The Industry Secret Keeping You Inflamed, Tired, & Bloated | Nina Teicholz & Max Lugavere

Highly processed vegetable oils, derived from seeds and beans, have become a dominant part of modern diets despite significant health concerns. Historical biases in nutrition science, influenced by the vegetable oil industry, have promoted these oils despite evidence from controlled studies showing negative health outcomes. These oils are unstable, prone to oxidation, and can create toxic byproducts, particularly when exposed to heat, contributing to inflammation and chronic diseases. Although they can lower LDL cholesterol, studies have shown that this reduction does not necessarily improve heart health and may increase risks for other conditions like cancer. In contrast, traditional fats like extra virgin olive oil and omega-3-rich foods offer more stability and health benefits, emphasizing the need for a balanced, minimally processed approach to dietary fats. In this episode, I talk with Nina Teicholz and Max Lugavere to explore the health impacts of different types of fats and oils, debunking misconceptions around cooking with extra virgin olive oil and emphasizing the dangers of industrial vegetable oils. Nina Teicholz is a science journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Big Fat Surprise, which upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat—especially saturated fat—and spurred a new conversation about whether these fats in fact cause heart disease. She is also the founder of the Nutrition Coalition, a non-profit working to ensure that government nutrition policy is transparent and evidence-based—work for which she’s been asked to testify before the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the Canadian Senate. Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist and the author of the New York Times best-seller Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life, now published in 10 languages around the globe. His sophomore book, also a best-seller, is called The Genius Life: Heal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Become Extraordinary and latest book Genius Kitchen. Max is the host of a #1 iTunes health and wellness podcast, called The Genius Life. Max appears regularly on The Dr. Oz Show, The Rachael Ray Show, and The Doctors. He has contributed to Medscape, Vice, Fast Company, CNN, and The Daily Beast, has been featured on NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and in The New York Times and People Magazine. He is an internationally sought-after speaker and has given talks at South by Southwest, the New York Academy of Sciences, the Biohacker Summit in Stockholm, Sweden, and many others. Full length episodes can be found here: Is Vegetable Oil Good or Bad for You? Nina Teicholz The Best Diet for Your Brain This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%.

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

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:23Dr. 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, Dr. Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, drhyman.com for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

• 1:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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, you go, is that broccoli oil? I mean, that just does not even exist. So we're talking about seed and bean and nut oils, like soybean oil, canola oil, saffron 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 store. I have no idea what that is. I wouldn't eat that. We're all trained that they're better for you and that 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

• 1:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  to more unsaturated fats. And saturation, unsaturation, it just, it's a chemical classification based on how many of the You know, sort of carbons are saturated with hydrogen on a fat molecule. So the more saturated it is, the more hard it is at room temperature, the more hydrogens there 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. They cause high cholesterol, they they clog our arteries, they lead to heart disease, and basically, we're told to swap out saturated for unsaturated fats, or called PUFA's, or

• 2:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  the omega six fatty fatty acids in these vegetable oils, or quote vegetable oils. And they're they're everywhere. They're kind of clear, tastes are 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

• 3:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  months, it's fine. If you take a plant oil and you leave it out, it's going to become oxidized. So it becomes very easily damaged, they're 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.

• 3:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Turns out it's not so clear cut. 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 oils should we hundred percent 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 want to 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,

• 4:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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, or the PUFA's or these plant oils. Now, uh, the same group looked in 2014 at a meta-analysis of all the literature, kind of looking at 72 different studies. Uh, 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-3 fat piece is really important.

• 5:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Omega-3 fats are basically from wild food, wild fish, um, wild plants. We don't eat that much anymore, but omega-3s are really important for our brain function, our skin health, our immune health, inflammation regulation, so many different things. And usually comes from wild fish at this point. Sardines are one of the best sources. So, so we should be paying attention to that, but we're, we're not, um, easily clear about this because there's so much conflicting data and, and experts can't seem to agree. You know, we like, you've got, you know, top nutrition scientists out there. I think one 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

• 6:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  in terms of what's the, the truth? And that's what I want to kind of unpack today a little bit.

• 6:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So, um,

• 6:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, the basic idea is that if you if you consume these PUFA's, 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, these seed and 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 key to reversing heart disease. It has to do with a lot of factors and some resistance, oxidation, inflammation, and so forth.

• 6:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So there was one really quite amazing study that, and the most sort of preface is 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 they're a little hard to decipher because 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 than 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 you eat saturated fats,

• 7:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  it won't necessarily be a big of an issue. And there's some genetics that has to do with who can tolerate saturated fat. I don't know if we'll have time to get into that today, but it's a little more nuanced. But basically, 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 the boogeyman. And 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 really, you know, where this was at 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.

• 8:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For example, certain oils like corn oil, sapphire 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, 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 three,

• 9:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  about four to one, two to one. Now it can be up to 20 to one. I had a patient who was diabetic, heart failure, very overweight, really junk food all the time, and her ratio was 20 to one, which is just a disaster. Very low omega threes, very high omega sixes. So you have to be kind of not just lump all the plant oils into one bucket. You have to kind of be a little more nuanced and you can actually look online as a table, I think on Wikipedia, showing the ratios of omega six and three for every plant oil. So you can kind of stick away from the ones like corn oil. So there was a study that was done, and then I always want to talk about this for a minute, it was a really important study. It was done in the sixties, you couldn't do that study now, it's unethical, but it was then in a psychiatric hospital where they had complete control over their diets.

• 9:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They gave one group butter and one group as their source of fat, and one group corn oil. Now, the corn oil 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 9,000 people. It's just impossible to do that because you have to lock people up to do this, right? And people don't want to be locked up. So this was the locked up people, basically, who were able to be experimented 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

• 10:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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 40 years later, they finally kind of assembled the data and published the 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 the, than, than, and, and, and that was dramatic. So I think, I think that's just an important cautionary note. If you're consuming these oils, make sure you have enough omega threes in your diet. Um, so you really, I think, um, you know, looking at historically, we used to get these omega six oils from foods we ate,

• 11:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  from beans, from seeds, from grains, from, you know, basically we'd 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. Want to have corn? It's got corn oil in it. If you want to have, you know, peanuts, eat the peanuts, you know, don't eat the peanut oil, don't eat the corn oil. If you want to 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.

• 11:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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 canola 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 talked about, we just talked about. So I think that's that's an important distinction. Also, if you want to get more omega-3s in your diet, you can eat wild fish like sardines, herring, mackerel, anchovies. If you want to eat wild food like wild bison, wild elk, wild kind of deer, you can buy these now. They're raised and they're

• 12:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  fed their natural diets. We generally raise cows can also be higher in omega-3s and lower in omega-6s. It's really possible to do that. I think it's really important. For example, wild meat and grass-fed beef contain about seven times as much omega-3s 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 maybe 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-3s 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 a

• 13:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  membership and one of the tests we check for is your omega index, which looks at all of your essential fatty acids, omega-3s, omega-6s, and saturated fat. And we can get a really picture of where you're at. You want to know what's happening and not guess. The other problem is if you eat too much of the omega-6s, it actually inhibits the conversion of the plant-based omega-3s. So if you're, let's say you're in walnuts or chia seeds or flax seeds that have omega-3s, which have ALA or alpha-linolenic acid, it actually prevents the conversion by inhibiting an enzyme called delta-60 saturase, which is necessary for the conversion of the omega-6s,

• 14:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean omega-3s that are in the plant form, ALA, to the omega-3s that we need for our brain to regulate inflammation and for everything else, which is called EPA, DHA, and it reduces that conversion. So it's, there's many reasons it kind of interferes with things. I would basically avoid consuming too much of this. There's been some population studies showing that high levels of omega-6s can contribute to more inflammatory diseases, can cause more mental illness, suicide, homicide. This is work out of the NIH.

• 14:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So I think Dr. Joseph Hiblin 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 I was hearing, you know, from this, so this paper, that paper, or this expert, that expert, and you know, everybody else. I'm like, I want to look at the literature for myself. And basically, I concluded what I just shared with you. And so you want to 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

• 15:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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, 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 know, seeds are great. Chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds. All fine. Fatty fish, sardines, macro herring, wild salmon, full of omega three fats. So it's really important to sort of 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

• 15:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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. They're using basically the, the combination oils that are soy or canola, that are not GMO, that are organic and so forth. And also add in, you know, you can add in different oils, like macadamia oil, or walnut oil, or, you know, almond oil. You can cook with these things. You can use them for flavoring their different things, but they shouldn't be staples.

• 16:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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, 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?

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Well, okay, so going back to Ansel 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 1960s. Well, this is where the food industry does come in a little bit, just to start off this story. So, the vegetable oil industry was kind of born in the early 1900s, right? The first vegetable oil product was Crisco.

• 17:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Right? So it used to be that those oils were used for the Industrial Revolution. They were used 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 & Gamble that figured out how to do that. They were going to make it into a soap. You know, soap is made from oil. Instead, they're like, "Hmm, that looks an awful lot like lard. Let's try to sell it as a food."

• 17:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  So they started to sell it as a food.

• 17:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Trans fat.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  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 10 years later, we started seeing increases in death from heart disease. So then Procter & Gamble figures out how to just sell oil as oil. So one of the things to understand about these oils is they're pressed-

• 18:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I thought Procter & Gamble produced like shampoo.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, 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 & Gamble had this brilliant advertising campaign, basically saying, you know, "Give up lard. Those are the bygone days of your grandmothers, like the spinning wheel of the olden days. And, you know, have Crisco instead." And this is the new fangled thing made in, you know, shiny scientist kitchens. So Procter and Gamble figured out how to then make vegetable oils that were

• 18:59Speaker 02

  fluid in bottles. They kind of tinkered with the fatty acids to make them stable. And then, so here's where they started 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 going to make you the designee of this radio show for a week." And 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 one

• 19:44Speaker 02

  largest non-for-profit in the country.

• 19:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Amazing.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Mm-hmm. Which was the worst idea, because it turns out that trans fats, everybody agrees in this, have killed hundreds of thousands, millions of people over the decades.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  So that's, yeah, the trans fats in the hardened vegetable oils and Crisco are bad for health, clearly bad for health. But in the liquid form...

• 20:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And now they're ruled as not safe to eat by the FDA after 50 years of pressure to change that. And finally took a lawsuit from a 97-year-old scientist who first discovered this 50 years ago to get them to change.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Right. Right. And that's also another story I tell in my book about how he tried to get it to change, another woman, a scientist who was trying to lobby for change, and how they were vilified, and how they were raked over the coals by all the scientists who disagreed with him, and how people would literally, the vegetable industry literally had people assigned to stand up in conferences and yell at these people when they were giving their presentations. I mean, this is the state of nutrition science. So, which again, continues today.

• 20:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Food hecklers.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  But so vegetable oils, so it turns out that 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, oils are highly unstable. That means that they oxidize easily.

• 21:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Go rancid.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  They go rancid. Oxidation is, remember, that's why we take antioxidants, because oxidation causes inflammation in your body. Like, yes, that's actually true.

• 21:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  On the inside and the outside.

• 21:24Speaker 02

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

• 21:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like rancid cholesterol, that's the problem.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is what, and in those clinic, in that, on all those studies, remember, we talked about the Minnesota Coronary Survey, where they had people, some people 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 early 1980s 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 going to ignore the cancer effect.

• 22:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So how do we explain them, these top Harvard scientists who've studied this data for decades, saying that we should all be consuming more of these oils?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  You know, I have-

• 22:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What's the dirty backstory on that?

• 22:25Speaker 02

  You know, I don't have the whole story. I have to, 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? A hundred papers written on that subject. You're not going to change your mind.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  It is also true that, that the Harvard scientists have a close relationship with Unilever, one of the biggest vegetable oil manufacturers in the world, if not the biggest.

• 23:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're a big food company.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  And Bunge, another big vegetable oil manufacturer. In fact, recently Harvard published a paper in which three of the authors were employees of Unilever.

• 23:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  What?

• 23:18Speaker 02

  And it's, and they have Unilever fellows who come and work with them. And- The, one of the biggest promoters of vegetable oils is, you know, on the scientific advisory board of Unilever. So, I mean, I just, I think that the veg, and what I found out from my research, because I actually started my book by writing about transfa, 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. And I came to understand how much they have controlled nutrition science for like the last 50, 60 years. They were involved in every single one of those trials. They would give them their products for free. They

• 23:58Speaker 02

  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 oil 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 intricately-

• 24:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's a whole vegetable oil lobby.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's called the Institute for Shortening in Edible Oils.

• 24:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow. They still call it that?

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The Institute for Shortening.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Shortening, right.

• 24:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know what they call it, shortening, right?

• 24:28Speaker 02

  I S E O.

• 24:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It shortens your life.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 24:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Shortens your life, yeah. That stuff is not good. And, and what's fascinating is that when we've 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.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  These were sort of invented 120 plus years ago, and we now have increased our consumption of soybean oil, for example, a thousandfold. 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, it'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 is confusing. There's a lot of people who are looking at large observational processes that show that there's a risk for saturated fat and a benefit for omega-3, omega-6 oils. And there's other data that show there's some actually randomized trials that show the opposite. When you just have people eat only the vegetable oil, they do worse.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Right. And let's just remember that latter data from trials is the rigorous cause and effect data, right?

• 25:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I mean.

• 25:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So what do you recommend? No vegetable oils?

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Well, 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 have to go through this process of extracting the oil. It's not even really oil when it comes out. It's this gray, rancid, disgusting fluid.

• 26:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's chemically extracted with hexane and other nasty chemicals.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Right. They have to use hexane as a solvent to extract it. And then they have, and then it's this bad smelling gray liquid. It has to be deodorized, winterized, bleached and all this. So it goes through like 17 steps in this giant industrial plant. And then it's Crisco. So compared to, and this is what we're told to eat instead of churning butter.

• 26:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 26:43Speaker 02

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

• 27:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How many steps did it take from the field to your fork? You know, if there's more than one or two, it's probably not a good idea. I always joke, I say, it's easy to figure out what to eat. If man made it, leave it. If God made it, eat it, right?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 27:19Dr. 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.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  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, um, people put it on their bodies, like, uh, an ointment 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 late 1800s.

• 27:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Interesting.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  So it wasn't actually an ancient food stuff. What humans.

• 27:49Dr. 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.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Did they really put it on their bodies?

• 27:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Mykinos when I was 17 and there were these beaches and everybody was rubbing olive oil all over their bodies. And I'm like, okay.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  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 was kind of not, it's not been accurately transferred through history. But, um, so, uh, olive oil is relatively stable. So the huge worry about vegetable oils, um, to my mind is that when they are heated, and even if they're left out in a, in a bottle where it's exposed to light, they will degrade.

• 28:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oxidants.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  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 know, look up the word aldehyde and see what that is, a known toxin that is created. And so.

• 28:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Deep fryers, they call it acrylamide, which is super toxic that's formed.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Acrylamide is another one. 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, 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.

• 29:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  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 McDungats or french fries or whatever, they are going to build up in your body and cause toxic inflammation in your body.

• 29:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I used to work when I was seventeen, I used to work in this mother's sandwich shop. And 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, we 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, you know, I think people don't realize that McDonald's and all those companies used to use beef tallow to fry in. And now they switched 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. So

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Oh, definitely worse. I 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 silicon 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.

• 31:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Go from McDonald's over Chinese takeout, is that it?

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the take home message here.

• 31:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I don't know about that. We're gonna work on that messaging.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Stay at home and cook. No, but I, but I wanted to tell you 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 freeze 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 en route, they would spontaneously combust in the back of the car because they were so

• 31:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Go on fire here.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Because 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.

• 32:03Dr. 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.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, well, I'm going to push back on that because if you, 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 would agree with you if you're cooking at low temperature, but not if you're stir frying at high temperature. And I, well, yeah, I'll tell you what, I tell you an interesting thing I did was I went and had my entire metabolism checked. And, and one of the things they find in metabolism 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 shouldn't be, but it's like, I need to sort of change the oil, use avocado oil or cook at low temperature.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  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% mono unsaturated fat, very chemically stable. I mean, think about it. Avocado oil, which is praised for its high.

• 33:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Mostly mono saturated, yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Is mostly, mostly mono unsaturated, right? So if mono unsaturated 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. Which we know 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 going to happen with extra virgin olive oil, you can rest assured that it's not going to become the cancer causing mutagenic disfigured oil product that you get when you cook with soybean oil or corn oil to high temperatures.

• 34:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Tell us how you really feel about those oils, Max.

• 34:23Speaker 01

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

• 34:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is which is pushing against the orthodoxy because the traditional nutritional orthodoxy is that these seed oils and bean oils like soybean oil, canola oil, they used to call grape seed, but it's a bad name. 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?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  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?

• 35:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  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?

• 35:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And when we ingest these oxidized fats.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  They get tugged around by these LDL, by these lipoproteins, by calomicroons, 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, man-made trans fats, due to the production process. They undergo a step in the production process called deodorization, which creates trans fats.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  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 aldehydes, 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.

• 37:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And again, again, also, 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 one study that was done, this was a fascinating study we talked about in the podcast years ago, that there was, there was a study done, that was funded by the government back in the 60s. It was before we had medical ethics. Essentially, they took people into mental institution and randomized them to two groups. Basically, they didn't have to give them form, because they go, okay, you guys are going to eat this, you guys are going to eat that. They basically gave half of them a 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.

• 37:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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 kind of staggering. And they were so staggering that the orthodox at the time was, was so entrenched that believed that saturated fat was bad. That they refused to publish the study and it wasn't published till 50 years later, when an NIH scientist found out about the data that had been hidden. It was in a basement somewhere. And went and found this guy, and there's a great Malcolm Gladwell podcast about this, went and found the son of one of the original researchers after his father died in a basement

• 38:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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 one of the very few interventional trials looking at saturated fat versus vegetable oil. That was really pretty interesting. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with

• 39:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  the highest quality, cleanest, and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store, where I've hand-selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity, and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients, and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top-quality, premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out drhyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D R H Y M A N dot com.