements. Okay. You want to typically do about two grams a day of fish oil. You also want to take a phospholipid supplement that has things like phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylserine in there. It could be sunflower lecithin, but that's a great option.

• 22:18Josh Axe?

  You want to also take vitamin E and get antioxidants like matcha green tea. And, but the biggest thing is food. Okay. So fish oil is probably the biggest thing and then the phospholipid supplement. And then after that, it's really food-based medicine. Remember getting wild-caught salmon in your diet, more blueberries, more pomegranates, more of these healthy foods in your diet every single day. Now here are my top 10 foods for healing your cell membrane. Number one, wild-caught salmon, like sockeye salmon. It's high in EPA. It's high in DHA. It's high in astaxanthin. Number two is caviar or salmon roe. These are very high in EPA, DHA, ETA. That's an omega three that most people have never heard of,

• 23:03Josh Axe?

  but it's very powerful and they're all phospholipid bound. Number three are sardines. They have one gram of EPA and DHA per serving. Number four, pasture-raised eggs. These could be chicken eggs or duck eggs are even higher in phospholipids. Number five, grass-fed beef liver, the richest source of choline on the planet. Now, if you just don't like liver, hey, maybe go and get that beef that has some liver in it already from forces of nature. Or what you can do is get liver capsules or tablets. If this is something you need more of. Number six, extra virgin olive oil. It's oleic acid plus the polyphenols. Amazing for those cell membranes. Number seven are avocados. They have a mix of those fats plus vitamin E.

• 23:47Josh Axe?

  Number eight, almonds, because they're high in vitamin E. Number nine, wild blueberries, because they're so high in polyphenols. And number 10, walnuts, because they have alpha-lipoic acid and vitamin E and some backup omega threes. And so those are the top 10 foods that are amazing for healing your cell membranes. And then you can see the seven ways here ranked. If you're going to do one thing of all the things I've talked about, number one is eating more fatty fish like salmon. Number two, getting more extra virgin olive oil. And number three, getting eggs or liver for choline. And one other thing is getting rid of the trans fats, the processed oils, the fast foods. Of course, those are going to inflame your cells.

• 24:32Josh Axe?

  And remember, when you've heard the principle, you are what you eat. It is most true about fats, because when you're eating fat, it literally becomes part of your cell. You can't say that for carbohydrates. Carbohydrates do not become you in the same way versus fats do. Three quick things before I close. Number one, grab your cellular healing guide. Now, I created this for you. It's worth nearly a hundred dollars and I'm giving it to you for free. And there's a link in the show notes and it really walks you through, hey, here are those top foods. Here are meal plan ideas. Here are the supplements, everything you need to build a whole cell, not just your cell membrane, but your mitochondria and everything as well. So you can look younger, feel younger, reverse disease.

• 25:13Josh Axe?

  And I want to encourage you to get the right blood work done. You can get this done at the longevity clinic. If you live in the state of Tennessee, or you can get it done online. If you visit cellrx.com. That's C E L L R X cell, as in your cells, cellrx.com. And you can get that omega three fatty acid test done there along with other cellular markers. So you know exactly what to do in order to heal. And I'll tell you, every patient I have that gets this type of blood work done, they're always so blown away at the benefits they receive from it. When they finally know, oh, here's what my omega three levels are. Here's my magnesium. You know, I actually had somebody say recently, I said,

• 25:53Josh Axe?

  you know, I have saved some money because I didn't realize, there was a bunch of supplements I was taking that I didn't realize I shouldn't be taking. And there were quite a few things that showed up on her blood work. Like for instance, she didn't know she was low in omega threes and zinc and selenium. And so now she knows exactly the supplements and foods she needs to be eating in order to heal. So you can click the link in the show notes or visit cellrx if you want to get that done. Now, here's what I want you to remember. Brain fog, cold hands, dry skin, a heart that skips, a memory that slips, increased risk of cancer. These aren't seven problems. They're one problem. That's actually seven nanometers thick. That's your cell membrane.

• 26:35Josh Axe?

  And if you eat the right types of fat, your body can start to heal. Rebuild the wall with wild-caught fish, eggs, extra virgin olive oil, and your body and cells can now work at a higher level. And by the way, if you have more questions beyond the show, remember to visit drax.com. That's D R A X dot com. And you can ask on there, we have a Dr. Axe AI. And you can ask me anything on drax.com. And I'm so excited to be able to answer you and to continue to add value to your life. And hey, do me a favor before you go. One last thing, subscribe. It's the number one thing you can do to support the show. It allows me to put out more content and allows me to reach more people.

• 27:17Josh Axe?

  So we can heal using things like food, herbs and natural medicine. I want to say thanks so much for watching. I can't wait to see you on the next episode.